The Fourfold Path to Healing – Thomas S. Cowan MD, Sally Fallon, Jaimen McMillan
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The Fourfold Path to Healing merges the wisdom of traditional societies, the most modern findings of western medicine and the esoteric teaching of the ancients. The fourfold approach includes: Nutrition using nutrient-dense traditional foods; therapeutics through a wide range of nontoxic remedies; Movement to heal and strengthen the emotions; and meditation to develop your powers of objective thought.
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In this podcast I’ll be exploring Calories and Hormones:
- I’ll explain what calories are and how counting calories won’t do much for your health
- I’ll talk about hormones and how they affect your health a lot more than calories
- Finally I’ll give a few tips on how to balance your hormones naturally to turn you into a fat-burning machine
CLICK HERE TO LEARN WHAT ARE THE BEST FOODS TO GET YOU LEAN
Calories are all people talk about when it comes to dieting and changing body composition. Funny thing is most people have no clue what a calorie actually is.
Well a calorie is a unit of heat energy where 1 calorie equals the amount of energy needed to heat 1 gram of water 1 degree Centigrade.
The way calories are measured is to burn the dry weight of the object you want to find the calorie value of and then measure how much heat is given off. So if you wanted to find out the number of calories in a banana, for example, you would first dehydrate it and then burn it and by measuring the amount of heat it gives off you will be able to work out the amount of calories it contained.
Now this is all fine and dandy when measuring calories using a calorimeter in a stale, stable, stagnant setting like a scientific laboratory, but when you’re talking about measuring the burning of foods in the human body or the metabolic-effect of how food calories are utilised by human physiology then Houston… we have a problem.
You see if you were to ask an aboriginal tribe in a South American jungle or African bushland or Australian outback who are excellent specimens of optimal human health whether they weighed, measured, and counted the amount of calories or energy or foods they ate on a regular basis, they would just look at you sideways, show off their bright-white teeth with a wide grin, and then they’d start laughing their bottoms off. They have a lot more important things to be concerned with than calories like maintaining shelters, hunting and gathering food, and getting back to telling stories and playing around all day. Sounds like the life right?
Your ancestors as far back as 100 years ago were not concerned with counting calories and obesity wasn’t even an issue back then. Today, however, it seems like the more calories we count as a society the more obese we seem to be getting. What’s up with that?
The reason is human beings are not calorimeters. You are not a simple input and output device. Your body is one of the most complex biological machines in the universe. Your body is an interconnected system of trillions of inputs and outputs.
For someone to say that they know exactly what happens to the hundred calories they eat from food or say that they know exactly how much calories they burned during exercise is human hubris at it again, meaning we think we know better than Mother Nature. It is impossible to know the exact amount of fuel energy you get from food and how much energy you burn from movement.
Another thing is that not all calories are created equal. 2000 calories of sugar water, for example, if you were to compare this to 2000 calories of coloured vegetables, yes they are the same amount of energy, exactly the same amount of energy, but when your body begins to digest, absorb, assimilate and metabolise and make use of the macro and micronutrients you will see a totally different effect in how your body looks, in how you think and feel, and how you act in life. A human body made up of sugar water compared to one made up of vegetables would be the same as comparing a house made up of straw and one made up of brick and mortar. One is weak and full of holes (tumours) whereas the other is strong and solid (healthy).
Ask yourself are the calories that you’re currently consuming on a regular basis turning you into a person of straw or into a solid piece of human awesomeness?
There are a number of ways the foods you eat and the movements you perform affect your biology way beyond calories and energy expenditure. You need to stop focusing on calories when it comes to happiness and health because there’s more to your wellbeing than just energy in and energy out.
The foods you eat and the movements you perform will absolutely determine the physical structure and functionality of your organs, they will determine your mood, and food and movement have a huge impact on your hormones.
Speaking of hormones these are molecules that your body uses to communicate between the many different organs, glands, and tissues. Hormones affect your body’s metabolism, immune function, growth and repair, your mood, your stress levels, and your body composition.
The major hormones you need to know about are:
- Insulin
- Cortisol
- Melatonin
- Leptin
- Ghrelin
- Oestrogen and testosterone and
- Thyroid hormones
Insulin is an anabolic or growth hormone released by your pancreas and helps transport nutrients from your bloodstream into your cells. Excessive amounts of glucose (sugar) in your bloodstream leads to the transformation of most of this glucose into fatty acids and high levels of nutrients in your blood causes your pancreas to release large amounts of insulin. Once insulin gets into your bloodstream it then does its job of storing all those nutrients into your cells as well as putting any leftover fatty acids into your fat cells, so insulin plays a major role in fat accumulation.
Cortisol known as the stress hormone is catabolic meaning it breaks things down and it is released by your adrenal glands in response to physical or perceived stress, low blood sugar levels, or low leptin levels. When your blood sugar levels get too low this will cause a cortisol spike. This sudden increase in cortisol then raises your blood sugar levels and when blood glucose gets too high insulin will need to be released to bring it back to a healthy low level and if your blood glucose drops too far then cortisol comes out to play again and this sugar and hormonal rollercoaster continues on and on making for a fatter and heavier you.
Melatonin is your antioxidant, anti-tumour, circadian clock time for bed hormone. Melatonin needs to be low in the morning and high in the evening for the best sleep and recovery as well as for the most growth hormone release during sleep, which helps you burn fat as you dream. This is the opposite rhythm to cortisol. Cortisol needs to be high in the morning and low in the evening. So if you don’t get enough daylight exposure during the day, you’re exposed to too much blue and bright lights after sundown, and if your cortisol rhythm is not normal, this will cause your melatonin levels to be low making it difficult for you to fall asleep and to get a full nights rest.
Leptin is a satiety hormone meaning it signals to your brain when you have enough energy in your body and is released by your fat cells. The more fat you have the more leptin your fat cells release signalling to your brain that you have plenty of energy on board and you don’t need to eat. The less fat you have the less leptin gets released signalling to your brain that you don’t have enough energy on board and that it’s time to eat. The problem for obese individuals is something called leptin resistance where you have so many fat cells releasing a lot of leptin that your brain just can’t take the excessive amounts of communication anymore and just stops listening. So even though your fat cells are signalling non-stop to your brain that your body has more than enough energy on board and that you don’t need to eat, your brain ignores these signals and still thinks you’re low on leptin and therefore low on energy and fat stores. Chronically low leptin levels as perceived by your brain will cause an increased release of the stress hormone cortisol and high cortisol levels keep your leptin levels low.
Ghrelin is a hunger hormone and works opposite to leptin. Low levels of leptin usually mean you are low on energy reserves and this causes a release of ghrelin which then increases your appetite. Once your appetite is satisfied and enough leptin hormone reaches your brain telling it you have enough energy on board then ghrelin hormone reduces which also lowers your appetite. Now if you have high levels of cortisol in your body this will cause leptin levels to be low meaning ghrelin will increase giving you an appetite. So the more stress you have the hungrier you get.
Oestrogen and testosterone are sex hormones used for growth and for reproduction. Women have slightly higher levels of oestrogen hormones compared to men and men have a lot more testosterone than women. Chronically high levels of insulin in your bloodstream (due to a high sugar diet for example) leads to an increase of testosterone in women and a decrease of testosterone in men as well as an increase of oestrogen in men. When cortisol is low testosterone and insulin are high, but when cortisol is high testosterone and insulin are low making cortisol a muscle wasting hormone. Chronically high levels of cortisol interferes with the normal production of your sex hormones, so too much stress overtime leads to low libido or sex drive, infertility, and the end of sexy times in the bedroom.
Last group of major hormones you really need to know about are your thyroid hormones. Your thyroid hormones are responsible for your body’s overall metabolism, meaning your cells ability to process energy. The two main thyroid hormones are T4 and T3. T4 is the inactive thyroid hormone and this is produced by your thyroid gland. The conversion of T4 to the active form T3 takes place primarily in your liver and in your gut. If your thyroid, liver, or gut are unhealthy and unable to do the work that they should then the production of T4 and T3 hormones will be dramatically impacted. Your body will either produce too much thyroid hormones leading to hyperthyroidism or having a very fast metabolic rate where you feel nervous or anxious a lot of the time, have irregular heartbeats, trouble sleeping, dry skin, excessive weight reduction, and excessive bowel movements. Or your body won’t produce enough thyroid hormones leading to hypothyroidism or having a very slow rate of metabolism where you feel depressed and irritable, experience hair loss and memory loss, feel tired and weak a lot of the time, find it difficult to reduce weight or have a dramatic increase in weight, have muscle cramps, feel cold a lot, have brittle nails, and constipation. High levels of perceived stress interferes with the production of T4 and high levels of the stress hormone cortisol interferes with the conversion of T4 to T3 causing abnormal metabolic function throughout your entire body.
Okay so that was a lot of information to take in about your major hormones. Now I’m not sure if you noticed, but there was one constant between them all. There was one hormone that popped up time and again and it has an impact on all the other hormones. Do you know the hormone I’m talking about? Yes, the stress hormone cortisol. That’s the hormone I’m talking about.
High cortisol leads to the increase of glucose in your bloodstream eventually causing a spike in insulin and this high insulin release causes fat storage and an increase in fat cell number and fat cell size.
High cortisol at night prevents melatonin from rising leading to trouble with sleep, less growth hormone release, less fat burning, a weakened immune system, and an increased risk of cancer.
High cortisol levels equal low leptin and high ghrelin levels meaning even if you’re obese or if you’ve eaten a big enough meal that normally would have satisfied you in the past, you will still have an appetite and feel hungry and will want to keep eating and you may never feel satiated.
High production of cortisol equals low production of your growth and sex hormones. More cortisol means less growth and more stress means less sex.
Finally high stress and rich cortisol production equals poor thyroid hormone production causing an abnormal rate of metabolism, either too high or too low. The majority of thyroid issues deal with a very slow rate of metabolism leading to difficulty reducing fat cell number and fat cell size.
So the big takeaway from all this hormone talk is that if you can control your cortisol you can control the rest of your hormones and you can determine the overall health of your body.
Not only that, but by taking control of your cortisol levels and the levels of all your other major hormones you can determine the amount of muscle and fat that your body synthesises and burns… without the need for counting calories.
Imagine that your hormones are an orchestra and that when they play in perfect harmony you get to hear wonderful music a beautiful symphony being played. However, when you have disharmony in the orchestra, when there’s a group or single instrument out of tune, out of sync, out of beat and rhythm then you’re left listening to something that would probably even make the walking dead turn and run in the other direction.
Homeostasis is a term that means a system is in balance and functioning as it should. When your many hormones are in harmony and playing sweet beautiful music together then you can consider your body to be in a homeostatic state. When your body is in homeostasis, where you’ve achieved hormonal harmony, then your body’s ability to burn fat and maintain or build health and muscle will be easy peasy lemon squeezy.
However, if your hormones are not in harmony with each other well then your ability to reduce fat and maintain or build health and muscle go right out the window. It doesn’t matter how many calories you count or restrict and no matter how hard you push yourself in the gym because if your cortisol and other hormone levels are not in healthy ranges then your body has bigger issues to deal with than worrying about energy in and energy out.
What I’m ultimately saying is that when your hormones are in balance with each other you’re a lean, mean, and very keen playful, happy, and healthy human being. But when your hormones are ‘out of whack’ (yes that’s a scientific term where I’m from) when your hormones are out of balance then oops-a-daisy you become flabby, fat, and lazy.
So what causes hormone imbalances?
High levels of stress and inflammation and stress and inflammation are caused by unhealthy relationships, disconnection from Mother Nature, exposure to toxic compounds, improper sleep, too much not enough exercise, eating inflammatory foods, not drinking enough quality water, and incorrect breathing patterns.
To get your hormones in a happy and healthy harmonious state you need to reduce your stress levels and lower the amount of inflammation in your body and you can do this by living a holistic healthy lifestyle. If you listen to episodes 2-15 of the Whole Guidance Podcast I go into detail about how to do this, but I will share a few quick and easy tips here on how to keep cortisol your stress hormone in check which will reduce the amount of stress and inflammation in your body.
First tip is to remove sugars and grains from your diet. Pasteurised dairy too if you’re really serious about keeping your cortisol levels balanced. Sugars and grains and highly treated dairy products are pro-inflammatory causing a lot of fire in your belly and in your body and also cause a lot of insulin to be secreted by your pancreas. By removing these foods from your diet for 21 days you can then try reintroducing them again to see how you feel and I bet you’ll notice a difference. With less insulin in your bloodstream your body’s metabolism will gradually shift from burning sugar and storing fat to not needing sugar and burning fat. Replace the sugars, grains, and dairy with more animal and fruit fats and oils.
Second tip is to get quality sleep. Now I said quality, not quantity and this means consistently going to bed before 11p and getting up around 6 or 7a for at least 21 days. This will reset your circadian clock and help restore your melatonin to its correct levels, low in the morning and high in the evening.
Third tip is to breathe deep diaphragmatic belly breaths through your nose. This helps keep your body in a rest, digest, calm, and connect state and so reduces your cortisol and increases your fat burning potential as well as your growth and sex hormone levels. Listen to episode 4 on how to practise proper breathing technique.
Fourth tip is to sprint more and cardio less. What I mean is that instead of doing 30 minute, 60 minute, or 2 hour long duration cardio sessions, why not try 4 minutes of high intensity interval training. H I I T or HIIT is where you go all out at 80-100% effort for 30 seconds and then rest for 90 seconds and repeat this seven more times. Timing isn’t set in concrete so you can go hard for 60 seconds and rest for 60-240 seconds if you wanted to. There’s no set rules. Find what works for you. You can do HIIT on a spin bike, sprinting up hills, or by performing exercises like burpees. Sprint training burns fewer calories during the exercise than long duration cardio does, but it produces a healthier hormonal profile after the exercise is completed meaning cortisol levels don’t stay elevated for long periods after a sprint session and your metabolism remains higher for longer periods after HIIT as well.
Fifth tip is to support your liver and gut health to ensure optimal conversion of your inactive T4 hormone into the more active T3 hormone making you a metabolism beast. Easiest way to support your liver is to reduce your exposure to toxic chemicals in your environment. You can do this by swapping out commercial home and personal care products for organic plant-based ones. Easiest way to support your digestive system is to eat real food. Real food is from Mother Nature. Anything from Father Industry I consider fake pretend food-like products and these will only create inflammation in your gut.
As Michael Pollan an author who writes about real food says:
“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
Sixth tip is to manage your self when it comes to stress. I did a whole podcast on how stress affects your health and how to identify and reframe your perspective on the stressors in your life so listen to that for more details. Also meditation and practising mindfulness and awareness is another way to move away from past regrets and future failures and to just be in the present moment. The more you can be ‘in the now man’ then the less you will be stressing about stuff in your head.
My seventh and final tip for reducing stress and inflammation and on how to best balance cortisol and all your other hormones is to get some smart sun exposure. Vitamin D is a powerful hormone that regulates over 1000 genes in your body and today about 70% of people living in western society are deficient in vitamin D and do not have enough of this health building hormone. You need to be exposing your skin to the sun on a regular basis to get the right amount of vitamin D, but of course you don’t want to get too much sun as too much of a good thing will burn you on the outside and cause fire and inflammation on the inside. I’ll talk more about smart sun exposure and vitamin D in the next podcast.
I’ll leave you with this final thought.
Throughout human history calories were never counted or measured in order to be healthy. Building muscle, reducing fat, achieving a happy mindset, all of these were and still are easily accessible to anyone living with balanced hormones without the need for calorie counting.
When you focus on the quantity of calories this will cause an imbalance in the quantity and quality of your hormones. So at the end of the day if you want quality hormones you must focus on quality calories.
To learn more about how calories really don’t matter read The Calorie Myth by Jonathan Bailor. This book lays out the science on how hormones beat out calories time and again for achieving the best health ever.
“Health is not a math equation.”
When your body is healthy, whole, and complete you’ll never have to think about calories ever again because health has always and will always be instinctively and innately and naturally easy.
