The Trail Out of Diabetes, Blood Pressure, Heart Disease & Obesity
In many cases, there may be a way to prevent future damage to your life from your diagnosis.
It is NOT an “easy way out,” however.
If you possess some grit, determination, and self-discipline, if you are very upset with your diagnosis, and if you want a do-over on what the rest of your life may hold in store: read on.
I’ve found that diabetes, blood pressure, and heart disease can be confusing for many of my patients. These diagnoses can be terrifying, but at the same time, you may not have many (or any) symptoms directly related to the diseases. Often, patients have seemingly-unrelated symptoms that are making them miserable (joint pain, allergies, digestive problems, etc.), but the “pre-diabetes” or “high blood pressure” or “heart disease” aren’t directly producing much obvious trouble.
Here are the basic facts you must know if you would prefer to live a long and active life without fear of disease.
For these diseases, medical treatment is limited to drugs to try to manage the disease process. There is no “cure.” If you’ve asked, your doctor will have told you that your only option is drug management and dietary changes to help you live as long as possible, but that the diseases are life-long.
I have worked with these cases for 27 years, and my experience has been extremely positive. Most patients respond very well to lifestyle changes and support to assist their bodies to heal themselves. Diabetes lab tests may become healthy, blood pressure and cholesterol drugs may no longer be needed; the weight comes off, etc. I don’t treat the disease. Instead, I support the body’s self-healing processes to help it overcome stress and heal itself.
These diseases continuously cause damage to your body, so the sooner you begin the process of recovery, the more successful you are likely to be.
To be successful, you’ll have to be dedicated and willing to go the long-haul. Helping your body to heal from these conditions isn’t easy or quick.
Understanding the Causes
These diseases carry a stigma of a poor or unhealthy lifestyle. Your doctor may even “blame” you for getting sick. “It’s all that extra weight I’ve been telling you to get rid of that’s causing your diabetes.”
No one will blame you for getting the flu or a cold. But with chronic illness, there’s an element of personal responsibility. You ate too much junk food, failed to exercise, drank too much alcohol, and now look what’s happened to you.
The truth is that this “personal responsibility” is mostly fiction. We live in a world where most of the available food is disease-causing. We’re bombarded nonstop with food-fiction designed to entice us into eating destructive foods and eating volumes more than we should. Our government supports and condones the sale of these foods, which are deliberately designed to be biologically addictive.
Chronic disease is supposed to be “non-communicable” in that it’s not passed on by bacteria or virus from one person to another. The science on this is quite a different story. You’re much more likely to be overweight if your family and friends are overweight.(1) Where you live is one of the most statistically important factors in whether you have a chronic disease, even more important than your genetics.(2) Culture plays a huge role in chronic disease, as is evidenced by comparing chronic disease in Europe vs. the US. Europeans have dramatically less heart disease, for example than Americans.
Non-communicable chronic diseases are, it turns out, highly infectious.
What Happens
The single most significant cause of chronic disease is our “industrial diet.” Our food is loaded with processed grains, sugars, starches, and refined fats. As you continue to eat quicky-absorbed sugars and bread, pasta, rice, and potatoes, the systems in your body designed to handle sugar begin to fail.
Most of the food you eat is broken down by your body into sugars. These sugars are moved into your cells by the hormone insulin. Insulin moves the sugar out of your blood and into your cells, where they produce your energy. If this system is overloaded by the high sugar and carbohydrate content of your diet, over a long period, you’ll develop “insulin resistance.” Now your cells require more insulin to absorb the same amount of sugar. As the insulin resistance increases, it eventually requires more insulin than your pancreas can manufacture to absorb your sugar. At this point, the sugar begins to build up in your bloodstream, causing inflammation, kidney stress, nervous system damage, weight gain, and many more chronic problems.
The first sign that you have a problem is not your blood sugar; it’s a high level of insulin. High insulin will make your body deteriorate. Insulin resistance leads to premature aging, along with heart disease, stroke, cancer, and dementia. High insulin causes weight gain in the belly area, unhealthy appetite, high cholesterol, low HDL, high triglycerides, thickening of the blood, and increased risk of cancer, Alzheimer’s, and depression.
