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In this podcast I’ll be exploring Food Cravings:
- I’ll explain what food cravings are
- I’ll talk about three different types of food cravings and what causes them
- Finally I’ll share my top tips on how you can better manage yourself when it comes to food cravings
CLICK HERE TO LEARN WHAT ARE THE BEST FOODS TO GET YOU LEAN
Let’s first make the distinction between hunger and food cravings.
Hunger is a normal physiological response by your body meaning hunger is a normal physical function that your body performs. Hunger happens in response to your cells being low on nutrition and energy and information. You know you’re really hungry when you receive growling sounds and feel physical sensations from your stomach. Hunger leads you to eat any food in general.
A food craving is a physical, emotional, and mental want or need for a specific food.
As I always say life is in flow and always in motion and if you’re not moving then you’re not living, you’re not growing, and you’re not changing.
Food cravings come from the fact that your current way of being, your current lifestyle is stuck in a rut.
“I define food cravings as a craving for change.”
Having a fixed mindset or being stubborn or not being able to go with the flow will lead you to become physically, emotionally, and mentally stagnant. You will find yourself repeating the same actions, expressing the same feelings, and believing the same thoughts over and over and this my friend is the root cause of all food cravings.
A physical food craving is due to your body lacking specific nutrients. If you find yourself eating the same foods day-in-and-day-out for long periods of time you will be getting plenty of nutrients in fact probably in excessive amounts from that one group of foods, but you will be missing out on a lot of other nutrients found in different foods. If you’re also eating a lot of fake pretend food-like products aka processed and packaged foods well these have hardly any nutrients in them. I mean there’s plenty of energy and calories in these foods, but where’s the nutrition?
Movement, either too little or too much causes physical food cravings. Nutrients and energy and information from the foods and beverages that you eat and drink get digested, absorbed, assimilated, and metabolised when your digestive juices, your blood, and your lymph fluids are all in flow. When you don’t move and you stay in the same physical position for long periods of time your lymph fluid doesn’t flow and your heart has to pump harder to keep your blood moving causing nutrient traffic jams. When you’re doing strenuous exercise stress hormones increase and this stops your digestion in its tracks.
Now if your breathing is short and shallow and if you’re drinking tap water then the nutrients in your body will not be transported as effectively as they could be. Proper breathing massages internal organs and keeps your cerebral spinal fluid in flow helping to move nutrients in and waste out of your cells. Quality water has no industrial chemicals and has the right amount of minerals to form healthy blood vessels and other fluids needed to move nutrients around your body.
So to sum up physical food cravings while eating the same real foods all the time and eating fake foods may give your cells certain nutrients and plenty of energy your cells will still be screaming out for other nutrients and different building blocks they need to do their job. Now with no movement or with excessive movement not all the nutrients that you eat will even get to where they are needed most due to the lack of lymph flow, inefficient blood flow, and too much stress shutting down your ability to digest and absorb your food. Also proper breathing technique and quality water are needed for effective transportation of nutrients in your body.
An emotional food craving is due to certain feelings triggering physical hunger signals. When emotional needs are perceived to not be met by self or by others then food is used as a replacement for emotional support. If you experience chronic feelings of fear, resentment, apathy, anger, worthlessness, being lost, or pain (yes pain is an emotion) this usually means you’re missing out on love, connection, being cared for, peace, meaning, inspiration, and pleasure and food can act as a substitute when these are lacking in your life.
In fact deep-seated emotions, positive or negative, that have been repressed or ignored or neglected will show up in your bodymind in a number of ways and not just as food cravings. A bit of a sidetrack here, but while what I’m about to say hasn’t been shown in scientific papers I personally believe that cancer, yep the Big C, is the biggest symptom of unresolved emotional issues today. I say this from personal experience having witnessed family members make it through cancer therapy and having to say goodbye to other family members who have died from cancer.
Anyhoo… back to food cravings.
A mental food craving is due to your thoughts being out of alignment with your feelings and your actions. Remember back in the podcast episode about Dream Building I talked about how your dream must align and be in harmony with your core values in order to live a happy and healthy life and to achieve living your dream. Any time your thoughts, feelings, and actions do not correspond to your values and your dream then stress, pain, and suffering are not that far behind.
Another thing is if you’re constantly ruminating about past events or thinking about what may happen in the future this can cause depression and anxiety leading to food cravings.
A foggy head with stinking thinking stuck in the past or trying to forecast the future will cause you to crave foods that do not serve you or your dream.
Okay so how do you go about managing yourself when it comes to food cravings? First some prevention tips.
With all types of food cravings physical, emotional, and mental you want to nourish your body with nutrient, energy, and information rich real foods from Mother Nature. When you nourish your cells with all natural ingredients and building blocks your feelings and thoughts will also be in alignment with the principles of nature meaning you will feel happier, healthier, and start to think how you can be of service to others as opposed to how others can serve you. You want to eat seasonally and locally as well as. This will ensure your diet is varied and fresh and changes with the seasons.
Something to take note of is that different physical food cravings relate to different nutrient needs by your body. For example if you crave chocolate this may be a sign of magnesium deficiency. If you crave cheese this may be due to not having enough fat and/or calcium in your diet. A craving for sweet foods could be due to a lack of sulphur and the amino acid tryptophan. Craving salty foods is often due to a lack of chloride.
So based on what you are craving have a look at your current diet and see if there may be some room for improvement by including different foods with higher sources of the nutrients that you may be missing out on.
Okay do yourself a favour and do a ‘Kitchen Cleanse’ or ‘Pantry Detox’. This is where you remove all processed fake foods that you crave for. Out of house, out of sight, out of mind.
Do not stay in one position all day long. Sit, stand, walk, squat, lunge, and fidget if you have to. Set a timer to 25 minutes and change positions or go for a one minute walk every time it goes off. The more you can move your body the easier it is for nutrients to be transported to where they’re needed most.
Remember to breathe diaphragmatic breaths. Breathing through your nose with your mouth closed and tongue resting on the roof of your mouth behind your teeth and expanding your belly for the first two thirds of the breath and then allowing your chest to move only in the last third then letting the breath out naturally either through your nose or mouth gives your internal organs a nice massage and expands and contracts your muscles as well as your spine creating movement of fluids and nutrition.
Make sure you keep yourself properly hydrated with quality spring or filtered water. Depending on your body weight, your activity levels, and your environment your H2O needs can range from 2 litres a day to 4 litres a day.
So move often, breathe deeply, and drink real water.
Now when a food craving does hit you what can you do?
First thing to try is deep belly breathing for one minute. Count 4-8 seconds on the in breath and the same amount of seconds on the out breath. Do this for a minute and wait and sense if the craving is still there.
If you still got a craving try drinking a big glass of water and wait 20 minutes.
Still got the craving?
Try a spoonful of extra virgin coconut oil or a shot of extra virgin olive oil. Yep you heard me. Get some real fats into your body. Again wait 20 minutes and see if the craving is gone.
If you still have the craving what I’m about to suggest next may not make sense, but give in to the craving. Now this doesn’t mean to go chomping down on whatever it is you’re craving okay.
I’m about to describe a mindfulness ritual that you can practise that will help you to give in to the craving, but at the same time stay in full control and awareness of how you’re being around that food.
Okay so pick up the food you’re craving and smell it. Take a deep breath in… really sniff that scent in.
Now break up the food and crumble it between your hands and fingers or dip a finger into it and pick up a bit of the food listening to the sounds that are happening as you do this.
Fully be present with the smell, sight, sounds, and feel of the food. Does it have an intense smell or is it mellow? How many colours can you see? Does it sound hard and sharp or soft and quiet between your hands or fingers? Feel its texture and temperature and notice the differences. Is it cold or hot? Does it feel smooth or rough?
Now put a piece of the food in your mouth allowing it to rest on your tongue, but don’t eat it! Just savour the flavour. Can you describe it? Can you describe the taste?
Finally, start chewing. Don’t swallow it. Just notice what your senses are telling you as you eat the food. Does it taste good? Does it feel good?
Alright, choice time. Now you have to choose whether to spit out the food and be done with the craving or swallow it.
If you do swallow it you will have another choice to make. Do you take another bite and continue eating or are you done with the craving?
This mindfulness food cravings ritual doesn’t work for everyone and if it didn’t work for you then what you have on your hands is not a physical food craving, but more an emotional or mental one.
To help with emotional and mental food cravings daily affirmations and daily meditation can help.
Affirmations don’t have to be overly positive and they can be as simple as, ‘I am here in this moment and this moment is all there is’. This type of affirmation removes past and future thinking keeping you in the present.
Meditation helps train you to be aware of your thoughts and to keep yourself focused on one thing. There are many types of meditation. You can do sitting, breathing, movement, walking, even gardening meditation. All of these will help balance your bodymind. You could do two minutes a day, two minutes every hour, two hours a day, whatever works for you just make meditation a daily practise as consistency is king when it comes to changing habits and ways of feeling and thinking.
Again meditation is about focusing the mind and one of the best ways to meditate or focus your mind is through play. Go outside and play tag or hide and seek with family and friends. Climb trees, fall off a tree, play fetch with Fido. Whatever it is you do for play let go of any expected outcome and just have fun. That’s what play is all about.
Another way to manage your emotional and mental food cravings is to keep a Food Mood Diary. This is where you note down date and time, place, people nearby, and how you’re feeling every time a food craving comes up. Over time you will notice a pattern begin to emerge. Emotional and mental food cravings can be triggered by a number of things and you may be able to find out what your personal triggers are by using a food mood diary.
Your ability to manage yourself when it comes to perceived stress plays a huge role in balancing out your thoughts and emotions. Self-management in terms of stress comes down to how much integrity you have with your thoughts, words, and deeds. If you say you’re going to do something then do it. If you write down a date that a task needs to be completed by then when that date comes that task better well be completed. And if you fail to do something that you said you would do apologise to the parties involved and if it’s just you apologise to yourself.
