Sexy Forever: How to Fight Fat After Forty (14 page)
Read Sexy Forever: How to Fight Fat After Forty Online
Authors: Suzanne Somers
Tags: #Health; Fitness & Dieting, #Aging, #Diets & Nutrition, #Diets & Weight Loss, #Weight Loss, #Women's Health, #General, #Diets, #Weight Maintenance, #Personal Health, #Healthy Living
You can’t be healthy if your body can’t get nutrients from the foods you eat. Period. So in order to lose weight, your job is to get healthy. And this chapter is about healing an area many don’t think of as key in losing weight: the digestive system.
Offending foods play a huge part in weight loss stalls for so many people. If you suspect that foods are making you ill, ask yourself if you are experiencing any of these symptoms:
- Are you constipated?
- Do you have dark circles under your eyes?
- Do you have frequent headaches?
- Do you have joint pain or stiffness?
- Do you feel tired or lethargic?
- Is your hair stringy?
- Does your skin look dull and tired?
- Do you get the flu or colds frequently?
- Do you bloat regularly?
- Do you often have a bad taste in your mouth or bad breath?
- Do you have offensive body odor?
- Does your face sometimes swell?
- Do your feet and ankles ever swell?
- Do you have heartburn or acid reflux?
- Do you have high cholesterol or fatty liver disease?
The more yes responses you have here, the greater the chance you have a food sensitivity or intolerance, and the greater your need to understand the level of your toxic burden and decrease it through natural
methods. But first let’s take a little tour through our digestive system, as you can’t optimize healing if you don’t understand how it works.
Great health comes from the body’s ability to digest nutrients and eliminate waste. The purpose of the digestive system is to be sure you digest your foods completely and eliminate wastes naturally. We are constantly exposed to toxins in our air, food, and water as well as in the workplace and at home, plus we generate toxins in our own bodies. These toxins produce irritation and inflammation, adding to the burden on our digestive system. When the digestive system becomes overwhelmed, it is no longer able to adequately perform detoxification functions. If your gastrointestinal (GI) tract is not working correctly, you won’t lose weight easily; it will always be an uphill battle.
In today’s world of processed, refined, and chemically sprayed foods, most people are experiencing mild to severe damage to the GI tract. These industrialized and processed foods are hazards to our bodies, as we’ve already discussed, and are wreaking havoc on our ability to obtain nutrition from what we eat.
Most doctors I have interviewed, as well as reports I have read, all say that disease begins in the GI tract. For our health’s sake, we must take the healing of it seriously.
Food intolerances are a relatively new concept—until very recently, who had ever heard of them? We have always known a few people who were allergic to peanuts or some other food, but today food intolerances are running rampant. And they are causing all kinds of symptoms and reactions: heartburn, migraine headaches, acid reflux, stomachaches, difficulty getting out of bed in the morning, feeling and looking tired even
after a good night’s sleep, an inability to lose weight, bloating, constipation, relentless water retention. Most people are walking around feeling bad to some degree, but rarely do they make the connection between the symptom and a specific food. As a result of identifying my food sensitivity to eggs and yeast, I was able to easily lose ten pounds simply by giving up the offending foods. And I feel so much better. An allergy or intolerance can be difficult to pinpoint. A compromised immune system is often the result of these intolerances, which compounds the problem for people who already suffer from discomforts caused by certain foods.
Food
allergies
are easy to recognize. They involve immediate, strong reactions to foods.
Food
sensitivity
expresses itself in a much subtler way. Food sensitivities are delayed reactions to foods; they can occur anywhere from a few hours to a few days after exposure. They can become health problems, with a full-blown reaction every time you eat the offending food, if the toxic load is too heavy.
An allergic response is generally limited to the air passages, skin, and digestive tract. For example, when someone eats strawberries and develops hives, or is exposed to pollen and starts sneezing, this is a classic allergic response, the type for which allergists test with skin pricks. This type of reaction is an immunoglobulin E (IgE) antibody-mediated reaction to antigens in the food.
