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.
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 willsolve 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:
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.
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.
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.
Here are four things I am going to tell you how to do for yourself:
How to improve your immune system to avoid / or have a better outcome if you get Covid.
How to think more clearly and reduce your anxiety or depression.
How toincrease your energy and motivation.
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:
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).
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.
“The existence of more-transmissible viruses emphasizes the importance of us upping our game and doing not more of the same but better of the same.”
—Tom Frieden, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Tom said it perfectly.
If we keep doing the safety cautions we were doing before, but the risk grows, we’ll be in trouble.
Here are the guidelines I’ve developed at my clinic and for my family to counter the increased risk. I hope that these will help you and your family to stay healthy.
Masks
I’m taking up MASKS first because this is the most effective tool for not becoming infected yourself while at the same time protecting those around you in case you have become infected and aren’t aware of this.
Medical-Grade Masks
Several European countries, including Germany, are now requiring people to wear medical-grade masks in public areas. The German state of Bavaria requires N95 respirators on public transport or in stores.
Dr. Anthony Fauci is now endorsing double-masking (wearing two face masks on top of each other).
Why? What the Heck?
In a word, VARIANTS. The B117 variant is a mutation of the COVID virus first found in Britain. It’s thought to be about 50% more transmissible and first appeared in Georgia in early January. Recently, this variant is increasing in Georgia in the Atlanta area. Nationally, COVID numbers have been trending downward in recent weeks, but the numbers are still higher than at any time earlier in the pandemic. The combination of high transmission rates and the possibility of the new variants means you need to up your game when it comes to safety.
Guide to Masks:
CLOTH MASK:
WHO (World Health Organization) recommends a three-layer cloth mask.
Protection: 26% – 80%. It mainly protects others from the wearer, but it does give minimum protection to the wearer.
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SURGICAL MASK:
A surgical mask qualifies as a “medical mask,” has several layers and fits snugly around the face to prevent leaks.
Protection: Generally, more than a cloth mask, but less than a respirator.
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RESPIRATOR:
You’ll find two main designations: N95 and KN95. These are similar; however, the KN95 is made to Chinese standards, which are less stringent than the N95 US standards. The CDC requests that N95 masks be reserved for health care workers. KN95 masks are fine for respirator-level protection in a non-medical environment and are readily available for purchase.
Protection: 95%. It uses an electrostatic filter to capture tiny particles, including viruses. This mask effectively protects the wearer as well as protecting others. The mask is made to seal around the face so that all air goes through the mask.
DOUBLE-MASKING:
There are several ways to double mask:
Wearing a decorative “stylish” cloth mask over a respirator (N95 or KN95). This adds a small amount of protection and can help you coordinate that outfit!
Wear a surgical mask with a cloth mask on top. This can effectively increase your protection AS LONG AS it doesn’t cause more air leakage around the edges of the mask. Make sure the masks fit well.
Wear a surgical mask on top of your respirator. This adds significantly to your protection and is a good idea if you must spend long periods in a closed space (airplanes, schools, offices, stores, etc.).
Mask Comfort?
Respirators are not as comfortable as cloth masks, but they’re easy to get used to. I’m logging a good six to eight hours a day wearing one, so I speak from experience. The mask is semi-rigid and doesn’t get in your mouth when you talk the way cloth masks can. It seals around your cheeks, nose, and chin so that all the air you breathe in and out passes through the mask (a beard will prevent this seal in most cases).
I feel so much more protected and safe when I have to go into a public building if I’m wearing this mask.
When to Wear a Mask?
Wear a mask anytime you could be exposed to droplets or aerosols (droplets are tiny drops of liquid containing the virus that are expelled when a person breathes, talks, or sings. Aerosols are microscopic particles containing the virus that can stay airborne indefinitely.
Wear a mask inside any building with at least one other person or in an empty building that had people in it within the past few hours.
Outside, you should wear a mask if there are many people, or if you will have to spend time close to another person.
In a car with another person: wear a mask and keep the windows down as far as possible. Sit as far from the other person as the seating permits.
Exposure
Preventing yourself from becoming infected with COVID is mainly a matter of controlling your exposure. Think of exposure as a scale:
Zero exposure = staying under your bed.
Maximum exposure (let’s call this a “10”) = a COVID ward in a hospital wearing no PPE.
There’s lots of room in between these extremes. On this scale, you want to plan to stay in the zero to three range.
Exposure Factors
Out of these, the most likely to infect you are droplets and aerosol particles. You get infected with COVID mainly by breathing in virus particles or by getting them into your eyes. This can happen from airborne droplets, from aerosol particles (particles small enough to stay floating in the air indefinitely), and from transferring virus particles from your hands to your face or eyes.
Your risk from these is proportional to the number of particles and the number of minutes you are exposed to those particles.
Your risk of touching an infected surface and transferring the virus to your face or eyes is proportional to the number of surfaces you touch and the length of time between handwashing and hand sanitizing.