The Solution
Undoing the dietary causes of these diseases is a significant part of recovering from them. However, if you’ve tried to do this in the past, you may know the difficulty involved. You’ll need a plan, a program, and a team to work with to be successful with permanent diet and lifestyle changes.
Changing your diet is essential, but only about 30% of what you’ll need to do to recover.
The rest of your healing will depend on accurate information and testing to be effective. Despite the uniformity of medical treatment for these diseases, each person develops similar symptoms from different sources. To be successful, you will need to do a treatment program that is individualized and based on accurate testing.
Clinical nutrition is essential in helping your body to heal and rebuild damaged tissue. Cells are made of nutrition (food), so providing the exact “replacement parts” needed in the required quality and quantity is a vital requirement for healing.
A major reason your body can’t heal from a chronic condition is excessive stress. It’s like cutting your finger and not bandaging it; the dirt gets in the cut, and infection sets in, which prevents healing. The bandage reduces the stress on the wound so that the body can heal normally. In your body, stress from bacteria, virus, fungus, toxins, allergies, metals, etc. can prevent healing from occurring, even when clinical nutrition is used. These stressors must be identified with testing and labs, then natural means of reducing the stress can be used (acupressure, homeopathy, supplements, herbs, etc.)
References:
[1] Christakis NA, Fowler JH. The spread of obesity in a large social network over 32 years. N Engl J Med. 2007 Jul 26;357(4):370-9.
[2] Graham GN. Why your zip code matters more than your genetic code: Promoting healthy outcomes from mother to child. Breastfeed Med. 2016 Oct;11:396-7.
Insulin Resistance– More Dangerous Than High Cholesterol
Contrary to what most people have been told, elevated cholesterol is not the villain it has been made out to be.
Unfortunately, many people are chasing the wrong criminal when it comes to improving health outcomes.
The medical literature is exploding with the dangers of insulin resistance in increasing cardiovascular disease and other disease entities.
It is reported that chronic insulin resistance is also associated with various types of cancer such as colorectal cancer, pancreatic cancer, endometrial cancer, and breast cancer.
Insulin resistance is when cells in your muscles, fat, and liver don’t respond well to insulin and can’t use glucose from your blood for energy. To make up for it, your pancreas makes more insulin. Over time, your blood sugar levels go up.
Carbohydrates such as simple sugars, grains, and starchy vegetables should be avoided as they stimulate insulin secretion. They should be replaced with higher protein-containing foods and non-starchy vegetables.
Adequate vitamin D intake
Aerobic and resistance training–High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) has been found to be superior to low-intensity cardio. Of course, I suggest that people completely out of shape work their way up to HIIT. Start out slow. Some exercise is better than none.
Get adequate sleep.
Reduce stress– meditation is recommended.
Get adequate magnesium intake.
Take Berberine supplementation.
Conclusion
I recommend one take insulin resistance very seriously. The implications of being associated with increased cardiovascular disease and cancer are overwhelming. The following robust list of peer-reviewed citations should be reviewed. I have provided above a good starting point in reversing insulin resistance.
We’ve all had the upsetting experience of someone close to us getting a scary diagnosis or having a health emergency.
Maybe you have a symptom that you’re worried might be the first sign of a serious problem, or you’re concerned because of diseases that run in your family. Maybe you are a member of a high-risk group (obese, past, or present smoker, diabetic, etc.) and are waiting for the other shoe to drop.
If you’ve been worried that you don’t know whether you’ll stay healthy or not, there’s an excellent reason for you to feel this way:
Most developing health problems are being deliberately hidden from you!
No, not by any nefarious person or organization. The culprit is your own body design.
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You Have the Same Body as a Caveman
OK, maybe a cavewoman. Bodies haven’t been updated or redesigned for roughly 200,000 years. We’re still on version 1.0. Back in those early days, there were no doctors, so anything that went wrong just had to get better on its own.
Having a symptom was very dangerous. If Joe Caveman had migraines, he’d either starve because he wasn’t able to hunt or gather, or he’d be distracted by his pain and gobbled up by something hungry and/or bashed in by a rival caveman (woman).
