You control your health. It is your responsibility!

Nutrition and lifestyle can make a bigger difference on our health than any medication and a relatively few number of people are actually taking advantage of this avenue for health. Heart disease, cancer, and diabetes are not just a fact of getting older and the causes are primarily not genetic. It's time the public was informed that they have real control over their health. Getting one of the diseases that plague our society today is not arbitrary! It is in direct relation to how we live our lives. We own the responsibility of caring for ourselves and we can not rely on the miracles of modern medicine to keep us healthy. Modern medicine can not keep us healthy! It can keep us from death for an extended period of time but it can not keep us healthy. Most of us are born with health. We have all we need to live a long healthy life but we do not care for our health and nurture it.  So how do we care for our health?

1) Engage in physical activity- A minimum of 30 minutes a day 7 days a week at a medium to rapid pace. Start a walking group, take a dance class, buy a bicycle, learn tennis, anything that keeps us moving. Remember, what is in motion stays in motion. It doesn't have to be hard exercise, it could be two 15 minute walks.

2) Eat Healthy - Nutritional information seems to be all over the map depending on who you ask but since our health is directly linked to our survival and our quality of life, I would encourage everyone to make an effort to seek out the truth about what to eat. Should we seek the truth from RJR-Nabisco or Phillip Morris-Kraft? They would have no reason to bias any information, right? Even the USDA advice should be looked upon critically since their primary roll is to support big meat, big dairy, and big grain processes. I encourage everyone to seek information from sources that are not supported or funded by anyone with something to sell. Seek the evidence of pure research or speak with people who have done the research and you will find that we need to:

• remove complex carbohydrates in the form of processed food (no cookies, crackers, bread, bagels, waffles, candy, ice cream, soda, etc.) from our diet
• remove trans-fats from the diet (and yes that means goodbye fried food)
• include three servings of whole grains a day (brown rice, quinoa, spelt, oats, barley, wheat berries)
• eat as many raw fruits and vegetables as you want
• include 3 servings of lean protein a day
• use good oils (olive oil, canola oil, soybean oil, avocado oil)
• eat nuts
• eat fish
• restrict dairy to one serving a day or less
• limit red meat to 2 servings a week.
• Take fish oil and a multivitamin

  3) Think Spiritually - What is it that we value? What do we want to embody? What we eat contributes to the essence of who we are and what we value. Do we value a disease free body, fit capable body, or a pure body and then we must think about the choices we make and do the correspond with what we value.

4)  Go Green - There are many environmental factors that impact our health such as chemicals in our; food, body products, plastic containers, and air. We should seek to remove as many of these chemicals from our lives as possible so they are not endocrine disruptors. Get back to products that are natural, good for the earth, and good for us. There is wisdom in how our ancestors lived and what they shared with us.

5) Stress is another BIG environmental factor in our health that we should seek to limit. Continuing to release stress hormones causes vitamin and mineral deficiencies and wears our body down. Many times stress is a value system problem.  We may be stressed because we are being asked to act in a way that is in conflict with what we value. Meditation can be a great way of relieving stress or simply setting aside 15 minutes a day to sit alone quietly and breath deeply.

 

Is your digestive system functioning properly? Would you know?

It is amazing to me that each day very little time is spent thinking about what we eat. Assuming we have access to food, we often think about what to eat from the perspectives of taste, weight loss, or ingredient avoidance but we don't really think about what food combinations will give us the best fuel and extend health. So if we spend very little time considering our bodily needs at that moment and long term we spend even less time thinking about what happens in our body once the food is eaten. Here are a couple reasons we should think about what happens in that black hole between our rib cage and our anus.

1. Majority of how well nourished we are has to do with what happens between our mouth and our anus. It's not all what we buy or order.
2. Your digestive system is one of the most important immunological functions
3. The largest single complaint that brings people to the Emergency Room is digestive problems.

How many of us have heard about a friend or family member who has been diagnosed with an illness such as Cancer, Diabetes, heart disease, etc. and we think “Wow I can't believe that has happened to her! She only ate organic, vegetarian, and always exercised. I guess it doesn't matter what we eat so I'll have the beer, nachos, and what's for dessert?” What we eat matters but there are two other steps in nutrition that are also very important and those are absorption and assimilation. Here is a quick run down of what happens when you eat.

