wellness tips

Okay, this may come across as a bit of a rant, but I was researching further last night about traditional diets, and well, I simply can’t understand where the current so-called healthy diet pyramids and food guides are coming from.

What we are being told to eat simply makes no sense. The problem with western medicine is we are missing the forest for studying the trees, and when it comes to health, we are studying disease in order to figure out how to be healthy! Doesn’t that seem a little upside-down and backwards to you?

If you wanted to become a world-class piano player, would you study the worst piano player you could find? Of course not! In order to figure out why we are suffering from so many chronic diseases today, we have to study the healthy and model them. That might be tricky in today’s world, because what populations are healthy to enough to study?

Luckily, we can look at the research of Dr. Weston A. Price, a dentist from Cleveland Ohio in the 1940s, who traveled the world looking at populations that were completely isolated and had not yet come in contact with “white man’s food”.

He looked at the peoples from an isolated Swiss village, the Inuit from northern Canada, the Australian aborigines, a few different African tribes and many other cultures, and even though each culture had a unique diet, he noticed that all of these peoples had beautiful bone structure and perfect, straight teeth with next to no cavities, and they were strong, lean and in perfect health. Their palates were wide so there was no crowding of the teeth.

This was not what he was seeing in his dental practice in the States. Here he saw that the bone structure below the eyebrows was narrowing, palates were small so there was not enough room for all the teeth, and jaw bones were also narrow – almost like the lower face was hanging from the skull, rather than the lower face supporting the skull.

Look around you, folks! How frequently do we see nice broad faces and jaw lines? How many kids don’t need braces? Is this an accident? No. The traditional peoples were eating a diet that provided the raw materials required by the body to create a healthy bone structure, and most of us today are not, in spite of the efforts of many people to follow food guide recommendations.

When we look at Francis Pottenger’s famous cat studies, we learn that it took only three generations of processed and cooked food before the cats could no longer reproduce. With each progressive generation, their skulls had narrowed and their bones had become more brittle.

Meanwhile, the cats that were fed their natural raw diet, remained healthy and strong, and had no problems reproducing.

The kids of today are of the third generation since we came off traditional foods and moved towards convenience and processed foods. And notice how fertility problems are becoming a larger and larger issue for our society! We need to change how we eat now, on a massive scale, so that we can regain our health, and we can learn a lot from how these healthy traditional societies ate.

Drugs are not going to be the panacea for our ailing health. We need to start with the building blocks of proper nutrition, so we can build ourselves strong, healthy bodies that function optimally.

So, what foods should we be eating more of? Exactly what the food guides tell us to avoid. All traditional cultures highly valued animal foods, and particularly saturated fats from animals, in the form of raw cream, raw butter, eggs, animal fat, organ meats, fish oils or fish roe, depending on the culture being examined.

This makes complete sense, as quality saturated fats are critical for the development of a healthy nervous system, digestive tract, cell walls, and also for the absorption of the vitamin A and D, and most minerals.

Without quality saturated fat, you can’t mineralize your bones. Human breast milk is loaded with saturated fat and cholesterol for a very good reason – these nutrients are vital to a growing baby.

And guess what is the vital precursor to the sex hormones, which are needed for good fertility? Cholesterol! It should be noted that none of these traditional cultures had problems with heart disease, despite in some cases eating a diet that was mostly saturated fat.

The other big message is these traditional cultures ate no foods that were denatured, altered or processed in any way, with no additives. Any grains that were consumed were fermented first, and frequently meat was fermented as well.

As soon as these cultures were exposed to the displacing foods of white sugar, white flour, pasteurized dairy, vegetable oils, canned vegetables and other forms of processed food, the bone structure and teeth of their offspring started to degenerate.

Read Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Dr. Weston A. Price and see the photos of the natives.

It becomes blatantly clear that by following today’s food guides that recommend we eat huge quantities of unfermented grains, that we choose polyunsaturated plant oils which are very inflammatory to the body, over healthful saturated fats, we are heading down the road to chronic disease and degeneration.

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Price, Weston A. Nutrition and Physical Degeneration Price-Pottenger Foundation, La Mesa, CA, 2000.

Pottenger, Francis MD Pottenger’s Cats; Second Edition , Price-Pottenger Foundation, Lemon Grove, CA, 1995.

Enig, Mary; Know Your Fats: The Complete Primer For Understanding the Nutrition of Fats, Oils, and Cholesterol Bethesda Press, Silver Spring, MD, 2003.

Fallon, Sally and Enig, Mary; Nourishing Traditions, Revised 2nd Edition NewTrends Publishing Inc., Washington, D.C., 2001

Ravnskov, Uffe, MD, PhD The Cholesterol Myths: Exposing the Fallacy that Saturated Fat and Cholesterol Cause Heart Disease, New Trends Publishing Inc., Washington D.C., 2000.