Integrity and harmony are key to having a clear bodymind that includes clarity of thought and a light heart.
Listen to the podcast I did on stress (podcast #3) to learn more on how to manage yourself and the perceived stressors in your life.
Here’s a quote by American philosopher and psychologist William James:
“The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.”
Emotional and mental food cravings fundamentally come down to not feeling appreciated when you expect to be and by not showing appreciation when you should. This includes self appreciation and giving yourself a pat on the back and loving your true authentic self.
So put down that pint of ice cream, that piece of pastry, that sugary cookie, that bar of milk chocolate, those salty chips, that crispy fried chicken, and choose instead to give yourself a hug and I want you to think, feel, and say to yourself, ‘I appreciate my life. I am worth it. I love me’.
If you find that difficult and don’t believe those words (and I know for some of you it is a struggle to show yourself authentic self love) how about thinking and feeling and saying this, ‘I have the potential to appreciate my life. I have the potential to be worthy. I have the potential to love myself’.
If you’re listening to this to my voice right now hear this, what I’m about to say for it is true: I Jason Marinovich appreciate you and your life. You are worthy for you are the reason why I record these podcasts. I thank you and give you all the gratitude I can give for listening and for giving me purpose. I love you my dear beautiful listener.
I’ll leave you with this thought.
Sameness begets staleness creating an unbalanced lifestyle leading to sickness, disease, and food cravings.
So keep moving forward.
Don’t let yourself get stuck in one way of being.
“Be water and keep in flow.”
Links and Resources
- WGP 014: Dream Building – How to Create the Life You Really Really Want
- WGP 003: How Stress is Making You Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead
Please leave a 5-star iTunes review for the Whole Guidance Podcast
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In this podcast I’ll be exploring Carbohydrates:
- I’ll talk about the many different types of carbs
- I’ll explain which carbs are essential for health and which carbs can contribute to disease
- I’ll talk about how to find your sugar and starch tolerance level
- Finally I’ll share the best ways to get more healthy natural whole real carbs into your diet
CLICK HERE TO LEARN WHAT ARE THE BEST FOODS TO GET YOU LEAN
Carbohydrates are one of the three main macronutrients besides fat and protein. The most popular carb of them all is sugar. This pure white highly processed refined powder has been the cause and reason for many people failing to reach their body composition and health goals.
Sugar’s sweetness and ability to affect your hormones, your immune system, and your neurology should not be underestimated, and I’ll talk more about this later on. But there’s more to carbs than just this simple sugar.
Carbs in the modern age need to be differentiated into two groups: cellular carbs and acellular carbs.
Cellular carbs are minimally processed whole vegetables, fruits, stems, leaves, and seeds of plants. Cellular carbs are made up of living cells with more nutrients, structural fibre, and a lower density and percentage of actual sugar content per cell. These carbs get digested by your body and your gut microbiota without issue (remember your gut microbiome is the ecosystem of trillions of microorganisms living in your colon).
Acellular carbs are highly processed and refined sugars, flours, and includes the starch stored in whole grains. Acellular carbs are made up of dead cells with hardly any nutrients, non-functional fibre, and a much higher density and percentage of actual sugar concentration per cell. The digestion of acellular carbs creates an immediate excess level of sugar in your blood as well as an imbalance of your gut microbiome due to the fact that these naked sugars without the nutrition and without the fibre are rapidly digested and encourage the overgrowth of Candida and other pathogens.
All carbs are made up of single or groups of molecules called saccharides or sugars.
Monosaccharides consist of just one sugar molecule such as glucose, fructose, and galactose.
Disaccharides are made up of two sugar molecules. Examples include sucrose (your regular table sugar), lactose (milk sugar), and maltose (which is two molecules of glucose).
Carbs that are made up of 2-10 saccharide molecules are called oligosaccharides and any carb over 10 sugar molecules long is called a polysaccharide.
Now mono- and disaccharides can be considered simple sugars and oligo- and polysaccharides could be called complex sugars.
Starch is a storage form of carbs. Starch is a polysaccharide made up of hundreds to thousands of saccharide molecules, specifically chains of glucose.
Dietary fibre is also a carb. Fibre from foods are non-glucose oligo- and polysaccharides meaning that while your digestive system will breakdown and assimilate sugars and starch into glucose it will not breakdown and assimilate fibre.
Fibres can either be insoluble meaning it doesn’t dissolve in water or soluble where it does dissolve in water.
Insoluble fibre passes right through your entire digestive system from mouth hole to south hole and is not digested by your body and is also not digested or eaten as food by your gut flora.
Certain soluble fibres are digested and eaten by your gut flora. These fibres that feed your gut flora are known as prebiotics and they feed both the good bugs (probiotics) and the bad bugs (pathogens).
Another type of carb that acts as a prebiotic is called resistant starch. It is a polysaccharide made up of glucose molecules, but unlike regular starch which is digested by your body resistant starch acts like a prebiotic fibre where it is resistant to human digestion and so becomes food for your gut microbiome.
So there’s a lot of different carbohydrates some of which your body can digest, some of which your gut flora can digest, and some neither your body nor your gut flora can breakdown.
So which carbs are essential for health and which carbs aren’t?
If there was ever an essential carb it would be dietary fibre, especially prebiotics. Whole real vegetables and fruits will provide you with plenty of prebiotic, soluble, insoluble, and resistant starch fibres.
Insoluble fibre has the benefit of taking out toxins, cholesterol, and metabolised hormones ready for elimination in your colon, but insoluble fibre also has a dark side as it can cause damage to your gastrointestinal tract if eaten in excessive amounts or if eaten out of balance with soluble fibre. Think of insoluble fibre as steel wool rubbing up against your single-celled very thin gut wall.
Soluble fibre on the other hand can not only act as a prebiotic feeding your gut flora, but also provides a soft sponge bath for your gut wall. Aloe vera and chia seeds are high in viscous mucous gelatinous polysaccharides that can give your gut wall a soothing massage and are a lot better for your gut than insoluble fibres especially if you’re dealing with gut issues like constipation.
Beta-glucans are a type of polysaccharide and fibre found in certain mushrooms and seaweeds that supports immune function and has been shown to boost the immune system helping cancer patients overcome their cancer. I believe beta-glucans are essential to a long and happy life.
Are sugars and starches essential for health?
In general I would say no, but it really does depend on your ability to tolerate sugar and starch which I will talk about soon.
Whatever your sugar and starch requirements are keep in mind that carb quality matters when talking about simple sugars and complex starches.
If you’re getting sugar and starch from cellular carb sources like whole real vegetables and fruits then your chances of developing a chronic disease, gaining fat, and upsetting your gut flora will be very low compared to someone else who gets their sugar and starch from acellular carbs like highly processed and refined flours and sugars from baked goods, sports drinks, and table sugar.
When you eat acellular carbs these get taken up into your bloodstream quite quickly causing a massive spike in blood glucose levels followed by a massive surge and release of the hormone insulin. Insulin’s job is to remove glucose from the blood. When glucose is left in the blood for too long it will cause damage to your cells, body tissue, and your immune system. So insulin puts glucose into your muscle, liver, and fat cells for use or storage. When insulin is active your body turns from fat-burning mode into fat-storing mode. If you become insulin-resistant like a type-2 diabetic where your cells no longer respond to insulin then glucose will be left in the blood for far too long causing long-term damage to nervous tissue and other bodily tissues and your immune system will be unable to function properly leading to premature aging and cancer.
Basically a high fibre diet with more prebiotic soluble fibres made up of cellular carbs from real food sources is a lot healthier for you than a low fibre diet or a diet high in insoluble fibre that’s rich in acellular carbs. Sugars and starches are not essential for health, but may be needed depending on your individual needs and lifestyles.
You may have heard of low carb diets, high carb diets, slow carb diets, and even controlled carb diets. How do you know which diet is right for you? Find your personal tolerance to sugars and starches, that’s how.
You have a unique requirement for sugar and starch different to anyone else and this is called your carb tolerance. Since there are many different carbs I like to be more specific and call it your sugar and starch tolerance. Your tolerance to sugars and starches is based on you being able to eat a certain amount without increasing your waistline or increasing your fasting blood glucose levels, and by not having a decrease in performance in the gym, in the boardroom, or in the bedroom.
So how do you find out how much sugars and starches you should be eating?
One way is to look at your ancestral background. Cultures that live on or near the Earth’s equator have a higher tolerance to sugar and starch due to the high availability and cooling nature of fruits and some tubers. Cultures that live closer to the Earth’s poles have a lower tolerance to sugar and starch due to the lack of vegetation and therefore they have evolved to eat more animal foods higher in fat and protein as these have a more warming effect on the body.
Of course today most people (me included) are fruit salads made up of many different ethnic backgrounds so it’s impossible to take this information as fact, but instead use it as a guide and it’s good to have this knowledge in the back of your mind as you work through the next practical step.
To find your tolerable level of sugar and starch intake you will start eating a ketogenic diet meaning very low carb with very high fat and then by slowly progressing toward higher levels of sugars and starches and lowering your levels of fat you will find out how much sugar and starch you really need to meet your activity requirements and the unique biochemical needs of your body.
Because you are looking for your own unique tolerance to sugars and starches you will need to subtract the total amount of fibre from the total amount of carbs which will leave you with just the sugar and starch content of that food. This is also known as net carbs.
So for example a cup of cooked broccoli has about 12 g of total carbs and 6 g of fibre and after calculating for net carbs and removing the fibre content the total amount of sugars and starches in a cup of cooked broccoli is 6 g. Okay another example, a medium sized cooked sweet potato (that’s about 200 g worth without the skin) has 36 g of total carbs and 6 g of fibre. Subtract the fibre from the total carb count and you get a net carb sugars and starches content of 30 g.
Remember to focus on eating cellular carbs as much as possible during these diets.
