Friday, December 16, 2016

Adrenal overload - our bodies many cries for vitamins and minerals.

Aloha everyone, 

E komo mai! Thanks for stopping by. 

This is going to be a sporadic blog dedicated largely to my musings on medicine as I've viewed it over the years. I'll talk about things I discover in terms of natural medicine. Or things involving emotional medicine and case histories I can present and how we reset the pattern to make that illness disappear. 

The year I turned 50, I was working on something else using NLP—Neuro Linguistic Programming—using the Time Line Therapy method to reset old limiting belief patterns when I 'accidentally' fixed my lifelong hypothyroid condition. I'll go into more details later but today I just wanted to start this off on something relatively simple and yet complex in it's design.

I've just discovered that I'm highly allergic to celery... 

Yes, my thoughts exactly! Who on earth is allergic to celery for god's sake? 

But it's the 14th most anaphylaxtic food in the world. 

Who knew? 

Certainly not me, and I've been involved in medicine of various kinds for a long time. 




But Alcat testing is becoming increasingly popular, and for good reason. Our bodies are bombarded every day with more and more stressors. Our poor adrenals are on overload. There's only so much they can take before they throw in the towel. 

We are literally bombarded with media these days unless you live out in the middle of the wop-wops in Montana with not a skerrit of Internet access, a cell phone tower or satellite TV. 

Back in the day... Ladies occupied their days (among other things) with letter writing and needlepoint. Correspondence was dealt with in a leisurely manner. And long epistles were written in lovely cursive handwriting using scratchy quills or glorious fountain pens. 




Once we wrote the letter it was sealed and taken to the post office or perhaps someone took it for us. It then traveled slowly toward it's destination. Upon arrival, the addressee took their time enjoying the letter. Sitting down with a nice cup of tea and reading it thoroughly. Then also replying, and that letter would then travel back the other way. 

But we could have been looking at weeks for this to happen—not minutes or seconds. 

And it might have been ONE or TWO letters per week. Even that seems like a gross exaggeration.

Now we're not only texting, IMing, PMing, Snapchatting, Tweeting, or god forbid - sending an email (do people still use those) :) But we often do several of these at once on our phone's, our tablets, and our computers. 

I sit in bed and generally work on my laptop. With my tablet right next to me and my cell phone. If something doesn't load in 3 nanoseconds, I'm playing a game on my phone to stifle the boredom. 

When you think about it—it's ludicrous. 

Nobody sleeps well anymore, the family dinner is going the way of the dinosaur. And god help me... but if I see one more bloody person at dinner with someone on their damn phone—I'm going to go over there and drop the damn thing in decorative fish tank by the restaurants front door! 




So, it's no wonder we're all stressed out of gourds.

We're on information overload. And even me writing this blog and you reading it, is one thing we have cramming our time and skulls. Yes, do stop reading this, go and relax, do nothing. :) 

But do you know how to? 

I find I'm slowly losing the ability to unwind. 

What most of us need to do is sit on a rock for a year and start out to sea...

So, this brings me back to our poor old overworked adrenals. They're taking a beating in this day and age. And health wise we're being slammed. Just about everyone has an allergy or food sensitivity these days or knows someone who does. Thirty odd years ago when I was first training in natural medicine, people thought you were a wee bit on the odd side to suggest they might be dairy intolerant. 

Now days, most people know about this and accept it as very everyday. 

We're not processing our life any more. It's moving faster than we can generally keep up.

Unless you're a hummingbird, most animals have a great deal of repose and rest time. Other than human animals... And we're depleted on many levels. Not only emotionally, mentally, spiritually but physically too. 

Medicine is a multi-layered modality. And I think working on every level brings about wellness or at least support until you can feel good again. 

Over time I'll talk about a lot of things in medicine but generally I do not support allopathic or Western medicine. I think it is superb in trauma situations, some surgeries etc. But in terms of everyday health, I think it's missing the boat. Occasionally, I'll probably rant about it but just skip past those ones. :) 


We interrupt this broadcast with a word from our sponsors...



I support integrative, progressive medicine. 

It's not 'alternative.' It's not even complementary. Perhaps holistic is the closest to what I do with people. 

Alternative suggests it's a wee bit woo-woo. It's not. Nor do I think it complements Western medicine. It is far ahead of it. 

And no, I'm not up for an argument over it. I'm just being clear here. 


Normal broadcasting is resuming: 

Anyway, as I was saying, one of the ways we're getting hammered is chemically because our adrenals just aren't equipped for this pacing. 

But...

We're still getting signals from our internal self. We just have to listen a wee bit harder.

My mum always taught me that our bodies will tell us what we need. And that's true. 

Well, yes, you might say but really... I don't think that eating five chocolate bars in a row is my body telling me anything. I'm just being a piglet, or bored, or have impulse control.

Maybe...maybe not. 




For women and chocolate, this is particularly true. When we are nearing our periods, we often crave choccie. Or if we're a wee bit anemic, we also crave chocolate. It's not our body being 'naughty.' It's actually being rather smart. One of the things that chocolate has is highish amounts of iron. And our body knows that. So it craves it when we're about to lose iron or don't have enough in our bodies to function well. 

It's the same in pregnant women, although we don't see if as much as we used to because of pregnancy vitamins. But back in the day, women often had bizarre craving combos... Ice cream and pickles for example. The body was intuitively craving something in those types of food and producing the craving for it. 

The body doesn't know that we might need to eat say 10 chocolate bars a day to get enough iron. It just knows chocolate contains it and it wants it!

Let's say you need about 20 mgs a day if you're a woman, not pregnant. 

There are 2.3 mgs in 1 oz of chocolate. At 20 oz of choccie, you should be about right. For a day. Or about 6 x 1.55 oz Hershey's choccie bars later... 




So you can see why you keep wanting to eat it. It seems like you're just gorging but you're body is really crying out for something it knows is in that chocolate bar. 

Obviously, this is not the healthiest way to up your iron intake. A good iron supplement would do you more good. 

But this is our body at it's finest really. It's telling us what we need

When I was craving potatoes, I wondered what I was missing in my vitamins and minerals. It turned out to be B6. 

So if you're craving something. Go and have a look at what's in it. What's it high in? That's often a clue. If you're craving more than one thing, see if there are any commonalities between them. Hmmm, both high in B6... 

Listen... we're a complex but simple system.