FEED YOUR BODY RIGHT: SHE SLIMMED DOWN BY SITTING DOWN
When it comes to eating, Kathy Wilson was a stand-up kind of person. She would stand at the cupboard and snack. She would stand at the refrigerator and snack. “I can honestly say that I never sat down and ate a meal,” says the 48-year-old DeWitt, Michigan, resident.
By the time she reached her mid-forties, Kathy weighed 262 pounds. Her blood pressure was way above normal. And she no longer wanted to go out with her husband, because she was embarrassed by her size.
All of these factors drove Kathy to confront her weight problem. She knew that she had to slim down, but how?
After looking into several weight-loss programs, Kathy decided to enroll in Jenny Craig. In the program, clients eat prepackaged meals until they’re halfway to their goal weights. Then they switch to preparing their own food, using menus provided by Jenny Craig.
“Typically, when you think of a diet, you think of what you can’t eat,” Kathy says. “But I learned that I can eat what I want, as long as I control my portions.”
She also learned to stop sabotaging her weight-loss program by eating in front of the fridge. “When I started adding up the calories, I realized that I was taking in a lot more than I should have been, mostly because of my stand-up meals and snacks,” Kathy ‘ “* says. “Sitting down«t the kitchen or dining room table each time I ate forced me to be more aware of the food that I was putting in my mouth.”
Within a year of starting the Jenny Craig program, Kathy had lost 100 pounds. She has maintained her goal weight of 162 pounds since April 1994.
Now that she’s slimmer, Kathy is more active than she used to be. She loves to run, ice-skate, and play softball. She was so impressed with how the Jenny Craig program changed her life that she became the director of a Jenny Craig center in Lansing, Michigan. “I want to help others achieve their weight-loss goals, as I have,” she says.
WINNING ACTION
Leave stand-up to the comedians. Research shows that nearly all of us, whether we’re heavy or slim, underestimate by 20 to 50 percent how much we eat. Like Kathy, we forget about the snacking in front of the refrigerator, the taste-testing during meal preparation, the nibbling during meetings at work. And those calories can add up fast. To keep tabs on absentminded eating, get in the habit of sitting at the table for every meal and snack. This simple action will help remind you that what you’re putting in your mouth counts toward your daily calorie intake. You may realize that you’re not as hungry as you thought!
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APPENDICES: PAIN-KILLERS
(Trade names are not given in this section, as the common pain-killers are used in a great number of different preparations. The ingredients are shown on the packet for those bought without a prescription.)
These are drugs that can block pain sensations. Our main interest in them is in connection with headache and migraine.
Aspirin and other salicylates (see Section 7A) reduce pain and damp down inflammation. They also have some effects on the blood platelets, and this may help to abort a migraine attack. Regular, prolonged use of salicylates can irritate the stomach lining and have other adverse effects, so this should be avoided. Paracetamol reduces pain but has very little anti-inflammatory effect. It has no ill-effects on the stomach, and as long as the maximum dose is strictly observed it is a very safe drug. However, it should not be taken long-term at the maximum dosage, nor should it be taken by anyone who has kidney or liver disease. There are rare instances of paracetamol causing skin rashes.
Codeine is a very mild opiate (a morphinelike drug) used in some migraine preparations. It is a fairly safe drug.
Caffeine is added to some pain-killers to speed up absorption and improve the effectiveness of the drug. Caffeine can also produce headaches, so heavy use of this type of pain-killer is not advisable.
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FOOD INTOLERANCE: PLANT FOODS
Potato family, Solanaceae: potato (but not sweet potato), tomato, aubergine, sweet peppers (green, red and yellow peppers), paprika, chilli peppers, tobacco, cape gooseberry.