Online at www.westonaprice.org

Online at www.pricepottenger.org

Online at www.ravnskov.nu/cholesterol.htm

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“May I have the courage to change the things I can …”

Finishing up on the quote by Reinhold Niebuhr, how often have you wished something were different in your life, and you realize that it is within your control, yet you don’t do anything about it, or you start working towards a goal only to find yourself petering out on your efforts after a few short weeks?

Usually a great deal of courage is needed to deal with the tough stuff, whether it is initiating important difficult conversations with loved ones, close friends or business colleagues, leaving the familiarity of a steady job to move forward on a business idea, or dealing with anything else outside our comfort zone. 

Often we are afraid of the unknown or of the reaction of loved ones, and so rather than do what we want, we procrastinate and feel frustrated with our lack of action.  Somehow not doing anything is way less painful than doing what we need to do, and therefore we remain stuck.

So, how to get unstuck?  We need to shift our thinking so that acting becomes more pleasurable than not acting. Only then will action be easy.

Write a list of the reasons why it would be painful NOT to achieve your goal, and all the happiness you will gain if you DO achieve your goal, and take the time to really feel the emotions that surface with each list – the pain of not changing, and the pleasure of changing.

For example, losing weight is a common goal, but when faced with fresh-baked cookies, we often give in to the immediate pleasure of eating the cookies, even though that action will sabotage our long-term goal of a slimmer body.

By changing our focus from how good those cookies will taste to how awful we feel when we feel chubby and how great we feel when we lose the weight may be enough to stop us from eating the cookies.  We need to keep focusing on the outcome we want.

Frequently, the imagined problems are just that – imagined.  So go for it!  For difficult conversations, it may be worth spending some time visualizing the conversation going perfectly.  At the very least it will give you an opportunity to rehearse what you want to say.

Often projects are less overwhelming if they are broken down into smaller tasks and tackled one at a time.  A little bit done on a weekly basis can add up to a lot over a year! So schedule some time into your day-timer each week to devote to your goal.

Often one may really want the end goal, but the journey is extremely challenging. There may be many stumbling blocks along the way that make us want to quit.  Having the belief in the goal and the persistence to keep trying in the face of great difficulty is what will eventually lead to success. 

It is said that Sylvester Stallone, who wrote the screenplay Rocky, was rejected hundreds of times before he found a producer that would produce his movie and allow him to play the starring role, which was his goal.  What if he had quit after only pounding on 10 doors?   We certainly would not know his name today. 

Most of us quit long before ten tries.  We figure after trying two or three times and being unsuccessful that we don’t have the aptitude and we quit.  Not trying guarantees you will not achieve your goal. 

Instead, try something and if it doesn’t work, modify it and try again.  The key is to try different approaches to achieve your goal until you find a way that works. Modeling someone who has achieved your goal can shorten the journey greatly, so approach that person and ask for help, and follow their advice. As Nike says, JUST DO IT!

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“May I have the serenity to accept the things I cannot change …”

Continuing further with topic of letting go, I think that sometimes forgiving someone for a previous transgression may be a necessary step in order to be able to let go of a painful event in the past that can’t be changed.

Forgiveness really isn’t about making the other person feel better for harming us, although they may be very grateful to know they are forgiven. Forgiveness happens within ourselves alone.

It is about getting rid of the pent up anger, sadness, fear, bitterness, disappointment, resentment, or other painful feelings that are stuck, churning inside ourselves, and possibly making us sick.

There is no point to purposefully hanging on to the hurt and anger associated with being wronged for years and years.

For example, if one’s spouse or lover left for someone else, no doubt it hurts tremendously. But why keep hurting oneself by hanging onto that pain forever?

Carrying that feeling of being wronged like a badge of honour may make one feel more righteous than the other person, but the venom inside is only harming the person carrying it.

As in the past example, forgiving can be extremely difficult. If someone close to you was murdered, how is it possible to forgive the murderer? I am not suggesting that by forgiving a murderer that that person should be allowed to roam the streets. Forgiveness is about freeing ONESELF of negative feelings, letting go, and moving on.

Even in far less severe circumstances, being able to truly forgive is really hard. I find that wanting to let go and being able to let go are two very different things. For me it is easy to forgive on an intellectual level, but getting that shift to happen at the gut level can at times be staggeringly difficult.

Sometimes our nervous system and neuropeptide system have linked so much pain to a situation, that we feel completely blocked emotionally. Being unable to forgive at an emotional level holds one hostage to the past, making it difficult to move forward in life.

I don’t have any real answers on how to overcome this kind of emotional baggage, except to suggest that everyone is doing the best they can considering the state-of-mind, information and ability they have at any given time. If any of you have any other suggestions, please share!

Please do keep the comments coming on my blog. If you want to share this article, go to the blog post and scroll to the bottom and click on the “share this” icon. If you want to search for other posts by title or by topic, go to www.wellnesstips.ca.

