Experiencing yourself as a whole network with food addictions

"No man in the world has more courage than the man who can stop after eating one peanut."  - Channing Pollock

In modern society, we have become accustomed to a fast pace. We expect everything, including our bodies, to do what we want, when we want. Most over-the-counter drugs help meet that need, for minor problems like heartburn or stuffy noses. We just want to shut down the symptom and get back to our busy day.

Many of the whole systems of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) point out that symptoms are a message from your body to You that you are out of balance in some way. In the short term, you will get away with ignoring the message.

In the long term, you are paying a price - something even more serious may happen if you don't pay attention. As we have discussed, the risk is that you block your body as a whole system from letting the symptom show up in one part, and your whole system just shifts the location of the illness process somewhere else.

So, if you shut down a skin rash with steroid creams, the illness process may manifest later in time with depression (brain) or asthma (lungs) - problems that conventional doctors will label as "new" and unrelated to the original skin problem. After all, the mechanisms at the end organs where the problems show up are very different - and they are.

Blocking manifestations without healing them is called suppression.

Conventional drugs are excellent at suppression, but so are some subtle energy healers or even self-help methods for guided imagery if what you image is attacking a diseased body part instead of
asking it to tell you what it needs to heal naturally.

If you take a whole person - holistic - approach to thinking about illness, you realize that it is you, the whole person, who is having a problem. And if you take steps to heal in a truly natural way, you will see the skin problem return as the depression or the asthma lessen. If you let the healing continue without blocking the process, eventually even the skin problem will just go away.

To convince yourself that this long-term change is possible, and that the body really is interconnected, try a shorter-term test that can teach you valuable things about your unique health problems and what you might do about them.

You can see this natural healing process in the short term if you have food intolerances, which often masquerade as food addictions. If you eliminate a highly craved food for about 4 days and then try to eat it all by itself on the 5 day, you may be able to see this process happen in miniature and in a short period of time.

That is, common and craved foods are often able to trigger chronic symptoms. You won't realize it because it seems that you feel better, not worse, when you eat those foods day to day.

The trick is to unmask your food addiction process by avoiding the food completely in all forms for 4-5 days. Then, if you eat a meal or two of just the food you want to test, you. are likely to experience a strong acute flare of your chronic symptoms.

The reaction will wear its way out of your system over a period of hours to days - and many people see a short-term series of symptoms that play out the interconnectedness of your body parts as an integrated whole. For example, at first you might feel a little giddy or irritable, then tired and sleepy, then have a stomach ache, then a headache, then a runny nose, and finally  - clear up.

In short, you have passed through multiple symptoms - all set into motion and sequenced by the same starting event...a food that you eat a lot. And you have healed naturally by letting the process play itself out and your system setting itself right again.

It is easier to see that you are all an interconnected network of parts that talk to each other and shift the focus of symptoms from one place to another when you do a food challenge test.

Foods that commonly come into play here for this kind of symptom are corn, egg, wheat, yeast, milk, tomato, potato, cane and beet sugar (table sugar). Forms of foods that are more rapidly absorbed trigger adverse food reactions more powerfully than those less rapidly absorbed. So if
you try a food in a meal with a lot of fat, the reaction may not peak as fast or hit as severely as it does with, for example, corn syrup.

Do NOT try this if you get life-threatening reactions to foods, obviously, and do this under a doctor's supervision if you get extremely ill or debilitated by dietary changes. But if your symptoms are not that severe, you may learn a lot about foods that contribute to your chronic symptoms of migraine or
irritable bowel or hyperactivity or even mood shifts. You can test one food at a time this way. Most people who have food addictions and intolerances have more than one food involved.

To dampen a severe adverse food reaction, some people report that Alka Seltzer Gold (TM) is helpful. It appears not to act too suppressively, but may hasten the end of the reaction. People with
kidney disease should not use this without medical supervision, but for other people, even though with mental or emotional reactions to foods, it sometimes helps lessen the severity.

If you find a food that seems to be a big trigger of symptoms, the best thing is to avoid it completely for at least 3 to 6 months. This type of food intolerance/addiction can fade gradually with avoidance over time. So, after complete avoidance, you may be able to eat it occasionally
without setting off the same kind of big flare of symptoms that you first experienced.

In fact, you can find out where you stand with a food over time by re-testing it and seeing for yourself at what point in time you stop setting off acute symptom flares. You can be your own personal laboratory to get control of your situation.

But if you re-introduce a food and try to eat it everyday, you run the risk of re-activating the craving and the food addiction - and the chronic symptoms that it triggered.

Avoiding all sorts of foods is not always a practical answer for someone with chronic disorder or disease, but it can give you a break from the severity of your symptoms, a chance to catch your breath and get yourself some other types of treatment, e.g., constitutional, that can change your tendency to get addicted to these foods and have adverse reactions to them in the first place.

Until next time - To your health!

Iris R Bell, MD PhD
Alternative medicine information from a doctor who is also a patient.
http://dririsbell.com
ebook http://gettingwhole.com

P.S. To learn more about food addictions and how to manage
them for children and adults, check out Dr. Doris Rapp's book
"Is This Your Child?" (available at:  http://tinyurl.com/djz5s).

Comments

[michael jones]

Really intersting post! I have a chronic heartburn and i think that your informaton will help me! Thank you very much!

[Alternative Medicine]

good balanced diet - ruling out any allergies is an idea: http://www.gotosee.co.uk/therapies/Nutrition.htm