Number of People
In Cobb County, Georgia right now, a group of 10 people has up to a 25% chance of including at least one COVID-positive member. Move the number in the group up to 25, and the chance goes as high as 50%. With 100 people, your risk is 75% to 100%. (Georgia Tech COVID-19 Event Risk Assessment Planning Tool).
Saturday is the most popular grocery shopping day.
Any large grocery will likely have 100+ shoppers and employees at any given time in the building.
CONCLUSION: Any trip to a grocery store, you could be physically close to a COVID-infected person, possibly multiple times.
SOLUTION:
Shop online and have the groceries brought to the parking lot or delivered.
Shop at off-peak hours (early in the morning, for example) and keep the trip as short as possible. Go shopping twice for 15 minutes each rather than one 30-minute trip.
Restaurants:
Restaurants involve many people sitting for long periods, talking to each other without masks on.
SOLUTION: Love your local restaurant with carry-out or meal delivery, but indoor dining is one of the most dangerous things you can do right now. Curbside delivery, UBER Eats, DoorDash, etc. Stay away from the risky parts of a restaurant, and you’re good! (The “risky part” is the inside).
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Visiting:
We all need to do a lot of this during the pandemic to keep each other sane.
SOLUTION: Avoid indoor gatherings. Avoid large outdoor gatherings.
Phone, text, email, video calls.
Meet in person outside, with masks and six feet apart.
Inside events need wide-open windows, fans in every room, well-fitted masks on everyone, very limited number of people, and distancing. This still produces a significant risk, especially right now.
Personal & Family Guidelines and Policies
Here is the list of rules I follow with my family and at the clinic:
Don’t get complacent. Check temperatures and ask questions of everyone every day. “How do you feel?” Treat headaches, digestive upsets, or tiredness with suspicion. If it doesn’t resolve quickly or gets worse, it’s COVID test time.
Boost everyone’s immune system daily with Vitamin C 500mg, Zinc 30 mg, and Vitamin D 200 mg. Get sugary foods and drinks out of the house. Fresh veggies, fruits, and good protein should be everyone’s diet, no fast or junk foods.
Keep hand sanitizer in each car.
Remind everyone to wash their hands a lot. After restroom use, before meals, after getting out of the car, after using the computer (keyboards are among the dirtiest surfaces in your house with the possible exception of your phone. Wipe both frequently).
Everyone should do daily exercise, walking, motion. There are online classes for yoga, Pilates, workouts, etc.
Ration the TV and internet browsing time. Doom-scrolling won’t improve your health.
Do creative things with the time you steal from TV and the internet. Plant a garden, practice a musical instrument, write, work in your yard or house, build models, play online chess.
Keep track! Post a chart on the fridge for everyone to mark their daily accomplishments. Then have some reward for a perfect week!
EXAMPLE:
Exercised
Slept 8 hours
Self-Care (did something for myself)
Creative (art, music, writing, gardening, etc.)
Avoided stressful media and people
Conclusion
We can do this! Stay vigilant. Stay strong. Stay safe.
As my grandma used to say, “This too shall pass.” Let’s get out the other side with our health intact.
You can do so many things outside safely like hiking, walking and meeting a friend. With some creativity and smart thinking we can still enjoy life but keep ourselves, our friends and our neighbors safe!
If You Have a Chronic Illness
With COVID, everyone else is walking a balance beam that’s six inches off the ground. If they slip, it’s usually recoverable. With your health condition, you are walking a balance beam that’s 20 feet off the ground. Slipping will have dire consequences.
There are solutions, however, to live without stress and worry.
“Last week, when I had COVID, I thought I was going to die. It was terrible, but I made it through. I am certain that if I had not been on a health program with Dr. Billiot for the past year, I would never have survived.” –Current Patient
The Evidence (If you have a chronic illness, this part is very applicable to you)
To date, the US has had about 25% of all COVID deaths worldwide, even though we have just 4% of the world’s population.
Something is seriously amiss.
A clue to this appeared in a Lancet article by three Johns Hopkins physicians linking overweight to more severe COVID cases.
It would seem that the disparity of deaths in the US is linked to the fact that we are less healthy than many other countries.
You can’t fix the US lifestyle and health problems, BUT…
You CAN do something about your health.
You can do something even if your doctor has told you that you are a “diabetic” and will always be a diabetic. Even if you’ve been told you will be on (hypertension / thyroid / heart / antidepressants / etc.) drugs for the rest of your life.
BUT there is no magic bullet or one-size-fits-all solution. What you need to do is different from everyone else. But it CAN BE DONE, and you CAN BE MUCH HEALTHIER.
Here is where to get started:
Click the button and fill out the secure online form. Tell Dr. Billiot about your health problems. We’ll set up a free phone consultation with the doctor for you. You can discover what you’d have to do to start improving your health and possibly getting off medications.
CLICK THE BUTTON, FILL OUT THE FORM
You can feel AND BE healthier, safer, and more confident of your future.
