April 20th, 2009
Stress phobics must learn to like and respect themselves and to appreciate their talents and potentials. Here are a few guidelines for the stress phobic:
1. Begin by admitting to yourself that you have feelings, that you’re not without emotions.
2. At the start of each day, face yourself in the mirror. Acknowledge your problems and your feelings. Tell yourself what positive steps you’re going to take to handle a problem and how good you feel now that you’ve made the decision to change.
3. Look at yourself in the mirror and tell yourself how enthusiastic you feel—that you walk, talk and behave enthusiastically. Keep that spirited feeling with you all day. It will help you generate endorphins and other good biochemicals, and overcome obstacles.
4. Believe and act as if you are someone with worthwhile opinions and attitudes. You are. You are someone who deserves to be heard. Seek and you’ll find the method that will enable you to be heard.
5. Learn to speak up when you feel put upon. Gently but firmly pursue your goal. Your friends will have more respect for you when you assert yourself. Gather up the facts necessary to present your side of a discussion and state them in plain language. You’ll feel better when you express yourself; it’s a healing feeling.
6. Look for the opportunities that are present in your life to make beneficial changes. You aren’t fated to have poor health or to live in poverty. You are destined for optimal health and prosperity, and you must tell yourself so, believe it’s so and act upon that belief.
7. Learn to ferret out the causes of dissatisfaction in your life. Face them. Take the steps necessary to correct them, or learn to accept what you cannot change. In any case, get going with your life.
8. Learn to like yourself. The steps that follow will help you develop a sense of self-respect and worth.
9. If you’re not sure of your purpose in life, don’t worry. It will come to you eventually. In the meantime, get on with your life; life is to be lived.
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Categories: General health |
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April 20th, 2009
Muscles love to work; they were born to contract and relax and keep you moving. It’s only with overuse or underuse that they have trouble. Put a trained athlete in bed for a week or so, and that person will lose up to 25 percent of his or her muscle strength. That’s quite a lot.
Whether you’re 30 or 70, you want your muscles to be well exercised and toned. Without good muscle tone we feel tired and weak and have difficulty at work, home and play. I use a dynamometer to measure the muscle strength in the hands of my patients. I find that people who can squeeze only 30 or 40 pounds of pressure can double or triple that figure after a simple exercise program. I’m not suggesting that you need to develop a bodybuilder’s physique. Muscles do not need to be bulky, but they should be toned. Depending on the exercise, you can tone and stengthen various muscles in your body to give yourself a feeling of health and put a spring in your step.
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Categories: General health |
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April 20th, 2009
As you go through your market, selecting Super Foods and other healthy foods, you’ll find yourself bypassing the majority of items on the shelves. These are the processed foods and junk foods, the enemies of our “doctor within.”
If you carefully read the labels, you’ll find that many packaged, canned and frozen items have very little real food left in them, and even less real food value. Many of their nutrients have been heated, frozen, processed or leached out. What you get is the food “shell,” along with large dollops of added fat, salt, sugar and chemicals. Occasionally, you also receive just enough spray-on vitamins to satisfy government regulations.
Nature fills her foods with nutrients. Man fills his foods with fat, sugar, salt, fillers, modifiers, texturizers, flavorers, preservatives and coloring agents. I am awed by the creativity of food chemists, but I am appalled by their lack of concern for our health.
Compare a real potato, for example, to a typical brand of artificially flavored mashed potatoes. A potato contains potato. Artificially flavored mashed potatoes contain potato flakes, monoglycerides, natural and artificial flavors, sodium bisulfite, calcium stearoyllactylate, BHA and BHT, sodium acid pyrophosphate and citric acid. Now, I’m not saying that everything in artificial potatoes is harmful. But why take a chance when the alternative is a tasty, 100 percent safe and nutritious potato? It comes back to the general rule: Did Nature make the food or did man? Nature makes potatoes. Man makes artificial potatoes.
Fast foods are also a health problem, for the same reason that processed foods are. The people who make fast foods and processed foods load their products with fat, sugar, refined carbohydrates, salt and chemical additives.
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April 20th, 2009
Your immune system and your mind are two very important aspects of your “doctor within.” Powerful as they are, however, they depend upon all the other components of the “doctor within” to build health and happiness. A weakness in only one part of your “doctor within” is all it takes to encourage disease and/or depression. If the arteries that bring fresh blood to your brain are so clogged that parts of your brain die, or if an injury to your kidneys decreases their ability to filter out wastes, the whole body can suffer grievously.
Your “doctor within” is an interlocking system, so some problems may affect more than one part of your “doctor within.” Depression, which is linked to a biochemical imbalance in the brain, can also trigger the release of high-voltage chemicals that can weaken the immune system. Anger and hatred spur the production of supercharged chemicals, which may hasten a heart attack.
Think of your “doctor within” as your shield. If you drop that shield, even a little, you’re exposing yourself to disease. What kind of disease? Anything from a heart attack to herpes. But remember, the heart attacks, herpes and other disorders are really symptoms. The real problem is a breakdown of your “doctor within.” The weak link may be in the immune system, it may be in the mind, it may be improper regulation of blood pressure or blood sugar. But the immune system, the mind and the mechanisms that oversee blood pressure and blood sugar are all part of your “doctor within.”
That’s why I say that most of the diseases we get are really failures of our “doctor within.” You can call them heart disease or infections or herpes or depression or stroke or high blood pressure or cancer, but the truth is that they are all due to a breakdown of your natural defenses. If your “doctor within” is strong, you can shrug off most diseases. That’s what this book is all about: keeping your “doctor within” in tip-top shape.
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Categories: General health |
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April 20th, 2009
Doctors come to food intolerance with a set of preconceived ideas that automatically prejudice them against the whole concept. And unlike the general public, they are not readily swayed by stories of miracle cures, however numerous those stories might be. This sort of evidence is referred to in medical science as ‘anecdotal’, and is quite rightly treated with great caution. The human body and mind interact in mysterious ways, and a person may recover from an illness spontaneously, or in response to an entirely ineffective treatment. This is known as the placebo effect. These and other factors make individual case-histories a doubtful item of evidence. Even if diets are helpful in clearing up the symptoms, it may be for some other reason entirely – perhaps the person’s previous diet was unsound nutritionally, or contained an unhealthy amount of caffeine or some other drug-like substance that was causing the symptoms.
The history of medicine is littered with bogus ‘miracle cures’ that apparently worked wonders in their day. Hydropathy, popular in the nineteenth century, was said to be a cure for all sorts of nervous complaints and long-term illnesses. The treatments consisted of alternate hot and cold baths, wrapping the patient in wet blankets, and requiring him to drink huge quantities of water. These measures were supposed to ‘strengthen the fibres’ of the body and rid it of poisons. ‘Direct Faradism’ (named after Faraday, who helped to discover electricity) involved giving mild electric shocks to the arms and legs.
It was recommended to anyone who was tired, run down, or had other nervous afflictions. The electric shocks supposedly ‘stimulated the constitution’. Both these therapies were highly regarded in their day, and thousands felt they had benefited from them. Mass enthusiasm is a strange thing – simply feeling caught up in some wonderful new discovery may be a powerful form of treatment.
There are various other preconceived ideas that work against food intolerance – the belief that food is essentially passive and innocuous for example, the notion that what we have eaten for thousands of years must be good for us and the simplistic model of digestion which assumes that no complex molecules reach the bloodstream. These mistaken ideas all contribute to the understandable scepticism of the medical world.
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Categories: Allergies |
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