Links and Resources
- WGP 004: How to Breathe for an Awesome Life
- WGP 003: How Stress is Making You Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead
- The Calorie Myth — Jonathan Bailor
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In this podcast I’ll be exploring Non-Coeliac Gluten Sensitivity or NCGS and living Free of Gluten:
- I’ll explain what gluten is and how it can negatively impact your health
- I’ll talk about the differences between coeliac disease and non-coeliac gluten sensitivity
- I’ll also talk about the single biggest mistake people make when shifting to a gluten-free diet
- Finally I’ll share some simple and effective tips on how to make gluten-free a part of your lifestyle
CLICK HERE TO LEARN WHAT ARE THE BEST FOODS TO GET YOU LEAN
So what exactly is gluten?
Gluten is a complex protein found in some grains. This includes all wheat varieties such as:
- Spelt
- Einkorn
- Emmer
- Durum and
- Khorasan aka Kamut
And also includes the grains barley and rye.
Oats don’t have the same gluten proteins, but the way that most of the oats are processed and stored today means that they do contain high amounts of gluten simply by being exposed to the same facilities and transport vehicles that are used for gluten-containing grains. So there’s a lot of cross-contamination that occurs with oats.
Gluten is made up of two different proteins gliadin and glutenin. Gliadin gives gluten its gluey stickiness and glutenin gives gluten its flexibility and stretchiness. This is why gluten-containing grains are perfect for baking and for manufacturing pretend fake food-like products. This viscosity and elasticity provides you the consumer with a delectable and delightful eating experience.
The problem with gluten today though is that it isn’t the same gluten our agricultural ancestors ate. The wheat you’re eating today is nowhere near the same wheat that is associated with biblical times commonly referred to as the staff of life.
In the past 60 years man has taken it upon himself to modify wheat into a more versatile and robust crop. Why would we do this? World hunger. There was a time in the mid 20th century where the main focus of society was on starving populations.
How times have changed eh. Today the main focus is on the war on terror or as I call it the submission to fear, but anyhoo… back to gluten.
In order to feed the world scientists and farmers hybridised different wheat varieties resulting in a wheat crop that was more resistant to temperature changes and drought and that would also grow more grains in less time. Specific wheat varieties were also chosen for their increased gluten content making for a better cooking ingredient.
And thus today we have modern wheat which is the third highest produced crop in the world behind corn and rice.
This wheat not only has higher amounts of proteins including gluten, but also has higher amounts of starch and sugar compared to ancient grains. Sure modern wheat has awesome baking characteristics and tastes nice and sweet, but unfortunately more gluten and more sugar make for more fat, more inflammation, more obesity, more diabetes, more heart disease, more cancer… and you get the idea.
So how does gluten contribute to making you fat, sick, and nearly dead? In more ways than one unfortunately.
First gluten damages your gut. You have this protective barrier lining your gut like a giant fortress wall and along the wall every now and then there are little gateways that open and close allowing certain nutrients in. Gluten actually causes these gateways to open allowing anything and everything to slip through into your body. This is known as intestinal hyperpermeability or leaky gut syndrome. When your gut becomes leaky you can get a whole cascade of health problems manifest as a result because now your immune system needs to go on high alert and has to battle all these foreign materials that should not be in your bloodstream. This heightened immune response creates stress and inflammation and chronic stress and chronic inflammation together are the main causes for all chronic degenerative diseases today.
Not only that, but any undigested food particles that leak through into your bloodstream will be targeted by your immune system and then out of nowhere you become sensitive to certain foods, foods that you’ve eaten your whole entire life and eat on a regular basis you will no longer be able to handle. So if a big piece of beef or broccoli or egg gets through a leaky gut the immune system will tag it for elimination and new immune cells are created specifically to get rid of that food molecule.
So let’s say a piece of undigested chicken got through your leaky gut wall. Your immune system sees it in the body and creates an antibody for it. An antibody is like an assassin that shoots to kill only specific targets, and you have many different antibodies each created for different kinds of threats. For example if you’ve ever had measles or chickenpox or had a vaccination for a specific disease your immune system would have created specific antibodies for them. So if you were to ever get measles or chickenpox those antibodies can quickly get to work and kill off the disease.
Coming back to the undigested chicken particles now that your immune system has seen it and created specific antibodies for it, anytime you eat chicken the immune cells, the chicken antibodies, the chicken assassin that has just been hanging around waiting for an excuse to fire off its weapon starts firing away causing inflammation. Your genetic weak link will determine where most of that inflammation and damage will occur so it could be in your skin, your brain, your heart, your muscles, your bones, your joints or even your gut it all depends.
So gluten activates the genes for intestinal hyperpermeability aka leaky gut and a leaky gut causes immune activation, inflammation, and food sensitivities all of which open the door for the development of autoimmune diseases.
Humans cannot fully digest gluten and because of this gluten alone can excite your immune system creating inflammation. Protein molecules like gluten are made up of polypeptides or long chains of amino acids. So as an analogy think of a protein molecule as a pearl necklace and an amino acid as an individual pearl. Through the process of digestion in your mouth, your stomach, and small intestines these pearl necklaces are broken down into single pearls allowing them to be absorbed and assimilated through your protective gut wall.
However, the human digestive system cannot digest and break down gluten into individual pearls. Gluten has a very unique and strange sequence of pearls, of amino acids that your gut enzymes do not recognise. So while your body will break up the long gluten necklace into smaller peptides or into smaller groups of pearls it will never be able to turn gluten into easily digestible single pearls. So just as I said before when you have a leaky gut and these larger chunks of gluten get into your bloodstream they will create havoc and mayhem and inflammation as your immune system becomes activated and goes about its business of wiping them out.
What makes matters worse is that the order of the pearls in the gluten necklaces, the sequence of amino acids that make up these undigested gluten molecules they look very similar to the amino acid sequence of organs and tissues in your body. This is known as molecular mimicry where foreign protein molecules are similar in structure to human tissue. So now your immune system which has created antibodies to these invading gluten proteins gets confused and instead of just taking out the gluten your antibodies, your assassins they begin attacking your gut leading to coeliac or Crohn’s or inflammatory bowel disease preventing you from fully digesting and absorbing the nutrients from the food you eat. Your immune cells will attack your thyroid causing hypothyroidism slowing down your metabolism making you feel slow and tired. Your skin is your largest organ and this can get attacked as well causing a whole range of skin disorders and even your brain tissue gets damaged by your own immune system leading to ataxia, multiple sclerosis, autism, depression, headaches, and giving you a foggy mind. Talk about a case of mistaken identity.
When your immune system reacts to your own body this is called an autoimmune disease.
Gluten can also disrupt the microbiota in your gut causing a reduction in probiotics the good population of microorganisms and an increase in pathogens the bad population. This imbalance is known as dysbiosis. This is due to the toxic chemicals and genetically modified organisms (GMOs) used in the production of gluten-containing grains. These foreign compounds kill off the probiotics and allow the pathogens to thrive. The more bad guys you have in your gut the more immune system activation you will have and the more inflammation your body will experience and the more stress you will have in your life.
One final and fascinating part (well I think its fascinating) to how gluten negatively impacts your health is how it affects your brain.
When your body attempts to break down gluten new pearl necklaces are created, new proteins and one of these new protein molecules is called gluteomorphin. Gluteomorphins activate opioid receptors in your body meaning your brain thinks it’s getting a dose of opium. Usually your body’s own endorphin chemicals stimulate your opioid receptors making you feel good and also reduce your perception to pain. But gluten as well as dairy (in the case of dairy these opioid and morphine-like proteins are called casomorphins) so gluten and dairy stimulate your opioid receptors giving you a bit of a high making you feel super awesome. Any wonder now why people fight tooth and nail when trying to give up bread and milk? It is rare, but some people actually do suffer severe withdrawal symptoms when coming off gluten due to the opioid drug-like effect that these gluteomorphins have on the nervous system.
Okay so if gluten contributes to gut damage, inflammation, and affects your neurology why is it that not everyone is keeling over in abdominal pain or experiencing depression right after eating gluten?
Three reasons: first one is genetics and epigenetics. Maybe you don’t have the genes that make you more easily affected by gluten. Awesome, good for you. That would put you in the estimated 50% of people who have been clinically shown to not be affected by gluten even though it does cause a few gaps in your gut wall.
Now even if you do have the gluten causing inflammatory genes remember epigenetics which is about how your environment and lifestyle determine which genes get switched on and expressed and which genes remain in the off position. So you have the genes, but your environment is helping to keep those genes switched off.
Second reason that people aren’t experiencing obvious gluten reactions is symptomatology. Diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer’s can take many years to manifest and express as a symptom. You could be experiencing hidden chronic stress and hidden chronic inflammation due to the consumption of gluten right now without even knowing it. Of all the people diagnosed with full-blown coeliac disease only around 15% of them express gastrointestinal symptoms, gut symptoms. The rest of people with coeliac express extraintestinal symptoms meaning they have issues in their skin, brain, joints, muscles, bones, anywhere but the gut. So just because you don’t feel the fire due to gluten doesn’t mean it’s not affecting you.
Last reason deals with time and immune tolerance. Some people suffer from an illness right out of the womb at childbirth; whereas it can take 60 years before somebody else will experience that same disease. This is due to your immune system’s ability to respond when needed and when your immune system becomes unresponsive this is known as a loss of immune tolerance. For example it has been shown that some people can go their entire life eating gluten without problem, but once they reached their 70s they developed coeliac disease because their immune system lost the ability to respond to gluten. So while you may not have coeliac disease or sensitivity to gluten now if you have the genes and you’re living an unhealthy lifestyle it is only a matter of time before that small amount of gluten in that delicious caramel slice acts like the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back leaving you with an upset gut, crappy skin, and bad moods.
Okay so what exactly is coeliac disease?
Coeliac disease is an autoimmune condition where your immune system reacts to gluten attacking your own body causing inflammation and damage to your gut and other tissues in your body. As previously mentioned this can include gut symptoms in about 15% of coeliac patients such as:
- Diarrhoea
- Constipation
- Bloating
- Cramping and
- Vomiting
Most other people with coeliac disease, however, express extraintestinal symptoms such as:
- Excessive weight loss
- Dermatitis herpetiformis and other skin issues
- Iron-deficient anaemia
- Arthritis
- Neurological and psychiatric disorders
- Infertility issues
It’s estimated that about 3% of the population have coeliac disease. If you have a family member diagnosed with coeliac disease than your chance of having coeliac disease jumps to 20%.
Now why do the rest of us have to worry about gluten? Well the fact that no human can fully digest gluten and realising that nothing in life is neither black nor white, but different shades of grey should make you think that even though you may not be on the extreme end of coeliac perhaps you’re somewhere in the middle of that spectrum or if you’re lucky may be you’re on the other extreme end where you tolerate gluten pretty well.
This is where the condition known as Non-Coeliac Gluten Sensitivity or NCGS comes in. NCGS like coeliac disease is where your immune system reacts to gluten causing inflammation and damage to your gut and other tissues in your body. But NCGS is not an autoimmune condition so your immune system isn’t attacking your body, but can become overactive leading to the development of an autoimmune disease later in life. People with NCGS experience the same symptoms as people with coeliac disease plus the following:
- Headaches and migraines
- Obesity
- Fibromyalgia
- Ataxia
- Depression
- Parkinson’s
- Alzheimer’s
- Asperger’s
- Autism
- ADD/ADHD
- Diabetes and
- Hashimoto’s and hypothyroidism
It’s estimated that about 10% of the population has NCGS, but due to the fact that testing for NCGS is still a new field of study with technology just catching up this number isn’t reliable. It has been shown in clinical practice where doctors work with patients that about 30-60% of sick people who change to a gluten-free lifestyle no longer show any signs and symptoms of disease. So it could be said that 1 in 2 people are sensitive to gluten.
Now there are many lab tests that you can pay for and take to find out if you have coeliac disease and if you’re experiencing any of the previously mentioned symptoms this would be a good idea. There are also other lab tests you can take to find out if you have NCGS, but as I said this form of testing is new and cannot be relied on 100%.
The best test for NCGS to find out if you’re sensitive to gluten is one you can do at home. It’s a gluten elimination and challenge test that involves the removal of gluten from your diet for 91 days, that’s 3 months followed by a gluten challenge. If you experience any symptoms after the challenge you’re most likely sensitive to gluten.
Okay so let’s say you do a lab test or the gluten elimination and challenge test and find out you’re gluten sensitive whether it be full-blown coeliac disease or NCGS well now what do you do?
Well whatever you do, DON’T DO THIS! The single biggest mistake that most people make when first switching to a gluten-free diet is to swap out all gluten-containing foods with processed and packaged gluten-free foods thinking they’re living healthier than before.
Processed and packaged foods whether they are gluten-free or not are still fake pretend food-like products lacking nutrition as well as having no energy and screwed up information. Swapping out gluten-containing pasta, cookies, rice crackers, for gluten-free versions does not eliminate the rancid oxidised and damaged industrial seed oils aka vegetables oils and does not eliminate processed and refined sugars and also does not eliminate the chemical additives and preservatives like colourings, thickeners, and MSG. Gluten-free junk food is still junk food. You eat junk, you feel like junk, and you produce junk in your life.
Now the other issue with processed and packaged foods labelled gluten-free is that labelling standards state that any manufactured food with a gluten content of up to 20 parts per million can be legally labelled as gluten-free. Why this number? Because gluten containing foods that are 20 ppm or less have been shown to not cause further gut damage when talking about coeliac disease, but what about damage to your skin, your bones, your heart, and your brain? If you end up eating a lot of these gluten-free foods even in the parts per million you’re still getting a few milligrams of gluten and Dr Aristo Vojdani a world renowned Immunologist says that only 1/1000th of a gram which is 1 milligram is enough to activate your immune system and produce anti-gliadin antibodies or gluten assassins.
So the bottom line is it only takes a little bit of gluten about the size of a kernel of wheat for it to activate your genes for leaky gut, for it to excite your immune system, and for it to produce antibodies that will start killing off both gluten proteins as well as your own body tissue and this goes on for a minimum of 3 months and up to around 6 months.
Dr Rodney Ford a paediatrician, gastroenterologist, and allergist with over 30 years experience uses the term Gluten-Zero which I like. Zero means just that. No gluten whatsoever. Just as you cannot be a little bit pregnant you cannot have just a little bit of gluten. You’re either on the spectrum of gluten sensitivity or not.
Right about now you’re probably thinking to yourself, ‘That sounds like too much work, that’s too hard, how exactly do I go gluten-free?’ and the first and best tip I can give you is to find a why. Find a big enough reason that’s going to surpass any challenges and obstacles that will most definitely come your way. What is your dream when it comes to living a gluten-free lifestyle? By having a dream you will make your health and being gluten-free the priority.
As part of the dream building process you can reframe how you see this new way of being.
Now it probably looks like a lot of work and a big hassle and stress that you just don’t have the time to deal with right now. Perhaps you can change your perspective to one of appreciation. How?
Appreciate the fact that you are like a canary in the coal mine and that you have heightened senses about what makes you feel bad. You are the lucky one. You have an obvious symptom teaching you to change so you won’t get a debilitating disease in the future.
Around 50% of the rest of population will continue to eat gluten without any obvious symptoms or are not mindful and aware enough of their own body language to know it’s talking to them daily and so these asymptomatic folk will eventually present with an illness and a disease later on in their life. The people that don’t know that they are sensitive to gluten will have an increased risk of death and will get colon cancer and Alzheimer’s and skin issues as well as gluten ataxia, congestive heart failure etc. Count yourself lucky that you do know that you’re sensitive to gluten and now that you know better you can do better!
Also please do not label yourself as the disease or condition. You are not a coeliac. You are not sensitive to gluten. Your body has a disease called coeliac disease. Your body has a condition called NCGS. You are not your body just as you are not your big toe, your hair, or your love handles. You have all these things, but are not these things.
