Posts Tagged ‘stress’

Many people have gone through numerous trendy diets and exercise regularly, yet still have pounds to release! What is not working then? There are many reasons why diets and physical exercise alone don’t work. First plain and simple “Diets to lose weight” don’t work period!

Second is the age factor – OK I know no one wants to hear that they are getting older, it is not about the number of years, more about the aging process itself and how it affects the hormones responsible to maintaining the homeostasis or health of your body. The homeostasis can be compromised by many external factors such as the environment, the water we drink, the air we breathe, the eating habits and most importantly the level of stress in your life.

Let’s identify some factors:

Hormonal imbalance: such as Adrenal Exhaustion due to STRESS, Thyroid, SAD (Seasonal affective disorder) is a type of depression that occurs at the same time every year.

Food sensitivities : You have a physiologic sensitivity to sugar or gluten (or both!) or other foods that is driving you to want those foods. We crave the very foods we are sensitive to because we’ve grown used the abnormal biochemical state those foods produce.

Neurotransmitter imbalance: Again Stress, Depression, and Chronic Fatigue – If we look first at biochemistry, it helps to understand the role of serotonin, one of the neurotransmitters most relevant to weight gain and loss. Serotonin is responsible for regulating mood, sleep, and body temperature, among other functions. What makes the cravings even more troublesome is that people with a serotonin deficiency often have a heightened pleasure response to carbohydrates.

Stress Old and New: It won’t surprise you to know that stress, and how you react to it, can be tangled up in your eating patterns. Stress activates your fight-or-flight response with the release of adrenaline and cortisol. This process can alter your digestion and your relationship with food. If you stay stressed for long periods, your body’s daily cortisol cycle will spiral out of whack, upsetting the normal internal conversation. Chronic stress allows these effects to continue indefinitely and you risk Adrenal Exhaustion, Hyper/hypothyroidism, Depression, Candida, SAD (Seasonal affective disorder) and other health issues like Insulin Resistance, Diabetes and Hypoglycemia.

While we all have stress in our lives, each of us will respond to it differently and that includes how, when, and what we choose to eat. If a person believes that showing his/her feelings and emotions is a sign of weakness, he/she might use food to hide that fear. Some people become obsessive-compulsive, and use strict food management to gain a sense of control over a stressful situation, especially one which is ongoing. Others retreat from stress, taking comfort in their favorite foods.

THINK ABOUT THAT! When we revisit in our mind old stressful events we set the cascade of chemicals reactions in motion once again! I call this “Living in the Past” or Negative “self-talk” – “Why did I do this?” “Why did he said/do that to me? “I can’t believe he/she….to ME!” worries do the same, you are in the future thinking of what worst can happened to you!

Stress is not a disease or a symptom- it is a learned behavior established early in childhood from our family programs. To change our response to stress is to let go of our old re-action to OLD and PAINFUL triggers. In NLP it is called an Imprint – in psychology an Engram – When you are able to accept all circumstances in your life as a RESPONSIBLE individual fully knowing that you have created then with your thoughts, you let go of VICTIMIZATION – you accept WHAT IT IS and start living in the NOW!

Emotional eating – healing starts with awareness! Whether we are using well-loved foods to calm ourselves, or depriving ourselves of them as punishment, we are preoccupying ourselves with food to prevent unwanted feelings, including — but not limited to — the big ones: anger, fear, despair, and shame…Emotional eating has its roots in actual emotions. No matter why you have these cravings or binging you need professional help!

Letting Go of your Limiting Beliefs

Beliefs are essentially made up of thoughts. When you habitually think of the same thoughts and when they become “real” in your mind, they form your beliefs. Beliefs can be positive and empowering; or negative and limiting. Positive beliefs can propel you to greater heights, while negative ones can send you spiraling downwards! Remember all your New Year resolutions and goals from years ago?

Many times, you probably feel as if your beliefs are fixed. You are dead sure that you are right and would stubbornly hold on to them. You feel outraged when someone dares challenge your “truths” and distort your reality. However, what you fail to see is the possibility that your beliefs may be flawed; giving you a false representation than what is truly the case.

You are a victim in life, when you refused to let go of your negative thoughts. In the face of a financial disaster, you believe that you are not worthy of having money. When you find yourself with no friends, your perception is that “no one loves me” or that “it is hard to make friends”. When you encounter problems at work, you say that “I am not good enough”. On a more horrifying scale, terrorists were motivated by their beliefs, to kill and die with others, by hijacking and crashing two American airplanes into the Twin Towers on 11 September 2001. And it was the belief that terrorism must be defeated at all costs that prompted President Bush to respond by attacking Iraq and Afghanistan.

