Body heat

There's a lot of talk at the moment about the rising cost of gas and electricity, and with winter approaching keeping warm is on everyone's mind. Naturally people are worried about how they are going to pay their bills, and are looking for ways to cut down their fuel consumption. I think there is another way to keep warm apart from turning the heating up. We all know about insulating our homes, wearing more clothes, taking a hot bath, and having hot drinks throughout the day, but I think there is a way of acclimatising our bodies to deal with the drop in temperatures.

If you think about where people work, indoors, office, shop, factory, all these places put their heating on for the comfort of their employees. No one would be happy with sitting at a desk in an office all day wearing a coat and hat. On the other hand, they go to work wearing lightweight clothes and expect the heating to be turned up because they are cold. Surely there should be a happy medium, wear thicker clothes and turn the heat down a notch or two. I think central heating set to a tropical level is making people soft. Their body then gets used to having heat blasted at it throughout the day so when they go home, they have to turn their central heating up high because they would shiver.

If your body gets used to being mollycoddled with constant heat, it forgets how to cope when it gets cold. I expect in five hundred years time people will all have their own heated personal bubble. It will be kept inside their heated garage, it will have wheels, so all they have to do is step inside and take themselves to work, where they will park it inside an underground heated park, and get the elevator up to their heated office. They will have no contact with the awful British weather, and their skins will be a sickly grey colour and their lungs will be under used and need extra supplies of oxygen. Their immune system will be zilch, they won't have one. Fantasy maybe, but you never know what will happen in the future.

Now look at the people who have hard lives living in cold climates, those that work outside, work the land or keep livestock. Think about the intrepid explorers traipsing through miles of snow and ice, those who live in cold countries. What have they in common, they move about a lot, and their bodies generate their own heat. They get acclimatised to their surroundings, and become toughened up to cope with cold.

Now I'm not about to tell you what to do, you can draw your own conclusions, but what I will say is, you can get out of your chair and move about, at least for ten minutes every hour. All right, I will tell you what to do. Don't sit all night every night glued to the goggle box, huddled under a blanket. Get up, walk around the house, walk the dog, go for a walk even if you haven't got a dog. Get your arms and legs moving, dance and jump up and down if you can. Generate your own body heat and keep it trapped close to you underneath your layers.

OK don't jump on me, I know there are people with limited mobility, and they will have to devise their own methods for moving the able parts of their bodies. If anyone is confined to a chair but can stretch arms and legs, then do it.

I am so glad that I had a lifetime of working outdoors, doing a physical job, I now find that I can cope very well without much heating. The only time I suffer is when I spend time in a building which is centrally heated. Some of my friends houses are stifling hot, I can only manage about twenty minutes. On the other hand I visit someone who doesn't put their heating on and we both sit there in our coats, ha ha. He is fine and so am I. The library is too hot, the bank is too hot, and the shops are too hot, I have to come out. My sinuses get blocked and I feel groggy and start yawning.

I don't live much differently in the winter than I do in the summer. All the interior doors in my house are open, I like all rooms to be the same temperature, don't like shutting myself in a hot room then having to go into a cold room. I move about a lot in the house, constantly up and down, doing something or other, and keeping busy. All I do is wear more clothes. I'm about to double up on the curtains again, as I do every year at this time. Get the spare sets out of the cupboard, and hang them over the ones already up.

So are you going to give it a go, move about more, go out more, go on, worth a try.
Toodle pip