Also stick to the same weekly routine in terms of activity levels whether that be in the gym or at home or at work. The goal here is to find the amount of sugars and starches that you can eat without harm in this current point in time of your life and if you find yourself not being as active or being more active than usual this is going to give you incorrect information affecting your results.
During each of the following four diets keep a journal and note down how you feel, your hunger and energy levels, your mood, your activity levels and performance in the gym, your libido, as well as your bowel movements. You will also want to note down any significant life happenings like a stressful event or celebration. And if you can, get yourself a glucometer or glucose meter which measures your blood glucose levels and measure your fasting blood glucose first thing every morning.
You will use all of this information after trying out each of the four diets to find out what worked, when it worked, what didn’t work, and what may have interfered when something should have worked because it was shown to have worked in the past.
Okay onto the diets.
The first diet you’ll begin with and follow for 2-3 weeks is the very low carb high fat diet aka the ketogenic diet. Total allowable net carbs on this diet will be 30 g a day and they will all come from non-starchy vegetables only. We want to restrict the sugars and starches on this initial diet. For an 80 kg male aiming for a 2000 calorie a day diet this means fat will be between 100-190 g a day and protein will be around 100 g a day. For a 60 kg female eating 1800 calories a day this means fat will be between 130-175 g a day and protein will be around 75 g a day.
So on a VLCHF diet (very low carb high fat diet) you could eat five cups of cooked broccoli and reach 30 g of your maximum allowance of carbs for that day.
After completing 2-3 weeks of the VLCHF diet move on to a low carb high fat diet for 1-2 weeks. This is where daily sugars and starches (net carbs) fall between 30-80 g and starchy vegetables are back on the menu. Again for the 80 kg male fat will now be between 120-165 g a day while protein stays around 100 g a day. For the 60 kg female fat now lies between 110-150 g daily with protein staying at around 75 g a day.
So on a LCHF diet you could eat a medium sweet potato (around 200 g worth) giving you 30 g of sugars and starches for the day.
Next diet to try out for 1-2 weeks is the moderate carb diet. This diet has net carbs between 80-150 g a day. So for the 80 kg male daily fat intake will be between 90-130 g and protein stays at about 100 g. For the 60 kg female daily fat intake becomes 80-120 g and protein sticks to around 75 g a day.
Final diet to test for 1-2 weeks is the high carb low fat diet. The HCLF diet is has net carbs between 150-300 g a day. The 80 kg male will have around 20-70 g of fat a day with protein still around 100 g. The 60 kg female will have about 10-60 g of daily fat with about 75 g of protein.
Remember all these are estimates and are based on your activity levels and whether you’re a pro athlete, a weekend warrior, or a sedentary office worker you will need to tinker with and play around with the protein and fat and net carb ratios.
Once you’ve done this sugar and starch tolerance testing you will once and for all know how much carbs you can handle without increasing your waistline, without feeling moody or hangry, and still being able to perform in the gym, the boardroom, and the bedroom. And remember this is just for where you are right now in your life and as I like to say life is a process never still, but always in flow. In a few years time you may find that this no longer works and you’ll have to figure out your new sugar and starch tolerance levels as well as protein and fat ratios that work for you.
Okay let’s talk about the best food sources for fibre polysaccharides and how to include more real carbs into your diet.
The following are all fantastic sources of prebiotics and resistant starch:
- Jerusalem artichoke
- Onions and garlic and leeks
- Asparagus
- Green bananas
- Beans
- Cooked then cooled potatoes and white rice
Shiitake, reishi, and maitake mushrooms and seaweeds are fantastic sources of beta-glucans. Remember beta-glucans help boost your immune system.
Aloe vera and chia seeds are full of gelatinous polysaccharides. This is great for gut health.
Imagine a meal made up of:
- Potato salad with red onion
- Roasted asparagus and garlic covered with butter
- Stir fried shiitake mushrooms and broccoli seasoned with kelp flakes and chia seeds
- Hummus
- Some reheated white rice
- Baked sweet potato mash with butter, cream, and cinnamon and
- Cauliflower puree with duck fat
In this meal you have altogether soluble, insoluble, prebiotic, and resistant starch fibres as well as a whole lot of phytonutrients, micronutrients, and sulphur with not that high a sugar and starch content and all of them are cellular carbs.
A favourite and simple vegetable dish I like is a starchy vegetable roast including potatoes, kumaras, sweet potatoes, pumpkins, and carrots roasted in extra-virgin olive oil or duck fat. Very delicious and tasty and simple to make.
I also enjoy soups and smoothies that include more raw vegetables and herbs and spices.
If you feel you need to be living a lower carb lifestyle remember that most fruits today are bred for sweetness with higher sugar content so focus on heirloom varieties with more skin, less flesh or with more tart and sour flavours. Fruits with a higher skin to flesh ratio will have more fibre, phytonutrients, and antioxidants and less fruit sugars. So for example smaller berries are more nutrient dense then larger berries and won’t cause as large of a spike in blood sugar and insulin.
Hopefully the next time you hear that a certain carb diet is better than another you’ll think twice and ask yourself, ‘how much essential fibre compared to non-essential sugars and starches are there in this diet and would the net carb ratios work for me and my current lifestyle?’
Don’t guess. Test!
“With any recommendations and advice you hear the only real way to find out if it’s true for you and whether it will work for you is by trying it out for yourself.”
You’ll never know if that jersey or that dress looks good on you until you put it on.
I’ll leave you with this. You cannot treat all carbs the same. Some are more essential then others and some are downright detrimental (acellular carbs). Your individuality means your fibre and sugar needs will vary from moment to moment and will be different to other people.
As with all foods quality matters so make your choice of carbs a quality choice.
Links and Resources
Please leave a 5-star iTunes review for the Whole Guidance Podcast
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In this podcast I’ll be exploring Saturated Fat and Cholesterol:
- I’ll explain how fats and cholesterol are needed by your body
- I’ll talk about how and why saturated fat and cholesterol were wrongly convicted of being the cause of heart disease
- I’ll talk about how industrial seed oils aka vegetable oils are very much non-essential and damaging to all life on the planet
- Finally I’ll share the best and most delicious ways to get more healthy natural whole real fats into your diet
CLICK HERE TO LEARN WHAT ARE THE BEST FOODS TO GET YOU LEAN
Saturated fat and cholesterol are essential for health, no doubt about it.
Saturated fatty acids form about 50% of the membranes of your cells. This is the cell wall and saturated fat gives your cells more strength and stability. Think about what happens to coconut oil or melted butter when left at a cool room temperature or if you put them in the fridge. They become solid. This is due to the high content of saturated fat which is much more stable and not as easily oxidised or damaged as the other two main types of fats monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats. Now if you were to put olive oil or fish oil in the fridge they would remain liquid as they don’t have anywhere near the same amount of stable saturate d fatty acids, but do have higher amounts of the more flexible monounsaturated fats and even more flexible and unstable and fragile polyunsaturated fats.
Besides making for strong cells by giving your cell membranes proper integrity saturated fatty acids also enhance calcium absorption which is critical for bone health. Saturated fats also help in the production of other essential fatty acids like omega-3 needed in the inflammatory response for healing. Saturated fats are also rich in fat-soluble vitamins A and D.
Now all fats in general have health benefits including helping your body to make use of fat-soluble vitamins. If you’re drinking low fat smoothies, you ain’t getting any of those fat-soluble nutrients. Fats also help stabilise your appetite and make you feel more satiated and full. There is no excessive release of the fat-storing hormone insulin when you eat fats compared to carbohydrates. Fats are a longer burning and consistent source of fuel compared to protein and carbs. Unlike fat protein and carbs, but more so with carbs these macronutrients get burnt up a lot quicker leading to sugar highs and sugar lows. Leaving you hungry and angry aka hangry.
Cholesterol is another very essential nutrient for health. Cholesterol is not fat, but a steroid alcohol and acts as a building block for hormones, neurotransmitters, and cells. Vitamin D for example is made when cholesterol in your skin mixes with UVB radiation from the sun. Your sex, growth, and stress hormones like testosterone and oestrogen and cortisol are made from cholesterol. No cholesterol equals no sex and growth my friend. Also cortisol is not only your primary stress hormone needed to help you deal with stress, but it also reduces inflammation in your body.
Cholesterol is also used in making bile that’s needed for proper digestion of ft. The protective coating surrounding your nerves is called a myelin sheath and these are made from fatty acids and cholesterol. Cholesterol is also an antioxidant fighting off free radicals in your body preventing DNA damage, premature aging, and cancer.
Finally and probably the biggest most important health benefit to saturated fats and cholesterol is that the dry weight of your brain is made up of at least 50% fatty acids and cholesterol. Without fat and cholesterol your brain would be nothing but a watery and mushy mass of stupidity. You want a fat head. You really do trust me.
As you can probably tell by now saturated fats and cholesterol are essential for a healthy and happy bodymind.
However, for many years now saturated fat and cholesterol have been demonised as the bad guys when it comes to health particularly heart health. This has never been true and fortunately the tides they are a changing. Whole natural real foods that the human organism was evolved to eat are coming back into favour while sales of processed and packaged fake pretend food-like products are starting to fall.
Our species of animal evolved and thrived on eating other animal meats, vegetables, and fruit. The coexistence of humans with these three main food groups has been going on for a few million years. Seeing as saturated fat is found predominantly in animal fat as well as coconut and cacao beans that humans have been eating forever and a day how could it ever be possible to think that an old-school food can begin to create new-school diseases.
For instance heart disease was a very rare and new disease over 100 years ago, but today it’s as common as canola oil and numero uno on the list of most fatal health conditions of all time.
To find out how saturated fat and cholesterol were framed for crimes they never ever committed we need to go back over 100 years ago when in the early 20th century a Russian pathologist called Nikolay Anichkov conducted studies with rabbits by feeding them high cholesterol animal foods. Seeing as rabbits are pure herbivores and raw vegans is it any wonder what the results were. Yep cholesterol damages arteries… in rabbits that don’t eat a high cholesterol diet.
