With all the social and cultural focus on what our bodies should look like, it’s easy to forget just what a biological marvel they are. Here are a few fun facts that might help you appreciate just how amazing your body is, and why it deserves love and respect no matter what its condition.

1. Your heart beats around 100,000 times every day, which is 35 million times in a year. During an average lifetime, a human heart beats over 2.5 billion times.
   
   
2. Your brain processes thousands of thoughts a day through 86 billion neurons. Neurons transmit electrical impulses that travel from cell to cell. This electrical information moves at up to 268 miles per hour.
   
   
3. Your lungs breathe 13 pints of air each minute, which equates to around 11,000 litres of air in a day. They also exhale nearly half a litre of water every day.
   
   
4. Our DNA is supercoiled so that it takes up less space. If the spirals of your DNA were uncoiled and laid end-to-end, it would stretch to Pluto and back. The DNA in a single one of your cells is actually longer than you are.
   
   
5. The average eye is so powerful it can distinguish 10 million different colours, focus on 50 objects per second, and detect light from a candle flame 1.7 miles away. Eyes are the second most complex organ after the brain.
   
   
6. Not only do you have unique fingerprints, but also a unique tongue print. In fact, this is being explored as an alternative to other biometric identification methods such as iris or fingerprint scanning.
   
   
7. Your stomach’s main digestive fluid, hydrochloric acid, is powerful enough to dissolve some metals.
   
   
8. The human body emits light that is invisible to the naked eye. Research has found that our body’s natural glow rises and falls throughout the day peaking at 4pm, which suggests it is connected to our body clock.
   
   
9. There are more than 100,000 km of blood vessels inside your body. This means an average person’s blood vessels could wrap around the Earth roughly 2.5 times.
   
   
10. An average adult is made up of 7 octillion atoms, nearly all of which were created billions of years ago by a star. As stars burned out, they created these tiny pieces of matter that are now present in everything in our world, including human beings. So you are literally made from a star!