As part of the dream building process communicate to all the people in your life who may be affected by and may also affect you in your gluten-free lifestyle. This can include family, friends, workmates, teammates, waiters and managers in restaurants anyone who will have a direct influence on your ability to live gluten-free. Communicate to them let them know what your dream is and what it is you need and how they can support you.
Go back and listen to the podcast I did on dream building to find out how you can better set yourself up for success when switching to a gluten-free way of living.
Next tip is to do the research and become an expert in gluten. Learn what foods contain gluten. Learn how gluten directly affects you and do not trust food labels. Research suspect food products by calling up the manufacturer. Get the word from the horses mouth.
Now is the time to clear out your house of all gluten-containing products. Could be food, personal care products, home care products anything that has gluten in it. You will replace all of these with gluten-free and non-toxic alternatives.
With regards to food you can replace tasteless and nutritionless pasta with delicious nutritious zucchini or courgette or butternut squash or spaghetti squash pasta. Actually any vegetable you can spiralise and peel will do the pasta trick.
For salad dressings make your own with extra-virgin olive oil mixed with some acid like fresh lemon or lime juice or apple cider vinegar.
Instead of wheat-based soy sauces use gluten-free tamari soy sauce or coconut aminos as alternatives.
Want to do some gluten-free baking? Swap out the grain flours for coconut flour, almond flour, linseed or flaxseed meal, and for something a bit more sugary and sweet use a mixture of white rice flour, tapioca flour, and potato starch.
People always complain about not knowing what to have for breakfast when going gluten-free. Try a bowl of chia seeds soaked in a liquid with some nuts to act as a cereal replacement. Why not have the classic free range bacon and eggs or leftovers from dinner? In reality there is no such thing as a breakfast, lunch or dinner food. Real food is nutritious, energising and informative no matter when you eat it. As always though listen to your body and learn what portion sizes and times of the day your body prefers meals.
Want a snack? How about a piece of fruit with some raw nuts or some vegetables dipped in nut butters. You can always have a tin of salmon or sardines, a couple hardboiled eggs or some real beef jerky and biltong.
Still wanting some bread eh? Try some plantains and eggs mixed and fried in butter or ghee or how about frying up some sliced round flat pieces of a root vegetable like potatoes, these can replace burger buns.
There’s always real food pancakes as well made with banana, eggs, coconut flour and some cinnamon.
Trust me you’ll find that there’s even more flavour, taste, and deliciousness and definitely nutrition when you live gluten-free.
Finally, you’ll want to start living not just gluten-free, but living holistically as well. Gluten is just one part of a bigger picture when determining how happy and healthy you feel.
- Manage yourself when it comes to stress
- Get quality restorative sleep
- Breathe deep belly breaths
- Eat real food and drink real water
- Move often
- Give gratitude
- Connect with nature and with other people and
- Lower your environmental toxin exposure.
Now above all else KEEP CALM.
It’s not the end of the world. The sky is not falling just because you can no longer have your toast, croissant, bagel or cereal for breakfast. Take a deep breath and remember to take this journey one step at a time. Patience and cool headedness are your allies on your path to health and happiness.
And if you’re really struggling hire a Holistic Lifestyle Coach. Professional sports teams, top CEOs these guys have sport coaches, business coaches. You want the best health for yourself? Hire a health coach.
Aim to live gluten-zero and you’ll at least get to living gluten-free where you’ll be exposed to gluten every now and then. It’s impossible to be 100% perfect in any way of being, but by shooting for the stars you’ll at least hit the moon.
Remember all we can ever do is take each day as it comes.
As Lao Tzu reminds us in the classic Chinese text called the Tao Te Ching:
“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
Alright here are a few resources you can use to learn more about gluten and living gluten-free. I will put links for these in the show notes for this episode.
Check out the books Wheat Belly by Dr William Davis and Grain Brain by Dr David Perlmutter to find out more about the perils of gluten, wheat, grains, and sugar. Also download and watch the awesome online seminar series The Gluten Summit created by gluten expert Dr Tom O’Bryan to learn more about gluten, wheat, and how to live a gluten-free lifestyle.
A few awesome grain-free and gluten-free cookbooks I recommend are:
- Danielle Walker’s Against All Grain by Danielle Walker
- Practical Paleo by Diane Sanfilippo
- The Zenbelly Cookbook by Simone Miller
- Nom Nom Paleo by Michelle Tam and Henry Fong
- Ancestral Table by Russ Crandall and finally
- The Paleo Kitchen by Juli Bauer and George Bryant
I own all of these books. I use them all the time. These will help anyone from the experienced chef to the kitchen newbie.
Links and Resources
- WGP 014: Dream Building — How to Create the Life You Really Really Want
- Change Your Thoughts – Change Your Life: Living the Wisdom of the Tao
- Wheat Belly — Dr William Davis
- Grain Brain — Dr David Perlmutter
- The Gluten Summit
- Danielle Walker’s Against All Grain — Danielle Walker
- Practical Paleo — Diane Sanfilippo
- The Zenbelly Cookbook — Simone Miller
- Nom Nom Paleo — Michelle Tam and Henry Fong
- Ancestral Table — Russ Crandall and finally
- The Paleo Kitchen — Juli Bauer and George Bryant
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In this podcast I’ll be exploring Inflammation:
- I’ll explain how inflammation can be both beneficial and harmful to your health and wellbeing
- I’ll talk about some of the different causes of chronic low-level inflammation
- Finally, I’ll review the best ways to reduce inflammation in your body
CLICK HERE TO LEARN WHAT ARE THE BEST FOODS TO GET YOU LEAN
Inflammation is your immune system in action and what a beautiful natural act of Mother Nature it is. Your body has the innate intelligence to heal itself and works best when you feed it real food, water, sleep, movement, breath, and healthy relationships.
You have seen inflammation in action when you’ve had a cut or a bruise or had an infection. That part of your body gets red, it swells up, heats up, and sometimes there’s pain. If you can support your body’s innate healing process with natural healing therapies and then get out of its way and not interfere too much then overtime the injured area gets better and heals.
Inflammation is key to healing. Without it your immune system would never be called into action and you would never heal. However, there is a dark side to inflammation.
Acute inflammation is obvious to spot and simple to manage. With acute inflammation the inflammatory reaction is massive like a Hollywood movie explosion. Chronic ongoing inflammation on the other hand is hidden and difficult to deal with. With chronic inflammation the inflammatory response is more like a small match lighting up. No big ‘hey look at me!’ as with acute inflammation, but still a calling card for your immune system to wake up and to get into action. So your immune system reacts the exact same way whether you have acute or chronic inflammation.
Now there’s nothing wrong with your immune system doing it’s job, but there is an issue with the amount of work your immune system has to do. Acute inflammation comes and goes — job done. Chronic inflammation comes over like an unwanted family member who overstays their welcome and your immune system does everything it can to heal and so reduce and remove the inflammation, but that stubborn chronic guy just won’t leave. The more your immune system is active the more energy and nutrition it will use leaving you tired and without the proper building blocks to support other areas of your body.
Now as a result of your immune system being overworked and frustrated another more serious problem arises. The quality of the work that your immune system does starts to go down. Meaning your immune system that includes white blood cells, T cells, and B cells starts to confuse your own body tissue with foreign and infectious objects. So now your immune system begins to attack you causing damage to whatever part of the body is being mistakenly attacked. This is what an autoimmune disease is. The body reacting to and attacking itself. Examples of autoimmune diseases include:
- Multiple sclerosis
- Crohn’s disease
- Hashimoto’s thyroiditis
- Type 1 diabetes
- Vasculitis
- Rheumatoid arthritis
- Psoriasis
- Systemic lupus erythematosus
- Coeliac disease
By the way if you are dealing with an autoimmune condition I highly recommend the book The Wahls Protocol by Dr Terry Wahls. Dr Wahls has MS multiple sclerosis, but by following an ancestral evolutionary diet and lifestyle was able to get herself out of a wheelchair and onto a bicycle. A truly inspiring story and individual.
Anyhoo… Not only does chronic inflammation send inflammatory signals throughout your body causing the breakdown of bone, nervous tissue, and organs, but it also sends out fat-storing signals and interferes with normal hormone communication.
It is this chronic low-level inflammation that is barely detectable by you and your health practitioner that is at the root of almost every single disease not just autoimmunity.
Another thing with chronic inflammation is because it acts on such a low level throughout your entire body and remember that inflammation causes redness, swelling, hotness, and pain so if you are dealing with skin issues, are holding onto extra weight that just won’t leave, have areas of your body that are hotter than they should be or you’re dealing with pain realise that all of these are huge symptoms of being inflamed.
Okay so what causes chronic inflammation?
Well a pro-inflammatory diet made up of fake pretend food-like products would be number one on the list. Remember 80% of your immune system lives in your gut because it has to deal to all the foreign stuff that comes through your gastrointestinal tract. So if you’re eating highly inflammatory foods your immune system will go into overdrive. Hello inflammation and hello disease.
The biggest fake food culprit of them all is industrial seed oils aka vegetable oils. These oils are full of trans fats as well as oxidised rancid damaged fats. When your fat-burning enzymes attach to a trans fat to metabolise it they can’t. It’s not a real fat. But now they’re stuck to this trans fat molecule stopping them from burning other fats. This can lead to an increase in your waistline.
Your cell membranes are made up of fat. If these trans fats get integrated into your cell walls then their integrity and stability begins to weaken leading to a damaged dysfunctional cell. Also, the cell receptors on the surface of the cell will be morphed into unnatural shapes preventing them from receiving nutrition and eliminating waste in and out of the cell. Trans fats are deadly to the cell and deadly to your body.
These seed oils are mostly made up of fragile omega-6 fats that get easily damaged when exposed to heat, light, and will go rancid after very short periods of time. When eaten these fats create damaging free radicals in your body and without enough antioxidants these free radicals will cause a whole host of diseases.
Second biggest baddie when it comes to chronic inflammation and food is processed and refined sugar and grains like flour and products made with them. When you eat any processed grain like bread, doughnuts, cooked corn even these metabolise in the body and turn in an instant into sugar. So there’s literally no difference between eating a piece of wholemeal bread or a cookie and eating a few teaspoons of sugar. Same goes with fizzy drinks and fruit juices. These are all sugar when they hit your mouth, your gut, and your liver.
A diet high in sugar leads to too much sugar being left in the blood causing the sugar molecules to stick to cells in the bloodstream. This process is called glycation and the new molecule that forms is called an Advanced Glycation Endproduct or AGE. AGEs block immune cells from getting into damaged tissues in need of repair stopping the reduction of inflammation.
Excess sugar consumption also raises insulin levels. Insulin is a fat-storing hormone and when this is high fat-burning is switched off. Insulin also triggers the release of interleukin-6 or IL-6 which is an inflammatory and anti-inflammatory molecule, but tends to create more inflammation in your body.
Wheat, pasteurised milk, table salt, instant coffee and any other processed and packaged industrialised fake food-like product are pro-inflammatory to your body. So if you love fast food, cheap food, and don’t know the difference between a spinach leaf and a cabbage leaf you my friend are probably full of inflammation.
Another cause of chronic inflammation is having the omega-6 and omega-3 ratio of fats in your diet out of balance. These two fats are essential to health and essential here literally means your body cannot make these fats therefore you must eat them. Now omega-6 is a pro-inflammatory fat, whereas omega-3 is anti-inflammatory. Our ancestors had the perfect 1:1 ratio of omega-6s to omega-3s in their diet. Today western societies have been estimated to be eating a ratio of omega-6s to omega-3s of 20:1 or more!
Going back to the seed oils and grains these are mostly omega-6 fats. Any wonder now why we live in an inflammation nation!
Stress of all types physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual cause the release of stress hormones in the body that can have an anti-inflammatory effect by suppressing your immune system. However, chronic stress with stress hormones left to linger in the body for long periods of time makes for a weakened immune system and creates more inflammation. Stress can cause damage to the mucosal barriers in your body making them more permeable and porous than they should be. So stress can cause your skin as well as your gut to become leaky leading to skin and gut inflammation and disease.
Sleep deprivation can make you as insulin resistant as a diabetic. Insulin resistance means your cells no longer pay attention to insulin leaving a lot of insulin and sugar in your bloodstream. So with insulin resistance comes more inflammation due to high levels of insulin and sugar.
Being overweight and obese is also inflammatory. Fat isn’t just a grouping of cells sitting around waiting for you to burn it as energy. Fat is actually an endocrine organ meaning it produces hormones. Adiponectin is a fat hormone used to control the metabolism of fats and sugars. It also makes you more insulin sensitive.
Another hormone that fat produces is called leptin. Leptin has been called the master hormone because not only does it tell you when you’re full it also looks controls other glands and hormones in your body. Problem with leptin is if you have too much leptin you will have a lot of inflammation to go with it. This is because leptin is also an inflammatory signalling molecule. So the more fat you are holding onto the more leptin you will have and the more inflammation you will get.
One last thing about food. Even if you’re eating organic and naturally raised real food you still may be causing yourself more harm than good if you’re eating foods you are allergic or have a sensitivity to. A food allergy is an immediate reaction to a food that you’ve eaten. A food sensitivity or intolerance could take hours, days or even up to a week before you get a reaction from that particular food. Food allergies and sensitivities are serious business when it comes to causing stress and inflammation in your body. These foods can cause inflammation in the gut making it leaky. If these foods were to get into your bloodstream further inflammation would go on in your body.
Being exposed to toxins industrial or natural makes for more inflammation in your body in more ways than one. The toxins alone cause inflammation and an immune response. Along with this though any toxins that are not metabolised properly by your liver get stored in your fat cells. The more toxins your body cannot eliminate the fatter you get (it’s not just about the calories people, in fact it hardly ever is). Anyhoo, remember with more fat there’s more leptin and more inflammation.
Electromagnetic fields (EMFs) cause a buildup of positive electrons in your body that act as free radicals damaging you from the inside out creating more inflammation.
All this fake food, stress, and toxin exposure also creates an imbalance of the microorganisms in your gut. A healthy gut will have a ratio of 85% probiotics (the good guys) to 15% pathogens (the bad guys). People with unhealthy diets and lifestyles have been shown to have a ratio of 15% good to 85% bad microorganisms. This imbalance is called dysbiosis. Dysbiosis causes many issues in your gut including malnutrition, leaky gut syndrome, and inflammation. Pathogens create endotoxins in your gut that will create inflammation and if these endotoxins get through a leaky gut into your bloodstream then inflammation will occur in other areas of your body.
Alrighty then let’s get into how you can reduce the heat in your life and be more cool like a cucumber, i.e. reduce your inflammation.
Eat an anti-inflammatory diet.
As an old English proverb says:
“Don’t dig your grave with your own knife and fork.”
By eating foods that are less pro and more anti-inflammatory you will dramatically reduce the immune response in your system. Stick to real foods organically and naturally raised that give more life force than they take. My free e-book describing the top superfoods in the world is a good guide for this. You can get it for free simply by signing up to the Whole Guidance newsletter at wholeguidance.com.
If you have some excess weight you’d like to let go of maybe a lower carbohydrate diet would be a path you can try walking down just for a month or two. By reducing your sugar intake not only will you reduce the inflammation and your risk of disease by reducing your insulin production, you may just find your body composition begin to normalise back into a healthy range reducing your leptin production.
Eat for a better omega-6 to omega-3 ratio. A healthy ratio of these essential fats would be 4:1 omega-6s to omega-3s with 1:1 being the ideal. Now this doesn’t necessarily mean get more omega-3 and drop the omega-6 because you don’t want to go to the opposite extreme as well. Take a good hard look at your diet and try and calculate how much more omega-6 fat foods are you eating compared to omega-3 fat foods. Are you eating a lot of seed oils or foods made and cooked with them?Are you eating too many baked food products made with flours? Cut back on these high omega-6 pro-inflammatory foods. Instead focus on omega-3 sources of food the best being cold water oily fish like wild-caught salmon, sardines, mackerel, and herring. Even chia seeds and flax seeds can provide a little omega-3 nutrition and by little I do mean very little, but I tells ya’ I love me some chia cacao vanilla cinnamon pudding way better compared to a gooey glop of porridge.