Then in the mid 20th century we have Ancel Keys an American scientist who did a study on 7 countries showing an association between high rates of heart disease with high amounts of animal fat consumption. Problem is he cherry picked his data and picked only the 7 countries out of 22 countries he could have selected to show this connection. If you were to pick another 7 countries from that same set of 22 country data today you could show the complete opposite that high rates of heart disease were associated with very small amounts of animal fat consumption. Meaning ladies and gentlemen of the jury that. that man, Ancel Keys intentionally chose only the information that he knew would support his hypothesis and idea that saturated fat causes heart disease.
But wait because unfortunately there’s more… oh when will the hurting stop?
This is where money and food industry come into the picture. The American company Procter and Gamble who were in the candle and soap manufacturing industry in the mid to late 19th century used to use animal fats in their products. At the same time new oils extracted from plants were coming onto the market and these were a lot cheaper than animal fats. In the early 20th century the process of hydrogenating cottonseed oil had been invented. Hydrogenation is where you take a monounsaturated or polyunsaturated oil which as I mentioned before is naturally liquid as designed by Mother Nature herself and then turning that liquid oil into a solid saturated fat. So of course Proctor and Gamble would use this cheaper industrial seed oil in their candles and soaps.
It wasn’t long till electricity came online in homes and in cities and then candle sales plummeted. So what Procter and Gamble did next was pretty clever, deadly in the long-run, but financially smart indeed. They started to sell the crystallised cottonseed oil as a cooking fat called Crisco.
Ever since then other industrial seed oils and other vegetable oils have come on the market as imitation butters like margarine and as replacements for lard and tallow in big restaurant fryers. Even the fast-food chain McDonald’s used to use animal fats in their fryers until they were persuaded to switch to Crisco and other vegetable oils for health and financial reasons I’m sure.
The reason for the abundance and low cost to these industrial seed oils is that national governments subsidise seed farmers and growers. Authorities support and give money to grow more of these crappy crops. These crops are the highest growing food group in the world and were originally used as animal feed, but instead of throwing out the leftovers and newly created waste government officials working together with the food industry realised that if they market this stuff as healthy they could make more money from taxes and sell it as human food.
So here we have some really dodgy science showing that cholesterol damages arteries and that animal fats cause heart disease and then we have food manufacturing companies selling extremely cheap unhealthy industrial seed oils and marketing them as a healthy alternative.
So what is it that makes these crop oils, these seed oils, these vegetable oils not only bad for your health, but also damaging to the environment?
I’ll start with the environment first because even if you couldn’t care less about your own health maybe you’d think twice about buying and eating these crop oils if you knew how it affected the planet, the environment, and the future that your children will be growing up in.
Because authorities are paying to help increase the production of these crops which include cottonseed, canola aka rapeseed, corn, and soy they are knowingly or unknowingly causing massive damage to the ecosystem. How?
Just as the health of your body depends on the health of your gut microbiota which are the population of trillions of microorganisms living in your gut the health of the planet is dependent upon the health of the soil.
Topsoil is the first half metre or couple feet of soil. This soil isn’t just a mass of dirt like the subsoil beneath it. Topsoil is an ecosystem of microorganisms, worms, insects, fungi, plant roots, and broken rock. Together this entire ecosystem transforms light (sun energy) and matter (earth energy) into a natural compost called humus and into minerals, vitamins, hormones, enzymes basically every single nutrient under the sun and on the planet that’s needed to create life and make a happy and healthy human is made and found in the topsoil.
It takes thousands of years to create just one foot of healthy topsoil. Sadly topsoil around the globe is being lost due to food industry growing monocultures of seeds, that is the same single crop on the same land year after year. Once we lose this topsoil we will lose a huge supply of food.
Different soils will have different nutrients. All plants have their own unique nutrition needs and provide a different set of nutrition to the soil. When one crop is grown on the same soil year after year all the nutrients required by that one crop will be sucked out of the soil leaving the soil malnourished and lacking in those particular nutrients. Eventually this soil will be dead of nutrition and the crop will no longer thrive and production will need to be moved to another location.
We need to remember and I say this almost every show it seems that life is a process always changing and in flow. We must rotate the crops we plant on the land so that the soil never gets stripped of one set of nutrients. So until the food industry learns this, the future of the health of the soil, the planet, and future generations of people looks pretty dark.
Once harvested these seeds are turned into margarines and other solid fat substitutes that I call franken-fats through a process called hydrogenation. This involves pumping hydrogen molecules into these fragile polyunsaturated fats, saturating them with hydrogen turning them solid. This process damages these unstable fatty acids oxidising them creating free radicals. So here you have a brand new and damaged food-like product that your body does not recognise and the damaged fatty acids create inflammation and stress leading to disease.
Another process called partial-hydrogenation is even worse as this creates trans fats. Only recently have trans fats been labelled as unhealthy, but what makes things worse is that food standards state that if there’s less than 0.5 grams of trans fat in a single serving of food then a food company can put on the nutrition label 0 trans fat content. Lies I tells ya. All lies.
There are new seed processing methods used today that do not create trans fats, but still create rancid damaged franken-fats. Fractionation and interesterification are what these new processes are called so if you see fractionated or interesterified on a food-like product label… drop it, drop it like it’s hot.
Now the processing of seeds and fragile liquid polyunsaturated fatty acids into damaged solid saturated fatty acids involves many steps that make me wonder how we as a species could ever call ourselves the smartest animal on this planet. Really?
First there’s the hydrogenation, fractionation, or interesterification process followed by chemical extraction, deodorisation, degumming, bleaching, addition of additives, preservatives, artificial flavourings, and synthetic antioxidants, and so you want turn and run when you see a brick of grey goo looking back at you when you open up the packet unnatural colourings are added to make these franken-fats look like real food. Still can’t believe it’s not butter? Eww and yuck! Seriously!
Now some of you might say ‘but it has been shown that these vegetable oils lower cholesterol in the blood’ and you’re absolutely right. You know why?
Because these fatty acids are damaged and cause inflammation in the body guess who has to go about putting out the fires caused by them — cholesterol. Cholesterol has been labelled the bad guy just because it’s been caught at the scene of the crime. But what mainstream medicine fails to realise is that cholesterol is like your body’s own fire brigade and they are at the scene trying to put out the fire. The real fire starters are eating fake pretend food-like products like industrial seed oils. So of course eating these franken-fats will lower cholesterol in your blood because most of your fire brigade are in the cells and body tissue busy repairing the damage caused by these rancid oxidised fats!
Alright let’s talk about what fats are healthy and how to include them in your diet.
I already listed the healthy animal and fruit fats you want to focus on back in episode 8, but I’ll share them again here.
- Egg yolks
- Ghee and 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
Remember all these fats should be minimally processed, extra-virgin, and cold-pressed so there’s no damage caused by heat.
“The best way to increase your intake of healthy natural whole real fats is by eating a lot more vegetables!”
Vegetables have a lot of antioxidant, anticancer, and longevity nutrients, but the real reason I love to eat vegetables and have eaten more of them in the past few years than I ever did in the first few decades of my life is because vegetables are the best vehicle for fats!
There’s nothing like lightly steaming up some broccoli, cauliflower, and cabbage and tossing them in some butter that’s come straight from the fridge, but then you see the butter begin to melt and get all gooey and when you season it with sea salt and take that first bite wow, what a taste sensation. Believe it or not friend but yes vegetables can taste juicy… you just need to add some beautiful fat.
You can take raw vegetables like celery, carrots, and cucumber and dip them in some nut butters or spread some fat on them. I love almond and macadamia nut butters. Peanuts are legumes not nuts and can have an inflammatory effect for some people so as always no matter what I or anyone else says be sure to listen to your body as the body never lies. If it doesn’t like a food then stop eating it.
Don’t forget by eating fats with vegetables and fruits your body can better absorb the fat-soluble nutrients in the food.
I have a big super green fatty vegetable smoothie every night with dinner which weighs in at over 600 grams. That’s over a pound of nutritious, delicious, scrumptious, and highly precious plant and animal fat nutrition, energy and information. I chew and chew with every mouthful and it takes me about 20 minutes to finish and by the end I’m as full and happy as Santa on the day after Christmas.
Another tasty way to eat more fat is to eat more of the fatty cuts of meat. Now remember back in the detox episode toxins love fat and get stored in your fat cells when your body cannot eliminate them. This holds true for animals as well. So if you’re eating the cheapest animal meat you can find that wasn’t naturally raised and bred, free-range out on pasture, eating a species appropriate diet then you have a toxic fat bomb right there.
When you choose fattier cuts of meat especially when it comes to organs meats like liver you must 100% choose the free-range and naturally raised meat. If you choose fatty cuts of muscle meat you can simply cut off the fat, but with offal and other meat where the fat is mixed inside the meat, don’t waste your money, time, health, energy, mood, and vitality. It ain’t worth it.
My personal favourite fat is 100% cacao or dark chocolate. No added sugar or sweeteners, just the cacao seed, bean, or pod whatever you want to call it churned into a fat bomb of a bar. With cacao being one of the highest antioxidant foods everything’s coming up chocolate!
Probably the best and most nutritious way to include more fat and overall nutrition in your diet is to eat liver pate. I love chicken liver pate. It is a mix of chicken liver, herbs, heavy full-fat cream or butter and it comes out like a dip. Raw vegetables again come to the rescue to help transport this beautiful mixture of fat and protein and vitamins into your bodymind.
My favourite chicken liver pate recipe is by Diane Sanfilippo author of Practical Paleo. I’ll put a link to the recipe in the show notes for this episode.
I’ll leave you with this quote by George Bernard Shaw as a reminder you are meant to have a naturally fat head and be proud of it.
“No diet will remove all the fat from your body because the brain is entirely fat. Without a brain, you might look good, but all you could do is run for public office.”
Amen George.