Bean and pea family, Leguminosae:
peas, haricot beans (kidney beans, whether white-, red-, brown- or black-skinned, also baked beans and flageolets), peanuts, soya beans, lentils, split peas, broad beans, butter beans, mung beans, lima beans, chickpeas, black-eyed peas, carob, runner beans, green beans, snap beans, string beans, mangetout peas. Different kinds of haricot beans and their green forms (snap beans, string beans and green beans, including those sold as a frozen vegetable) are all the same species and should be regarded as the same food. Peanuts belong to a separate tribe from other members of the family, and experience with patients who are allergic to peanut suggests that cross-reactivity with other legumes is generally low, but peanut-sensitive people may react to soya beans. Patients sensitive to soya beans are
likely to react to a wide range of legumes. Anyone with these sensitivities is usually advised to avoid peanut and soybean oils as well, but this may not be necessary – such oils contain no detectable protein, and tests with allergic individuals showed no reaction to the relevant oil. But there might be a reaction if someone were intolerant of a non-protein component.
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NUTRITION SUPPLEMENTS: AN ELIMINATION DIET SHOULD TAKE A NUTRITIONAL SUPPLEMENT
Doctors who are concerned about possible nutritional defects suggest that anyone embarking on an elimination diet should take a nutritional supplement. They argue that many are likely to have deficiencies anyway, especially if they number diarrhoea among their symptoms, and that the restrictions of the elimination diet will only make the situation worse. Such doctors also recommend a special type of nutritional supplement to anyone coming off the Pill -and certainly to anyone staying on it. It is quite easy to overdo things with both vitamins and minerals, particularly with the fat-soluble vitamins, A and D, because these are stored by the body if taken in excess – water-soluble vitamins such as vitamin C can be washed out of the body in the urine. So grabbing a handful of ordinary vitamin pills is not the answer – they can be dangerous if the body already has an excess of vitamin A.
Ideally, anyone who is concerned about their nutritional status should have a full analysis done, so that a supplement can be tailored to their specific needs. Unfortunately, testing itself is a contentious issue. The traditional method of just testing a blood sample is now considered inadequate by many doctors. It appears that some nutrients – zinc for example – can be deficient as a whole but show normal levels in the blood. The suggestion is that the blood ‘needs’ the mineral more than other parts of the body, so there are mechanisms that ensure a good supply, scavenging the mineral from other tissues to keep the blood level high. A more extensive method of testing, using hair and sweat samples, as well as blood, often shows up nutritional defects that are not revealed by the blood alone. This form of testing seems to be vindicated by the results in individual cases – correcting the deficiencies shown by hair or sweat tests often does wonders for patients with previously intractable health problems. This Ts not hard, scientific evidence of course, and some carefully designed trials are needed to test these new approaches to nutrition.
In the meantime, what can be advised? Extensive nutritional testing is only available privately, but for those who can afford it there is little to lose, and. For anyone corning off the Pill, a special supplement is probably advisable.
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WHAT CAUSES FOOD INTOLERANCE? IS THE IMMUNE SYSTEM INVOLVED?
At the beginning of this book, we defined food intolerance as ‘any adverse reaction to food, other than false food allergy, in which the involvement of the immune system is unproven because skin-prick tests and other tests for allergy are negative. This does not exclude the possibility of immune reactions being involved in some way, but they are unlikely to be the major factor producing the symptoms.’ Because food intolerance has long been thought of as an ‘allergy’, most research into its causes has centred on the immune system. It is only in the last ten years or so that other possible reasons for intolerance have been investigated.
Despite extensive research, the evidence for immune-system involvement is fairly limited. The general consensus of opinion now is that immune reactions may have some role in food intolerance in some people, but they are only part of the story – something else must be going wrong as well.
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IN WHAT AGE MOST ALLERGIES ARE APPEAR?
Although most allergies first appear in childhood, particularly the acute types of food allergy, there are a few adults who suddenly develop an allergy for no obvious reason. Dr AW. Frankland, formerly of St Mary’s Hospital in London, describes the case of a woman of 50 who suddenly became allergic to sesame seeds, which she had previously eaten without difficulty. One day while eating a biscuit containing sesame, her mouth and throat began to tingle, and urticaria (nettle-rash) developed on her skin. These symptoms disappeared after an hour. When she ate another such biscuit two weeks later the reaction was far more severe. Her lips and eyelids swelled, urticaria developed all over her body, and she collapsed unconscious on the floor. Only prompt medical attention saved her life. This is an unusual, but not an isolated case, and is difficult to explain in terms of what we now know about allergies as inherited disorders.