Eat for gut health. So don’t just eat for you, but also eat for your gut microbiome. Your probiotics need to eat just as much as you do and they love soluble fibre and resistant starch. So basically eat plenty of fibrous vegetables. Grains have too high of a fibre to nutrition ratio so even if you did go with some whole grains you’d want to limit them. If you’re wondering about fruit sure eat plenty of fruit as long as you don’t have any weight and metabolic issues such as diabetes or heart disease.
Taking a probiotic with many different strains of bacteria and with high potency meaning it has a high number of them per serving is also a great way to support your gut health.
Obviously the best way to support your gut health is by eating fermented foods. Sauerkraut and kefir are my favourite. You can learn more about fermented foods in my free e-book.
Drink quality natural spring and artesian water or water that has been filtered. The best solution for pollution is dilution and seeing as inflammation is your body on fire some nice cooling water will be exactly what the holistic doctor ordered.
Get quality restorative sleep. Your body runs on a circadian cycle that follows the cycles of the sun and the moon. As a general guideline you want to be in bed by 10p and up around 6a. Listen to episode 5 on sleep for more info.
Manage your ability to handle stress. There are many different ways to improve your stress resiliency including meditation and mindfulness practises. I explained how I personally reduce my perception of stress back in episode 3 so you might want to listen to that.
Finally, reduce your toxic and EMF exposure. You will never ever be able to live a toxic and EMF free life, but you can dramatically reduce how much exposure you get to these pro-inflammatory materials everyday. Check out the previous Whole Guidance podcast episode I did on how to detox your life for more information.
Links and Resources
- The Wahls Protocol — Terry Wahls MD and Eve Adamson
- WGP 005: Are You Getting Enough Sleep?
- WGP 003: How Stress is Making You Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead
- WGP 012: How to Love Your Liver and Detox Your Life
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In this podcast I’ll be exploring Movement:
- I’ll explain how movement is one of the most essential nutrients for your body
- I’ll talk about how a lack of movement affects your health
- Finally, I’ll talk about the different types of movement that your body expects and how to increase your consumption of real movement nutrition
CLICK HERE TO LEARN WHAT ARE THE BEST FOODS TO GET YOU LEAN
Movement is life. Life is movement. If you’re not moving you’re not living. Movement nourishes your body and mind.
Your body and mind are actually one and the same. Clinical Professor of Psychiatry Dr Dan Siegel defines the mind as the following:
“The mind is an embodied process that regulates the flow of energy and information.”
Your mind is embodied within your entire being, your whole body, cultivating the many different life processes happening within. From your left pinky toe to your right ear lob.
Whenever I refer to your body I’m also referring to your mind and vice versa. So you can think of your body and mind as one entity called the bodymind.
Movement then moves not only the body, but the mind your entire bodymind.
Movement acts as a pump. Every time you move you contract and relax different muscles in your body and this process of restriction and expansion within each muscle acts like a pump. These pumps move water, blood, oxygen, nutrients, energy and information throughout your body. No pumping action means no nutrition for your cells.
Your lymphatic system is your waste management system and does not have a pump of its own as does your circulatory system that has the heart as a pump. Lymph fluid in your lymphatic system only moves when you move. If you don’t move then all that toxic waste just sits around in your lymphatic system and doesn’t get into your bloodstream where it can be processed for detoxification and elimination. Overtime this causes a toxic buildup in your body and when you do decide to move this will eventually overwhelm your detoxification organs such as your liver, skin, lungs, and kidneys.
You must get into the groove and move in order to transport nutrients to where they are needed the most inside of your cells and in order to transport and eliminate waste out of your body.
If you’re not moving and remain in one position for long periods of time and I’m not just talking about sitting, this applies to any long held position standing, kneeling, then your cells begin to starve due to a lack of nutrition and you also create a buildup of waste.
One of the symptoms you will experience due to a lack of movement is tiredness and low energy. When your cells do not receive the nutrients, energy and information that they need to function your metabolism begins to slow down, your bodymind begins to slow down because it’s low on nutrition and energy. Even though the energy is there inside your body your lack of movement is not transporting that energy to where it’s needed the most.
Not only does a lack of movement cause you to feel tired, but because the nutrients aren’t being transported to vital organs in your body such as your gut, heart, and brain your bodymind begins to lose focus and attention and you also begin to experience unstable mood swings and can begin to feel irritable.
Having unstable energy levels isn’t just due to a lack of nutrients reaching your cells, but also due to your inability to handle carbohydrate and sugar. Eating excess carbs and sugar creates many issues in the body including having unstable levels of blood sugar. So while you may experience an energy high at first after a carb-heavy meal or snack as the sugar rushes throughout your bloodstream it’s not too long before your energy comes crashing down as all that sugar gets quickly burnt up for energy and any excess sugar gets put into storage and then you begin to feel hungry again. You may get hungry or you may feel angry after such a sugar crash, but for me I definitely get both hungry and angry after I eat too many carbs. A phenomenon known as HANGRY!
Muscle is one area of your body where excess sugar (glucose) gets stored as glycogen. Now if you do not have enough lean muscle mass then your tolerance for carbs will be lower than someone else who has more lean muscle. One way you can maintain lean muscle is by moving. Move it or lose it right.
Also movement makes muscle cells more sensitive to the carbs you eat. After doing some high-intensity movement your muscle cells begin to scream out for nutrients and they are extremely hungry for carbs. Now your fat cells are always screaming and always hungry for additional fats made from the excess carbs and sugars you eat. But by moving your body you can at least make your muscle cells scream louder for nutrients compared to your fat cells.
So by moving you can maintain lean muscle while at the same time you can tell your muscle cells to take up most of the sugar you’re eating keeping your blood sugar levels from rising and falling too quickly. This allows you to step off and skip the next ride on the energy roller coaster.
Peristalsis is the wave-like contraction of the muscles that make up your digestive system and the more you move the more peristalsis occurs in your body meaning you will have better elimination of faecal matter — that is to say you’ll poo like a champion. Lack of movement reduces peristalsis and can make you constipated. When you’re constipated your poo sits in your colon longer than it should and water and toxins in the poo will be absorbed into your body. This reabsorption of toxins that were meant to be eliminated creates double overtime work for your liver. This extra work for your liver makes it very hungry for energy and this will cause you to feel tired and fatigued as other areas of the bodymind are not getting the energy that they need.
Also chronic constipation and exposure to toxins in your environment (such as chemicals in food and in personal and home care products) will overwhelm your liver and it will not be able to do its job 100% and usually the next organ that takes the hit for an over toxified body is the largest organ — your skin. So crap starts to come out of your skin and you can get rashes and acne all because you’re constipated and all because you are not moving and of course if you’re not well hydrated.
So if you want to move-it move-it down there you’re going to need to move-it move-it up here.
Your heart pumps blood through your circulatory system, however, it’s not a lone ranger. Your heart is part of your bodymind and works together with all other parts of your body. When you’re moving, even if it’s just fidgeting. anytime you use your skeletal muscles you’re providing additional pumps to move blood and nutrients around your body. This supports the heart so the heart no longer has to work as hard. Movement can create less strain and less stress on your heart… unless you’re doing long duration cardio, but I’ll talk more about that later.
Now this is also why sitting has been called the new smoking and why chronic sitting can lead to heart disease because without frequent movement you’re causing your heart to do more work on its own. This can create constriction in your arteries causing high blood pressure and gradually overtime due to the chronic high blood pressure and constant rushing of blood through constricted passageways in your circulatory system this will cause damage to your arteries.
Another issue with a lack of movement is your body can no longer grow and repair itself. Living life causes wear and tear on your body particularly in your muscles and joints. These are the workhorses of your body the slave workers doing hard physical labour. The cells in your muscles and joints are constantly being damaged and are dying off. If these cells are malnourished and not getting enough nutrients and energy they will not be able to repair the damage done by daily activities and the dead cells will not be replaced as quickly as they should be or will not be replaced at all. This will lead to muscle aches and joint pain. This is where slow energy-building movements come in and I’ll talk more about these soon.
So does this all mean you have to be moving 24/7 even in your sleep? No. But you do need to be moving often and change up your physical position throughout the day.
There are many different ways to incorporate movement into your life. There are informal types of movement that include play and random bouts of physical expression where there is no end goal in mind when you’re participating in the activity. So you can play outside, you can walk, run, hop, skip, jump. You can climb trees and literally just hang out and pull yourself up. You can swim, ski, go hiking, or mountain climbing. All this movement counts and yes this even includes sexy times.
Formal types of movement include training and exercise where you have particular disciplined movement patterns that require skill, proper form, and correct technique to perform.
Just as there are nutritious foods with different types of nutrients and fake foods with no nutrition whatsoever, there are also nutritious movement patterns with different types of movement nutrients and fake movement patterns with barely any movement nutrition.
One fake movement pattern that does more harm than good overtime is chronic long duration cardio. Yes joggers, cyclists, and marathon runners alike are all performing an unnatural act as it relates to your bodymind. Long duration cardio has many benefits as most movements do, but unfortunately chronically performing this type of exercise has one massive downside and that is the increase in heart muscle mass and rigidity. Your heart is a muscle and with chronic overuse this turns to abuse as the heart becomes rigid leading to heart conditions as endurance athletes age.
Another fake movement is seen in the competitive sport of bodybuilding. Again another unnatural act that puts too much strain on the bodymind as a whole and couple that with the use of artificial enhancements and drugs and it’ll lead to a lower quality of life as these athletes age.
Now there’s nothing wrong if you participate in these activities to a point. You can run marathons and become a bodybuilder for health reasons, but once you get competitive at these sports health tends to go out the window. Once you realise that you are doing something your body was not designed for and knowing that you may have to do unnatural things in order to participate you will be able to modify other aspects of your lifestyle to compensate.
There are three main types of nutritious movement your body really loves and was designed for in terms of living a happy, healthy, and long quality life.
Now before I get into these three nutritious movement patterns understand that your body doesn’t run off calories alone. Hormones play a huge role in determining the health of your mental, emotional, and physical wellbeing. These three nutritious movement patterns turn on fat-burning and growth hormones, and increase sex hormones. While these three types of movement may not burn as many calories as other forms of exercise they also won’t put your body under massive amounts of stress like other forms of exercise [cough] chronic long duration cardio. Anyhoo…
First nutritious movement is lifting really heavy things aka high intensity training. Strength training can involve weights and machines, but there’s nothing wrong and everything right with using your own body as resistance. If you’re new to lifting heavy things you will want to go through three different stages of body conditioning and preparation work beforehand to reduce your chance of injury: mobilisation, stabilisation, and flexibility. By making sure your joints and muscles are mobile and flexible enough to handle weight and by conditioning your core muscles to share the load evenly you will dramatically reduce your risk of injury. You’ll need to find a skilled exercise coach and personal trainer for this and I suggest looking for CHEK Practitioners in your area. Highly skilled with holistic and functional training CHEKkies are one the best trainers, rehabilitators, and physical therapists in the world. You can find them at chekconnect.com.
Two more great resources for conditioning your body are the books Foundation by Dr Eric Goodman and Peter Park and Becoming A Supple Leopard by Dr Kelly Starrett and Glen Cordoza.
With this strength training you want to be lifting at high intensities. So this doesn’t mean 5 sets and 30 repetitions of the same exercise. High intensity is more like 1-5 sets of 3-5 reps of a single exercise with 3-5 minutes of rest in between each set. You only need to spend about 30-50 minutes in the gym for one of these workouts. Another way to perform at high intensities is by lifting and lowering weights very slowly. This type of slow resistance workout takes less than 20 minutes to complete and can be done by anyone over the age of 16. Check out the book Body By Science by Doug McGuff and John Little for more on this slow resistance training.
Next nutritious movement pattern is sprint intervals or high intensity interval training. If you were to look at a marathon runner’s body compared to a sprinter’s body you’ll notice one isn’t quite as lean and muscle bound as the other. The sprinter’s body looks healthier because of the hormonal effects that sprint training provides.
Sprint interval training involves warming up for a few minutes and then going all out for a certain period of time and then resting for a certain period of time and repeating this pattern a certain number of times. You can use a spin bike, treadmill, or a real bike and sprint for real. You can even use weights. Any movement can be turned into high intensity interval training as it’s based on working at your hardest energy output for a set period then resting. I personally use a spin bike and warm up for three minutes. My first interval starts off with 30 seconds of going all out and then resting for 90 seconds where I go at an extremely slow recovery pace. I repeat this interval seven more times with a five minute cooldown afterwards. So that makes a total of eight sprints and a total of four minutes of actual physical high intensity activity.
I used to do 40 mins on the bike before I learnt about sprint training and it’s made me more time efficient and has been a lot more effective at improving my health.
So right away you can see these first two movement patterns are not exactly long workouts, but they are definitely intense and once done your bodymind bathes in the positive hormonal afterglow that follows.
Final nutritious movement pattern involves moving slowly and moving often aka not being stuck in one position all day every day. These movement patterns you can call working in instead of working out. Workouts drain your body of energy, whereas working in cultivates and builds energy within your bodymind.
The most simplest and easiest work-in of them all is to breathe. You don’t even have to get out of bed for this one. Taking relaxing diaphragmatic belly breaths through the nose as described in a previous episode I did on breathing moves your body in all three dimensions as your belly expands forward, ribcage expands sideways, and your spine expands up and down.
Another easy work-in movement pattern is walking. Very simple, you don’t have to strain yourself, just walk. Maybe start off with 30 minutes a day so get a timer, set it for 15 minutes, start off on your walk and once the timer goes off you walk back.
Next work-ins are Tai-chi and Qi-gong. These are very slow forms of movement and are more meditative in nature. Along these lines of movements are Zone exercises which are a form of Qi-gong where you do the exercise not so much for meditation (but they can be used this way), but more for healing a specific health complaint that you may have. To find out more about these Zone exercises look up the book How to Eat, Move and Be Healthy! by holistic health practitioner Paul Chek.
Yoga is another form of working in. Now I’m not talking hot Bikram melt-in-your-clothes yoga that’s more of a workout, but Hatha and Iyengar yoga. That’s the yoga you want for working in.
One final tip for those stuck in a chair most of the day or stuck being in one set position for long periods of time. No amount of movement can reverse the damage caused to your arteries from being chronically stuck in the same position all day. You need to break up the static pattern with either frequent dynamic movements or by simply changing position. So set a timer to 25 minutes and every time it goes off get up for a few minutes and go for a quick stroll around the building or go outside or simply do air or chair squats, lunges, or march on the spot. If you’re fortunate enough to have a workstation that can be raised and lowered simply change from a sitting to a standing position throughout the day.
Just don’t stay in the one position for longer than an hour.
I’ll leave you with this:
“Life is a dance and Mother Nature only dances with those who dance and move along with her.”
If you ain’t movin’ and you ain’t groovin’ then Mother Nature’s bouncers aka bacteria, fungi, and parasites will gladly show you the door.
Links and Resources
- ChekConnect.com for Holistic and Functional Exercise Coaches and Therapists
- Body By Science — Doug McGuff MD, John Little
- WGP 004: How to Breathe for an Awesome Life
- Foundation — Dr. Eric Goodman, Peter Park
- Becoming a Supple Leopard — Dr. Kelly Starrett, Glen Cordoza
- How to Eat, Move and Be Healthy! — Paul Chek
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In this podcast I’ll be exploring a topic I’m very familiar with Digestion:
- I’ll explain how proper digestion works and its many different stages
- I’ll talk about poor digestion and how it can affect your health
- Finally, I’ll give some digestion rituals that you can practise to increase the absorption and usage of the nutrition and energy and information you get from eating real food
CLICK HERE TO LEARN WHAT ARE THE BEST FOODS TO GET YOU LEAN
Digestion can be broken up into two main phases. First is the psychic phase. Second is the physical phase.