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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 the topic of Dream Building:
- I’ll explain why having a dream is necessary to living a happy and healthy life
- I’ll talk about personal core values and how they help you build your dream
- Finally, I’ll share some tips on how to build your own dream that will move you toward the life you’ve always wanted
CLICK HERE TO LEARN WHAT ARE THE BEST FOODS TO GET YOU LEAN
A lot of people today feel lost and live out their lives without really knowing what it is that makes them truly happy and what they really want from life.
What does this have to do with dream building?
Well dreams aren’t just what you experience during REM sleep. Dreams aren’t just visions and ideas created in your mind. Dreams aren’t just fantasies disconnecting you from reality. Dreams are much more.
Dreams act as your North Star a guiding light and give you direction in your life. Having a dream gives you purpose. It gives you the desire and the will to experience and live the life you want and to live it on your own terms.
Your dreams also make up your legacy where your legacy is your gift and your contribution to the world.
In order to live out your dream though you need to set goals.
Goals give you two things. Firstly goals give you an intention and provide you with a target to aim for. Secondly goals give you a means to reaching that target. So for example, if your dream was to be healthy and full of energy then one of your target goals could be to reduce excess fat and reduce your waistline by a certain amount before a set date. In the process of reaching that goal you would need to change up your diet and other aspects of your lifestyle. It is in this process of learning how to live a healthier lifestyle where you develop and grow as a person becoming someone different to who you were before.
So goals aren’t just something you achieve, but are also a means to learning a new way of being.
Without a dream your life becomes like a ship without a map and compass and without clearly defined goals that ship is without a captain on board. A ship that has set out to sea without direction and purpose will sail on endlessly going round and round in circles.
As the saying goes:
“If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.”
Having a dream gives you your GPS coordinates telling you exactly where you are now and where you want to go. Having clearly defined goals programs that GPS to give you the most effective route to achieve your dream.
Now I’m sure at one point in your life someone has told you to ‘stop daydreaming and pay attention’.
Now imagine if historical figures like Jesus Christ, Rosa Parks, William Shakespeare, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr, Mother Teresa, Mahatma Gandhi, Leonardo Da Vinci, Kate Sheppard and Mary Ann Müller who have directly or indirectly changed the course of human history imagine if these people stopped dreaming and did exactly what everyone else was doing.
Martin Luther King Jr would not have been inspired to lead the African-American Civil Rights Movement and make his famous ‘I have a dream’ speech, but instead would have had to unhappily sit on the sidelines and settle for having to live out somebody else’s dream.
This is where your own personal core values come in.
Your personal core values are the needs you have when it comes to living an awesome life. They define how you want to live, they guide your choices, and they determine the type of person you want to be. Core values also influence the types of personal relationships you want to be in and also what communities and organisations you wish to join.
Basically core values help you choose when to say yes and when to say no.
Living in harmony with your values creates a very happy and well-balanced life free of major and chronic stress. However, if you don’t live your life according to your own set of core values then stress just begins to pile up and up and up and you’ll never achieve true happiness and health.
For example if you value health and vitality, but are eating fast food on a regular basis the image you have of yourself in your mind compared to what you see in the mirror may just shock you. Another example what if you value free quality education for all yet you work for a very expensive and exclusive private school with horrible teaching strategies. Working in a place that has a very different set of values to you will give you more stress then you bargained for giving you a lot more than a mere shock as time goes on.
Now if you aren’t willing to live your life and make choices that align with your core values then realise what you’re actually doing is choosing to live your life according to somebody else’s value system. To take control and responsibility of your own life means to live it in full alignment with your core values otherwise in reality it’s another person or organisation that is driving your ship wherever they want it to go.
Some categories of core values and basic needs you should be aware of include:
- Physical health
- Emotional health
- Mental health
- Spiritual health
- Financial needs
- Time needs
- Relationship needs
- Social needs
When it comes to building your dream you want to make sure that your core value system is in full alignment with your dream. If your values are opposite to your stated dream you will end up working against that dream so change your values to be more dream affirmative.
If your dream is to be healthy and full of energy then valuing eating whole foods over processed fake food-like products is in harmony with your dream. But if you end up eating fake food half the time then there’s a conflict between what you want for your dream and what you need in your life leading to stress and eventually unhappiness.
Okay so now that you know why you need a dream and a goal and to live life according to your core values and that these values need to be in harmony with your dream let’s get into how to build a dream worth living.
First up, find your dream. What is your dream?
You want to make your dream big enough to energise you and to move you. This energy in motion will give you the motivation and the inspiration to move forward in the face of challenges and obstacles that most definitely will come your way. You want a big enough why to inspire you to achieve what may look like the impossible. Realise though that impossible is simply another way to say I’m possible!
Your dream statement can’t be superficial. Something like wanting to lose weight or to look good naked or to be rich would be superficial. You can start here, but then ask yourself why do you want to lose weight? What will that give you? Maybe it will help you keep up with your children while playing or allow you to travel and walk the century old streets in Europe. Why do you want to look good naked? Is it to have more confidence and be a better lover to your partner? Maybe it’s so you can live a longer quality of life where you’ll be able to see your great grandkids one day and still be mobile and agile enough to pick them up. Why do you want to be rich? Is it so you can volunteer your services for free and help others who wouldn’t normally be able to afford them? Maybe being rich is a means for you to have more free time allowing you to support charities and other non-profit organisations.
In these cases you would reword the dream from wanting to lose weight or look good naked or to be rich to I want to be full of energy so that I can play with my kids without getting tired and out of breathe or I want to be healthy and fit so that I can travel to Europe and walk the ancient streets of Rome or I want to be able to give my full time and attention to supporting a particular charity.
So what is your dream? Is it to live in another location in a nice home surrounded by family? Is it to complete a half-marathon? Is it to climb Mt Everest? Is it to make vice president or to gain employment at a specific organisation? Is it to build a real foods delivery service? Is it to keep working in your current job to create enough financial security so that you can take time out for a whole year building your own business?
Write down your dream on a piece of paper.
If you’re finding it difficult to come up with a dream then think about what makes you come alive and are passionate about. Think about things that inspire and motivate you.
If you’re still struggling think about what you despise and hate or what’s causing you the most stress in your life in this moment. For example I hate the fact that food outlets even gourmet organic restaurants still use industrial seed oils like canola oil as their cooking fat of choice. So I could have the dream of becoming a real food advocate for getting natural animal and fruit fats into food outlets and getting seed oils out. Or I could have a dream of owning my own restaurant that served only real food without a single pretend fake food-like product in sight. Maybe you use public transport and hate the fact that the timetables and scheduling are out of sync with what people actually need. Your dream could be to create your own private transport service that provides more availability and flexibility. Perhaps your biggest stress right now is with your husband or wife and your dream is to renew your vows of marriage and to a have a loving and respectful physical and emotional relationship together.
Whatever your desire, pleasure or pain there’s a dream in there somewhere.
Next write down your personal core values. These relate to what it is you need to live your dream and to be happy. Write down at least five core values for the eight different categories I listed previously and feel free to add more categories such as career needs, equipment needs, or environmental and location needs.
Ask yourself in each category what do I need? For example regarding physical health you could ask yourself what are my dietary and movement needs? For spiritual health you could ask yourself what are my meditation and being outdoors in nature needs. For mental health you could ask yourself what are my needs in terms of challenging my brain and having some quiet time to myself.
Remember your core values should be congruent and in harmony with your dream.
Next step is to create your dream team. Your dream team are the people in your life who will support you in realising your dream. This could include family members, friends, personal trainers, business coaches, doctors anyone who is on your side and wants to see you succeed and that you need the support of in order to achieve your goal. Write down a list of people who will support you in realising your dream.
Next come the ABCs of dream building. ABC is an acronym which is actually read backwards beginning with C.
C stands for Clarity, B stands for Belief, and A stands Action.
Starting with clarity you need to be clear on what it is you need to do, how much time it will take, and the resources and energy you will need in realising your dream. This is where goal setting comes in.
Goals need to be SMART that is S M A R T which is another acronym.
S stands for Specific. So be clear on what it is you want to achieve and why, example ‘I want to decrease my body weighto isn’t as specific as ‘I want to feel happier and have more energy by decreasing my body weight by 10 kg’.
M stands for Measurable. This qualifies and quantifies the goal so you know when you’ve reached it or not. So sticking with the previous example you know you’ve reached your goal when you’ve decreased your weight by 10 kg.
The A and R stand for Attainable and Realistic. Your goal needs to be achievable and within the realms of possibility. So wanting to drop 10 kg in four weeks is a lot more attainable and realistic than four days.
Finally the T stands for Timeliness. Your goal needs to have an end date. This gives you two things. First it gives you a sense of urgency as you make progress toward your goal. Second it gives you a completion date on which you can check on the results you got or didn’t get. From here you can evaluate what worked and what didn’t work and then get cracking on a brand new goal.
Your turn. Write down one or two goals. Your goal should be both target-focused and means-focused or create one goal for each respectively.
So a target-focused goal would be wanting to decrease your weight by 10 kg before the 1st of December for example. A means-focused goal would be wanting to feel happier and have more energy making you a better father and husband or an employee that contributes positively to the workplace. One goal focuses on the end result while the other goal focuses on how you’re being in the process of reaching the goal.
Next, but still with the C of ABCs you need to create a plan of actionable steps that you need to take in order to achieve your goal and realise your dream.
Write down what you need to do and have done in the next 91 days or three months. Next write down what you need to do and have done in the next 28 days or one month. Then write out action steps for the next 7 days. After you’ve got your action items written out for the next 91, 28, and 7 days from today onward you are going to write down what it is you need to do today as part of completing all the action items for the week. This is your plan.
Once you’ve completed a week, review your 91, 28, and 7 day plans again and update when necessary and create a new weekly and daily plan. Repeat this process till you reach the end of your goal and evaluate the results.
After planning and gaining clarity comes belief.
