The human body is a wondrous creation, we are born into this world within a body that can adapt to stressors placed upon it to help us adapt to the world we are born in.
Now there are many kinds of stress that our bodies have to cope with on a daily basis.
In Paul Chek’s book “How to Eat Move and Be Healthy” 6 forms of stress are outlines; Physical, Chemical, Electromagnetic, Psychic, Nutritional and Thermal.
Now it’s very easy for individuals such as myself who are personal trainers, strength coaches or nutritional advisors to tell our clients of all the threats to their bodies and their health in the world.
It can however come across as a little fear mongering and overwhelming for the client.
I’ve had many clients over the years that when told they must change what they eat, when they go to sleep, how they cope with stress, how they exercise and that they must change many of the cosmetics and other everyday items due to their negative effect on us.
In my opinion if you’ve decided you want to improve your health and wellbeing you need to pick the area that’s going to have biggest positive effect.
Over my next few articles I will look at how we can look to bring our bodies back into balance to aid in regaining our health.
I’ll start off with this article by looking at our history with food; In Robb Wolfs book The Paleo Solution he outlines our evolution in relation to food in a very simple way. With Robb Wolf being American he uses the analogy of an American Football field.
He states that walking from one end of the 100 yard long pitch to other we would walk approximately 99 ½ yards before we got to our history 5000 years ago.
However it’s really been in the last 50 years we’ve hit the overload button. In the 1960’s and 1970’s America was coming to end of its war in Vietnam, the housewives of America were unhappy at how expensive it was to put food on the table for their families.
This led to a decision to remove restrictions on farmers allowing them to produce as much food as they could; this led to great stores of corn to build up. The Japanese discovered a way of converting corn into corn syrup.
This was the catalyst. Now food once containing sugar such as sugary drinks could have corn syrup instead, this lowered prices meaning the consumer was happier.
As more and more food was being made containing corn syrup it was decided that to help with sales that fat needed to take the fall.
As a result the “fat is bad for you” movement was formed. As time progressed more and more low fat food was produced, all full of sugar or corn syrup.
Now when we ingest sugars and it enters our blood stream our blood sugar levels rise, in response to this our body releases insulin. The insulin tells our cells to absorb the sugar to use for energy.
The main problem comes from eating too much refined sugar for too long. Our brains run on sugar so the brain gets dibs on the first of the sugar that enters the body to survive.
After this in a healthy individual approximately 80% is utilised by the muscle, 10-15% is used by the liver and the remaining 5-10% is used to maintain our fat stores in case of emergencies.
When we become insulin resistant and most people who are overweight are somewhat insulin resistant we tend to switch our 5-10% of carbohydrates for fat maintenance becomes more like 80%.
This then means we begin to increase our fat stores. This in turn leads us to become more insulin resistant.
The best thing to do from that point is to remove these sugars from our diet. If we consume natural foods such as animal proteins and a variety of vegetables we get the amino acids we need to repair our cells and create muscles that keep our metabolism up.
By consuming a variety of vegetables that encompass all the colours of the rainbow we ingest all the micro nutrients and antioxidants we need.
So in close, look at your meals and think about makes each part up. Would you eat the constituents in their natural form?
If not don’t eat it and replace with something natural and start to take control of your insulin levels. Once we’ve taken out refined and processed sugars some will find that sugar cravings become too much.
A great way to deal with this L-Glutamine; I have found myself and my clients have too, taking 40-80g of L-Glutamine with water throughout the day helps to curb these cravings.
Another great benefit of supplementing your diet with L-Glutamine is that helps to repair the gut lining therefore helping to reduce inflammation in the diet caused by gluten intake; but that’s another article.
You can find much more information on living a holistic lifestyle in these free magazines and on our YouTube channel.
Steve Farrell
PICP Level 2 Strength Coach
BioSignature & Trigenics Certified
