the life change process begins

In my last post I introduced the concept of my “life change” programme. Given the serious nature of some of Catrina’s symptoms I decided the priority was to begin some work on her physiology so yesterday’s session was run as a typical nutritional therapy session.

First of all I took Catrina’s complete health history from birth right through to now. her main reason for coming is to feel healthy and lose some weight as she recognises that this will help relieve other problems. It soon became clear that all her systems are out of balance but my main concern is her liver – congestion here can lead to major symptoms in all parts of the body and is directly part of her problem with gall stones.

Because of the amount of toxicity that Catrina clearly has I don’t want her to do too much too quickly as this could precipitate a healing crisis. So therefore before addressing diet I want to sort her hydration out and take some pressure off her compromised liver.

I’d asked her to keep a food and mood diary before coming along and noticed that in the 5 days before seeing me she’d consumed:

7 cans of diet cola

1 can lemonade

3 cups of black coffee + 2 cappuccinos + 1 latte

1 snowball

3 glasses of wine

5 x 1/2 litre bottles of water although one day didn’t have any water

1 ginger tea.

I have challenged her to cut down then cut out all the stimulants and increase her water intake. Cutting out caffiene will take pressure off her adrenal glands as well as her liver. Caffiene also disrupts the blood sugar balance significantly which in turn affects appetite and sugar cravings. Aspartame (in the diet cola) has been linked with Fibromyalgia and proven in clinical trials to not only increase appetite but when taken with food increases the amount of calories extracted from that food! To help with the motivation on giving up the artificial sweeteners I’ve lent her my copy of the documentary “Sweet Misery” which gives an excellent account of how aspartame came to be approved as safe in the US by the FDA despite the evidence to the contrary, alongside stories of those most severely affected by this chemical.

Caffiene is a physically additive drug so going “cold turkey” or even dramatically cutting down can result in withdrawal symptoms such as headaches and mood swings. Increasing water intake can negate these but if it doesn’t help then dropping a few drops of coffee or cola under the tongue can relieve the problem without exposing the digestive system to a big dose.

Finally I asked her to start the day by drinking juice 1/2 fresh lemon in hot water very first thing. This is to stimulate her gall bladder and encourage more frequent production of bile as is a very gentle gall bladder flush.

[Via http://whywaittofeelbetter.wordpress.com]