Do you have anything that'll give me energy?!

Man, I wish I  had a nickle... 

Usually this is followed up with a request for some kind of natural, healthy speed.  What I want to say is "Yes.  I do.  Go home, turn off the lights and the phone, lay down, go to sleep."  What I actually say is, well, that is what I actually say. 

People will immediately come up with a 1000 reasons they can't fill that prescription.  They all basically boil down to "the world will come to an end and we'll all die if I don't stay awake doing stuff".  Believe me, I was convinced for a very long time that the world would stop if I fell asleep before midnight!  Psst... it isn't true. 

The cold hard truth is, if you don't have any energy it's because you already used yours up.  You spent it all.  It is gone!  And you'll only get it back in two ways... sleep and food.  When I say sleep, I mean uninterrupted, droolin on your pillow, dead-to-the-world sleep.  When I say food, I mean, a nutrient dense, calorically sparse, vegetable-based diet with adequate animal protein and essential fatty acids to meet all your needs (we can talk about this part later). 

I really do not like to utilize upper-type/speed supplements in an effort to artificially accelerate your metabolism and keep you awake.  This strategy is similar to whipping a tired horse until it runs faster.  While it may work in the short term, it usually kills the horse and you find yourself worse off than before you started.  From my personal experience and from observing hundreds of patients and clients over the years, this is a recipe for disaster. 

If you find yourself looking for a secret weapon that gives you energy and renders sleep obsolete, that is a very clear sign that you really need to... "Turn off the lights and the phone, lay down and go to sleep."  Your health, your family, your co-workers, and your fellow humans will thank you when you wake up refreshed and rarin to go! 

modus vivendi... a way of living

The Center for Holistic Medicine is pleased to announce an exciting new health enhancement program. This program takes its name from the Latin for “a way of living”. This is important for two reasons. First, it is named in Latin to remind the public that the West does in fact have a holistic medical system. Naturopathy is our culture’s “ayurveda” or Traditional Chinese Medicine. Second, it is a way of living, not [read with a big booming voice!] The Way of Living.

The goal of this program is to help each participant discover and implement their own individual way to live in an optimally healthy manner and decrease the risk of developing chronic disease, bridging the gap between what they "know" and what they do. 

The modus vivendi program will be co-led by Dr. Rick Gloor and myself.  Dr. Gloor is a board certified Osteopathic family practice physician with over 20 years of clinical experience. He has always believed that if our country’s health status is going to improve, it has to begin with each individual making a proactive health improvement commitment.  His frustration has been that the pace of mainstream practice didn't allow him to teach the lifestyle changes that he knew his patients needed.  This program is the one he always wished his patients had access to. 

Where most programs focus on telling you what to eat and how to exercise, modus vivendi will focus on helping you develop the ability to create a process of consistent lifestyle improvement and to discover your capacity to persistently follow-through with your intention. Along the way you will learn the basics of diet, exercise, and stress management.   

We are each responsible for our own healing.  I heal me and in so doing, I become a more effective guide to take another through their own process.  modus vivendi is my process, taken from the very many guides I’ve encountered and sought out in my personal and professional healing journey.  Many thanks to my teachers, my clients and patients and a huge thank you to the students at SWIHA... especially those who have taken the Exercise and Wellness class or the Herbal BioSciences/BioArts class, which contained the foundations of the modus vivendi course! 

If you are interested in finding out more, call us, email us or come to the Center.  Beginning on Tuesday October 19, and repeating each Tues night through November 16, informational question and answer sessions will be held to outline the details of the modus vivendi program. These sessions will run from 7-8pm and will be held upstairs in the Conference Room of the Bledsoe Building at 775 Haywood Road.  The cost of each informational session is $5.

The actual program will begin the second week of January, just in time for those Resolutions!  It will run for 12 weeks, with meetings once a week for the first 6 weeks and then going to every other week for the second 6 weeks.  You'll have a support network that you'll be in touch with daily for the entire course.  Pre- and post-program bloodwork, blood pressure, height and weight, waist circumference and skinfolds for body fat will be collected and gone over in a one-on-one setting. 

The Sweet Stuff

Sugar is a problem for us for several reasons. First, it doesn’t occur in nature the way we eat it now, so we haven’t evolved with it as a regular part of our diet. In nature, “sugar” is always a combination of sugars rather than the isolates we put in all of our food now days. The other issue is that it has never been readily available for more than a few months of the year since it is seasonal as fruit and tree sap, or you’d have to get it from a hive of bees which is always tricky and usually painful.

The main issue we have with sugar is that it is an irritant and quickly becomes toxic to our system. Simple sugars quickly enter the blood stream and stimulate an over production of insulin. The high levels of insulin cause a rapid drop in blood sugar which leads to foggy thinking, irritability, and the other symptoms associated with “hypoglycemia”. This dramatic up-and-down cycle is very hard on our hormonal system and on our waistline. Daily exposure to this up and down cycle, repeatedly throughout the day, eventually leads to a situation where the cells of the body stop paying attention to all that insulin... “insulin resistance”.

This insulin resistance continues to get worse until eventually, we lose our ability to keep blood sugar under control and it builds up in the blood. At a certain cut off point, we receive the diagnosis of “diabetes”. The important point is that long before we can be labeled “diabetic” we are no longer healthy. A common symptom of insulin resistance is increased body fat around the midsection while the limbs stay relatively lean. People also begin to notice problems with keeping energy levels constant throughout the day, especially feeling irritable before and drowsy after meals. On blood tests, triglycerides will be elevated.

Sugar is also pro-inflammatory and may be contributing to your joint/muscle pain. Blood sugar does the same thing to your cells that it does to your fingers when they are damp and you touch sugar... makes them sticky. When blood sugar levels are too high, the red blood cells and immune cells in the blood can’t work as well because they are sticky. As little as one teaspoon of sugar suppresses your immune system for up to 4 hours. If you have a problem with seasonal allergies, catch frequent colds and flu, suffer from chronic or repeated UTI and upper respiratory infections, etc, check your diet diary!

Sugar sneaks into our diets from many unexpected places. Processed foods are higher in sugar than the whole food version because it improves taste and it makes a great preservative. Foods which advertise they are a “low fat” alternative to some other food are higher in sugar to make up for the loss in flavor when the fat was removed. If you see sucrose, glucose, fructose, dextrose, maltose, corn syrup, corn syrup solids, high fructose corn syrup on the label, it means “sugar”. Agave nectar is as highly processed as high fructose corn syrup and affects us the same way. Just say no.