The first phase deals with your mind, with your emotional and mental state and the choices you make when it comes to eating. So what you choose to eat, when you choose to eat, how you choose to eat, and the whys behind each choice are the beginning of your digestive process.
I will focus on the second phase of digestion in this episode the physical phase and there are many different stages.
Remember from a previous episode that your enteron, your alimentary canal, your entire digestive tubing from your mouth hole to your south hole is technically outside your body. It is your body’s first line of defence against anything you put into your mouth. It is in your gut where the stuff you eat finally gets absorbed into your body.
The first stage of physical digestion begins in the mouth when you eat and chew your food. Mastication, that is the mechanical physical act of chewing, breaks up the food into smaller pieces making it easier to swallow and mixes it with the digestive enzymes in your saliva. These enzymes begin to break down the macronutrients in the food, specifically carbohydrates into smaller starch molecules. So properly chewing your food makes it easier for later stages of your digestive process to function.
The second stage of physical digestion happens in your stomach. The acidity of your stomach is very high. It can burn skin and dissolve metal and if it wasn’t for the thick mucous membrane that lines your stomach it would eat itself. One reason for the high acidity in your stomach is to further digest and breakdown food molecules, specifically proteins from long chains of amino acids (polypeptides) to smaller ones. Another big reason for a very low pH (meaning a very high acid level) in your stomach is to ensure that any bacteria, fungi, or parasites that have stowed away in the food and come along for the ride are killed and destroyed. You do not want these bad bugs to go any further than your stomach.
The next stage of physical digestion is in your small intestine. Now your small intestine has a very different pH level compared to your stomach meaning it is more alkaline and not acidic at all — in fact its neutral. This is because your pancreas, an organ that secretes digestive enzymes and hormones, also releases bicarbonate into your small intestine to neutralise the acidic foods coming from the stomach.
The digestive enzymes secreted by your pancreas further breakdown the carbohydrates into saccharides (smaller sugar molecules) like glucose and fructose, the proteins get broken down into individual and very small chains of amino acids, and fats are also broken down into individual fatty acids. As the food travels further into your small intestine the digested macronutrients and micronutrients (remember micronutrients include vitamins, minerals, trace minerals, and plant nutrients) so the macros and micros begin to get absorbed through the gut wall of your small intestine. Once absorbed saccharides and amino acids travel to your liver to be processed and detoxified before they enter your bloodstream. Fats take a different route to your bloodstream by hitching a ride through your lymphatic system, your waste management system.
Once in your bloodstream the absorbed macros and micros get transported to where they are needed most and assimilated by your cells and metabolised, used for cellular function. The waste products of metabolism are then taken back to the liver for processing and elimination through the skin by sweating, lungs by breathing, kidneys by urination, and the large intestine your colon by defecation, that is pooping.
Now going back to the small intestine any undigested food particles, macros, micros, and fibre that are not absorbed through the gut wall of your small intestine will move on to your colon for the final stage of digestion.
The colon is where your gut microbiota lives and has a lower pH and higher acidity level than your small intestine, but still nowhere near as acidic as your stomach. You will have a diverse population of microorganisms here and what you really want is a well-balanced ratio of good bugs (probiotics) to bad bugs (pathogens). That ideal ratio is about 85% probiotics to 15% pathogens. The more probiotics in your gut the more lactic acid they produce. The more lactic acid produced the higher the acidity of the colon. The higher the acidity of the colon the lower the number of pathogens as the bad bugs cannot thrive in an acidic environment.
Your gut microbiota take up any undigested food particles, macros, micros as well as prebiotic soluble fibre and use these as their food. As a result of your gut microbiotas digestion more nutrients and waste are created.
Nutrients such as vitamin K, some B vitamins, and short chain fatty acids are produced by the probiotics. The pathogens on the other hand produce toxic waste products. These additional nutrients produced by the probiotics as well as water in the colon will be absorbed into your body. At the same time any leftover foods, macros, micros, and fibre that are not digested by your gut microbiota along with any waste products made by the pathogens and also any dead cells of your gut microbiota these will all form into faeces, into poo for final elimination.
So to summarise the many different stages of digestion in a sentence: digestion begins in the mouth and ends in the south and involves mastication, digestion, absorption, detoxification, transportation, assimilation, metabolisation, and elimination.
If there is a problem in any one of these stages you will encounter many symptoms of poor digestion including:
- Diarrhea
- Constipation
- Gas
- Bloating
- Belching
- Stomach reflux
- Feeling tired after meals
- Feeling hungry after meals
- Muscle and joint pain including neck, shoulder, and back pain
So a few causes of poor digestion include dehydration due to not drinking enough water.
Your saliva, mucous membranes in your stomach and small and large intestines are mostly water. If you’re dehydrated you won’t be providing enough enzymes in your mouth to begin predigesting your food. Your stomach lining which protects it from the acid will be weak leading to the formation of stomach ulcers. Your small and large intestines will not be able to breakdown food and push the food through your gastrointestinal tract effectively causing lack of nutrient absorption and blockages.
Your poo is also mostly water so when you become dehydrated you get constipated. The longer poo remains in your colon the more water is extracted and absorbed into your body and the more constipated you get. Not only that, but the waste in your poo which is meant to be eliminated begins to get absorbed into your body as well. So you want to make sure you’re hydrated otherwise you will begin recycling your waste back into your body.
Another cause for poor digestion is eating the wrong foods and taking pharmaceutical drugs and prescribed medications. So if you’re eating processed fake pretend food-like products such as vegetable oils, table salt, instant coffee, pasteurised dairy, wheat and any other packaged junk foods you will cause problems with your digestion. This is due to the fact that these foods are very micronutrient poor and are filled with chemical agents, preservatives, additives, colourings, thickeners, emulsifiers, synthetic minerals and vitamins which are very damaging to your gut and feed more of the pathogens and less of the probiotics. Medications have the same effect.
Eating a lot of these foods and taking drugs also causes your liver to work overtime to get rid of the toxins and because there’s more energy being drawn to your liver to process this junk there’s less energy available to other areas of your body. So instead of building muscle, burning fat, thinking clearly, healing and repairing, fighting off infections your body is too busy trying to detoxify what you’re putting into your mouth.
Plus by not eating enough micronutrients you end up with cells in your body starving of nutrition unable to function leading to illness
Drinking municipal town and city water that has chlorine in it can also upset your digestion. Chlorine is an antibiotic meaning it will kill a lot of your gut microbiome leaving behind the perfect environment for opportunistic pathogens to takeover leading to less nutrient production, more waste production, a weakened immune system and eventually sickness and disease.
So if you’re not drinking enough water, not eating real food, not staying healthy and so not having to take medical drugs, and if you’re not drinking high quality living structured water then you are putting more stress on your body than it can handle.
Stress of any kind whether it be physical, mental and emotional, or biochemical and physiological will cause digestive issues.
How you think and feel about events in your life affect your stress levels and determines whether your body stays in parasympathetic mode your rest, digest, calm, and connect mode or shifts to sympathetic mode your fight, flight, flee or freeze mode. Remember sympathetic mode is all about survival and not about digesting, growth or repair which is what parasympathetic is all about.
So even though you may be eating the highest quality organically farmed, naturally raised food blessed by the Pope himself you will not be digesting and absorbing any of the nutrients if you are in a high stress state. If you’re rushing out the door late for something, arguing with someone, getting frustrated in traffic, watching and reading bad things in the news, these are all causing your body to shift from digestion to survival mode.
So the first phase of digestion, the mental game is really huge when it comes to properly digesting your food. If you can correct the psychic phase of digestion your physical digestion will work a lot better.
The biggest problem with stress of any kind is that it causes physical damage to your gut. Your gut wall is made up of finger like projections called villi that stick out to breakdown food and absorb nutrients and they are connected to each other by tight junctions at their base. When you eat the wrong foods or a toxin or experience stress which will cause the release of stress hormones and other chemicals, all of these act as irritants in your gut causing those tight junctions between your villi to open up. This is bad news as only nutrients should be allowed through your gut wall, but now your gut has become leaky meaning any substance in your gut whether it be nutrient or toxic or parasite, small or large, can slip into your body. This causes a whole cascade of stress, immune responses, inflammation and damage to whatever bodily tissue that foreign substance attaches to. It may attach to your arteries, your joints, your thyroid, your bones, your muscles, your brain, leading to a whole bunch of diseases.
Remember what Hippocrates said:
“All disease begins in the gut.”
A leaky gut is serious business and I should know because I used to have one!
So you must be very aware of what you’re thinking and how you’re eating and that’s what I’m going to go into now — how do you eat for better digestion?
As I mentioned in a previous episode on water drinking a huge glass of water 20-30 minutes before a meal will improve digestion by lubricating your gut and your stomach and helping with the production of stomach acid as well as more saliva in your mouth giving you more enzymes to breakdown food.
The biggest tip I can give you is to eat real food and drink high quality water. The less toxins you ingest the more nutrition you will digest, absorb, and assimilate.
There’s an old saying:
“Drink your food and chew your water.”
You want to chew your food until it turns into a liquid. There’s no specific number of bites, but you’ll know what it is by the fact that you should not need to drink during a meal. If you’re finding yourself having to drink during a meal to get your food down that’s a huge sign telling you that you ain’t chewing enough.
Chew your liquids. Swirl your drink around in your mouth to allow your saliva and enzymes to infuse into the liquid so that your stomach and later stages of digestion recognise it as food and digest it as normal. Not chewing your water leads to it going right through your body with hardly any absorption at all.
Don’t watch or read the news. 99.9% of it is negative causing stress in your subconscious and your body. If you want to watch something or read something it should be a comedy. It should be inspirational and motivational. Or listen to music that makes you more mindful. Calming music not rev-yourself-up music. Me I love to watch the Food Channel of course or I’m listening to empowering podcasts while I eat.
Final tip if you have to go, number two that is, then go! I used to hold it in and I had trained my body to not go even when it wanted to go and eventually that lead to constipation with acute and sudden bouts of diarrhea, also known as constirrhea. If you’re currently fighting the urge to go number two it’s not too late to retrain your body back to its natural state by listening to it and when the urge comes you go and you go hard.
I’ll leave you with this:
“You’re not just what you eat, you’re how you eat as well.”
So eat real food and eat it well to keep your gut happy, healthy, and leakproof.
Links and Resources
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In this podcast I’ll be exploring once again my favourite topic Real Food:
- I’ll share which fake processed pretend food-like products you should never eat… ever
- I’ll be offering a master list of real foods that you should be eating plenty of on a regular basis
- Finally, I’ll explain how to best use this real food manifesto for your individual goals
CLICK HERE TO LEARN WHAT ARE THE BEST FOODS TO GET YOU LEAN
Remember the definition I gave in the previous podcast describing what real food is.
“Real food is any organic and natural plant or animal that fuels and nourishes the human body with energy and nutrition.”
Well the first group of foods I’m about to share now are the exact opposite because they are not food, but are marketed to you as being food. You should never and I mean ever intentionally buy, store at home or work, eat or even think about including these fake processed pretend food-like products in your diet and your life. No human, no mammal, no animal, no plant on this planet should be consuming these products.
That’s not to say that you won’t ever be exposed to these pseudo-foods these fake foods, but you can at least minimise the damage they cause to your body and health by reframing how you look at these foods and changing your perspective from seeing foods to seeing crappy industrial commercial products instead that do nothing more than expand and fatten your waistline as well as the bottom-line of big corporations.
First pseudo-food are industrial seed oils also marketed as healthy vegetable oils.
- Canola — aka rapeseed
- Corn
- Soya
- Cottonseed
- Safflower
- Low-oleic sunflower
- Peanut and groundnut
- Rice bran
- Grape seed
These oils all come from seeds, grains, and legumes, not from vegetables. The way these oils have been manufactured, produced, processed, stored and packaged damages the delicate fatty acids in the oils making them go rancid. Rancid oil is off, it’s stale and dead and when you eat rancid oil you get turned off to life as well.
Ever wonder how they turn a liquid oil like canola into a solid? By using biochemical processes such as hydrogenation and transesterification companies can do amazing things. Too bad the end products are one molecule away from being plastic! So next time you see hydrogenated or transesterified on a label you run. Run literally like your life depends on it.
So do not eat industrial seed oils or any product made with them such as:
- Margarine and other buttery spreads
- Sauces
- Salad dressings
- Mayo
- Chips
- Baked goods
- Gluten-free foods
Virtually all processed food-like products have been made with these damaged rancid industrial seed oils. Also a lot of restaurants and food outlets fry and cook foods with these industrial seed oils because it’s cheaper and they believe they’re doing the right thing in terms of giving customers a healthier end product.
Now if you have a heart healthy program in your country you will see a lot of these fake foods with a heart healthy mark on them. Again don’t believe the hype and the marketing. In New Zealand where I live we have the the Heart Foundation Tick programme where over 1100 products (products!) in 62 food categories have purchased the right to proudly display the healthy red tick. Yes it’s a paid for service. Unfortunately most of the products use industrial seed oil as the main ingredient.
Be alert, be wary, but don’t be afraid because now that you know better you can do better.
Next pseudo-food is regular table salt. Table salt has been processed and stripped of its minerals and trace minerals meaning there’s no micronutrients in table salt as there is in naturally occurring salt leaving behind a very bright white powder. Also there are anti-caking agents and other chemical additives added to table salt to prevent it from sticking and clumping together.
Table salt, not natural sea salt, is associated with blood pressure issues. Your body requires natural salt for many bodily functions such as keeping your water, sodium, and potassium levels in balance.
Salt should not be a pure white colour. It should be grey, pink, red, any colour besides white. It should be of the ocean and earth it came from. It will be full of Earth minerals and trace minerals as well as Earth energy and information.
You’ll find table salt in extremely high amounts in processed and packaged fake food-like products, salted butter (unless it says sea salt on the label), in takeout and fast foods, and even restaurants use the cheaper salt.
I love my New Zealand sea salt and Celtic salt is another great sea salt. Rock salt like Himalayan salt is awesome too.
Instant coffee is pseudo-food number three. Instant coffee is to organic whole bean coffee as a McDonald’s Fillet ‘o Fish burger is to a baked fillet of wild-caught salmon served over mesclun salad drizzled with lemon juice and extra-virgin olive oil.
Instant coffee is junk food. Usually the worst of the worst coffee beans, the bad, the ugly, the deformed are ground to make instant coffee. Also the way it’s processed and stored leads to a build-up of mould and microorganisms that create toxic products, which they happily leave behind in the powder. Personally I find instant coffee just tastes like crap.
Another thing to keep in mind for those with coeliac disease and non-coeliac gluten sensitivity is that instant coffee has high cross-reactivity with gluten meaning your body may process instant coffee the same way it processes gluten.
So instant coffee — don’t even go there.
Fourth pseudo-food I believe that no life should be consuming is pasteurised milk. What is pasteurisation? Pasteurisation is the processes of heating a liquid to kill all the microorganisms in it. Well that’s actually marketing. That was a legitimate reason back in the day when cows were literally living in their own filth. But the reason pasteurisation of any food is still used today by the food industry is so that fake foods have a longer shelf-life meaning more sales, more money, and a new BMW or Audi for food company executives.
Now raw milk from any mammal is full of nutrition and energy and information that supports the growth of life. It’s full of naturally occurring macronutrients and micronutrients. It’s full of good microorgansims, the probiotics that keep the bad microorganisms, the pathogens from infecting and spoiling the milk. It’s also full of native enzymes that help digest and breakdown the milk.
Pasteurised milk that has been heated to kill the bad bugs has also killed the good bugs. So now you have a milk that’s lost its defence system and if pasteurised milk gets infiltrated by even a tiny amount of pathogens it spoils. It spoils quickly and it spoils hard because there’s no probiotics to protect the milk and fight off the bad guys.
Also the enzymes that would usually help you digest the milk have been destroyed and the macros and micros have all been modified and denatured to the point where a lot of people get sick drinking this stuff.
