WE ARE NOT ALONE!
I must say that I am excited to create this post today. I made it successfully through Thanksgiving and now prepare for the quick-approaching Christmas. I can only hope I am as successful this coming holiday, as I will be having family here with me and will be preparing the food. Lord help me! Haha. My journey in the next several weeks will be interesting, and I will be posting as much here as I can so that I can help those of you who are looking for an accountability partner. Don’t forget you can head over to my Facebook Page where we can hold each other accountable daily!! www.facebook.com/healthfulchoices
However . . . . . I am here today to talk to you about the question that many of us are asking. Why the heck am I eating so clean and exercising like a crazy person and STILL NOT losing any weight? I know I am not alone in this journey to find out why it is so. I am excited to share what I learn as I do as much research as possible to figure this out. So many people assume when looking at me that I eat a bunch of crap or never work out. Chances are that I eat ten times better than they and could give them a run for their money out on the trails. As stated earlier, I am already trying to maintain a gluten-free, dairy-free way of eating while attempting to embrace the pescetarian guidelines. I am currently taking some all-natural supplements to speed up my metabolism and to help adjust my sleep patterns to help with my adrenals. I am also taking a green drink that helps alkalinize my system. I use a superfood-packed vegan protein shake as a meal replacement more than several times a week. I am a self-proclaimed juice ninja, haha, and I love blending as well! I have been doing all this and probably a few other things I have missed for about ten-plus months and have had no change in the scale per se. That scale loves to tease me by going down a couple pounds, but, about a week later, it is like my body regulates and the weight pops right back up where apparently it is more comfortable. Grrr.
So, I am just so thrilled to have found the book, “Accidentally Overweight” by Dr. Libby Weaver. I will be sharing what I learn in each chapter here with you all because I really feel that as society becomes more and more crazy busy, there will be a need for the words of wisdom of Dr. Libby and others like her! There is hope for people like me who just can’t seem to lose that weight no matter what we do!
I found Dr. Libby after being invited to listen to a webinar where she was discussing how stress affects our hormones and our weight. She has this awesome accent and is so fabulous to listen to. Added to that, she has this knack of making complex concepts seem so easy to understand. It felt like she was talking directly to me as I listened to her speak! What she had to say was extremely eye-opening and validated what I had already begun to research. I came away from the webinar heading directly to the computer researching estrogen dominance, looking for recipes for liver detox juices for my juicer, and heading to YouTube to try to figure out what the heck diaphragmatic breathing is! I couldn’t wait to dig further into what she had to say and immediately bought her book for my iPad and started reading!
This book couldn’t have come at a better time in my life as I research how I can help my teenager with some awful cluster-type migraine headaches without pumping her full of a drug that will make her hair fall out, lose weight, and make her have a lack of concentration and dizziness – at the age of 14! Yeah, that will be a last resort choice. Even after the small amount I have heard from Dr. Libby and what I have read, I have come to realize that stress has so much to do with our physical and mental well-being. The stress our children are under today is not allowing them to be children in my opinion, and we won’t know what the outcome of what I feel are adult stressors will have on our children for years. Holy crap, by the time they are 40, our children will be morbidly obese and won’t be able to get it off and will be depressed and miserable AND they won’t understand what they are doing wrong. It is unbelievable to me, and it makes me truly sad as I realize that my daughter exhibits at age 14 symptoms of hormone imbalance due to stress. I am going to do whatever I need to do to help my daughter now, not later! Well, that is a whole other post for the future!
Okay, so Dr. Libby believes there are nine “primary factors essential for your body to be able to access fat to burn it for energy,” and she discusses these in detail in her book, “Accidentally Overweight”.
– Calories
– Stress Hormones
– Sex Hormones
– The Liver
– The Thyroid
– Insulin
– Gut Bacteria
– Alkalinity
– Emotions
LET’S TALK DIGESTION!
I have read chapter one several times, and I must say I couldn’t be happier to have learned so much and come away with some actions to apply to my personal journey right off the bat! Dr. Libby jumps right in and gets down to the nitty gritty, and I love it! I find myself wanting to read it again x 3! Not because I didn’t understand it, but rather because there were so many aha moments that I need to read them over and over! She jump starts her book by talking about digestion and what a key role it plays in our daily lives. “Digestion is intricate and complex and yet relatively robust. And it is intimately connected to how you feel and function every single day, from the energy you feel to the fat you burn, from the texture and appearance of your skin to whether you have a bloated tummy or not, right down to your mood.” There is so much wonderful information in this chapter about digestion, but what I want to leave with you is what I will be adding to my journey from the first chapter.
