How did my body get where it is today? What went wrong? I have been health conscious forever and yet here I am with food sensitivities up the wazoo and a leaky gut generating unnecessary weight gain and limiting my energy abundance. My health efforts have not been completely in vain as the average American male by age 65 is on 6 to 10 medications for such things as cholesterol, blood pressure, diabetes, and so on. I am 64, and as of this point in time, I am on zero medications. So some things are working, but not everything.
I hear that person in the back saying that I am just getting older. To the extent that means I have accumulated lots of experience, then yes I am older. But at 64 there is nothing natural about the accumulation of reactions to otherwise healthy foods. What’s up?
Actually because of my accumulated experience, I can answer my whining question. The answer lies in the long term effects of very small indiscretions. There is nothing you can point to and say “ah ha,” there is the problem! No, I am dealing with lots of little things that I may be sharing with many other people. The issues are seemingly insignificant. In the moment they are insignificant, but over time they take you down. So what kinds of things have created where I am today?
I eat until I feel full. This seems like a perfectly normal way to eat, but it is a killer. By the time our stomach is full enough to signal the brain that we are full, we have already over eaten. This is exacerbated by the fact that I eat quickly and not in a leisurely fashion. I am focused on what I am doing and I do it until I am finished. This is how I do everything in life. This is great for work, but bad news for digestion.
Focus produces a body state of sympathetic dominance – the exact opposite of what is needed to stimulate digestion. Digestion is stimulated by relaxed leisurely para-sympathetic nerve action. Taking a couple hours to eat a meal is the ideal way to eat for maximum digestion. The consequence of eating quickly in a focused manner shovels in food faster than the body can produce the enzymes and stomach acid to digest the food. Does it matter if I eat this way only once in a while? Of course not, but as your all-the-time way of eating, you end up with a gut chronically full of partially and undigested food. This is a problem.
Any undigested or only partially digested food can not normally move across the gut wall and into your blood stream to feed your body. That means that it hangs out inside the gut until it is either eaten by gut bacteria or attacked by your immune system and neutralized. Unfortunately the foods we generally eat end up feeding bad guy bacteria. Simple carbohydrates, complex carbohydrates, and proteins incompletely digested all feed the bad guys. Basically it is the fibers we can’t normally digest that are supposed to be left over after digestion that feed the good guy bacteria. We aren’t supposed to have any left over food for the bad guys to eat.
What about the fats we eat? Fats digest through a different pathway. They have to be combined with bile salts from your liver/gallbladder to be properly absorbed. Again your body has to be in that relaxed para-sympathetic state to release bile for the digestion of fats. Eating bitter foods helps with the production and release of bile as well. I have always hated bitter foods and avoided them with a passion – another little health transgression.
Put simply, years of poor digestion destroys your gut lining and produces leaky gut. Once leaky gut sets in then all sorts of problems result like food sensitivities, auto-immune issues, systemic inflammation, weight gain, hormonal imbalances, nutritional imbalances affecting proper genetic coding and transcription, and so on… All this results from something as simple as not kicking back and being relaxed while I eat.
If I were a typical American, the problems would be a lot worse because of the really terrible things average Americans eat – for example:
Artificial food colors which block protein digestion
Sugar which feeds bad yeast & bad bacteria overgrowth
Grains & flours which directly attack the junctions of the gut lining cells
Hydrogenated fats which create Frankenstein hormones and body chemicals
Vegetable oils & fried foods which promote inflammation and cell dysfunction
Preservatives which disrupt hormone pathways
Alcohol & pain relievers which punch holes in the gut
Medications which poison all sorts of metabolic pathways
Overeat as a sport or under-eat to be thin producing endocrine dysregulation
Eat around the clock preventing systemic detoxification and clean out
Avoiding these dietary “sins” 90% of the time are probably why I am not on a bunch of drugs at this age. But something as tiny as rushing through my meals so I can get back to whatever work I believe I need to do has still gotten me. My workaholic ways are beating me up. Maybe there is a lesson in there somewhere…? I also graze. I like to eat a little protein or fruit while I am working. Again this is the same type of problem – eating while in a work mode for the body. I don’t snack while I am relaxing, like at the movies, watching television, or reading for pleasure. I would probably be healthier if I did instead of snacking while I work. But I am a workaholic. I say that through objectively looking at my behavior. I don’t think that about myself. To me I just have so many interesting things to fill my attention with – so many things to research and learn about. I love being focused, taking in new information and synthesizing new perspectives for myself. But realistically, my body is saying that I am not doing something right.
That is the thing about the body – it does not let us get away with anything for long. Our health is the direct reflection of the balance in our life. Our body is the direct reflection of our consciousness. Bummer, but helpful if we want to actually achieve happiness.