• You smell, see, anticipate food and your body starts to secrete digestive enzymes in the mouth and stomach
• You chew – your teeth and salivary amylase (spit) start to break down food into manageable pieces
• Bolus (food mixed with Saliva) moves down the esophagus to the stomach
• The stomach secretes Hydrochloric acid to lower the pH so pepsin is activated. These acids breakdown the peptide bonds of the food and kill bacteria
• Food mixed with gastric juices (this mixture is called Chyme) moves into the duodenum (the upper part of the small intestine). In the duodenum the stomach acid is neutralized and secretions from the liver and pancreas break down the chyme even further into the tiniest particles.
• Food then moves to the jejenum (the second 3^rd of the small intestine) and food now in the form of maltose, sucrose, lactose, and glucose is being absorbed through the epithelial cells lined with micro villi.
• Food is absorbed into the portal vein and sent to the liver for direction and further purification (some long chain fatty acids can not cross the brush barrier into the portal vein and are transported via the lymph system to the liver)
• At this point any waste from all this break down is directed to the large intestine. The large intestine takes one more crack at digestion but mainly wages a war against the bacteria in the food waste. The large intestine also removes the water from the waste and absorbs this water back into your blood stream That's right, water in you body is water that has gone through the digestive system into the colon and is now being reabsorbed back into the blood. Now you're starting to see that it might be important to eat as cleanly as possible.
• The final step is assimilation - Assimilation is the process by which nutrients are passed through the membranes which surround each living cell For this process to take place, cells, especially their membranes — must be healthy.

Setting aside the hormonal components of nutrition and just looking at the digestive system it's no wonder we visit ER's most with digestive complaints. So much can go wrong, excess hydrochloric acid backing up into the esophagus (indigestion), too much bacteria in the stomach (salmonella), ulcers of the duodenum if the acid is not neutralized properly, tares in the intestinal wall from anti-inflammatories, alcohol, or allergy causing foods, over taxed livers from too many toxins in the food, colon's without the right bacteria to kill the bad bacteria before being reabsorbed, or cells with hardened membranes caused by low-fat diets (more later on this topic).

What can be done to promote better digestion?

1. Eat organic clean food
2. Eat a balanced diet with fiber from fruits and veggies to keep things moving
3. Eat Greek Yogurt or take pro-biotic supplements for the colon
4. Take a Glutamine supplement to repair tears in the small intestine
5. Take vitamin C to help you immune system
6. Consider doing a cleanse or taking an anti-fungal to get rid of yeast in your body
7. Eat slowly and never eat when you are stressed or angry.

A little about me

I am a 41 year old wife and mother who has always been a high strung type-A personality. I often eat too much, drink too much and sleep too little. In the last 5 years I have become allergic to almost every food except meat and veggies and now I am taking a holistic look at my lifestyle to figure out what the problem is and how to heal it. I am allergic to wheat, corn, soy, citrus, all seeds, all legumes, and possibly dairy and onions.  When my allergist suggested I stay away from these foods for a year to see if my allergies improve I decided to see advice from a holistic doctor. You can NEVER eat out if you have to avoid all these foods or go to a back yard BBQ.  What I am allergic to is a big part of the American diet. Seed Oil and or Soybean Oil is used in everything from salad dressings, sauces, snack food items, even wheat free snacks used seed oils.
In the fall of 2009 I went to a nutritionist in a holistic wellness center trying to gain insight into why I have all theses food allergies. What I found is that my body is on toxic overload and my hormones are way out of whack.  So for the last 4 months I have been taking all natural whole food supplements, as directed by my nutritionist, with the goal of balancing my hormones and now will start detoxing and balancing vitamin and mineral deficiencies. Now that my hormones are in a more balanced state I feel less anxious all the time, more grounded, less like I'm holding onto my sanity by a thread.  With this new feeling of grounding I have a desire to create internal peace, tranquility, health and happiness.
 So yesterday January 1st I started a 28 day cleanse.   I am working the cleanse program by Dr. Alejandro Junger as written about in his book CLEAN.  Week 1 is limited whole foods, i.e. fruit, vegetables, fish, nuts, seed, Quinoa, Brown rice, water and green tea.  Weeks 2-4 are two liquid meals and one fish or chicken and salad meal.  Other than the fish and poultry all food should be raw for maximum nutrients.
 So I started yesterday, January 1st, and day one was tough because I was hungover from all the Champagne on Friday night and yes I have been binging for the last 3 weeks on food and wine knowing that this day was coming.  The power that sugar has over us is crazy strong.  One day of no salt and sugar and by last night I wanted to eat the giant bag of Tootsie rolls left over from Halloween. Luckily I did not eat the bag and so I successfully completed day 1.   Every day I will document my withdrawl struggles and share the feelings of elation I will supposedly experience as I am getting cleaner.  Here goes nothing