To improve survival, Nature designed bodies to hide symptoms for as long as possible.
That was all fine back then, but this is still how your body behaves 2,000 centuries later!
Your body can hide symptoms of a developing problem for over a decade, keeping you comfortable (and hiding the problem from your PCP in all those checkups as well).
Then, you experience some stress that causes your body to lose control (or it just runs out of resources) and you develop a symptom or disease.
You and your doctor think this just happened when actually it’s been in the making for over a decade!
Why Conventional Medicine Can’t Cure Your Problems
“Chronic” (ongoing or repeating) problems arise when your body’s ability to maintain and heal becomes compromised, and may start a decade before you experience your first symptom.
These problems are so complex that there is no conventional medical cure. Doctors can only attempt to manage your symptoms with long-term drugs.
The one entity that exists which does know the origin and solution to these problems would be your body. Your body is also designed to repair itself.
So, your body is the only qualified “doctor” that could possibly solve your health problems.
I understand how it feels to suffer from unsolvable health issues. It was my own frightening health experiences that inspired our mission.
For 29 years, we have helped over 10,000 patients resolve stressful problems and regain control of their lives and health.
You’ve been through a lot. It’s time to address everything with a new approach that gives you back your health the the control of your body.
Q: Young people are healthy, mostly, aren’t they? A: Those “immortally healthy” 20 and 30-somethings you see eating junk, drinking too much and burning the candle at both ends: Their bodies are hiding the effects. Sadly, if you revisit them in 10 or 20 years, you’ll likely find them exhausted and on multiple prescriptions.
Q: If you have several health problems, does this mean that your body can no longer hide symptoms from you? A: NO. There are probably more problems that your body is dealing with and hiding from you that you have no idea about.
Q: WAIT! You’re telling me that I can feel totally healthy but I’m really not? A: I’m telling you that you have no way of knowing the condition of your health unless you get tested correctly, because your body isn’t going to tell you until it’s too late.
Q: But aren’t most people really pretty healthy? A: Six in ten adults in the US have a chronic disease and four in ten adults have two or more. Chronic diseases are the leading causes of death and disability in the United States. They are also the leading drivers of the nation’s $3.5 trillion in annual health care costs. –CDC (link is to CDC website)
Q: So, you’re just doom and gloom, everyone is sick? A: I’m realistically looking at an incredibly toxic and stressful environment that continues to get worse. Already more than half the population is diagnosed as chronically ill. My idea is that if we recognize the problem, it’s possible to live a lifestyle that helps your body become healthy enough to withstand the environmental stress.
Q: It’s possible then to live in a way that keeps me healthy for the rest of my life DESPITE these odds? A: YES, EXACTLY!
To be thankful. To love and appreciate the good around us. The people and the things that make our lives better and worth living. The big things and the little things. I am so grateful for so many things.
I also am guilty of not really being that grateful a lot of the time.
I look at the bad. I will be honest. I get afraid a lot of the time that only looking at the good will make me less safe; will make me unrealistic and a “Pollyanna.” I must see the bad too. What’s wrong, what isn’t going right so that I can fix it and make it right. Do you ever feel like that? The problem with this perspective is that it can create fear, and fear does not beget gratitude. Fear begets more fear and as a consequence, more bad things are likely to happen as darkness very rarely brings light.
Sometimes the darkness can feel safer. From darkness we can keep finding all the wrong places, from there, all you can see are the wrong places. And there are more and more wrong places and after a time you have a hard time finding the right places. All you have been looking for is the wrong. What we put attention on grows, and when you find all the wrongs, you’ve been watering the wrongs for too long.
As a doctor, I often know when someone will get well and when they won’t. It starts with all the wrongs. If someone can only see what is wrong and cannot see anything that is right or that it could ever be right, it will always be more wrong than right. Sickness and health are that way. Sometimes we are afraid to let go of the wrongs because if we do, it just seems impossible. It seems we may have to be someone else; it seems we may have to do different things than we’re comfortable with. So, we hold on to the wrongs— and they have a way of spiraling down and down into the abyss of more wrongs.