Sadly, all of us, including myself, grew up with several limiting beliefs. Perhaps it was that when you were young, you were told that you were lousy at art, music or dance. The beliefs became self fulfilling in a way, because you gave up your dream in pursuing any one of these interests. If anything, when you were 6 years old, it was easy to accept what an adult or an authoritative figure tells you. Let me explain further –

What Are Limiting Beliefs?

According to a research into beliefs done by Dilts and DeLozier (both NLP innovators and authors), there are 3 main ways that people limit themselves.

They are:

Hopelessness. You feel as if there is no hope because you do believe it is possible to achieve anything.

Helplessness. You believe that something is possible but you are not personally capable of achieving it.

Worthlessness. You do not believe that you deserve to attain success whatsoever.

Ask yourself if you have any of these limiting thoughts:

“I really have to work hard at…”
“It is too hard to reach the top”
“Other people can be rich not me”
“Money don’t grow on tree”
“Rich people are greedy and obnoxious”
“Others can do it better than me.”
“It is difficult to be successful.”
“Trying something new is too scary.”
“It’s impossible for me to lose weight.”
“I am just not genetically wired to be creative.”
“I am not attractive and cannot attract a good man (or woman) into my life.”
“I am not good at selling things”
“It runs in my family genes”
“My DNA is what it is and I can’t change it”

How Are Beliefs Formed?

The terminology “Childhood Imprints” in Neurolinguistic or “Engrams” in Psychology refers to the time of life starting from conception of a child until the developmental stage of 7 years of age. Major events can affect your view of the world and of yourself. These imprints come from all the experiences you have been exposed to unconsciously and consciously from:

- The environment in which you grew up. Your parents, your school and the community that you are exposed to play a part in shaping your belief system. How you encounter difficulties now is largely determined by the stories that you have been told as a child.

- Modeling. You may unconsciously take on the beliefs of someone you deeply admire. If the model in your life says so, then it must be so. Again parents are the most predominant model shaping our beliefs system about who we think we are and what we are expected to do.

- Significant Experiences. You may go through certain life-altering experiences that shape your beliefs. If the experiences turn out to be triumphs, you are likely to believe that anything is possible. If the experiences are horrid ones and your attitude is negative, you are likely to adopt a lot of disempowering thoughts and fears.

The life that you create is largely determined by your beliefs. Take a minute to assess where you are in life – are you fulfilled and satisfied by your life, relationships, and career? Are you achieving your goals? Are you getting the results? When you hold on to your beliefs that you are not capable of achieving something, you don’t have the desire to work at it enough, lose interest and sabotage your efforts in some way. Ring some bell here? You also prevent yourself from finding evidence to disprove them.

Change your Limited Beliefs – Change your Life

Using NLP terms, beliefs are perceptual filters. They determine how you view the world. They also act as confirmations in your reality of the environment. However, problems arise when they are flawed, distorted or steeped in unhelpful ways. Only when you become consciously aware about your assumptions, can there be the possibility of you breaking free.

Whatever makes up your beliefs becomes true for you. Thoughts that are disempowering wear you down and put you in a constant struggle. Instead of a smooth balance path, you find yourself facing more difficulties than others. With limiting beliefs, you are thwarting the process of personal growth for yourself. According to the Law of Attraction, it will also be difficult for you to attract the outcomes that you desire, since you are not in alignment with your inner Being and the Universe.

It is crucial that you deal with these self sabotaging thoughts. When the beliefs are deep rooted, they are usually in the form of black or white thinking. This simply means that you think in terms of extreme pole ends such as “should” and “should never”, “can” and “cannot”; and “a piece of cake” and “way impossible”. For myself, my pet words used to be “don’t know how” and “no I can’t”, which created many missed opportunities in the past.

What you don’t often realize is that when you learn “how to do the new things” that you initially have no faith over; your beliefs start to change. Suddenly, from a feeling of failure and hopelessness, you feel more positive and empowered!

The paradigm shift that you experience can be a very liberating experience! And when you do have this shift, you experience Oneness with your inner Being. You are in alignment with who you really are, doing your PURPOSE. The Law of Attraction works in your favor and best at this stage and you create more opportunities to confirm your new belief system!