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“May I have the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference.”
Reinhold Niebuhr, 1926

Probably when you get right down to it, all unhappiness in our lives stems from having difficulty with part one or part two of the above saying. When we find ourselves wishing for something different in our lives, it is worth asking ourselves whether or not what we are wishing for is something that is within our control.

If our wish is something that is not within our control, then it is perhaps best to accept what is, and let go of that desire. In the simplest of situations, it is a merely a matter of adjusting one’s thinking.

For example, if you are in a hurry and find yourself stuck in a traffic jam, the reality is there is nothing you can do to make traffic move more quickly no matter how hard you may wish otherwise. Tying oneself in emotional knots is not helpful nor healthful.

Let go of the worry of being late. Instead, have the presence of mind to accept your current reality, and be at peace. The difference between being at peace and being extremely stressed comes down to the difference in how you think. Nothing has changed in terms of the physical reality of the situation, but the hormone and neurotransmitter response in your body will be radically different.

Letting go is a vital part of maintaining emotional health in the most difficult of times in our life. Life is forever changeable, never remaining the same, and it is certain that we will be parted from those we love either through a relationship ending, or through death.

How we deal with these realities can mean the difference between health and disease. Hanging onto the past and not letting go can mess up hormone, neurotransmitter and peptide balance and over time this can create major problems in the body. So mourn, accept what is, say good bye, and let go.
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Your heart is a muscle that sits in the centre of your chest right behind the breast bone and between the two lungs. It is not really located on the left side of the chest as is often believed, but the left ventricle of the heart that pumps the blood to your whole body sits slightly to the left, which may give that illusion. Your heart pumps about five litres of blood throughout your body every minute in order to bring nutrition, oxygen, hormones and electrolytes to every cell, and to carry waste and carbon dioxide away from the cells. Depending on your fitness, it can either pump a thimble full of blood with each beat, in which case it has to beat very frequently to get that five litres of blood around your body, or it can pump about a cup or 250 ml of blood with each beat if you are in good cardiovascular shape, using less beats to deliver the same amount of blood. As your heart becomes a stronger muscle and can pump more blood, your heart-rate per minute will decline. A very fit person may have a resting heart-rate in the low 50s, and an unfit person may have a resting heart-rate in the 90s. A stronger heart is a healthier heart, and that is why even patients that are recovering from heart attacks are usually given a walking program.

If you are out of shape, walking is an easy way to begin strengthening your heart, and it can be an enjoyable activity that is relatively easy to include in your life. Perhaps instead of taking the car, you can complete some errands on foot. Slowly build up your walking time to half an hour a day. If it is safe, walking after dinner can be very helpful with weight-loss, as it will reduce your blood sugar as well.

Once walking half-an-hour is not challenging, it is time to increase the intensity of the exercise to get continued improvements in heart strength. To know if you are working hard enough when exercising, you can calculate your heart-rate zone by subtracting your age from 220, which gives you your theoretical maximum heart-rate in beats per minute, and then taking 60% to 80% of that number. Now you know the lower and upper limit in heartbeats per minute that you should be exercising in order to condition your heart. (There can be huge variation in maximum heart-rates – if you want to know exactly what your max heart-rate is, ask whether your University physical education or kinesiology department does max testing.) Common forms of aerobic exercise that you can use for exercising your heart include jogging, cycling, swimming, inline skating, cross-country skiing, for example, but if you are injury-free, I would suggest setting up a weights circuit that uses the large muscle groups and do exercises such as multi-directional lunges, cable wood-chops, squat push-presses, pull-ups of some sort, and possibly a Swiss ball push-up prone pike or maybe burpees. By moving quickly between exercises you will keep your heart rate up AND maintain your muscle mass. Use a qualified personal trainer or CHEK Practitioner to teach you how to do the exercises correctly. Unless you are an athlete that is training for a cardiovascular event, I don’t think it is a great idea to do more than 30 minutes of aerobic exercise three times a week. Too much cardio decreases muscle mass and immune function. For more info on this, see Want fat loss? Aerobic exercise alone is not the answer.

The easiest place to take your pulse is in your neck. Find your Adam’s apple and slide your fingers into the groove just to the side of it and feel for your pulse. Don’t press too hard as you have receptors in the carotid artery that will sense the pressure and slow your heart-rate down giving you a false reading. Count the number of beats you feel in 10 seconds and multiply by six to get the number of beats in a minute. You will get good at taking a tiny pause in your exercise to check your heart-rate. Or those heart-rate monitors are a fantastic tool to help you with your cardiovascular exercise program. As you get into better and better shape, you will have to work harder and harder to get your heart-rate into your zone. Congratulations – your fitness is improving!

Take your pulse daily in the morning before getting out of bed to learn your resting heart-rate. If you ever notice that your resting rate is 10 beats higher than usual, your body is fighting something, so don’t exercise that day, do what you can to reduce stress and nourish your body well, and you may avoid getting sick.

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