There’s no point to pasteurised milk it’s been killed, it’s a dead product.
Seriously raw milk is the only way to go.
Final pseudo-food to keep away from your life forever (forever ever?) forever is wheat. The wheat of today has been commercially purposefully hybridised and bred to be smaller and contain a lot more gluten compared to its distant ancestor that is associated as being the staff of life in biblical times.
Wheat producers have made wheat a lot smaller so that their industrial agricultural machinery can more easily harvest and process the grain. Plus they’ve dramatically increased the gluten content of wheat to make it a lot easier to bake with as gluten literally is the glue that makes baked products nice and doughy.
Problem is no mammal on this planet can fully breakdown and digest gluten. I will repeat no mammal on this planet can fully breakdown and digest gluten.
Gluten is a protein made up of a long chain of amino acids. So if you can imagine a pearl necklace as a protein molecule and each pearl being an amino acid gluten is a very long pearl necklace a very long protein molecule compared to proteins found in animal and other plant foods. Gluten will get partially broken down say to a smaller necklace, but our body only accepts individual pearls and extremely tiny necklaces and these larger protein molecules are what cause people with coeliac disease to digestively explode and for other people with non-coeliac gluten sensitivity to experience other non-digestive issues. For me my mind gets all screwy when I eat gluten.
Not only that, but many people are also allergic and sensitive to other components found in wheat.
So the wheat of today has broad health implications for humans due to the way it’s been modified and manufactured and farmed and is definitely not the same grain that was eaten by our pioneering agricultural ancestors.
As an alternative to wheat the best and highest quality grain you can eat is known as einkorn. It contains none of the many allergenic stuff you’ll find in wheat and yes while einkorn still has gluten in it, it is in a different form and in different proportions compared to the gluten in wheat meaning people who may not tolerate wheat or gluten may find einkorn doesn’t upset their body and mind so much. I haven’t tried einkorn as I’m gluten-free, but it’s on the horizon for me to try out to see if it works for me or not.
You can also eat barley, rye, oats, and spelt if you enjoy grain-based products.
Your mission if you choose to accept it is to make sure you don’t intentionally eat any of these five pseudo-foods. Chronic consistent everyday exposure to these fake foods will overwork your body to the point where one day it’ll finally give up. All because you haven’t been eating enough real food that would have the nutritional and energetic and informational resources to eliminate the fake foods from your body. If you eat plenty of real food on a regular basis then the nutrition and energy and information that you receive will make sure that any time you are accidentally exposed to fake pretend food-like products your body will have the resources to repair the damage caused by eating that crap.
I’m about to layout the real food manifesto, but first let me explain what a manifesto is.
A manifesto is a declaration of what you believe to be true.
A manifesto is also a platform and a base that one can use to build upon and improve any given situation.
This real food manifesto is what I use to heal myself and what I also use to help others reach their health goals. It’s not the be all and end all of healthy food recommendations as I’ll talk about later in the show, but it’s a great starting point for anyone who is just starting out on their health journey or is confused on where to go next.
Remember as I stated in the previous podcast on real food quality absolutely matters. You want real food that has lived by the laws of Mother Nature in its natural environment eating a species appropriate diet without added industrial toxic chemicals and with no genetic modifications.
Let me now list all the real foods you should be eating in order to get the nutrition and energy and information you need for your body, your mind, and for an awesome life.
Fats
- Egg yolks
- Ghee
- Clarified butter
- Butter
- Lard
- Bacon fat
- Tallow — beef and lamb fat
- Duck fat
- Coconut oil
- Palm oil
- Cacao butter
- Macadamia oil
- Extra-virgin avocado oil
- Extra-virgin olive oil
- Sesame oil
- Raw nuts and seeds
Proteins
- Organ meats — liver, heart, kidney, brain, pancreas etc
- Fish
- Seafood
- Eggs
- Wild game
- Lamb
- Beef
- Fowl
- Pork
Carbohydrates
- Sea vegetables
- Land vegetables
- Fruits
- Dates and dried fruits
- Raw honey — local
- Maple syrup — 100%
- Natural sweeteners — stevia herb, lo han guo, erythritol, xylitol
- Refined sugars — molasses, rice and pure glucose syrups
Grains (carbs)
- Organic white rice
- Non-GMO organic corn
- Pseudo-grains — actually seeds like quinoa, buckwheat, millet
- Whole grains — einkorn being the preferred choice
Legumes
- Green beans
- Peas
- Organic peanuts
- Fermented organic soy — natto, miso, gluten-free soy sauce, tempeh
- Other beans
Fermented foods (include but not limited to)
- Fermented cod-liver oil
- Sauerkraut
- Kimchi
- Kombucha
- Amasai
- Kefir
- Soy sauce — gluten free
- Tempeh
- Miso
Dairy
- Amasai
- Kefir
- Yoghurt — fermented for at least 18 hours
- Goat
- Sheep
- Buffalo
- Camel
- Cow
- Ghee, clarified butter, and butter oil — 99.99% fat
- Butter — unsalted, 80% fat
- Cream — 35-50%
- Cheese — 4-40%
- Yoghurt — 4-10%
- Milk — 4% fat
Salt
- New Zealand kelp salt — sea salt with added kelp
- Celtic sea salt
- Himalayan crystal salt
Herbs and spices (include but not limited to)
- Parsley
- Oregano
- Rosemary
- Basil
- Thyme
- Garlic
- Turmeric
- Ginger
- Cinnamon
- Cumin
- Nutmeg
- Raw unsweetened cacao powder — my personal favourite spice
Water
- Spring and artesian well water
- Filtered water — chlorine and fluoride filters or reverse osmosis, but you must add back minerals to RO water
- Bottled water — glass and stainless steel
- Coconut water — full of electrolytes
Phew! I will put this manifesto into a PDF document that you can download in the show notes for this episode. You can find that at wholeguidance.com/blog.
Everyone is different, we are all different. The way we think, the way we feel, the way we live our lives and also the way our bodies digest, absorb and assimilate, metabolise and detoxify, and finally eliminate the food that we eat. We all do it differently.
So while this real food manifesto is a great starting point for you on your health journey you have to listen to your body, read the signs and symptoms and go where it flows.
For example I said pasteurised milk is fake food and raw milk is real food, but if you find when you drink fresh raw milk you get skin outbreaks or gas or mucus building up in your body, don’t drink it. Maybe you’ll do better with higher fat dairy products such as cream or butter and if you can’t even do butter you may find you do just fine with high quality ghee or clarified butter which are virtually 100% fat with extremely low-to-no dairy proteins present.
Other examples are maybe you don’t tolerate cooked eggs and figure out you can eat raw egg yolks without any problems (that’s me!). Maybe you can’t do beef right now, stick to lamb or fish. Maybe seafood isn’t for you.
Another thing is macro ratios and serving size. You may find you do better on a higher carb diet due to the high-intensity exercises you perform on a daily basis. Perhaps high fat low carb works for you because you’re doing more low-intensity and more endurance based activities and you find eating this way gives you better clarity of thought and you’re able to focus on tasks longer without being distracted.
“There’s so much individuality when it comes to diet.”
One way to find out which foods and in what proportions work and don’t work for you is to listen to your body and take note of your body language.
Are you able to isolate any health symptoms you’re currently experiencing like acne, constipation, back pain, and migraines and blame it on a particular food or food group? For example I know that when I eat gluten while I don’t get any obvious digestive symptoms I do get pretty moody and my ability to think straight and focus goes down the toilet. Stinkin’ thinkin’ begins to brew and if I were to continue to eat gluten on a regular basis and become a chronic consumer of the stuff dark thoughts start to creep back into my life. I basically become a lifeless zombie with a foggy brain.
The elimination diet is the best tool around to help you figure out which foods promote your well-being and which foods turn you into the walking dead. Best book on this topic is The Elimination Diet by Tom Malterre and Alissa Segersten.
Okay so for macro ratios if you find yourself tired, feeling full yet hungry, and with sugar cravings after a meal you probably ate too much fats and protein. If you get a headache, don’t feel full and get hungry quickly, feel tired but wired you know like the jitters, with up and down mood swings you may have eaten too many carbs.
Keep a track of how you look and feel after every meal for 7 days and you may see a pattern emerging. The longer you keep track of this stuff and the more data and information you gather the better off you will be long-term as you can now make more well-informed food choices.
With this manifesto you could still blindly eat all the real foods on this list and not listen to your body and while you may experience some issues with your health you will not get anywhere near as sick as you would have if you were to eat foods according to some other recommendations, e.g. the Cookie Diet or the United States Department of Agriculture’s food pyramid.
Okay so this real food manifesto I hope will provide you with a clearer picture on what real food really is and what fake pretend food-like products you should never touch again.
Remember to listen to your body and eat what works for you in the proportions that fit your current lifestyle requirements and don’t eat what doesn’t work.
Hippocrates said:
“Let thy food be thy medicine and thy medicine be thy food.”
Have you had your medicine today?
I would like to build upon that quote and say:
“Let real food be your guide and let your guide be real food.”
If you’re feeling lost in life try a morsel of real food. It will light up the path, your life purpose, that has been hidden from your view.
Real food has definitely enlightened my life.
Links and Resources
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In this podcast I’ll be exploring my favourite topic Real Food:
- I’ll explain what real food really is and its different nutritional components
- I’ll talk about how eating real food and fake food affect your health
- Finally, I’ll share how to recognise real food and simple ways to make it a part of your holistic healthy and happy lifestyle
CLICK HERE TO LEARN WHAT ARE THE BEST FOODS TO GET YOU LEAN
What is real food? If I were to sum it up in one word — QUALITY. Quality food makes for quality humans, which makes for a quality planet, which makes for quality soil, which makes for quality plants, which makes for quality animals, which makes for more real quality food and here we have the circle of life.
If I were to use a few more words real food is any organic and natural plant or animal that fuels and nourishes the human body with energy and nutrition.
Now if I were to use some poetic words to define real food it’ll go a little something like this:
Real Food
Lived on the Earth
In the Sky
Under the Sun
Real Food
Is fished from pristine Oceans
Harvested from organic Soils
Plucked from vibrant Trees
Real Food
Has abundant Nutrition
Limitless amounts of Energy
Universal intelligence and Information
Real Food
Is loved by Mother Nature
Lives giving Love
Dies receiving Love
Real Food
Eats
Real Food
So hopefully by now you’re getting the idea that real food isn’t invented, created, and made-up in a lab by Father Industry.
Real food is birthed, grown, and raised by Mother Nature. Real food comes from the land, the sea, the sky, and is lovingly cared for, cherished, and blessed before it’s harvested from the bosom of Mother Nature. Real food is of the Earth not of the petridish or chemistry set or factory line or a corporation’s bottom-line.
Real food is the highest quality of nutrition, energy, and information infused with the life force of Mother Nature herself.
Let’s talk about real food nutrition and here I’m talking about macronutrients (macros) and micronutrients (micros).
Macros include fats broken down in the body and used as fatty acids. Proteins broken down in the body and used as amino acids. Carbohydrates broken down in the body and used as saccharides (sugar). Fibre a form of carbohydrate is not broken down and used by our body and mainly comes in two forms. One form is broken down and used as food by your gut microbiota (that’s all the microorganisms that live in your gastrointestinal tract) and this fibre is called a prebiotic. The other form of fibre isn’t digested by your body or your gut microbiome and is eliminated. Last macro and possibly most important is water. Water is a massive component of real food and the quality of the water in real food depends on how the food was grown and raised.
Micros is where we get into the teeny tiny small world of nutrition. However, micros have a far bigger impact on your health than macros ever will. What real food really gives you in terms of happiness and health are these micros in huge amounts.
Micronutrients include vitamins. There are fat-soluble vitamins such as vitamins A, D, K, and E (sidenote vitamin D is actually a hormone), and water soluble vitamins the B complexes and the most well known vitamin of them all vitamin C.
Another group of micronutrients found in real food are minerals such as calcium, magnesium, phosphorous, potassium, and sulphur, and trace minerals like zinc, iron, copper, manganese, selenium, and cobalt.
Phytonutrients are another group of micros. Phyto comes from the Greek word for plants so these nutrients are found in plants, but they can be passed on to animals that you eat as well. The list of phytonutrients goes on for days and includes polyphenols, carotenoids, flavonoids, isoflavonoids, indoles, lignans, anthocyanidins, proanthocyanidins, catechins, thiocyanates, isothiocyanates, etc etc.
You can think of macros as providing the basic building blocks of the body giving the body its physical structure. But what’s holding these building blocks together? What’s the glue, what’s the cement, what’s the duct tape that keeps the fats, proteins, carbs, fibre, and water all working together are the micros.
All cellular functions and metabolic processes in your body require assistant molecules called cofactors and micros are these cofactors. If you’re eating macro-rich yet micro-poor foods your body turns into a house of cards where any second now, any minute, any day, month or year it’s going to break down and fall apart. Without the micros the macros you consume are like a classroom full of unsupervised misbehaving teenagers up to no good. No good at all.
Macros and micros are present in all real foods, but in different ratios. Vegetables and fruit from the same garden or tree for example can have very different levels to each other due to environmental factors such as the angle of the sun, temperature differences, and water availability.
The last nutrient I’ll talk about when it comes to real food is difficult to measure in a lab, but exists nonetheless — Energy and Information. This energy is the vital life force that comes from Mother Nature and the planet and the information is linked with the universal intelligence that lives inside all matter. Yeah yeah sounds woo-woo hairy-fairy, but do you think that’s you that’s breathing you now?
Anyhoo…
Real food contains quality energy and information and the quality depends on how the food was grown and raised. Was it in sick soil? Was it sprayed with chemicals? Was it given growth hormone or antibiotics? Was it genetically modified? How fresh is it and how long has it been sitting out?
“Sick food makes for sick humans, makes for a sick planet, makes for sick soil, makes for sick plants, makes for sick animals, makes for more sick food and here we have the wheel of death!”
If you had an apple freshly picked from an apple tree in your backyard and another apple that was imported and flown in from halfway around the world or local and sprayed with chemicals and you took a huge bite out of each apple, now I’m not talking about flavour, taste, texture, macros or micros I’m talking about energy and information, you will feel, you will sense, and you will receive more abundant energy and information from your backyard apple compared to the journeyman drugged apple.
The food you’re eating may look real on the outside, but in fact could be empty of energy and information and be close to dying on the inside and you wouldn’t even know it because it’s been waxed or coloured and injected with preservatives. Fake food is stripped of Mother Nature’s life force and is full of mucked up scrambled information because of the way Father Industry has treated that food.
Energy and information transcends appearance.
I know people who others would say look a bit rundown and a little bit dodgy, but when you actually take the time to sit down and have a chat with them their attitude, their vitality, the vibration that they give off you totally receive it and then you get infused and inspired by that same attitude and energy and information they’ve shared with you. Then there’s the other type of people I call fit-sick people and I used to be one of them. Fit on the outside, but sick on the inside. These guys can look like Greek gods and goddesses, but being around them just drains the living life force out of you and that’s the same with food.
There are some foods that are so sick on the inside they draw energy and information out of you when you eat them.
Then there’s food that’s so chock-full of energy and information you get inspired by them. For me I love blueberries especially the teeny tiny small ones, they’re so tart and sometimes surprisingly sweet. They have a lower flesh to skin ratio compared to larger berries meaning less sugar and a whole lot more phytonutrients and antioxidants from the skin. For some reason I can eat a whole bowl of big berries and feel ‘oh, that was nice’, but when I eat a whole bowl of little teeny tiny berries I feel a whole lot more vibrant, vital, energised, inspired, and happy!
So when you go on nutrition websites or use nutrition apps and look for the fats, proteins, carbs, fibre, water, vitamins, minerals, trace minerals, and phytonutrient contents of a food there’s one last thing you need to keep in mind. Don’t forget that there’s energy and information, life force energy of the planet and universal intelligence that you’re downloading into you when you eat food and uploading into your brain as you absorb and assimilate that food. You really are what you eat. Your thoughts, your feelings, your actions, and your results are hugely, significantly, massively impacted by what you eat.