Belief is a huge factor in realising your dream and accomplishing your goals. You may have a dream that seems beyond your current capabilities and skill set right now. Well believing in yourself is about having a vision of who you are going to have to be in order to realise your dream and who you will become once you’ve lived your dream. Self belief will drive out those limiting and negative thoughts that keep you as you are and prevent you from changing.
Napoleon Hill author of Think And Grow Rich, which is an oldie but a goodie in terms of personal and spiritual development books, said:
“Whatever the mind can conceive and believe the mind can achieve.”
And as Arnold Patent author of You Can Have It All says:
“To live life in ideal terms, you must first conceive of it that way.”
So before you can realise your dream in reality you must realise it in your bodymind. You must see it, envision it, embody it and fully embrace your dream. You need to believe in your self and know that you have what it takes to make your dream come true.
Now that you’re clear on what you need to do and believe in yourself the next and final step in building your dream is to take the necessary action required. You can read every single book in the world on how to ride a bike or swim, but until you put butt to bicycle seat or get your feet wet and actually have the experience all that knowledge will be of no use.
It has been said that ‘knowledge is power’, but in reality knowledge is potential power. Applying knowledge by being in action is when you are the most powerful version of yourself.
As Morpheus said to Neo in my favourite movie of all time The Matrix:
“…there’s a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.”
So use your empowering belief of self and take action on your plan.
“Experience is real power.”
One last thing to keep in mind is that life is a journey not a destination. Life is an ever changing process and you will need to understand that challenges and obstacles are a part of that process. The path toward your dream will be littered with many stumbling blocks. You will be able to steer clear of the most obvious hurdles that show up, but there will always be finer bumps in the road that you will never see coming that will trip you up.
So one the best tips I can leave you with when it comes to building and following your dream is to expect hardship and difficulties to show up every now and then and while you should follow your plan to the T, like a boat at sea surprised by very strong winds, don’t forget to make adjustments and course corrections along the way.
Your mission isn’t to get from A to B without a hitch. Your mission if you choose to accept it is to get from A to B with the least amount of clumsy hilariously goofy looking trips and falls as possible and to get up and stand up taller every single time.
Here’s to living the life you’ve always wanted.
Links and Resources
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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
Please leave a 5-star iTunes review for the Whole Guidance Podcast
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In this podcast I’ll be exploring the topic of Detoxification:
- I’ll talk about the health impacts of having excess toxins in your body and explain how your innate detoxification system works
- I’ll talk about the hidden toxins that could be lurking in your environment
- Finally, I’ll share some tips on how to support your innate detoxification system
CLICK HERE TO LEARN WHAT ARE THE BEST FOODS TO GET YOU LEAN
Today there are over 85,000 industrial chemicals in the environment. Globally this equates to 310 kg (685 lbs) of toxic chemicals being released into the air, on land, and in waterways every second.
Toxic industrial chemicals are all around us and are the price we pay for civilisation and advanced technology.
Even newborn babies have been shown to have on average over 250 toxic chemicals in their umbilical cord blood. 180 of these chemicals were carcinogenic meaning cancer causing compounds.
The health impacts of toxic exposure include:
- Neurological disorders
- Endocrine disruption causing hormonal imbalances
- Unstable blood sugar
- Accelerated aging
- Digestive disorders causing malnutrition
- Fatigue and low energy
- Reduced bone integrity and muscle mass
- Increased fat gain
- Autoimmune diseases
- Weakened immune system
- Increased inflammation and of course again
- Promote tumour growth aka cancer
Now our ancestors never had to deal with such an overload of toxins. They would only have been exposed to a foreign toxic chemical if they lived by an active volcano, were exploring underground caves, or came across an unknown species of plant or venomous animal.
Your body has an innate intelligence that breathes you, that beats your heart, that helps you grow, that heals and repairs you, and also detoxifies you.
Fortunately for our ancestors their innate detoxification system could function without much strain or stress. Unfortunately for us that’s just not the world we live in today. Industrial chemicals, heavy metals, naturally occurring biotoxins, electromagnetic fields and radiation, high levels of perceived stress these all create a toxic load on the body and your body’s innate ability to detox is near breaking point every day.
There are two types of toxicity or toxic exposure.
Acute or sudden toxicity means your body has been exposed to a high dose of a single toxin creating an immediate reaction in your body also known as being poisoned.
Chronic or gradual toxicity means your body has been exposed to extremely low doses of many different toxins creating a slow and steady response over time.
This doesn’t mean chronic toxicity is not as bad as acute. Far from it. Both acute and chronic toxicity are equal in how they affect your life. While one will kill you in the moment the other will kill you slowly, but surely over time.
In order to explain how chronic toxicity makes for a slow and painful death I need to talk about mitochondria. These are the parts of a cell that convert fatty acids, lactic acid, and glucose a sugar molecule into physical energy. So these guys are the power-plants, the energy centres of the cell and your entire body.
A quick side note it is believed that mitochondria were one of the first single-celled organisms to have evolved billions of years ago and the fact that they have their own DNA separate to the cell and to you supports this idea. So mitochondria are bacteria that use the human body as a vehicle to feed themselves. Trippy huh? Now if you also think about the fact that there are 10 times more microorganism cells than human cells and 100 times more microorganism DNA than human DNA in your body it kind of makes you wonder… who’s running what now? I mean that’s a bit of a mind cluster right there. Definitely makes me come back to that age old question, ‘Who am I?’.
Anyhoo back to chronic toxicity… any excess toxins that your body cannot detoxify and process gets stored in your fat cells. Now why I bring up mitochondria is that these guys metabolise fat for energy and it is believed that low levels of fat-soluble toxins can poison the mitochondria. So these poisoned mitochondria are unable to metabolise these fat-soluble toxins leaving your body no choice but to store them in your fat cells increasing your waistline.
Also poisoned mitochondria are unable to metabolise glucose which leaves more sugar in the blood. Sugar in your blood begins to stick to other cells and proteins damaging them leading to accelerated aging, tumour growth aka cancer, and diabetes.
Finally with less mitochondria creating energy in your body you become fatigued and tired all the time.
So the next time you hear some authoritative figure say that your exposure to environmental toxins, to toxins in your food, at home and at work is too small to have an affect on your health realise that they’re right. But at the same time they’re wrong because these very small toxins will affect the very small energy centres in your body called mitochondria and one day you’ll wake up fat, sick, and nearly dead.
Your liver is the main detoxifying organ of the body, but it also plays many other roles that help keep you alive.
Your liver:
- Filters blood containing food nutrition from your gut
- Produces protein and cholesterol
- Stores energy as glycogen
- Turns excess sugar into fats
- Produces bile needed to digest fats
- Stores iron and vitamins and
- Detoxifies toxins and breaks down medications and drugs
As you can see your liver is a busy bee. Remember liver stands for life, for living, and the more you can support it the better your life will be. No doubt about it.
There are two phases that toxins, leftover hormones, medications and drugs, and other waste products go through when being processed by your liver.
Phase 1 neutralises the toxin setting it up for phase 2 which prepares the toxin for elimination via your bowels or your kidneys. If you find yourself constipated due to dehydration, poor nutrition, lack of movement, improper breathing, or high stress levels then the waste products in your poo will be reabsorbed back into your body and will either cause harm or have to go through a second round of detoxing causing extra strain and stress on your liver.
Phase 1 mainly uses vitamins and phytonutrients (plant nutrients), whereas phase 2 uses sulfur and amino acids. So you want to be eating plenty of vegetables and some animal and fruit fats to support phase 1 and plenty of sulfur-rich veggies as well as some animal meat to support phase 2.
I’ll put a link to the different micronutrients your liver uses in each phase in the show notes for this episode up on the Whole Guidance blog.
Your liver has a family of detoxification enzymes used to process external foreign toxins as well as internal natural toxins. There are different pathways in your liver a toxin can take in order for it to be processed for detoxification and elimination. If your liver enzymes or detox pathways get overloaded with a particular toxin then that enzyme and pathway will no longer be available to process other toxins that need them. Not only that, but if a toxin has to use an alternative pathway additional toxins, waste products, and damaging free radicals get produced causing more strain and stress on your liver.
For example, pain killers and alcohol these use the exact same detox enzymes and pathways in the liver. If you take these two toxins (yes alcohol is a low dose toxin), if you take them together then one or the other is going to last longer in your body causing side-effects. Now your liver will usually begin detoxing the alcohol first leaving the pain killer to have to use a different detox route. The problem with the pain killer having to go down this other detox pathway is that it creates a new waste product. This new waste product can only be taken care of by your body’s own innate antioxidant called glutathione. So now your body is having to produce more glutathione to neutralise this new waste product and your liver is having to do double-duty in having to process this new waste product again creating extra energy and nutrient demands on your body.
Bottom line is your liver requires a lot of energy and resources to function properly and if there’s an overload of toxins in your system then your liver is going to have to do more work draining energy and nutrients from other parts of your body. The less work your liver has to do the more energy and the more vitality you will feel and the better you will perform in life.
Toxins are hiding in everyday consumer products. You would think that if something was bad for you that your national government and local authorities wouldn’t allow it to be displayed on a store shelf and sold. But unfortunately we live in a world where dollars talk louder than cents. Literally money is more important in current society than common sense and well-being.
When it comes to food there are organophosphate chemicals used to poison life sprayed on crops and produce. Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are sold as healthy. Growth hormones and antibiotics are used to increase sales of cattle, pork, and chickens. Naturally occurring metals like lead and mercury and other industrial chemicals bioaccumulate in seafood with the larger fish biomagnifying the effects. You are what you eat and your liver detoxifies what you eat and if you think your poor liver doesn’t have to deal with the chemicals, foreign genes, hormones, and drugs you get from the food you eat — you’re living in a dream world my friend.
Your kitchen is a potential toxic bomb. Are you still using teflon and non-stick cookware because it’s easier to cook with and to clean. Uh-oh. Perfluorinated chemicals (PFCs) including perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) are what makes things non-sticky and are bad news for your liver and for your life if you wish to live it cancer free.
