Is It Because of the STRESS, or Because of Poor Health?

Spoiler: Later in this post, I will show you how to make some simple changes to demonstrate how you can be DONE with your stress problems. Stress in our Covid world is high and getting higher. It’s not like there was no stress to start with, either.Stress has severe effects on your body and health. The hormone, nervous system, and circulatory system changes your body makes in response to long-term stress can cause many health problems:

• Headaches: Stress can trigger or intensify tension headaches.
• Heartburn: Stress can increase stomach acid and cause reflux and heartburn.
• Shortness of Breath: Rapid breathing from stress can tense up muscles.
• Pounding heart: Stress hormones increase heart rate.
• Irregular periods: Stress hormones throw sex hormones out of balance.
• Depression: Chronic stress can wear you down and wear you out.
• Sleep: Stress makes it harder to get to sleep, and stress hormones can wake you in the night.
• Weak immune system: You become more vulnerable to infections (not what you need now).
• High blood sugar: Your liver releases extra sugar with stress which can cause or worsen type 2 diabetes.
• High blood pressure: Stress hormones tighten blood vessels and raise blood pressure.
• Stomach aches: Stress affects digestion and can cause cramping, pain, and nausea.
• Low sex drive
• Shoulder and back pain: Tense muscles from stress cause tension-related pain.

Patching Up Your Stress

A patch is a temporary fix for a problem until you can get it repaired correctly. If you research stress solutions, you will find about 99% of them are patches.

Stress “patch” examples:

• Breathing exercises
• Walking away
• Be more aware of your body, and its effect on your stress symptoms
• Taking care of yourself, trying to relax
• Drugs
• Supplements
• Meditation

All of these may reduce (temporarily) your stress symptoms and make your life more tolerable. However, none of them will solve your stress problem.

This is Important:

Unless you know three important facts, you will be “patching” your stress symptoms for the rest of your life. I may sound dire, but realize that none of the actions you’ll ever see recommended to help handle stress are intended to END your stress problem; they are designed just to kick the can down the road. They are “patches.”

The real solution to your stress problem is not supposed to be possible.

Medically, the solution doesn’t exist (which should be obvious, as otherwise millions of stressed people would be treated and getting better). Here’s what you must know to get DONE with your stress problem and all the symptoms and misery you are experiencing:

1. Many of your health problems are from physical and mental stress sources. They are related to how your body physiologically handles long-term stress. Stress-induced health problems are caused by the damage to your body from long-term stress and the body’s resulting inability to handle that stress. Stress burns up minerals and B-vitamins at alarming rates. When you have been stressed for long periods, your brain and other organs can become affected. This can cause brain fog, exhaustion, inflammation and subsequent health problems.
2. Your body can be in very poor condition, but your medical doctor may tell you that you’re completely healthy. Basic conventional blood tests are very specific and may not catch the majority of health problems. The average person has chronic symptoms with no medical treatment, and it’s become the norm to say these people are healthy. Even if your blood work is normal, you may still not feel right. If you feel bad, something is going on in your body that isn’t right.
3. It’s possible to take actions that will help your body regain and restore its ability to heal itself. Doing this allows you to become healthier (often dramatically so). As your body’s health improves, it will become more and more able to handle the stress in your life. Eventually, you can solve your stress problem BACKWARDS: By getting your body healthy enough to deal with the stress instead of trying to reduce the stress, so your unhealthy body isn’t overwhelmed.

You may not have heard of this approach before because medical doctors aren’t trained to help the body become healthier overall. Medicine is involved in the treatment of disease and the reduction of symptoms.

Get Started

To get started, you should do an experiment to discover for yourself that you can help your own body get healthier and feel better without drugs or various stress-reducing exercises. Once you’ve proven to yourself that there is a way to (permanently) feel good, be healthy, and still handle the stress in your life, you can decide what to do next to continue your healing and improvement.

Your Experiment:

You will make a series of simple diet changes that most people can accomplish in a few days. You won’t be doing a long-term “healthy diet.” This experiment is a short-term method of removing immediate stress from your immune system. With less stress, your immune system will be able to get some of your health issues under better control. The important thing is that you will notice the difference and see that this works. Read this link and do what it says. If you make these simple diet changes for about two or three weeks, you’ll very likely see some remarkable changes in your body. You aren’t likely to be done with your stress problems, but you will have seen a demonstration of how doing the RIGHT thing can make notable changes in your health.

Once You’re Convinced

Talk to me! Everyone needs an individual program to improve their health. I can help you find out precisely what YOU need to do to be done with your stress… forever.

Reduce Your Risk & Improve Your Life

Here are four things I am going to tell you how to do for yourself:

1. How to improve your immune system to avoid / or have a better outcome if you get Covid.
2. How to think more clearly and reduce your anxiety or depression.
3. How to increase your energy and motivation.
4. How to improve your digestion and help with 1, 2, and 3 above.

None of these actions will be overly challenging (I am always telling my patients, “Things that work aren’t hard to do”).

Truthfully, these things work so well that you’ll be sending this email to everyone you know.

THIS IS PART ONE OF A THREE-PART POST: I’m covering 1 and 2 above. Here is a link to PART 3. I’ll be posting PART 4 shortly.