Food sensitivity, in contrast to an acute allergic response, is caused by immunoglobulin G (IgG) and may affect any organ or tissue of the body, resulting in a wide array of physical and emotional symptoms. Such reactions can be delayed by as much as three days, so they are frequently not recognized as food sensitivities.
It is common for reactive foods to be consumed frequently to the point of addiction. Case in point: alcoholics. By habitually consuming foods (here, alcohol) that the body doesn’t want, the person unconsciously avoids withdrawal symptoms.
Unfortunately, eating foods your body rejects will perpetuate digestive disorders. When the food-sensitive person eats the offending foods on a daily basis, the small intestine responds by producing an antibody response. With the passing of time this response irritates the digestive lining by producing inflammation. The response is analogous to wearing wool every day; the skin would eventually react by becoming inflamed. The same holds true for the lining of the gut.
Dr. Nicholas Gonzalez, a dear friend whom I featured in my book
Knockout
, said recently, “There is an epidemic of gluten and wheat sensitivity in modern times. This is becoming an increasing problem, and for a very simple reason. Forty years ago, farmers, organic or otherwise, had access to some one hundred different varieties of wheat, each with its own particular value and each with a particular soil proclivity, et cetera. Most of these were very easy to digest. However, with the advent of high-tech farming and very selective breeding, farmers now have access to generally only five strains, all of which are very hardy and all of which are more difficult for humans to digest. This applies to organic as well as nonorganic farms. This has been a particular problem in the past ten years. As a result, even people with no history of gluten or wheat sensitivity are showing symptoms. What’s changed isn’t their metabolism but the reliance on a limited number of tough-to-digest strains of wheat—even in the organic marketplace. It’s a vastly underappreciated problem.”
F
ROM A
S
WEET
T
OOTH TO
F
ULL
-B
LOWN
A
LLERGIES:
M
Y
G
RANDDAUGHTER’S
S
TORY
She’s an incredible child, Bruce and Caroline’s oldest daughter, Camelia. I was in the delivery room when she was born. In fact, as the doctor was performing the C-section, Camelia was only halfway out of the womb, and I held her little hand—creating a connection between the three generations that cannot be shaken.
A healthy and energetic child, Camelia has always been on the go. Very active, bright, funny—and man, does she love her sugar. I used to joke that she inherited my sweet tooth. She started having some health problems in fourth grade—stomachaches that could not be traced to a particular food or activity or to stress. They were located in the upper abdomen; sometimes after she ate, sometimes on an empty stomach, sometimes after exercise, sometimes in bed. On occasion she would complain of pains in her chest, like she was having a heart attack. We were obviously concerned. The pediatrician did tests; her digestive tract was clean. He tried taking her off dairy; no results. Over time the episodes tapered off somewhat, but when they came she just learned to live with them.
One day in sixth grade she called home to say half of her face was numb, including her tongue; she had numbness in her right hand, and she was speaking in jumbled phrases and transposing her letters as she wrote. Caroline immediately called a neurologist, who told her that when he hears about those symptoms in adults he thinks stroke, but in kids he thinks migraine. Caroline rushed to pick her up. By the time she got there, Camelia had an intense pain behind her eye, and fell fast asleep on the way to the neurologist’s office. This was a classic migraine headache—her first one, at only age eleven. After getting some background information, the doctor was immediately able to connect the dots regarding her stomachaches back in fourth grade—they were “abdominal migraines.” And the pains shooting up her chest were part of the nerve path.
Finally we had a piece to the puzzle. She had a diagnosis, but what was
causing the migraines? Hormone fluctuations? She was getting close to that age. After she had several debilitating episodes, I asked Dr. Jonathan Wright for his thoughts, and he immediately suspected allergies, specifically gluten and dairy. He had seen the connection of adolescent migraines with gluten and dairy allergies many times before. He suggested Caroline and Bruce give Camelia magnesium oil to prevent the migraines, explaining that this deficiency is common among migraine sufferers. They ordered the magnesium oil and rubbed a small amount on her forearm every day, and the migraines seemed to taper off.