How about food containers? Do you use plastic food containers made with polyethylene, polypropylene, phthalates, bisphenol A (BPA) and bisphenol S (BPS)? These are all endocrine disruptors causing you to have unbalanced hormones and interferes with proper child growth and development, e.g. girls maturing earlier and boys developing more physical female attributes.
Don’t forget tap water is laced, yes I said laced with bleach aka chlorine and an industrial waste product that makes you and your children stupider than a single-celled amoeba called fluoride.
Home cleaning, air freshening, and laundry products are definitely a mass of toxic sludge.
- Ammonia
- Chloramine gas
- 1,4-dioxane
- Chloroform
- Bleach
- Phthalates
- Toluene
These are but a few of the chemical ingredients lurking in your living and working habitats.
Shower curtains! Most of these are made out of polyvinyl chloride aka PVC plastic and outgas, they release volatile organic compounds (VOCs) such as dioxins, xylene, and toluene that have no business anywhere near your liver. Every time you’re having a hot shower the increase in temperature only makes the PVC outgas even more.
Personal care products. Oh man talk about a toxic soup of epic proportions. Hair, skin, mouth products, deodorants and antiperspirants, cosmetics, antibacterial sanitisers (I used to love those things), soaps, sunscreens, baby wipes, diapers, tampons, pads etc these all have the following toxic crap. It’s a bit of a long list, but let’s do this.
- Aluminium or aluminum
- Chlorine
- Dioxins
- Furans
- Phthalates
- BPA and BPS
- Benzyl acetate
- Parabens
- Sodium lauryl sulfate (SLS)
- Sodium laureth sulfate or sodium lauryl ether sulfate (SLES)
- Ammonium lauryl sulfate (ALS)
- Sodium pareth sulfate
- Triclosan
- Cocamide diethanolamine (cocamide DEA)
- Diethanolamine (DEA)
- Monoethanolamine (MEA)
- Triethanolamine (TEA)
- Monoisopropanolamine (MIPA)
- Ethoxylated alkyl amine (PEG)
- Oxybenzone
- Avobenzone
- Octisalate
- Octocrylene
- Homosalate
- Octinoxate
- Sodium polyacrylate
Phew!
Finally synthetic fragrance. Whenever you see fragrance on a product remember that this one single word will have 10s of ingredients hidden behind it. It’s a loophole that businesses use to hide what they don’t want consumers or their competitors to see.
The clothing you wear also affects your health. If your clothes contain synthetic plastics and metals than these will interfere with your hormones and energy signature. This includes stain-resistant clothing.
Your furniture and carpets will be outgassing toxic chemicals including flame retardants. Baby’s new crib, could be a cesspool of poison. That new car smell, that ain’t sunshine and roses my friend. That’s a burden on your liver.
Also electromagnetic fields (EMFs) and toxic relationships create additional stress for your liver. Wifi signals, cell towers, electronic gadgets, stress, and stinkin’ thinkin’ all create an imbalance in your energetic being, your aura, your energy vortices known as chakras. Chakras that are out of sync create havoc with your physical, emotional, and mental bodies. This is due to the EMFs and perceived stress in your life causing a buildup of positive electrons in your cells that act as free radicals that damage your body from the inside out.
Okay I know that was a lot to take in, but if you want a happy and healthy life you need to know what could be causing your liver to be weak and tired and in turn making you feel weak and tired.
So right now you need to ask yourself one question:
“Do I have toxins in my body?”
The answer is a brutal yet life-changing YES!
Brutal because industrial chemicals have been found in Antarctic ice and at the tops of mountain ranges around the world. We live in a toxic world and there’s no running or hiding from it.
Life-changing because now that you know better you can do better.
So your goal isn’t to go fleeing into the woods or some cave high up in the Himalayas. You cannot escape being exposed to toxins.
What you can do though is dramatically reduce that toxic load.
The following is a list of the top 10 things you can do to love your liver and detox your life:
1. Eat organic naturally raised produce and animals that aren’t genetically modified and haven’t been treated with chemicals. You can grow and raise your own food or buy local from farmers markets.
Eat large fish like tuna on rare occasions and focus more on small fish like wild-caught sardines and salmon as well as seafood.
Remember to eat a variety of different coloured vegetables to support your liver’s first phase of detoxification and eat plenty of sulfur-rich vegetables and some animal protein to support the second phase.
According to the 5 Element theory in traditional Chinese medicine sour foods are great for supporting the liver. So a tea made with freshly squeezed lemon juice and freshly grated ginger would be ideal for loving your liver.
Drinking fresh vegetable juices (not fruit juices) with some lemon or lime and ginger is another liver tonic.
2. Drink spring, artesian, and filtered water.
3. Take liver supporting supplements that contain milk thistle extract silymarin and dandelion root.
4. Use cast iron, ceramic, stainless steel, or glass cookware and food containers.
5. Swap out standard home care and personal care products for ones with organic natural plant-based ingredients or make your own. There are plenty of recipes online on how to make natural all-purpose cleaners, toothpaste, and deodorants.
6. Wear clothes made of natural fibres. Hemp and wool are awesome choices as even some cotton today is genetically modified.
7. Buy furniture that is made without volatile organic compounds and fire retardants. Air out any new furniture, a new car, or a newly renovated house for a few days to a week before using.
8. Turn off wifi and any electronics that aren’t in use. Ground yourself to the Earth every day by spending at least 30 minutes with bare skin to soil, grass, and sand.
9. Let go of resentment. See everyone as another version of you living in another set of clothing in a different pair of shoes. Just as you had no control on the body you were given and the parents that you were born with neither did anyone else. Realise we are all finding our unique way through life and we all have our own personal ways to express love. Doesn’t mean we will understand each other’s expression, but at least we can understand we are all trying to express that One Love that drives us all.
10. Manage yourself when it comes to handling stress through proper breathing, meditation, sleeping, hydration, nutrition, exercise and play, and by being out in nature.
Links and Resources
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In this podcast I’ll be exploring Connecting with Nature:
- I’ll explain the importance of relationships and connecting with others
- I’ll talk about the different types of natural connection that nourishes your bodymind
- Finally, I’ll share some simple and effective relationship and nature rituals you can put into action to grow your natural social network
CLICK HERE TO LEARN WHAT ARE THE BEST FOODS TO GET YOU LEAN
All life came from a single cell billions of years ago. Now this cell wasn’t alone for long as it soon multiplied into a community of cells. Over time this community of cells adapted and evolved and grew and developed into all the different life forms we see today.
Human beings are social creatures. We live and we love and we fight in communities. Wanting to be with other people and feeling a connection with another person is built into your DNA going way back to that very first cell.
Now if you think about it how do we punish someone who’s already in prison? Solitary confinement. This is where people are physically separated from the main population and put into a room by themselves isolated from the rest of the world.
There’s no worse prison than that of a mind of someone who has lost connection to their friends and family.
Whether you experience pleasure or pain as long you’re with other people there’s a hidden sense of safety and security that makes you feel like it’s okay to feel this way. You can call on another person for help or you can blame that other person for causing your problem. A shared experience also tends to feel more alive and vibrant in the moment then if you were to have it by yourself.
But when you are cut off from family and friends this is where feelings of loneliness and solitude begin to creep in. Every time I bite into a delicious piece of dark chocolate or drink a tasty smoothie the first thing that comes to mind is ‘I want to share this experience with someone else’. But if I’m alone at the time there’s a split second where I get a little bit sad at not being able to share what I’m having.
Sadness is an emotion that you can feel and deal with on your own quite easily. Grief on the other hand can hit you pretty hard and it usually comes from a major sad event happening in your life suddenly, out of the blue, and unexpectedly. Dealing with grief alone is never easy. You need support and people around you to help you to see a different perspective of things and to see that this time of grieving is only temporary, eventually things will get better. Without support that grief if left to linger may turn into depression.
To paraphrase a line from The Lord of the Rings:
“Grief must move on, grief cannot linger.”
The saying it takes a village to raise a child is very true if we want that child to grow into a happy and healthy adult. Today many families are having to raise children alone. I’m not talking about single mums or dads, but families that have no extended relations nearby to help them. No grandparents, no aunts or uncles, no-one to act as a babysitter or teacher or guardian. This raising of kids without proper support puts too much stress and strain on the family and eventually on society as a whole.
Obviously us human beings are happier and healthier together than we are apart — up to a point as we do get on each other’s nerves every now and then, but as a society we are all in relationship with each other whether we like it or not. It is this relationship, this togetherness that moves you as an individual and us as a society forward and helps every single one of us to learn and to grow.
“Relationships are the key to experiencing the fullness of life.”
A lack of relationships equal a lack of experience leading to a lack of learning and growth and a lack of living.
Now even if you were the last human on this beautiful planet you still wouldn’t be alone. Animals, trees, and plants you are also in relationship with these guys. You have a relationship with the planet itself and even the sun.
The three key relationships in your life include:
- The relationship you have with your self
- The relationship you have with other people and
- The relationship you have with Mother Nature
The primary relationship you have is with your self or should I say selves. You are not only a physical being, but also an emotional, mental, and spiritual being. Your inability to live an awesome life comes down to the fact that your many different beings are out of sync with each other. For example, if you say to yourself ‘I want to be happy and healthy’ which is an expression from your mental being relating to your emotional and physical being, but then you eat fast food full of rancid plastic vegetable oils, sick drugged animal meats, and processed sugars then your emotional and physical beings are going to express something a lot different to what you were intending.
Another example let’s say you’re a person of faith who follows a creed of ‘love thy neighbour’, but more often than not you gossip about other people behind their back in order to make yourself feel better than them due to a lack of self-esteem. Well here you have a disconnection between your mental, emotional, and spiritual beings.
In order to have a happy and healthy relationship with your self you need to have a clear intention on how you want to be in the world and then you need to live your life in harmony with that intention. If your intention and way of being are incongruent, are not in harmony with each other you will never truly be able to love your self and who you are.