My Take-Aways:
– Take longer to chew my food before swallowing. My grandpa has actually challenged me in the past to try to chew my food 20 times before I swallow. This sounds easy, but I swear I am ready to swallow by about the ninth time I chomp down!
– Drink diluted apple cider vinegar between 5 and 20 minutes before my meal. This will help my stomach acid to have the correct pH balance to digest my food and hopefully aid in getting rid of my indigestion, regurge, and gas/bloated stomach.
– Drink some Aloe Vera in the morning to help with my gut health.
– Drink water in between meals, not at meals. Water’s pH does not match your stomach’s pH, and it dilutes the stomach acid.
– Add Chamomile tea during my day to help soften and flush out old waste stuck in my bowel.
Join me as I read and share what I have learned from each chapter of “Accidentally Overweight,” as well as what I will be applying to my own journey as the information applies to me.
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UPDATE 12/06/12
After reading this blog post the morning after I published, I felt that it was lacking more information from the section that read. So, after wrestling the iPad away from the four-year-old long enough to ask the teenager to teach me how to highlight excerpts on the Kindle App, I have come back here to add a “Did You Know” section to my blog review on the Digestion Section in Dr. Libby Weaver’s “Accidentally Overweight”. I will make sure to add a section such as this with the review of each upcoming chapter as well, I promise!
DID YOU KNOW?
According to Dr. Weaver:
“80 percent of the body’s total serotonin is in the gut? And with serotonin being our primary happy, calm, content hormone, gut dysfunction can enormously affect our mood.”
When eating carbs nerves of our stomach are “fired off when they reach a certain stretching point and send a message to the brain to let you know you have eaten.” With “fat and protein however, once we have chewed these foods, messages are already being sent from the mouth to the satiety centre of the brain to let us know we are eating.”
“The aroma of food, as well as the chewing action itself, stimulates stomach acid production.”
“The optimal pH stomach acid is 1.9.”
“Adults with reflux or indigestion tend to assume that the burning sensation they experience with heartburn means they are producing too much acid when the reality is usually the opposite. They are usually not making enough stomach acid and/or the pH of it is too high.”
“When the pH is higher than ideal, digestion problems are likely further along the tract. These may be symptoms of the small or large intestine, such as bloating, pain, or excessive wind.”
“Poor digestion can also be due to stress or, more precisely, adrenaline. Adrenaline diverts the blood supply away from your digestive processes and concentrates the blood in your periphery, your arms and legs. . . it keeps you focused on escaping the danger.”
“Some of the fragments of food that can escape out of a leaky gut into the bloodstream can also have an opioid structure. . . it is possible that the opioid effect some foods have the potential to create when a leaky gut is occurring, is one of the factors behind food addictions and, hence, for some, overeating or eating and not feeling like you can stop.”
My favorite Dr. Weaver quote of this section is a concept that is new to me and one that I am really trying to implement. She says that “all you do when you weigh yourself is weigh your self-esteem.” Amen to that!!
There is so much information about the gut in these first pages that I honestly keep reading it just to remind myself of what I just read. It is amazing how much digestion plays such a key role in how we feel and function. Since I last wrote the first portion of this post, I have been diligent in taking diluted ACV and am up to 4tsp before each meal. I have noticed a difference in the bloating in my stomach. I have been very careful to chew my food more than four times each time I take a bite. It took me longer to finish my salad the other night than it took my hubby to get four plates of all-you-can-eat pizza, and he was actually done and waiting for me to finish so we could leave. I have also made sure I do NOT drink water with my meals, but rather between meals. And I have also tried to be more mindful of adding in protein with each meal, whether it is peanut butter or beans or fish, etc. I have been trying chamomile tea, and I have added Aloe Vera to my shopping list for my next health food store run.
It is all so interesting to me how all these steps can help with digestion. I look forward to implementing more changes in the upcoming chapters!
Healthful Choices! 