1. IMPROVE YOUR IMMUNE SYSTEM

Your immune system should be your priority right now. Covid is at extremely high levels, and the new variants are much more contagious. For safety information on how to effectively protect yourself without over-or under-doing it, see this article.

Actions to improve your immune system in order of importance:

Don’t raise your blood sugar level. See this article for a full explanation.

• You should stop eating cake, candy, cookies, soda and sweet tea. (OR: Use healthy sugar substitutes—here’s information about these).
• Eat no more than three servings of fruit per day, and not all at once.
• Eat protein with every meal and snack (this buffers the sugar absorption and also keeps it from spiking from fruit sugar and carbohydrates like bread, pasta, and rice).
• Reduce your simple carbs (bread, rice, pasta, and white potatoes) by at least ½.

Take these immune-boosting supplements every day.

• Vitamin C: 500 mg
• Vitamin D: 2000 iu
• Zinc: 30 – 50 mg

Don’t be a couch potato.

• Move your body for 30 minutes at least once a day; twice is better! You can walk, bike, swim, run or do 30 minutes on a treadmill or other training machine. You don’t have to break a sweat; just move for 30 minutes. Here’s a great indoor portable stepper. Here are some examples of rebounders. Here’s a link to a free YouTube yoga class.
• Don’t sit for more than 30 minutes at a time without getting up and moving around.

You should consult your physician or other health care professional before starting any fitness program to determine if it is right for your needs.

Sleep for seven or eight hours every night.

• Getting enough sleep can be a matter of self-discipline for many people. You have to put your body to bed in time to get enough sleep. This is especially true for you Netflix bingers who go to sleep in front of the TV and then can’t get back to sleep when you go to bed.
• If you have trouble sleeping, try these tips:
  • Waking in the night: Eat a snack at bedtime (low blood sugar may be waking you).
  • Trouble getting to sleep (lots of information at this link):
    • Get your body tired! Those 30-minute walks will help.
    • The blue light from phone, TV, and computer screens suppresses the hormone melatonin which gets the body ready for sleep. Get rid of blue screens an hour before bedtime (most phones and computers have settings for this). There are blue light settings on most modern electronics. Windows 10: Search for “Night light settings.” IOS: Settings/Display & Brightness/Night Shift.

2. THINK MORE CLEARLY, REDUCE ANXIETY & DEPRESSION

Once you are more protected from Covid (by boosting your immune system and adopting effective safety protocols), your next focus should be on enjoying your life! If you have brain fog, are depressed and sad or anxious and fearful, you won’t enjoy much of anything.

Stop eating mind-altering foods

• Read labels, stop eating junk: If you can’t pronounce the ingredients or don’t know what they are, you are eating stuff that IS NOT FOOD. Artificial sweeteners and flavors, preservatives, colors, texture enhancers, flavor enhancers—all this stuff can directly affect your brain. Further, many people have developed allergies to these chemicals, which can cause severe brain fog and difficulty concentrating.
• Try avoiding the most likely allergic foods. Over the past decade, food allergies have become an epidemic (or plague). Allergy testing and a health improvement program to address allergies can reduce inflammation, allow natural weight loss, and help with everything from digestive stress to brain fog (see here for more information). While testing and treatment of allergies can permanently reduce your problems, the do-it-yourself approach can still work wonders:
  Try avoiding the foods below for two weeks. I recommend you do it one food group at a time to know what to avoid and what you can still eat. If you notice that you can think more clearly, have a better mood, or that other symptoms improve (joint pain, digestive problems), then quit eating that food group.

   

  • Gluten-containing foods (wheat, barley, rye).
  • Dairy foods (milk, cream, cheese, yogurt). Butter is usually OK.
  • Eggs
• Stop eating refined sugar. Your blood sugar is crucial to the correct operation of your nervous system. Eating refined sugar can make blood sugar swings from high to low and back, which can cause mood swings, depression, anxiety, and brain fog. Try this: Quit eating sugar for two weeks and see what happens. Most people who do this experiment never go back to their previous sugar consumption.

Reduce the danger in your world, so you aren’t in fight or flight

You may not even realize that your environment has become threatening to you. However, there is an experiment you can run to quickly find out if you are always on edge.

Do these actions for a week and see how different you feel.

• Stop watching/listening/reading the news. I promise that the world will still go on without your knowledge. Stopping can be hard at first; if so, please notice that you may be somewhat addicted to your news feed (not good).
• Stop watching/listening/reading opinion content. Stop talk radio, Twitter feeds TV shows and Facebook.
• Survey your contacts: In person, social media, phone calls, emails. What you’re looking for are people who make you feel worse after you have contact with them. Quit talking/communicating with these people. Maybe just get off Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter entirely for the week.

I have people look at me cross-eyed when I tell them to do the above actions. It’s as if they never realized that this was even an option. I’m not telling you to ditch all media forever, but you will never look at it the same after this week of freedom.

Tell Me How You’re Doing

Just write to me at PatientServices@AlternativeHealthAtlanta.com. I am concerned and very interested in your experience.

Wishing you the very best,

Dr. Billiot