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A SELECTION OF MEDICINAL HERBS – COMFREY (SYMPHYTUM OFFICINALE)
Comfrey grows, for the most part unnoticed, near farmyards, in ditches and by river banks. Because of its excellent medicinal effects it should be lifted from its obscurity and used more widely. Even in ancient times it was employed to heal wounds and broken bones, especially fractures of the leg. It is for good reason, then, that people gave it common names such as ‘knitback’, ‘bruisewort’ and ‘healing herb’. Considering its good services in cases of fractures alone, it deserves more attention than it usually receives. Comfrey, especially when taken in a homoeopathic form, promotes the healing process and speeds up the formation of new bone cells, which is probably due to the fact that it contains 0.8-1.0 per cent allantoic This substance is known to encourage granulation and the formation of epithelial cells. Comfrey also contains choline and other, still unknown, elements.
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WALKING AND EXERCISING ON DEWY GRASS IN THE MORNING
Not everyone may find it easy to get up early in the morning and walk, run or do their exercises on the still dewy grass. Perhaps you live in a town with narrow streets and would find it inconvenient to go outside and seek out a green meadow before breakfast in order to do a little morning exercise. Still, it would be a most refreshing activity for all the many town dwellers who are normally locked up in their rooms and offices, before actually having to surrender to the hustle and bustle of a busy day.
How much to be envied are those who still live close to nature, who in the early morning carry out their natural exercise by making hay or doing general farm and garden work. Even though they may not realise it, these people are conditioning their bodies all the while. To them it is nothing but their work, part of their daily routine. It would be a first-class restorative to take a holiday on a farm and get up early and join these people in their early morning chores so as to regenerate our bodies which have been wearied and worn out during the working year. Think, too, of the opportunity you would have of learning from nature, helping you to adopt a more optimistic view of life.
Early morning exercises require deep-breathing, and this will help to drive out the remaining traces of weariness from our bodies, enabling us to start the day’s work refreshed, even more so if we are able to walk on dewy grass. Sebastian Kneipp was one who called attention to the effects of dew, and it is beneficial to our health if we make use of nature’s gifts. Civilisation has robbed us of much of our freedom by forcing us to live in cramped houses and towns, but nature teaches us little things that can make up for this loss to some extent. Observing these lessons can help us to maintain a reasonable physical balance while having to accept the hustle and bustle of everyday life.
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BEAUTIFUL HAIR – CARE OF THE HAIR (BATH AND TONIC)
Excessively oily hair is often a problem for young people around the age of puberty. In the case of girls, this is generally due to a temporary disruption of the ovarian function. In order to help, the cause must be treated; warm underwear is recommended and warm herbal sitz baths are necessary, taken every night until relief is achieved. Some older men try to keep their hair by using expensive tonics, but these preparations often benefit the manufacturers and advertisers more than those who would like to see an end to their bald pate. Really, all is in vain, because once the hair bulbs have gone, no new hair can grow.
Most people look after their hair in one way or another, even though they may not have grasped the idea that the basic care and treatment has to be from inside the body itself. In other words, by eliminating any existing internal deficiencies, the appearance of the hair will improve. I often hear from patients who have taken silica and a biological calcium preparation who tell me, ‘My hair is beautiful again.’ They are elated and surprised at the same time.
External care will no doubt benefit your hair to some extent, and so will a good hair tonic.
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SEVEN BASIC RULES FOR THE PREVENTION OF CANCER – RULE SEVEN
The endocrine glands play an important part in our body and should be cared for so as to keep them functioning normally. Maintaining the right balance will prevent unnecessary problems. Interestingly, there are some people who have such a favourable predisposition, despite the unbalanced and turbulent times we live in, that they experience no problems with the functioning of their glands, particularly the sex glands. However, not everyone is so fortunate and well-balanced; there are some people who push themselves too hard, while others suffer constantly from inhibitions. Both tendencies are responsible for unnatural conditions of irritation and are harmful to the cells. Excessive irritation and tension encourage cancerous degeneration of the cells if they occur repeatedly. In this case, harmony in one’s emotional life is a necessary requirement if one wants to keep healthy.
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