5 Reasons You Are Not Healing
1. You have undiagnosed digestion problems
You have changed your diet for the better: given up gluten, tried a low fat diet or going dairy free, or maybe you even went whole hog and did the Paleo diet. Yet you only feel marginally better and are still experiencing unexplained weight gain, weight loss, or gastrointestinal issues. Diet is KING, however, it does not matter if you have the most perfect, unadulterated diet if you are not digesting the food becomes toxins in your system.
2. You are chasing symptoms
Have you ever googled your symptoms and let your imagination run wild with all the debilitating and deadly illnesses you might have? According to the internet, you probably have thousands of diseases! Talk about anxiety! Let a professional narrow it down for you. Every nongenetic disease can be mapped back to an imbalance in at least one of the body’s three major systems (gastrointestinal, detox, and neuroendocrine). You need an expert to review each system in order to determine if and why you are imbalanced.
3. You are not treating the root cause of the issue
The heart of functional medicine is to ask why, and then ask why again. For example, if a woman has hormone imbalance symptoms, she should be asking why? If testing points toward adrenal fatigue, the next question is why did she get into adrenal fatigue? Fixing the “why” is the real answer to healing.
4. You are under stress
Stress of any degree impairs the body, including the stress that comes from trying to self-diagnose and self-treat. Let me help you navigate the healing process. Not only will you get better faster, it will be less expensive in the long run. With my help, you can eliminate the guesswork and the learning process, and simply focus on just getting better.
5. You want quick results
You have done the work—eliminated stress as much as possible, addressed your GI and digestive system concerns, created a nutrition plan with your functional medicine practitioner—and you want to feel better today. If you’ve never heard it before, this will definitely not be the last time you hear it: healing takes time. I attended a kettlebell workshop where the instructor told all the participants that we could go to workshop after workshop, but we would not excel at the sport unless we spent some time actually lifting the bell. He was right. This applies to all areas of life, including healing. You have attended the “workshops” and started the “heavy lifting,” now let the healing take its course. We are all bio individual, and that means your body is unique. It may take twice as long as you might prefer, but you can and will heal.
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Heidi Toy Functional Medicine Blog
Did you know most people didn’t have refrigerators in their homes until well into the 1900’s? It wasn’t even invented for large scale commercial use until the mid 1800’s [1]. So how did people keep their milk cold and make their food last longer? Fermentation. It sounds like a gross concept, because we often associate fermentation with a bad odor, but foods like cheese, yogurt, sauerkraut and pickles are all fermented foods. And those aren’t gross, are they? Well, some might disagree with me about sauerkraut, but that’s beside the point. Fermented foods are digestive aids. Microscopic living organisms in fermented foods help extend the food’s shelf life, enhance flavor, and help the body absorb minerals. These organisms pre-digest the food, getting rid of harmful components, and create more vitamins and enzymes than the food began with. Enzyme-rich foods have many benefits including [2]: Increase digestibility of food we eat Boost immune system Increase alkalinity; neutralizing pH levels Provide a healthy balance of friendly flora in the gut (Learn more about your microbiome in my other blog posts ) Tone the colon and help with elimination Control cravings for unhealthier foods Eliminate toxins and undigested wastes in the body In the “old days,” people use to ferment all kinds of foods through pickling, canning, pasteurization and added salt. Nowadays, however, large scale fermentation has lost many of its nutritious benefits due to the need for speed to get the product on the shelf as fast as possible and as cheap as possible. The only true fermented foods you will find are sauerkraut, kombucha, yogurt and kefir, beans, wine and beer, some meats (such as salami and pastrami), legumes and nuts (such as tofu, soy sauce and miso), sourdough bread, and various kinds of vegetables [3]. Fun facts about sauerkraut: The Germans “stole” it from the Chinese! Sauerkraut (probably not labeled as such for the Chinese, but the same recipe) was one of the main foods for those who built the Great Wall of China. Genghis Khan brought it to Eastern Europe during an invasion. It also contains high levels of vitamin C, and sailors often took it on long journeys to prevent scurvy.
How can we best keep blood sugar stable? Do what our body is designed to do – use fat for energy. Our species did not survive the Ice Age because of vanilla coffee lattes and cheesecake. Throughout most of our history, we ate a diet that was likely 50-70 percent fat. Look at the old family photo albums, specifically pictures of people in the first half of the 1900s, before we had so many processed foods. You won’t see many fat people--in fact, most look darn skinny. If they lived on the farm, they ate lots of eggs, meat, milk, and vegetables out of their own backyards. “Diet foods” were non-existent. Heart disease was almost non-existent. Our metabolism is designed to work much better with fats better than with sugar. Fats provide the slow and steady fuel our body likes to use for energy. Think of fats as a slow-burning log on the fire. One log (i.e. one meal containing fats) lasts for hours. Starchy carbs, on the flip side, are like kindling. You constantly have to throw more twigs (chips, pasta, bagels) to keep the fire burning. The first step is to know your sugars by reading the labels, and then avoid said sugars as much as possible.
How Stabilizing Blood Sugar Can Help Put Autoimmune Conditions into Remission and Promote Healing
Omega-3 and Omega-6 are considered “essential” fatty acids because they cannot be produced by the body--we get them from the food we eat. They are biologically active upon ingestion, which means the body utilizes them right away and cannot store them up for later. They are essential because they help with both inflammatory and anti-inflammatory responses.
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