How to recover? How to change this mindset? How to replace this fear with something better— with love? I have found that I can change the way I see things, I can start to see the rights in my world, by being grateful. Just as with acts of kindness, being grateful is never wrong. These last two weeks have been stressful in both our personal and work families. My husband’s dad who is 93 almost died from a heart arrhythmia and it took ten people in the ER to bring him back. With the technology we have today, he is back home with an unblocked heart and a pacemaker to guide things. He gets better every day.
I am grateful for the technology we have that saves lives in our emergency rooms. I am grateful this technology gave us more days with this wonderful, kind man who is the light of his family and who is such an example of love to so many. I am grateful he is in my life and the lives of my two boys and that I have had the last 23 years to claim him as my family too.
I am also grateful today that one of my valued staff members who had to have an emergency surgery last week is at home recovering. I am grateful that we have surgeons who can create modern day miracles and save people’s lives and give us back our family members and friends so we can love them some more. I am grateful for life.
I am grateful for my boys who are my life. I am grateful that they teach me every day to be a better person. I am thankful for my husband who does such a better job than I do at seeing the rights and putting more attention on them than the wrongs. It has balanced the days when I could only see from the darkness.
I am grateful for my pets. My beautiful, special pets who bring so much joy and silliness to our lives. I am grateful for so many things. Do you see the light gratitude brings? It is spilling over in my heart and drowning out the darkness and the wrongs, so much so that I want to tell you about so many more things that I am grateful for; the light on the trees, the flowers in the yard, a beautiful song, a lovely talk with a friend, a friend.
I am grateful for the beach, that I have known unconditional love, that my son got well when he was so sick. That I had another son and that I have two boys who are big and strong and who love me. I am grateful for good food and good times and love. The light grows and the darkness recedes. The wrongs may still be there, but they are not as big not as scary. I challenge you to try it.
Pretty soon, the wrongs will start to fix themselves or you will see what to do because you are the light, the joy the gratitude and darkness cannot live there. Just start. Get a gratitude journal or share one thing you are grateful for every day with a friend or family member. You may run out of notebook, because what I have found is that even when the wrongs hit, I find some gratitude in them. It may be between tears, and it may take a minute, but even in the “wrongs” there can be gratitude.
For example, I lost a valuable staff member at a really bad time, how can I find gratitude? I could blame her, I could blame myself, I could say it is all lost and now I’ll never find anyone good. Because darkness never gave birth to light remember? Or I could say, “I will find someone who is an even better fit, who will stay and bring their gifts to the business and help it grow even more than the person who left.” I could also be grateful that I could learn from the choice I made and see how I could improve the next time.
I lost my grandmother last fall. She was a very special person to me for all of my life. We were very close and the loss for me was very hard; it still is. If you have ever lost someone you love, you understand and it is very hard to find gratitude sometimes, and easier to find pain. The pain was so deep though, that I knew my grandma would have wanted me to frame it differently, because she never would want me to hurt like that. She was always so positive and so grateful even in hard times, especially in hard times and she taught me by her actions.
So, I was tasked with finding gratitude in the loss of my Grammy who I could not hug or go visit ever again. I couldn’t call her or ask her help or advice again. I couldn’t hear that beautiful voice again or know she was always just a phone call away. How to find gratitude in that? But you know what? There it was right there; in all that. The fact that my grandma was always there for me to share a hug or an accomplishment, to give me encouragment and love any time day or night it didn’t matter to her.
I used to spend weeks in the summer with my grandma and grandpa camping and playing in the woods as a child, visiting and making rhubarb pies with her. She was always there for me when I came home from college with a special meal just for me and hours to talk. She supported me through many hard times and always, always loved me no matter what.
I found my gratitude.
I had known unconditional love from this woman for almost 50 years. I know what it is! She modeled this for me, for my whole family. I know what it looks like, what it feels like and I am so very grateful for this gift that she gave me! Not everyone has this type of love, let alone for this long. The ache doesn’t leave from her loss, but it is now tinged with joy, with the light that she always had emanating from her heart.
