I hope you were better to your body than I was this last holiday season. I managed to skip over the first leg of the self-abuse cycle that starts at Halloween with the candy bags two weeks before Halloween that seem to have to be restocked the day before the ghosts and goblins arrived. I even skipped the pre-holiday baking attempts that get the season rolling. Everything was good until Thanksgiving Day and the evil pecan pie temptation.
In all fairness, I set myself up for the fall through some new work I was doing experimenting on subconscious reprogramming. I was in hope that the control circuits for my autoimmune issues were in the subconscious. I spent a weekend actively working on changing the core beliefs and associative patterns that wrapped around the autoimmune related food limitations in my life. My intent was to change my body’s intolerance to various foods and heal the gut sensitivities. So I had an intent to be able to get back to eating normally. The pecan pie was just the seductress that I chose to step back into dangerous waters with.
I was not willing to go so far as to eat gluten, but I thought I would give the eating of other grains, dairy, and limited amounts of sugar a try for 30 days. This was a Thanksgiving to Christmas trial run to see if changing the subconscious programming would change the physical intolerances. Between Thanksgiving and Christmas I gained 30 pounds without over eating – just choosing different choices. I would have to say the test was a resounding failure. The resulting inflammation massively put weight on my body. If you have chronic weight issues that don’t respond to diets or anything else you do, it is probably inflammation caused by food intolerances. These intolerances make you crazy, because you can be intolerant to anything. You can be triggered by the very foods that everyone says are the healthiest foods you can eat.
It is not about avoiding “bad” foods. I still avoided “bad” foods – fried foods, cakes, cookies, candies, doughnuts, pastries, vegetable oils, and excess sugar. But I did allow yogurt, organic butter, natural cheeses, corn tortillas, rice, oats, and more than 1 piece of fruit a day into my diet. I also still did intermittent fasting, which means that I skipped breakfast and had my veggie juice and homemade yogurt smoothies filled with herbs and protein powder each morning at eleven. But adding in my personal “forbidden foods” threw my body into a metabolic tailspin that showed up as massive weight gain – a pound a day! I would not have believed such a powerful reaction was possible. I mean, how can you gain more weight than the amount of food you actually consume?
Well 2015 is now upon us and it’s time to do the cleanup from this experiment. I have now cut out the offending foods from my diet. This has resulted in a few pounds of water weight loss, but nothing significant. I am fairly convinced that while my body was doing its inflammatory reaction thing, it also shut down its usual detoxification pathways. This is the only way I can explain the amount of weight gain. If my body is not able to eliminate its natural poisons or the poisons from my environment, it has to store them. In the short term it does this in fat tissue. If the fat tissue you have is full already, it just makes more fat tissue in which to store the poisons.
What part of the body is responsible for eliminating the poisons in the body? This is the job of the liver and kidneys, and to a lesser extent the lungs. Kidneys and lungs do their job 24/7 most of the time. It is the liver that is the big variable in detoxification. There are over 800 different chemical pathways that take place in the liver, all run by various special liver enzymes, transmitters, and co-factors. These don’t all run at the same time. For instance, whenever you eat a meal, all the liver detoxification pathways shut down and the liver food processing pathways ramp up for about eight hours.
Everyone is genetically different in the amounts of these specialized enzymes they produce. A common example is the enzyme alcohol dehydrogenase, which is for breaking down alcohol. Some people produce half as much as normal – they get drunk on a single glass of wine, while other people produce twice as much as normal – and they can drink a lot and not get drunk. Alcohol is a poison and alcohol dehydrogenase is a liver detoxification enzyme. Genetically some people are gifted with high levels of all these liver detoxification enzymes that run the 800 different chemical pathways. These people are generally slim and seem to have better health than average because their bodies are better at getting rid of poisons. Others of us have lower levels of the detoxification enzymes and tend to be fat and have more health issues because our bodies are having to store the poisons in fat tissue. These days the shear amount of poisons in our environment and foods is so high it is overrunning almost everyone’s liver enzymes, so we are all gaining weight. Our society has simply pushed our bodies too far with too many poisons to create the comfortable lifestyle we want.
So what do I have to do? I have to reduce the toxic burden, which I already do by my low poison exposure lifestyle – natural cleaning products, purified water, and so on. I have to eliminate foods that are toxic to me personally because of my immune intolerance to them. And I have to ramp up my liver detoxification pathways to their max to start removing the poisons from my body once again. My pathways may not be terribly strong, hence the trouble I have gotten into, but they still work to some degree or I would be dead. So how do I do this?
The natural world actually provides the answer to this question. In ancient hunter-gatherer times, everyone would be doing a liver detoxification process right about now. Winter is the detox time of year. There is no food available to keep the liver busy processing food, so it naturally shifts into detoxification mode. To put it simply, the maximum way to promote detoxification is fasting on nothing but fiber. Ancient people had nothing but tree roots and inner tree bark to eat in the winter – fiber. There was nothing else. For a couple months every year their bodies lived off their stored fat and focused on eliminating their stored toxins. The average healthy person has enough fat stored to keep them going for several months. All it takes to trigger the liver to go into full 24/7 detoxification mode is to reduce the amount of calories you consume to below 500 calories a day. This is a fasting state. The metabolic physiology of a fasting state is completely different than normal physiology. The eating rules for feeling good and staying healthy don’t apply to a fasted state.
Normally our brain and body burns sugar for energy. If we run low on sugar, we feel bad; we have low blood sugar symptoms. But in a fasting state, blood sugar becomes irrelevant because we shift over to burning fats for energy. Ideally this would also happen whenever our blood sugar gets low during the day, so we would not get low blood sugar problems. But our modern diet has destroyed our ability to shift easily back and forth between sugar and fat burning modes.
To start cleaning out my system from my experiment, I need to first get into a fat burning mode by completely eliminating carbs from my diet. Once I am in fat burning mode, I then need to reduce my total calorie load to below 500 calories a day. I could do this very low calorie protocol everyday for maximum speed in detoxing, or I could do it only certain days of the week. Why might I not want to do it continuously? When the body is consuming a reduced number of calories for a long time, it goes into conservation mode and reduces our general metabolism rate. It’s like going into hibernation, so we will survive longer.
The additional thing I need to do is supply the liver with all the nutrients it needs to help it break down and eliminate the poisons. The detoxification enzymes do two basic things: They break the fat soluble poisons that we store in our fat cells in half and then combine the poisons with little chemicals to make the poison mix easily with water. It can then be dumped out through the bile duct and combined to fiber in the gut and be eliminated. Poisons that are already water soluble are generally eliminated through the kidneys. So I have to make sure my liver has all the nutrients it needs to do this properly. I will discuss this more in another newsletter.
But for right now my first step is to get into fat burning mode once again by eliminating the carbs from my diet completely. Even though I had been living that way for years, the last month of eating carbs was sure nice. Grains, sweet potatoes, regular potatoes, rice, and even some real sugar are very addictive. Even though I have created substitutes for all these things that are 90% as good, there is just a brain attraction to the feel-good chemicals formed by these high carb foods. As for dairy, well there is just no real replacement for good butter and cheese. I created an amazing cheese replacement, but it just isn’t real cheese. Oh well. I am still searching for how to change my genetic expression that is limiting my health when I eat these foods. Some day…
Take care,
David