The following year, Caroline called me, again concerned about Camelia. She was getting bloated, particularly in the face and stomach. This is a kid who dances three hours a day, so where was this swelling coming from? Something was off. The clincher was one night when Camelia had a severe allergic reaction to a cat—the first time in her life. Her whole face blew up. Now it seemed an allergy test was a necessity.
Dr. Wright ordered a blood and stool test (which checks another type of antibody called IgA), explaining that many allergies to gluten are missed in blood tests (which check the IgG antibody) alone. He also ordered a mineral test on her hair and a candida test. Bingo—when the results came back, Camelia was off-the-charts allergic to gluten, dairy, eggs, several kinds of nuts, soy, beef, pineapple, peaches, and many more things she regularly ate. Dr. Wright explained that with gluten sensitivity, the body does not absorb nutrition, so even though you are eating, you are not getting the amino acids, minerals, and many other nutrients the body needs for fuel. That’s why Camelia had such a huge craving for sugar! When people have gluten allergy, eating that sugar means survival. And they keep eating it to fuel their bodies.
He explained that Camelia was so full of antibodies to various allergens that her body was basically at war all the time fighting them. The cumulative effect had caused something called leaky gut syndrome. This means that some of the allergic substances were leaking into the bloodstream, where the second line of defense—white blood cells—then started making those IgG antibodies. He described them as being like criminals who had escaped from jail and were marauding in the streets. All that warfare
between allergens and antibodies in the system contribute to inflammation and other disruption, which explained the bloating and weight gain. How about the cat reaction? She only reacted to the cat because her total allergen load (from the food allergies) was so high that when a respiratory allergen came along, like the cat, it was a tipping point. Without the food allergies, she never would have reacted to that cat. Her candida test turned out to be negative—that was good. But in her intestine he did find abnormal types and amounts of bacteria, which also cause inflammation. Her mineral tests showed she was low in a number of essential minerals, indicating she had had this gluten sensitivity for a long time and it was wreaking havoc on her system. Had we not caught this problem, Camelia’s bones would likely have deteriorated to full-blown osteoporosis by the time she was only in her forties! And if the gluten allergy continued to go unchecked, she could have destroyed her digestive system and ended up with ulcerative colitis (another often gluten-related disease) by eighteen.
Here is the program Dr. Wright suggested for her: eliminate all the foods on the upper scale of the allergy test, eat the foods in the midrange no more than once every four days, and enjoy the foods in the low range at will. This was a huge adjustment for Camelia, but she is lucky to have a mother who prepares fresh protein and vegetables anyway. It meant getting rid of the junk she liked to eat for treats, and avoiding all that stuff served at school and parties. Not easy for a fourteen-year-old kid, but Camelia wanted her health and her body back. In addition, she takes powdered glutamine plus probiotics every morning and evening to help repair the intestinal damage caused by the gluten allergy, and a customized blend of amino acids to rebuild her muscles and other protein-containing tissues. For about eight weeks he also prescribed goldenseal to reduce the abnormal bacteria in her intestine (this was the natural alternative to giving her an antibiotic). She saw an almost immediate decrease in bloating once she started this. And to round out her overall health, she took a multivitamin, vitamin D (5,000 IU), vitamin K, calcium, and Lugol’s iodine for breast cancer prevention (7 drops once a week).
I am so proud of how cooperative Camelia has been. It’s no easy task. In time, Dr. Wright says, she can become desensitized to most of the allergy
foods—with the exception of gluten. The gluten allergy is a genetic predisposition and she will never be able to eat gluten without adverse effects to her health. For most of his life, my son, Bruce, has had horrible respiratory allergies; Dr. Wright suspects his allergies are underlied by a gluten sensitivity and that he passed this down to Camelia. He also suggested that my younger granddaughter, Violet, get tested. Guess what? She’s allergic to gluten, dairy, and eggs. Fortunately, hers was caught before major damage to her system. In the meantime, Camelia is slowly seeing and feeling the results and has adapted to this new lifestyle. Thank you, Dr. Wright. From the first time I told him she had a migraine, he suspected gluten and dairy! It is a privilege to work with such excellent doctors and to share these findings with my readers.
