You are born as a part of nature yet you do NOT travel on to the next level of awareness in the same form - as a part of nature. This might be one of the toughest dilemmas of the human race. You are delivered either c-section or vaginal which will have a huge impact one of the most vital group of organs: your digestive system. Your microbiome depends on how you are born. And then of course your only source of food is breast milk if you’re lucky enough to have a nursing mom. When you are two or three years old if not earlier you are exposed to mainstream media and advertising of foods that you would never dream of eating. They spend billions of dollars every day to influence you. You might not be talking yet, you’re still a mouth to be fed, in short, a target audience.
Once we grow enough to understand what a reward is, food is taught and associated with reward, success and guilt. From a young age you might learn that ice cream is a reward; which represents attention, love and celebration. There is a pattern on relying on sweet foods when you’re actually craving attention and love!
School years arrive. You start to go to school and you take the school bus everyday even though the school is 2 miles away. You are not to walk or bike in order to fit in. Everyone takes the school bus, why would you stand out? You eat in school cafeteria, all your peers eat there and you want to blend in. Fast food is probably your only option. In schools you do learn about when a war starts but you do not learn about where the food comes from and what you should eat. It’s the way the school system works. You memorize war years but not much about nutrition, although you are to eat two-three times a day. Functionality is not a concern of your schools. You are exposed to the world and it defines who you are. Who you are should not be a list of roles and interests, yet it is unfortunately. It is a cultural obsession to define yourself with what you do. Instead of choosing something depending on our wishes, and then getting feedback from the universe as to whether it’s in alignment with who you are or not, you analyze and rationalize and make lists of roles that you do NOT fit in. The disconnection begins. Your thoughts are not yours, others define your goals, and you have a role to play. You are out in the wild and you feel like you don’t have a choice but to play that role. You don’t know who you are, you’ve lost connection with yourself; your true essence faded away. The role you’re playing brings a lot of responsibilities, thus stress to your life. You have to beat yourself up to maintain a so-called “good quality” life, which does not allow you to eat your food at a table but on your way to work or on your way home from work. Your only food choice is Standard American and you snack most of the time. Kitchen is not the heart of your home anymore. You don’t digest very well as you probably do not chew your food enough. Your colleagues talk about a gym that they go after work. You also join the club, get a membership, which you invest your hard-earned money on. Perhaps you have to create some time to workout just like others; you should not fall behind. You come home exhausted, dine and go to bed late knowing that you’ll wake up to another hectic day. Sleep deprivation is not your most important concern. Why? Because show must go on! As a result, your Circadian rhythm is disturbed. What is it anyway? Circadian rhythm is your internal clock that you have to synchronize. Imagine your body has an orchestra and you need a conductor. Its role is to synchronize your whole body in terms of liver, heart, and muscles and digestion. Sun affects your rhythm. Your eye is the metronome to your body, keeps the body in synch. Light is key for your rhythm. When you wake up, you need exposure to sunlight. On the contrary, you’re exposed to artificial lights day and night and the blue lights disturb your synchronization and suppress your melatonin. Timing of your food is another key. You are not to eat while you should be sleeping. “But I eat organic.” Organic broccoli can’t save you in this scenario. You start feeling sick, or rather you’re so disconnected with your nature you don’t even realize that you’re falling sick. You end up at a doctor’s office sometime in your life and most of the time doctors don’t have time for your health history and they do not have an integrative approach to most of the medical conditions. The Health Care System itself is disease management oriented not disease prevention oriented. It is so expensive because nobody is being treated in the long term. Medication has to be used in the context of an integrated treatment plan that includes many other modalities and especially emphasizes lifestyle change. But who cares? Promoting health and preventing diseases is not the goal because they don’t pay! The doctor prescribes you drugs that will most likely kill your gut bacteria, which has a huge impact on your overall health. Almost all of the medications we use are counteractive in nature. They counteract physiological processes. Have a look at the names of the medicines; they start with the prefix “anti”. If the body is very badly out of shape, you need to use these agents that will put it back toward the balance point. Once you achieve the balance, you need to back off the use of that medication. Nobody tells you that because the system wants you to become dependent to them. Once the body gets used to certain drugs it is not easy to get off of these drugs. It is called “homeostatic trap”. And turns into a vicious cycle that you might want to break! This vicious cycle affects your digestive system. Your digestive tract is the inner tube of life that is bringing the outside world within and to your physiological terrain. Over 70% of your body’s immune cells are located in your gut. You have 10 trillion human cells and you have 100 trillion bacteria in your colon. All these bacteria living in your digestive tract are your first line of defense. The bacteria are the first things meeting the outside world that you take in everyday through the foods that you eat, the things that you drink and the medications that you take. Your digestive track is one of the most important areas where you come in contact with the external world; it is the skin of your internal system. When it gets damaged you are exposed to the external world, which is very scary. Gastrointestinal track is the source of suffering for many people. The most common source of irritation is food. There is a digestive system epidemic that is really raging out of control. You bring in 25 tons of foreign matter from outside world into your mouth throughout your lifetime in the form of food. You perceive a lot of things in your intestinal tract as foreign, as foul and as dangerous. And you launch an immune attack against them. And when your immune system is confused and not working very well, you are more than likely to be inflamed since chronic activation of the immune system causes inflammation that does not go away and result in chronic diseases. What happens when your inflammation does not go away? First of all, your inflammation might be below perception of pain. And it is also good to know that too little or too much inflammation is bad. Yet, we certainly need inflammation. When there is too little inflammation, it makes you a target for microbes and when there is too much inflammation, the body attacks itself.
“Let food be your medicine and let medicine be your food."
This quote from Hippocrates explains how the food we eat can cause hormonal responses in our body, and how those hormonal responses can either turn on or turn off inflammatory genes. If we can control it, we can grab chronic disease from its Achilles heel. And as a health coach, I believe human beings are not just physical bodies, we are also mental emotional beings, spiritual entities, and community members. All other dimensions of human life have to be taken into account in understanding health and wellness. We are bio-individuals, so there is no one-for-all diet or strategy to heal. I believe in your body’s ability to take care of itself given the chance. My job is to provide you tools to try and point you in directions you’ll have to experiment yourself. We will dig enough to find root causes; we will access core values and we will be motivated together to make changes. Taking consistent action in alignment with your needs you can begin the journey of living a healthier, happier life. We can invite our loved ones to join the party and make it fun, as wellness will take time. And the ripple effect feels so good. I know you can get better! Breathe, you are not alone!
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