Tips, tidbits, and treats from a holistic nutritionist for a healthier world.

How did you do? I emerged fine, with a little chocolate slip-up, but the entire process was very enlightening not only for myself, but for what I can now bring to my clients: a better understanding of how powerfully trigger foods work on our physiology. Trigger foods are foods that cause you to lose control and binge, or exacerbate the cravings cycle. This could be sugar, white flour, dairy, chocolate, even corn, or any food you might be allergic to. I’ve explained before that you often crave or binge on foods to which you are intolerant/allergic, because the body sends an endorphin rush to counteract the inflammatory effects the food has on the body when you eat it. This endorphin rush gives you a “high,” causing you to crave or binge on that food, but the internal inflammation is causing great stress inside the body. You may feel a drugged or pleasurable feeling. It often happens with white flour refined foods or sugar, but any food could be a trigger food.

Discover and remove your trigger foods or the foods to which you’re allergic/intolerant, especially if weight loss is your goal–unknown food allergies are a main reason people have trouble losing weight. On another note, if you crave sugar, you may have candida (yeast) overgrowth, and removing sugar from the diet starves out of the yeast. Sugar feeds yeast, so sugar cravings are a main signal of candida overgrowth, and consuming sugar exacerbates the candida. If it goes unchecked, candida can wreak havoc on your health, causing major gut problems, weight gain, foggy thinking, hormonal issues, and yeast infections.

Back to the sugar detox. Removing sugar can have so many beneficial effects on your life, especially if you are sugar sensitive, as I’ve mentioned before. If you lose control and tend to binge on sugar or alcohol or white flour foods, or if you have a tendency toward hypoglycemia, you would most benefit from a long period of time without sugar. Can you go longer than 21 days? How about 3 months? 6 months? You may be surprised by the profound effects on your life. It’s like removing a drug from your life. You are able to get in tune with your authentic self–your true energy levels and feelings when not affected by the drug-like effects of sugar. Not to mention the health benefits! Sugar (and white flour, which breaks down and acts like sugar in the body) is one of the greatest health destroyers.

If you suffer from regular sugar cravings, consider a sugar-free anti-fungal diet to starve off any candida that could be exacerbating the cravings, and make sure to get good high quality protein at each meal to keep blood sugar balanced. This means no fruit, fruit juice, white rice/flour, sugar of any kind, or mushrooms (fungus). There are a number of anti-candida supplements to assist this cleanse. Contact me for an evaluation to get specific recs for this.

There are a couple options for a life without sugar: totally sugar free with no honey, stevia, natural sugars of any kind, save for fruit, or just natural sugars. What would a life without sugar look like for you?

Hypochlorhydria. It’s a fancy way of saying you have low stomach acid: not enough of it, or the PH of your stomach acid is too high (the higher the PH, the less acidic and closer to neutral), so your food is not properly broken down. You see, your stomach is a very acidic environment, with a PH of about 2, more acidic than battery acid. This is good and necessary because an acidic environment is needed to properly break down food and kill bacteria and pathogens that may be present in your food.

Causes of low stomach acid are most commonly aging, but too much alcohol, the presence of H. Pylori (bacteria that causes ulcers & reflux), poor diet over time, and not chewing thoroughly can also contribute. You’ll know you have it if you see undigested food fibers in your stool (that’s right, have a look–it can give you significant clues about your health), if you’re gassy and belch a lot after meals, or if you are prone to eczema, acne, or heartburn/reflux.

Low stomach acid can be problematic because if you’re not properly digesting your food, your body isn’t absorbing the nutrients your food provides, so deficiencies develop over time. Not to mention the waste of money! If you’re buying and eating great organic meals and taking high quality vitamins but not absorbing them, it’s a waste! That’s right, this undigested food is just excreted by the body and you don’t absorb it. This can cause iron or calcium deficiency over time, or if you are not breaking down proteins, you have no raw material for tissue repair and neurotransmitter manufacture. Neurotransmitters are the feel good chemicals in the brain like serotonin and dopamine. Deficiencies can cause depression, cravings, poor sex drive, weight gain, insomnia, and anxiety.

Even worse, hypochlorhydria can contribute to leaky gut syndrome and dysbiosis over time. Dysbiosis means the bad bacteria has overtaken the good bacteria in the gut, and this can cause all sorts of unsavory digestive issues such as inflammation, constipation, diarrhea, gas, bloating, and leaky gut. Leaky gut is a condition that develops over time as food particles leak through the permeable intestinal membrane into the blood stream and are attacked by the body’s immune system. This can create a lot of system-wide problems like allergies, cravings, malabsorption, and auto-immune issues.

SO. What to do? Chew thoroughly. Try a spoonful of apple cider vinegar to simulate stomach acid production, or drink ginger tea before meals for the same effect. Take a digestive enzyme with betaine hydrochloride. Try swedish bitters or a bitter herb combo before or after meals. Probiotics help, too. Digestion is a cornerstone of good health. Does yours need a tune-up?

You know what’s not normal? Here is a list:
-pooping less than once per day (yeah, let’s talk about poop first)
-feeling groggy or tired after meals
-feeling tired in the afternoon
-burping and farting your way through the day
-waking up and not being able to fall back asleep during the night
-waking up frequently during the night
-waking up groggy and cranking and not being able to function before coffee
-struggling with cravings
-constant hunger
-being chronically depressed
-being in pain
-debilitating menstrual cramps
-foggy thinking, not being able to concentrate

Many people are so used to experiencing the above issues that they believe it’s normal. This is especially true with digestive issues and energy levels. You may be used to poor sleep, waking up exhausted and needing to fuel yourself with coffee to keep going throughout the day, or having heartburn (or do you treat it with Prilosec?), feeling gassy and bloated, or constantly being overweight because you are constantly hungry and subjected to cravings. You may be resigned to thinking that’s just how you are.

These are all signs from the body that something is off balance. Ideally, you wake up in the morning feeling refreshed and clear. You should be able to make it through the day without fueling up on coffee. You poop once or a couple times a day. You feel energized by your meals rather than tired after or bogged down by them. You can make it through the day without succumbing to overwhelming cravings, and you’re not mindlessly snacking. You fall asleep by 11pm and sleep well during the night. You should be able to relax without drinking wine, and fall asleep without Ambien. Does it sound too good to be true?

Bloating, belching, farting, constipation, and heartburn are NOT normal, and taking meds to relieve these issues only addresses the symptom, not the underlying cause of the problem. And while we’re at it, poop consistency is important. Do you look? It should be roughly banana shaped and formed and without a disgusting odor, not loose and stinky. If you see undigested food particles, you could have low stomach acid that’s not properly breaking down your food. This also means you’re not absorbing all the nutrients you need from your food.

Of course we all experience the above issues from time to time, but if you’re facing these problems regularly, it is a sign that your body is off balance. These initial pesky problems are often the body’s first way of alerting us to an imbalance. You can pop a pill and forget about it or uncover the reason why it’s happening and correct that. Which do you choose? Medicate and forget, and wait until your body is so far off balance that you’re hit with a serious illness? Or nip it in the bud?

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