Once you can live a harmonious life and love your self then the relationships you have with other people are a lot easier to be in. You won’t have the need or feel that you have to defend yourself when other people question the way you live because you know that your intention and your way of being are 100% in harmony. So no matter what vile crap other people might spew in your direction to try and rock your boat, you can stand tall and simply agree to disagree because you can only control how you feel. Their feelings are not your responsibility.
As my mentor Paul Chek says you are 50% responsible for every relationship you are in. You are 100% responsible for how you think and feel toward your self, but you can only take half that responsibility when in relation with another person.
You want to nurture the relationships with the closest people in your life. This doesn’t just mean family or friends, but anyone that you interact with on a regular basis. Even the relationship with the local shop owner you buy your lotto ticket from every week needs to be nurtured.
We are social creatures after all and were made to live in communities sharing experiences and ourselves with each other.
“Isolation leads to desolation, whereas integration leads to celebration.”
The final and most vital relationship is the one you have with Mother Nature. This means the Earth, the sun, and all other life forms.
Your body is of this planet, this planet is of a star, and stars are of the universe so you literally have the Universe inside you. You are made up of the Universe. You are made up of stardust. You my dear beautiful [reader] are made up of the Earth and soil.
Our human ancestors before the dawn of air-conditioning, television, malls, and high-rise buildings spent 100% of their time on soil, on grass, on sand, or in the sea. Even huts and shelters were made out of natural organic materials meaning our ancestors were connected to the Earth even while sleeping.
Why is this important?
Your body is a biobattery where your cells hold an electrical charge and positive electrons build up overtime and act as free radicals in your body. These free radicals cause damage to your body like rust damages a car. Now think of the world we live in today with WiFi signals, cell towers, and all these new consumer electronic gadgets our world is full of electromagnetic fields and these EMFs disrupt your battery, your energy signature, your aura. EMFs also cause a buildup of positive electrons in your body leading to more free radical damage, more rust.
Guess what electrical charge the Earth is? It’s not neutral, it’s not Sweden right it’s negative. So every time you ground yourself to the Earth and come into physical contact with it the Earth sucks up those positive electrons, those free radicals and gives you more health affirming negative electrons. This is called grounding or earthing and has many health benefits besides fighting off free radicals. Earthing can also:
- Reduce stress
- Improve sleep
- Speed up healing
- Decrease recovery time
- Increase energy
- Improve the flow of blood normalising blood pressure
- Reduce inflammation
- Boost immune function
You can find out more about earthing and grounding at earthinginstitute.net.
Okay so that’s your connection with the Earth now let’s have a look at why you need to connect more with the sun.
Vitamin D controls the expression of over 1000 genes in your body. Vitamin D actually isn’t a vitamin, but a steroid hormone like oestrogen and testosterone. Vitamin D is a powerful antioxidant combating those damaging free radicals. It also boosts and activates the actions of vitamins and minerals and controls how these micronutrients work with your body benefiting your bones, skin, and blood vessels. Vitamin D is also involved in fighting certain cancers.
Now your main source of Vitamin D comes from your skin when it’s exposed to UVB radiation from the sun. Note I said UVB rays not the cancer causing UVA rays. So slapping on a pile of toxic UVB blocking sunscreen and sunbathing behind glass which filters out the UVB and only allows in the UVA is the exact opposite thing you want to be doing for better health. You can also get some vitamin D from food and supplements, but your best and original source of vitamin D will always come from the sun.
Don’t worry if you don’t have a healthy relationship with the sun right now, I’ll give some tips later on how to rebuild it.
Last point about your relationship with Mother Nature involves being surrounded by her loving embrace and by this I mean being within and with her natural forms. So this means connecting with other life forms other than the human ape.
This could mean having a pet or how about NOT stepping on a snail or killing other small bugs. This could mean having a garden and tending to it regularly or going for a swim in a natural body of water like the ocean or a river.
In Japan they have a natural organic therapy that has been shown to heal many diseases and prevent illness called Shinrin-yoku translated as ‘Forest Bathing’. Another translation would be ‘getting outside and going for a hike in the woods’.
Animals, trees, and plants, all living beings release signalling molecules called pheromones to communicate subconscious intention to other members of their tribe. Now trees and plants also give off other organic compounds called phytoncides that can influence your bodymind and by being in a forest surrounded by nature breathing in these plant chemicals you can experience the following benefits:
- Reduced stress
- Improved sleep
- Faster healing
- Decreased recovery time
- Increased energy
- Improved blood flow normalising blood pressure
- Reduced inflammation and
- A stronger immune system
Have you noticed that these are also the exact same benefits you get from earthing and grounding. Coincidence? Yes! Life begets life and the Earth, the sun, animals and plants all boost your life force energy.
Remember we are all of this one song this Uni-verse. We are single notes of a symphony or individual pieces of a giant puzzle. As this quote from Alan Watts nicely puts it:
“You didn’t come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean. You are not a stranger here.”
‘We are the world‘ as they sang for Africa 30 years ago and it’s true. We are all in this together my friend.
Okay so here are a few ways to improve your connection with self, with others, and with Mother Nature.
To have a better relationship with your self meditation is a great option. Meditation isn’t so much about reaching a point of enlightenment, but moreso about being in a focused state of mind where you can keep your mind on a single thought. By practising meditation on a regular basis you can train your mind to stay in the present moment giving your thoughts full attention
Meditation is also a time for quiet and in a world where we are drowning in noise from other people, from the media, from our own thoughts having a daily me time and quiet time ritual will help reduce your stress making you more resilient and better able to handle stress in your life.
Now there’s a 1001 ways to meditate. You don’t have to be sitting in a cave in silence for days on end chanting a mantra although you can if that floats your boat. There are movement meditations like Tai-chi and Qi-gong.
Personally I like walking and cooking meditations.
During walking meditation I time my breaths with my steps and count my steps as I walk counting 1 2 3 4 as I inhale and 1 2 3 4 as I exhale through the nose with my mouth closed.
Cooking meditation involves me being fully in the moment where I may have some music playing in the background and where I may or may not dance while in the kitchen and I time my chops of the knife or stirring of the pot to the beat of the music. I stay away from intense house or dance music as these can be a bit of a health hazard when wielding a knife in the kitchen.
There are some fantastic books out there on finding your self and being true to who you really are in all forms of being. I recommend reading:
- Way of the Peaceful Warrior by Dan Millman
- Motivation Manifesto by Brendon Burchard
- The Music Lesson by Victor L Wooten which is best listened to as an audiobook
- 10 Secrets For Success and Inner Peace by Wayne Dyer and
- The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success by Deepak Chopra
These five books are a great start on your journey to integrating your physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual beings into one harmonious force of awesomeness! You can find all these books in the Book Reading Club on the Whole Guidance website at wholeguidance.com/brc.
To enhance your relationship with others try finding ways to be of service to them. Giving is a fantastic way to serve. You can give your time and attention. You can give money. You can give knowledge or you can give others responsibility.
Receiving is another way to serve where you can receive what other people have created like a beautifully cooked meal and you can receive by letting others authentically express and share with you what’s really on their mind without judging them.
By giving and being open to receive others in their true and honest form you will see your relationships with the people in your life go from artificial and superficial to rich and more intimate.
Tips for getting outdoors in nature… get outside and get into nature!
Go hiking, walk trails, mountain bike riding, swimming, play on the beach, take your dog for a walk — don’t have a dog then get one from an abandoned animal shelter (definitely on my list to do). Get your thumbs green and get into gardening and horticulture or how about climbing a tree like you used to as a kid before getting told off.
Ideally you want to spend 30 to 90 minutes a day earthing your body to the ground, on grass, soil, or sand to reduce the stress of EMFs and boost your immune system.
At the same time why not get some sun exposure to produce some vitamin D.
You want UVB vitamin D producing rays not UVA cancer causing rays. While UVA rays penetrate the atmosphere and reach the Earth’s surface at all times of the day and throughout the year UVB rays only come through the atmosphere when the sun is high enough in the sky and this is usually around 10a to 2p during the summer and warmer months of the year (remember the sun doesn’t run by daylight savings time so keep that mind if you have that where you live). Also if you live in the upper and lower latitudes of the globe during the winter months UVB rays will not reach the surface of the planet even between the hours of 10a and 2p. So be sunsmart and protect yourself when the sun is low in the sky and expose yourself (go on I know you want to) when the sun is way up high.
Your skin colour will determine how much time you should be exposing your skin to the sun. Fare and white skinned people only need as little as five to 20 minutes a day in the sun. Dark skinned individuals may need to spend 30 to 60 minutes. Basically you want to be out long enough where you see the first signs of a tan happening on your skin, but not so long that you get burnt. You can gradually increase your time out in the sun as your skin will get used to being in the sun for longer periods. Keep in mind though that too much of a good thing is no longer a good thing.
Now Shakespeare wrote:
“To be, or not to be: that is the question.”
So you could choose not to be, but that’s no fun at all!
So I’ll leave you with this poem I was inspired to write describing who we are all to be in relation to everything else.
You were designed
To be
Under the sky and
On soil
On sand and
In the sea
You were created
To be
In the bush and
In forests
With plants and
The trees
You were embodied
To be
The same as animals and
Bugs
As well as the birds and
The bees
You were born
To be
Giving
Loving
Happy and
Healthy
You are
To be
A unique
Expression of
The Universe living
Your own reality
Links and Resources
- Earthing and Grounding — EarthingInstitute.net
- ‘We Are The World’ music video
- Way of the Peaceful Warrior — Dan Millman
- Motivation Manifesto — Brendon Burchard
- The Music Lesson — Victor L Wooten
- 10 Secrets For Success and Inner Peace — Wayne Dyer
- The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success — Deepak Chopra
Please leave a 5-star iTunes review for the Whole Guidance Podcast
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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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