Take a minute to assess where you are in life – are you fulfilled and satisfied with your life, relationships, and career? Are you achieving your goals? Reaching your dreams? Are you getting results?

If you don’t say yes to all of these questions then it is time to consider taking my New group class called “THE POWER OF BELIEFS” starting in May – Space is limited so act quickly – for more information just give me a call!

The difference between great people and everyone else is that great people create their lives actively, while everyone else is created by their lives, passively waiting to see where life takes them next. The
difference between the two is the difference between living fully and just existing.”

– Michael E. Gerber, Author of The E-Myth Revisited

Why would our most superb organ first to develop by the fetus simply stop working only after few decades?

Western medicine typically attributes heart conditions to an array of physical and lifestyles factors, ranging from cholesterol and diet to environmental toxins and stress. While these may be accurate on a purely chemical level, they do little to address the actual reason why heart condition exists. What does “Failure of the heart” really means? Maybe it’s no coincidence that lifestyle factors are linked to human emotion.
Is there something that we “feel” over the course of our life that can lead to the catastrophic failure of this organ? The answer is YES~

There is a growing body evidence in modern medicine, Quantum Physic and from leading-edge researchers suggests that ”hurts” cause the failure of our heart, specifically, the unresolved negatives feelings that underline chronic hurt- our beliefs- have the power to create the physical conditions that we recognize as cardio-vascular disease: tension, inflammation, high blood pressure, and clogged arteries. Yet, these findings are not new to Traditional Chinese Medicine –

About 5,000 years ago, the Chinese discovered a complex system of energy circuits that run throughout the body called Meridians (Acupuncture) from observations of life-styles, environment and nutrition. Eastern philosophy is about UNITY of mind and body. Chinese medicine has associated “Emotions” to each organ and system, and regard the physical body as one Unified Field of Energy.

James Blummenthal recently documented this mind/body relation at Duke University, and Tim Laurence at the Offman institute in England. Both describe the potential impact of our failure to heal and forgive old hurts and disappointments. Blummenthal conducted a number of studies that show that physical conditions of anger and tension can lead to BP, headaches, lowered immune system, stomach and digestive problems and finally heart attacks. On his own words: “Perhaps when people talk about dying from a broken heart, they are really saying that intense emotional reactions to loss and disappointments can cause a fatal heart attack”.

It is time to accept that our human body is a Whole Energy System, mind-body-soul interacting within a Quantum Consciousness.

You can read the article at : http://Dukemednews.org/news/article.php?id=353

* The Spontaneous Healing of Belief -Gregg Braden

If you feel exhausted and “burned out,” depend on caffeine and high-sugar snacks to get through the day, or are frequently “tired but wired,” you may be struggling with adrenal fatigue caused by STRESS. The demands of an “always on the go” lifestyle fall most heavily on the adrenals, and such demands tend to peak between the ages of 35 to 55.

Adrenal fatigue causes a host of health problems, from exhaustion and weight gain to immune suppression. Yet most people with impaired adrenal function don’t realize their adrenals are the cause of their symptoms and that most of the time it is caused by stress even if they don’t “feel” stressed – or that they can heal themselves with natural support. Cortisol, DHEA, Aldosterone and Adrenaline are the main adrenal stress hormones.

An abnormal Adrenal rhythm can influence many function of the body:

1-Lack of Energy production

People who have a hard time rising in the morning or have low energy level throughout the day often have abnormal adrenal rhythm and low blood sugar.

2- Muscle and joint fatigue

Reduce tissue repair and increase tissue breakdown with chronic pain

3- Bone Health

If level of cortisol is too high in the morning our bone do not rebuilt well and we may more prone for Osteoporosis

4-Low Immune Health

Short and long-term stress is known to suppress the immune system responses to the surface of our body (lungs, throat, urinary and intestinal tract) reducing the production of antibody

5-Sleep disruption

Lack of REM sleep cycles reducing regenerative sleep

6- Less Skin regeneration

Occurs normally at night but impaired due to high level of cortisol

7- Thyroid Function

Hypothyroid symptoms Level of cortisol control thyroid hormones production

8- Grain intolerance and stress response

High level of cortisol also affects the ability to digest grains. The gut becomes inflamed within 30 minutes after ingestion of grains creating gas and bloating symptoms.

Your Natural Health care provider will be able to support you with preventive measures such as diet and lifestyle, offering new strategies to change your response to stress with natural remedies.