Gratitude is magic. It fills the empty dark spaces, it makes light. Can you see it? Can you try it? Don’t be afraid. And if the darkness and the fear come back in, “gratitude it back out.” Replace it with love, with gratitude. Keep listing all the things. There are so many. We have so much, so very much to be grateful for. Gratitude will soften your heart it will bring you joy, and it will light the way in a world that tempts us to only see the wrongs.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking this simple thing cannot change the world. This simple thing can change the world because it can change you; and you and I together can change the world.
It is a simple and gentle thing. Do it and keep doing it every day. If you do, eventually you will start to see more good than bad, more rights than wrongs. You will wake up one day with love in your heart and magic in your soul and you too will make your own miracles happen for yourself and for all of us. To a better world, with more light and more gratitude!
With heart disease and cancer killing 1.2 million annually (the two leading causes of death in the US), should you be fooled into believing that anything is really known about prevention?
If you worry sometimes (or a lot) about getting cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, or other life-altering (or life-ending) diseases, there’s a reason for that:
You aren’t in control of whether you get these diseases, and you are hoping that you get lucky.
Sure, that would worry anyone.
Using cars as an analogy: you climb into the passenger side of a car and look over to see your neighbor’s 16-year-old son getting into the driver’s seat. You are WORRIED! You’re sweating, you’re shaking. So, you get out, evict the kid from the car and drive it yourself. Suddenly, no worries! You’re back in control. It’s not like you are the world’s most talented driver, but you trust yourself to stay out of trouble.
What if you did this for your health worries as well? What if you evicted your doctor from the driver’s seat and made the guy into an advisor instead? What if you stopped buying into the idea that “you can’t know” what to do to stay healthy and prevent disease other than general, inane stuff like “stop smoking.”
Here is an example of the insanity that passes for “Prevention” in our current health care system:
(Actual) “Top Tips for Cancer Prevention:”
Don’t use tobacco.
Eat a healthy diet.
Exercise and avoid being overweight.
Get regular medical care and screenings.
Here is my satire of these tips:
Top Tips for Auto Accident Prevention (Medical Version):
Make sure your headlights work if you drive at night.
Make sure your brakes and tires are inspected regularly.
Test your horn.
Schedule regular bumpergram imaging for early detection that you’ve already had an accident.
What’s Preventing the Prevention?
Prevention implies that something is being DONE to prevent the bad thing from happening. Current medical prevention includes no hint that you have some control of your own life and health outcome. There isn’t any inkling that you could be responsible for your health.
If you add personal responsibility and the idea that you can have control of your own health into the Tips List, it would look something like this:
Tips for Auto Accident Prevention (Personal Responsibility Version):
Pay attention to the road, traffic and your environment.
Drive as if the other guy might do something stupid at any time.
Don’t do distracting things while driving (phones, radios, kids).
Keep your speed and spacing with other vehicles so you have reaction time.
Tips for Cancer Prevention (Personal Responsibility Version):
Test your body to find out if anything is inhibiting your immune system and correct it.
Test your body to find out what you could do to help your body improve its overall health and do this.
Find out what diet restrictions are needed with your body and develop a more ideal food plan to improve and maintain your health.
Get tested regularly for cancer risk factors (such as thermography) and handle any that are found.
If you aren’t familiar with these last four tips, you should know that understanding them could be the answer to much of yourworry about scary diseases.
To understand how these tips would work, here’s a quick rundown of important health information that is either little known or little understood:
Summary: Your body is intelligent and constantly is working to maintain and heal itself. By accessing information from the nervous system with specific types of testing, it’s possible to let the body be its own doctor. You can find out from it what help it needs and then assist it to heal itself. We have treatment techniques and supplements all designed to be used by the body to repair itself and return to health.
This Information Changes Everything
Working with the body to assist it to heal itself ends the standard trial-and-error methods of conventional medicine. It ends the tyranny of the pharmaceutical treatment model as the ONLY method of treatment accepted as legitimate. It gives you the ability to improve and control your own health, and to kick the teenage driver out of your car for good.
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