Eat low energy low information low intelligent food and you will feel the exact same way.
Now the health impacts of eating real healthy food compared to eating fake sick food.
I’m going to focus on three areas of your health.
The most important health aspect of them all is your immune system and your gut microbiota or more specifically the probiotics in your gut. Pro meaning for and bio meaning life so probiotics are the good bugs in your gut. Okay so what’s the link between your immune system, probiotics, your gut, and your health.
There’s a few ways foreign objects can get into your bloodstream. Your skin, your lungs, your mouth hole and your south hole. Guess where more than 80% of your immune system and most of the microorganisms are located in the body? In your gut. Believe it or not, but from mouth to south, the enteron, the alimentary canal, your digestive tube is actually technically outside of your body. Now you ingest foreign objects via the mouth 3-6 times a day and that stuff goes down your oesophagus your throat into your stomach and then your small intestines to your large intestines where any leftovers and other bodily waste products are eliminated. This is why almost all of your immune system and microorganisms in your body live in your gut as they deal with a lot of foreign stuff coming down the pipe.
The immune system works side-by-side with your gut probiotics. They’re besties, tight, friends for life. Always liking and sharing each other’s Facebook posts and Snapchatting non-stop. Your immune system and probiotics are essentially linked together fighting the good fight on your behalf. Together they decide who and what can stay. They decide what can be absorbed and assimilated through your gut wall and allowed to enter inside your body and they decide who and what must go.
When your immune system and probiotics aren’t working together as they should your immune system begins to weaken meaning you get sick a lot easier than usual. Also one of the main roles of probiotics is to keep the peace within your gut microbiome meaning no pathogenic microorganisms take over the joint. Patho means disease and genic means to create so pathogens are the bad bugs. So if your probiotic population gets upset and begins to shrink you increase your chances of getting a parasite, fungal, or bacterial infection in your gut.
When you’re eating real food guess what happens to the probiotic population in your gut? They thrive. Probiotics love fibre, they love prebiotics. It’s their real food.
Your immune system and the processes that depend on it loves macros and micros. However, if you’re eating cookies, if you’re eating pastries, if you’re eating kids cereals, if you’re drinking pasteurised skim milk or juices, not only do these foods have denatured damaged macros and micros in very small amounts, but the sugars from the highly processed and refined modified carbs feed the bad bugs, the pathogens. At the same time you’re starving the probiotics of fibre of prebiotics of their food because processed fake foods have no fibre.
Eating fake foods grows the population of pathogens and shrinks the population of probiotics and then your immune system no longer has the support of the good guys to do its job properly and becomes weak. Then the pathogens continue to grow getting stronger and they start fighting your immune system, oh the horror! This is what happens when you don’t give the body what it needs.
Another area of your health I’ll talk about is epigenetics.
Most people know about genetics, genes, and DNA and how they influence your eye colour and hair type etc and how they come from your parents.
So what is epigenetics? Well epi means above so epigenetics is above the genes and it’s all about how external environmental lifestyle factors control genetic expression. That is how the way you live your life can turn certain genes on and off. Epigenetics is telling you that your environment, your thoughts, your feelings, who you interact with, how you respond to events in your life, what you eat and drink, how you move, the type of sleep you’re getting, how much time you spend with Mother Nature, and your toxin exposure all of these affect your genes!
Let’s say for example you have a gene for breast cancer. Well just because you have the gene for breast cancer doesn’t mean you’ll get breast cancer. What it means is depending on your epigenetics how you live your life will determine whether this gene turns on or off.
Epigenetics gives you control of your genes. Now you won’t be able to change your eye colour or hair type (well the jury’s still out on that one actually), but you can turn genes on and off based on how you live.
In terms of food eating real food, again with natural forms of macros and micros along with plenty of energy and information this tells your body one thing — this person is in an environment of abundance therefore I’m going to turn on all my happy genes. All genes that make me feel good, that fulfill me, that provide me with vitality because in this moment life is good.
But when you’re eating fake food without the cofactors, without the nutrition, lacking the energy and information that your genes require change of plans people. Now your body thinks you’re living in a place of scarcity. It’s saying to itself, ‘this person is starving, they’re eating too much crap, they’re overfed, but undernourished so we need to make sure that we can keep their body running because they’re killing us right now.’ So your body starts putting all these backup survival plans into action and starts turning off health affirming genes and turning on disease affirming genes at different intensities in order to keep it alive. Yes, disease is your body’s attempt to survive.
As an analogy I’ll use what the USA use for determining alertness and readiness levels in their military. First up:
- Defcon 5 — Shut down digestion, growth, and sex hormones; switch on stress hormones.
- Defcon 4 — Shut down energy production; switch on pain genes.
- Defcon 3 — Shut down health genes; switch on disease genes.
- Defcon 2 — Shut down immune system; switch on auto-cell destruction.
- Defcon 1 — Shut down tumour destruction; switch on cancer production.
I’m talking about end of the world stuff happening in your body and while the end result is the same for everyone, death, the path to get there is very individual based off your own genetics. For some people their body will turn on the fat gene the obesity gene. For other people they’ll turn on the diabetes gene or both the fat and the diabetes gene (ever heard of diabesity). But as there’s a 1 in 2 chance for women and a 1 in 3 chance for men getting cancer today guess what most genes are getting switched on when you’re not eating and living a holistic, healthy, and happy life? Yeah, cancer genes.
Your body and your genes have worked for so long with so little that they’ve enough. They’ve broken the emergency glass to grab the key of last resort and then they’ve inserted that key into your control centre and turned it in order to enable and uncover the button of last resort and finally your body and your genes who are sick and tired of being starved and mistreated look you in the eye, give you the finger, and say ‘freak you south-hole!’ as they hit that self-destruct button.
You cannot run a fully booked 100 seat restaurant with one chef, one server, and no manager. You cannot run a hospital on generator power with half the usual staff.
You cannot run your body on the wrong nutrition for it won’t be too long before it breaks down and falls to pieces.
All that to say, that’s what happens to your genes when you eat fake food.
Last thing I’ll about when it comes to how food impacts your health is aging.
Aging I’d like to reframe as dying. You are living and dying at the same time. Every breath you take, every move you make, every bond you break, every step you take is bringing oxygen into the body and every time that oxygen is used by the cells it produces waste products and this waste causes rust and damage to your body. Every time your immune system has to switch on and get into action and clear out the bugs there’s a little damage left behind. Luckily your body has mechanisms and processes in place to clean up that rust and repair damage such as the use of antioxidants that cleanup the rust and heat shock proteins that repair the damage.
But no matter how many antioxidants you take you will continue to age and eventually die. That’s the natural process of life.
Now real food provides plenty of antioxidants, provides plenty of protein, provides plenty of energy and information for your cells and genes to do their job as well as clean up after themselves. There will still be a little mess lying around, but not as much as compared to eating fake food where your cells don’t have the necessary materials and aren’t given the correct energy and information and where your repair genes stay switched off and don’t get turned on leaving a lot of rust and mess and damage to build up in your body, which makes you age quicker and die faster. Age quicker die faster sounds like a Hollywood movie. ‘Age quicker die faster coming to a theatre near you.’
Anyway…
So if you want to live not just longer, not just in a wheelchair, not with dementia, not being able to look after yourself, if you want to live a long quality life full of vim and vigour and vitality give your cells and your genes what they need in order to clean up after themselves and repair the damage. Cell and DNA dam-age will age you. You see what I did there? That’s right damaging is aging.
Alright so how do you recognise real food?!
One simple test. If it has an ingredients list it’s probably not real food because real food is an ingredient. A real food is a single whole food ingredient. There is no list of ingredients.
Second real food tip. Would your great grandparents recognise it and have called it food or would they have asked you ‘what is this concoction?’
“If it wasn’t around 150 years ago and if it’ll sit on the shelf for another 150 years there’s a good chance you shouldn’t be eating it!”
Another real food tip. If the food you’re looking at is a bit processed and does have an ingredients list how do you know whether you’re getting enough nutrition and energy and information. Well can you pronounce the list of ingredients, do you understand that list, do you know the meaning and what those ingredients are? I mean there’s things like sodium sorbate, potassium bromate, monosodium glutamate, and polyvinylpyrrolidone, blah blah blah. If there are all these chemical compounds in the ingredients list, definitely not a real food. Now can you say chick-en or broc-co-li. Pretty simple right. Real food is simple too. If there’s less science and more life in the ingredients list then you’ve got yourself a better choice of food.
Now there are a lot of pretend fake food-like products out there that have been pumped full of artificial colourings, preservatives, additives, thickeners, emulsifiers, bulking agents, flavourings, texturants, and synthetic vitamins. Fake foods have also had their genes modified also known as GMO foods. These fake foods have been modified and treated to the point where your body, your digestive system, your immune cells, your gut probiotics, and your genes they don’t recognise it as a food and this causes a whole bunch of fuss and confusion. It’s like showing up to a fancy party without an invite or forgetting to RSVP. It causes a lot of trouble and you might get in or you might get kicked the freak out, but either way it creates an issue for all involved. So in terms of food labellings look for non-GMO foods with no added chemicals.
Along these lines look for foods that are certified organic or biodynamic. Certified organic means that food is non-GMO and not sprayed or treated with pesticides, insecticides, herbicides, fungicides, paracides, bactericides, rodenticides, antibiotics, and hormones. Biodynamic means the same as organic, but with a stronger emphasis on the sustainability and regenerability of the environment.
Spray-free is another label you may see and I see this alot in farmers markets and it means the same as organic, but it’s not certified as organic. You have to pay and follow strict guidelines for three years to have the right to say your food is organic and many farmers just can’t be bothered with the cost and the time, so while they may not have the fancy certification their spray-free food is just as good.
So you want to make sure that your food was grown by the laws of nature and ate real food having had a diet that was appropriate for its species. Was that plant grown in soil with plenty of nutrition and energy and information? Was that animal raised in its natural habitat eating the food it was designed to eat? This goes back to either the circle of life or the wheel of death depending on the health of the soil, plant, and animal.
Pigs can eat just about anything. Chickens, they’re omnivorous as well and will eat bugs, they eat insects, and they also eat grass and plants. Sheep, goats, cows — grasses, shrubs, and other plants is what they eat. Animals should not be eating anything, but what they’re evolved to eat.
In CAFOs or Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, which are massive factory farms, you find cows eating grains — GMO grains. Now why do you think they give grains to cows? Because it fattens them up quicker! Even then greedy meat producers aren’t satisfied and inject cattle with growth hormones or better yet GMO growth hormones. Now because the cows are getting bigger faster than they would naturally a lot of them get sick and are injected with antibiotics.
Don’t forget about the chickens and pigs in CAFOs. These poor animals have it even worse than the cows. At least the cows get some time outdoors on pasture with fresh air and sunlight. Chickens and pigs are not only eating fake foods and being injected with hormones and antibiotics, but they are stuck literally stuck they cannot move in their cages or even in massive barns because there’s just too much of them.
So the worst meat you could ever buy the sickest meat on the planet is from one of these CAFOs, factory farms.
Now I’m not going to talk about what happens when humans eat grains as I’ll leave you to meditate on that idea yourself.
You’ll see labels like natural and cage-free and free-range and grass-fed or grass-finished, but in all honesty it’s all marketing. Buy direct from the farmer who can answer any questions you may have about their food or pickup the phone and call the company selling the food. Ask them what do they mean by natural and free-range and are the cows on the farm 100% grass-fed throughout their lifetime or how long was it before they went back to eating grains to be fattened up for the kill.
If your food is not organic or biodynamic and was not raised as Mother Nature intended it’s not real food and it’s not going to fully nourish you.
Remember fake food is from Father Industry. It’s an unnatural man-made and lab manipulated food-like product just like a television, a watch, a shoe, or a mobile smart-device. It’s a product it’s not food. We as humans cannot fully digest these fake foods, which will have thousands of ingredients in them. It’s basically dead food. It’s been processed beyond life itself to the point where most of the nutrition is no longer present and the energy and information has been altered. You’ll know a fake food as it’ll usually come in a packet, but that’s not to say all packaged food is fake, but definitely processed and packaged foods are the lowest of the low.
So here’s a quick five step guide to real food:
- It’s all natural — provided by Mother Nature herself
- Food the human animal has evolved to eat
- Single whole food ingredient
- Still has its life giving properties of energy and information with minimal processing and packaging
- No chemicals added
The best and most effective way to get real food into your life is by growing and raising it yourself. I’m not just talking a herb garden or vegetable garden or fruit trees. I’m talking about backyard chickens and also buying into a cow-share program where you get together with a bunch of people and buy a whole cow to be split up between you all when the time comes.
Next level down would be to eat local direct from the source. At farmers markets you can always ask the grower or farmer what they used to raise that food. Eating local isn’t just good for your health, it’s not just good for the farmer, it’s not just good for the local economy and community, but it’s awesome for the environment as a whole. There’s a very small carbon footprint when you buy locally. So vote with your dollars and save the planet as they say and it all starts by looking after and saving yourself.
Now if you can’t source anything local go certified organic or biodynamic even though it comes from out of town or overseas at least you’re certain it’s toxin free.
Eat seasonally. This is really important. Most people today only eat about 12 different foods on average — 12 foods! When you eat with the seasons you get a lot more variety in your diet
“Variety is the spice of life.”
Eating the same foods over and over causes your body to become resistant to that food and eventually sickness and disease show up. Even if you’re in a place that doesn’t have dramatic seasonal changes like the tropics you can still eat seasonally by rotating your food manually.
So eat local and eat seasonal for the best real food experience.
If you cannot find or afford high quality real food then relax. Don’t worry, be happy. Your food doesn’t have to be blessed by a one-armed Tibetan monk high up in the Himalayan mountains to be the best tasting and nutritious food in the universe giving you better health and happiness.
I understand not everyone has the ability to access local hormone-free, antibiotic-free, pasture-raised, free-range, grass-fed, organic animal foods or local pesticide-free, GMO-free, organically or biodynamically grown plant foods.
I’m not saying if you eat fake food you will die.
What I’m saying is the majority of food you eat throughout your lifetime will determine the quality of life you experience for the majority of your time.
A couple books I recommend reading to find out more about the different effects real food compared to fake food have on the health of the human animal is Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston A Price and Deep Nutrition by Catherine and Luke Shanahan.
A couple cookbooks on how to eat real food. One of my favourite ancestral cookbooks is Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon and Mary Enig. My favourite recipe in this entire book is the vanilla ice cream. That’s on page 550. Best ice cream ever! Another awesome real food cookbook is Practical Paleo by Diane Sanfilippo and my favourite recipe here is the lemon rosemary broiled salmon. Delicious.
Remember real food is about feeding your immune system and probiotics. It’s about telling the good genes to switch on and the bad genes to switch off. It’s about repairing the damage that’s happening inside your body every second so you can live happier for longer.
Links and Resources
- Nutrition and Physical Degeneration — Weston A Price
- Deep Nutrition — Catherine and Luke Shanahan
- Nourishing Traditions — Sally Fallon and Mary Enig
- Practical Paleo — Diane Sanfilippo
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In this podcast I’ll be exploring Water and Hydration:
- I’ll explain what water is and what it does in your body
- I’ll talk about how not getting enough water affects your health and the importance of water quality
- Finally, I’ll give some simple tips on how to know if you’re dehydrated and how to improve your hydration and overall health
CLICK HERE TO LEARN WHAT ARE THE BEST FOODS TO GET YOU LEAN
You cannot survive a week without water making H2O one the most important nutrients for your body. Water covers around 70% of planet Earth. Your body is about 30% solid and 70% water. Also, your blood has a similar amount of salinity as ocean water. Isn’t it amazing how similar your physical body is to that of the Earth? I mean it’s as if you and Mother Nature are intimately connected and ultimately come from the same place. Well I think it’s an awesome idea.
