Is your body giving your warning signs that something isn’t right?
Your body is such an intelligent piece of machinery. What I’ve learned over the years as I’ve worked with my body to heal naturally is this… If your body tells you no, the answer is no.
I know how it is to absolutely LOVE things like sugar, dairy, bread, pastries, and all the other grain-filled goodies. I know what it feels like for those items to make up the bulk of your diet and wander “what in the world am I going to eat if I remove those things?” The reality is, it requires a definite shift in the way we view our plate and our food. I had to relearn that food is fuel.
The mental/emotional attachment to food is real. Those feeling of “comfort” we receive from certain foods is real. AND the addiction is real. We actually receive a physiological response when we consume certain foods. That means they alter the chemicals within our bodies that leads to those feelings of euphoria. But I learned that this food-euphoria can come at a great price.
My advice? Pay attention to your body.
Listen for clues. When you experience symptoms in your body, it’s the intelligence of the human body calling out for change. It’s as if your body is screaming, “WARNING, SOMETHING IS NOT RIGHT!” If a food is making you sick every time you consume it, stop consuming it! It doesn’t matter what a doctor or a lab test or even a minister tells you. If you feel bad every time you have a piece of bread, then put the bread down and don’t consume it. Back away slowly… and it’s okay to RUN!
I’ll go back to my initial statement about the body being a very intelligent piece of machinery. The truth is, the body knows when something has entered into its environment that is causing harm. It actually elicits an attack in response to what it perceives as an invader. This causes inflammation in the body, which can cause a range of symptoms, but worse than that, it can cause a range of diseases.
Something that may seem very innocent, like putting bread in your body when your body says, “no” is only adding fuel to the fire. You deal with the consequences of how you may or may not feel afterward, but it’s not as innocent as we’d like to believe. This repeated inflammatory response can actually lead to disease states in the body.
When we listen to and respond to our body and give it what it needs, we can enter into a state of thriving – where we can flourish, prosper, blossom, and succeed. On the other hand, when we continually put things in the body that cause inflammation and illicit a response that puts our cells into attack mode, it creates stress on the body. If this stressor is in the form of food, like some of the toxic foods mentioned previously, it can begin to compromise the lining of the gut.
In a healthy body, the gut is lined with tight junctions, allowing only things like nutrients in the form of amino acids, vitamins, and minerals to pass through and be absorbed into the system to bring us into a state of health. The gut lining can become compromised because of stress, pathogens, or from continuous stressors/toxins from our environment that are eliciting a stress response or an attack on the body.
What does this mean?
It means that these tight junctions, that prevent larger particles in the gut from spilling into the body, actually lose their strength to hold those food particles in. This is known as leaky gut – or intestinal permeability – where the contents of the gut are literally spilled into circulation, where they don’t belong. This is a process that happens over time because of some of the stressors mentioned previously – food being only one of them. When these tight junctions become loose, and larger particles begin to spill into the body, they are seen as foreign invaders, and the intelligent piece of machinery that we are walking around in begins to elicit an attack on these particles that do not belong in the bloodstream.
This creates food sensitivities or intolerances, and in some cases disease processes and can even lead to things like autoimmunity. Autoimmune patients have one thing in common for sure, and that is a leaky gut. Many times one autoimmune condition can lead to another. Your body doesn’t hate itself. But it’s attacking what appears to be a foreign invader.
Food is only a small piece of the puzzle. But many times it’s one of the easiest to resolve. Not emotionally, because people are truly attached to their foods, but many times these attachments are not our fault. Food companies create foods that lead to addiction. If you’ve read my book Healed His Way, I talk about the reasons food, and in particular dairy is so addictive, and that’s because it works on the same receptors in the body as morphine. So you literally have a morphine-like response in the body when you consume dairy, which can cause it to be one of the most difficult foods for people to eliminate.
Does this mean you can never eat dairy or grains again? Well in some cases, maybe! For some, gluten just doesn’t work. I recommend that you test in your own body if you want to know what works best for you. The body doesn’t lie.
I choose to do my best to keep certain foods out of my diet after running several food sensitivity panels. I’ve also found a common denominator in many of the foods that cause problems for most people. So even without testing, I typically recommend removing grains, dairy, sugar, artificial sweeteners, soy, and alcohol for a period of about time and if you decide to reintroduce, then pay close attention to how your body reacts. After my last food sensitivity panel, I noticed that there were certain food groups that consistently showed up for me. When I decided to take that a little more seriously, it changed my life.
In my case, I’ve dealt with hypothyroidism for many years, and according to symptoms, for much of my life. But I’m learning now that it’s possibly related to the fact that I never really healed my gut completely because I compromised in certain areas a little more than I probably should have. My gut is my week area and I have to constantly work on that. But if I put inflammatory foods in all the time, then I know my gut will never truly heal.
I do take support for my gut on a regular basis as well as thyroid support in the form of herbs and natural supplements that give the body what it actually needs to heal and repair. Will I ever be 100% without the help of supplemental support? I’m not sure. But what I do know is that it is a journey. And I’m working every single day to eliminate what’s causing me harm and including what is bringing me health. And as long as I do what I know I should, I live symptom-free. And you can too.
I encourage you to begin to examine some of the things in your life that are causing you stress. That can be emotions, food, chronic illness, relationships, too little or even too much exercise, and more!
The secret to my success in almost every area of my life can be accredited to hiring and partnering with mentors and coaches who push me to become my best self. Those are many times people who want to see me accomplish my goals as bad as I want to accomplish them.
If that resonates with you, I’d love to chat with you and possibly help to you dig a little bit deeper into finding out what could be the cause of some of your symptoms. Or find someone else in the field of functional health who will form a partnership with you, so you can become your best self.
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