Anyhoo…
Water comes in three well-known forms or phases — liquid, solid, and gas — but there is also a fourth phase of water called Exclusion Zone, EZ water, or living water. If you’d like to learn more about EZ water I recommend the book The Fourth Phase Of Water by Gerald Pollack. It’s a beast of a book too nerdy for me believe it or not, but was still a very profound read for me personally.
Water is a solvent meaning it dissolves other substances creating a solution, a mix of water and whatever is in the water. The best quality drinking water is not naked water meaning it’s not just H2O. Health affirming water also has minerals, trace minerals, electrolytes and other stuff inside of it. The measurement of these inorganic and organic substances found within water is called Total Dissolved Solids or TDS. I’ll come back to this later.
When you look at water in its frozen phase you can see crystals within the ice. In its liquid state water still has these crystal-like structures. So water is a liquid crystal and just as LCD technology makes use of these liquid crystals to store and transmit energy and information in LCD televisions your body uses water in much the same way.
Energy, nutrition, hormones, neurotransmitters, and waste products are stored, transmitted and transported around your body and eliminated in your sweat, in your urine, and in your poo all thanks to water. Water!
Your blood is mostly water. The lymph found in your lymphatic system your sewage system is mostly water. The cerebral spinal fluid that surrounds your brain and spine is made up of water. Synovial fluid, which provides lubrication for your joints and the discs in your spine, again water. About 80% of your brain is water.
Water also provides stability and integrity to the cells in your body giving them proper structure and form as it makes up part of the cytoplasm, which is the thick solution or gel inside each cell.
If your body is too acidic due to high sugar consumption and chronic stress for example it will retain water in order to buffer and stabilise your pH levels leading to additional weight gain. Also, for every gram of carbohydrate you eat your body will hold onto 4 grams of water. Meaning if you’re eating too many carbo-HYDRATES your body will be heavier on the scale and look softer in the mirror. So unless you like feeling bloated and looking so fluffy dropping a lot of processed and refined sugars from your diet may be action step number one in your ‘improve body composition’ plan.
So without the right amount of hydration all of these different areas of your body will begin to slowly, but surely breakdown and as a plum becomes a prune your body will become a flat wrinkled empty skin-bag of puny muscles and porous bones. It’s crucial to keep yourself hydrated with high quality water.
According to internationally renowned researcher, author, and advocate of the natural healing power of water Dr F Batmanghelidj in his book Your Body’s Many Cries For Water (which I highly recommend) the Doc says:
“… even 1% dehydration of the central nervous system can cause significant psychological disorders. “
Other symptoms of dehydration include:
- Weight gain as mentioned earlier
- Thirst and hunger
- Low energy
- Lower fat-burning
- Infrequent urination and dark coloured urine
- Constipation — your poo is about 70% water
- Headaches, back pain, other aches and pain in general
- Reduced sweating
- Arthritis
- Asthma
- Irregular blood pressure
- Poor digestion
- Dry eyes
- Dry mouth — actually the last thing to occur when your body is dehydrated is when you get dry mouth
Water water everywhere yet why are we so sick? Water quality is crucial to proper hydration and functioning of your body and mind.
Municipal tap water or town and city water is probably the lowest quality water available today. Due to the water source and the fact that water has to travel through a system of pipes decades old local governments add a few chemicals to treat tap water in order to make it safe to drink. Unfortunately this so-called safety comes at a cost.
One of those chemicals is chlorine, which is a bleach and it definitely works and does the job of killing the bad bugs in the water. However, drinking chlorine kills the good bugs in your gastrointestinal tract. Your gut is filled with billions of different colonies and species of microorganisms called your gut microbiota. In fact there are more microorganism cells than human cells in the human body meaning your body actually isn’t your body at all! These microorganisms provide many beneficial functions such as:
- Improving digestion
- Producing vitamins
- Boosting the immune system
- Keeping the bad bugs in line
I’ll talk more about your microbiome in another show, but taking antibiotics, which includes drinking chlorinated water destroys the balance of your microbiota and basically wipes out your microbiome leaving behind a wasteland in your gut similar to that seen in post-apocalyptic futuristic movies like Mad Max. Now just as a city with no law enforcement ends up with rioters and looters first on the scene ransacking the place guess who are the first to show up in your gut after antibiotic exposure? The bad bacteria.
So being exposed to chlorine and antibiotics are bad for your health.
Another chemical used in tap water is a known neurotoxin called fluoride. Authorities say ‘fluoridated water is required for dental health’. So they’re basically telling you ‘we’re going to medicate you because you have no clue how to look after your own teeth’. They are literally treating us with a chemical they call medicine and last time I checked I never gave them permission to drug me with this crap. I mean where does this end? Why not put statins or beta-blockers in the water or how about vitamin C and omega-3s.
Fluoride is an ingredient used in pesticides and is also an industrial waste product. It has no health benefits and has been shown to contribute to many diseases:
- Cancer
- Hip fractures
- Dental Fluorosis (even though it’s meant to improve dental health)
- Neurological impairment
- Learning disorders
- Lower IQ in children
All of this has been researched and proven, but because governments and big industry are so intertwined and in bed with each other of course they’re going to want to recycle their waste products and want to make more money at the expense of their fellow man. They did it with genetically modified corn and soy so why not toxic chemicals as well. Soy protein isolate is a waste product of soybean oil production, but instead of dumping the stuff they market all forms of soy as healthy tricking you the consumer into consuming that toxic rubbish. Soy protein isolate is found in health bars, protein powders, and worst of all baby formula!
Man! I just get so frustrated with the fact that you put your trust in the authorities to do what’s right, but it’s blind faith and it’s misplaced and you need to do your own research and not trust anything anyone says. Including me! Always try out for yourself what I recommend. It’s not true, it’s not real until you give it a go and see if it works for you.
Dr Robert Carlton a former US Environmental Protection Agency scientist himself said that fluoridation is the greatest case of scientific fraud of the century.
Okay another thing when you eat something it has to go through your liver first before it’s allowed into your bloodstream. Now 60% of anything you put on your skin gets absorbed directly into your bloodstream and anything you inhale also goes directly into your bloodstream as both of these pathways bypass the liver. When you’re having a hot shower not only are you absorbing chlorine and fluoride via your skin the heat vaporises the water turning it into a gas and you’re breathing this stuff in. So you’re getting a double whammy of toxic exposure! Ouch!
Oh it gets worse.
Effluent water (water that’s drained from sewage waste) is allowed to be dumped as natural waste leaving it to penetrate groundwater (water in the soil), streams, rivers, and oceans with a lot of it ending up in aquifers (underground lakes of pure clean water). Also, effluent water is recycled in water treatment plants allowing it to be reused as tap water. Finally, effluent water is used for irrigation of crops. Problem is sewage water is full of pharmaceutical drug, pain-killer, antipsychotic, antidepressant, birth-control, hormone, antibiotic, and other prescription drug chemicals due to them being pirssed and pooped out of sick people and flushed down the toilet. So the tap water you’re drinking, bathing in, and gardening with and any food that you eat that’s been grown with recycled city sewage water could be overdosing you with medications, making you infertile, disrupting your hormone levels, and killing the microbiome on your skin and in your gut.
But wait there’s more. Listen to this extract from a book called Under the Veil of Deception by Paul Chek:
“Today we drink water that is heavily contaminated with nitrates, heavy metals, and synthetic chemicals, including pesticides and medical drugs. No commercial sewage system or water treatment purification plants can entirely remove all these contaminants and some barely remove any.”
So now you can add even more toxins to the list of bad things for your health that are in your tap water and the fact that water treatment plants don’t remove 100% of those toxic chemicals from the water.
Bottled water isn’t the ideal solution for your dilution requirements as well. Specifically water in plastic bottles. The reason plastic bottles are bad are due to the fact that they contain xenoestrogens. A xenoestrogen is a foreign chemical compound found in the environment that when it enters your body acts in a similar way to your own estrogen hormones. Plastics are one big xenoestrogen bomb. Overtime and especially when exposed to heat say a plastic bottle left inside a car on a hot summer’s day the chemicals in the plastic start to leach into the water. Remember water is a solvent so it’ll dissolve those compounds right into itself. Now I remember the taste of water from a plastic water bottle left in the heat or even the taste from a frozen plastic bottle of water that I’d leave to thaw overnight or during the day. They had a very distinct and interesting flavours. No doubt about it. Now I know why.
Once consumed these xenoestrogens get picked up by the cells in your body and can affect your body in many different ways. Once your cells have picked up these xenoestrogens your own natural estrogen hormones have no place to go so are eliminated. Overtime this will tax your liver and elimination pathways causing them to overwork and this will eventually lead to an imbalance in your hormonal profile due to the fact that your cells think they have what they need and are telling your brain ‘hey, we got plenty of estrogen, no need to make so much’ and so your body produces less estrogen and has to deal with eliminating both your natural estrogen and the foreign estrogen-like compound. Problem is the xenoestrogens have massive hormonal impacts on your cells. In some people it makes your body estrogen dominant meaning too much estrogen leading to cancer in women and man boobs or moobs in men. For others it can make you deficient in estrogen making you testosterone dominant leading to cancer in guys and excess facial hair growth in women. So yeah eventually you will get illness and disease showing up due to a lack of your own estrogen and because of the ill effects of those xenoestrogens in your cells.
Now how do you go about getting the highest quality water available to you?
One thing you can do at home is install a water filtration system. Home, tap, and shower head filters are ways you can treat the municipal water entering your home. You want to make sure that your filter gets rid of chlorine (the chemical itself, not just the odour and taste) as well as fluoride if you have fluoride in your local city water. There are a few filtration systems to choose from.
Reverse osmosis systems can be expensive not just for the equipment, but also due to the fact that it takes three parts water to produce just one part of drinking water. Now RO water does filter out the toxins, but the problem is RO also filters out the minerals in the water leaving you with naked, hungry, unstructured water. Hungry water when drunk will leach minerals from your body so daily drinking of this type of water will cause mineral deficiencies in your body overtime leading to, you guessed it, illness and disease. Short-term use of hungry water is fine for detoxification purposes, but I would not go more than a week personally of drinking hungry demineralised water. You can fix this issue by restructuring and remineralising hungry water by adding pinches of real sea salt or juice from a lemon.
Distilled filtering systems actually do a much better job of removing all material from water compared to RO systems making distilled water the hungriest water of them all, basically dead water. Even adding sea salt and lemon juice won’t be enough to feed this water and to make it living water again so use sparingly for detox purposes only.
Carbon and charcoal filtration systems are a cheaper option and keep the minerals in the water.
You can filter just your drinking tap or your showerhead or if you’re able to you can install a whole house water filtration system. Right now in the house I’m living in there is a whole house filter for chlorine and a drinking tap filter that removes both chlorine and fluoride. It cost about a grand to install and $250 a year for replacement cartridges. Not a bad investment I think. No need to go running out for bottled water and definitely notice the health improvements from no longer drinking chemicals with the water. It has also improved the flavour of stews and other meals cooked with the water. I’ve also noticed after a shower my skin isn’t as dry and my eyes aren’t as red.
Filtered water isn’t the best water though with spring and artesian well water being the best two choices of living, structured, mineral water. Spring water is the purest form of water that has bubbled up from aquifers (underground lakes) picking up minerals as it travels through the rocks giving it a high mineral content, a high total dissolved solids count, and a neutral pH. Artesian well water comes from the same aquifers, but hasn’t matured so to speak and sprung up out of the earth hence having to dig a well for it. Still very pure with a neutral pH, and good TDS reading, but not as high a mineral count as spring water.
If you don’t have access to a local spring look for bottled spring or well water with a neutral pH between seven and eight and a TDS of 200 minimum with 300 or greater recommended.
When going for plastic bottled water make sure to buy the most popular brand in that area as these bottles are not going to be sitting around for long periods of time meaning there’ll be less chance of plastic chemicals leaching into the water.
What you really want in terms of bottled water is glass. Glass bottled water will remove the issue of foreign chemicals leaching into your drinking water entirely.
Also again with bottled water whether it be plastic or glass you really need to check the source of the water. Most bottled water is just tap water remarketed so be cautious and make sure the source of the water is from a spring or artesian well. As an example Coke Cola has a few different brands of bottled water out there and they have been shown to be acidic malnourishing liquid leechers. I’ll put a link to a YouTube video showing fellow holistic health practitioner Angie Lustrick testing the pH of different brands of bottled water to prove that point.
Side note if you’re an athlete in need of quick rehydration with electrolytes get rid of those Gatorades and Powerades, which are full of sugar and artificial sweeteners. Stick to coconut water. Coconut water is Mother Nature’s electrolyte elixir that will both fuel and rehydrate you to the finish line without any negative side-effects.
Alright how do you know if you’re drinking enough water? A few things you can look at. Check the colour of your piss. Your urine should be a light pale yellow colour. Not completely clear as this is a sign of either over-hydration or your body trying to get rid of toxins and irritants (such as those found in teas and coffee). Your piss shouldn’t be a dark colour it shouldn’t be orange or brown. If it is you’re dehydrated.
Next tip is actually one of the best at-home medical tests you can do to figure out not just your hydration status, but also how healthy you are overall and it’s free. Examine your poo. Yes you need to turn around and expect the results of your bowel movements and yes I do this every time. Saves going to the doctor when I can just read the cues in my poos and change how I’m living accordingly. You should be expressing from your bottom pooping easily without strain nice smooth fluffy non-foul smelling sausage like poos. There is a chart of different types of poos called the Bristol Stool Chart (BSC) (I like poos better than stool) that you can look at and ideally you want type three and four poos. I’ll put a link to the chart in the show notes. If you’re constipated and pooping out little sheep pellets (types one and two on the BSC) then you need more water. If you have diarrhea (the last three types on the chart) you also need to increase your water intake as your body is quickly removing toxins from the system and this process uses up a lot of water.
Another simple thing you can do to check your hydration levels is to use the pinch test. So on the back of your wrist grab a pinch of skin for a few seconds — go on do it now — let go and it should return to normal in less than a second. The longer it takes to return to normal the more dehydrated you are.
Some bonus tips to help you with digestion.
Drink water at room temperature. If you’re drinking icy cold water it’s just going to hang out in your stomach. Your intestines don’t like the shock of extreme cold so the water will stick around until it’s warm enough to be released in your gut.
Also drink a big glass of water 20-30 minutes before your meals. This helps lubricate your gut and helps with the production of stomach acid and digestive enzymes getting your digestive juices primed and ready for action. Don’t drink a lot during your meal as this will actually dilute the acid in your stomach causing the food to hang out there longer than it should. If you need to drink take small sips throughout the meal. Don’t skull it down.
Last tip is to chew your water! Take a sip, swirl the water around your mouth for 1-2 seconds and then swallow. By doing so you are infusing the digestive enzymes in your saliva into the water meaning when it does reach your stomach your body recognises the fact that you’ve purposefully ingested this liquid and will begin to take it in. Water that you skull down that doesn’t have your salivary enzymes in it goes in and out your body in one fell swoop. So to stop wasting the water you’re drinking and to reduce the number of visits to the toilet — chew your water.
Finally, how much water should you be drinking? A good rule of them, remember this is a general guideline it is not law and it depends on what you’ve been doing that day, your activity level, the stress in your life, the temperature of your environment. It’s a guideline a place for you to start from, okay. So a general guideline multiply your body weight in kgs by 0.033 and that’s how much water in litres you should be drinking daily or if you’re still in the dark ages and measure your body weight in lbs then drink half your body weight in ounces of water a day, okay.
I’ll leave you with this quote from Dr Batmanghelidj:
“You’re not sick, you’re thirsty. Don’t treat thirst with medication.”
Couldn’t have said it better myself Doc. Next round of spring water is on me!
Links and Resources
- The Fourth Phase Of Water — Gerald Pollack
- Your Body’s Many Cries For Water — F Batmanghelidj MD
- Under the Veil of Deception –Paul Chek
- YouTube Video — Is Your Water Making You SICK?
- Bristol Stool Chart
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