Here's a question for you: If you throw up, does that mean your body is sick or healthy? Think about it.
Let's look at this a little more closely. Say you and your friends went out to a not so fabulous restaurant and ate some potato salad that wasn't properly stored. Later that night all of you get stomach cramps. What's the best thing for your body to do? Throw the bad food back up; get rid of it, right?
What should your body do if the digestive tract is overrun by a pathogenic bacteria or virus? How about if you lose track of how many beer you've consumed and the alcohol in your system is becoming toxic? The best response for your body in both these scenarios is to vomit. That's the healthiest reaction for the body. A healthy body expels toxin substances from the upper digestive tract by vomiting. Even though you may not feel perky, the body is not sick. It is protecting you from becoming sick.
Too often we look at symptoms as being the problem rather than looking for the cause of the symptoms. Just suppressing symptoms can be dangerous. What if you stopped the vomiting in the situations mentioned and the toxins remained in the body? Far more serious damage would occur.
Back pain, neck pain, headaches, fatigue, sleeplessness, numbness, weakness; they are all just symptoms. What is causing the symptoms? That's what chiropractors try to find. Our primary job is to find vertebral subluxations that are interfering with the proper functioning of the nervous system. A variety of symptoms, not just pain, can occur when the nervous system is not working optimally. The key is to look to the cause of the symptoms and not just mask the symptoms. Just like inhibiting vomiting can be dangerous, covering up or numbing any symptom can also produce greater problems.
Symptoms, like vomiting, are a healthy body's signals to you that there is a problem. You need to fix the cause rather than eliminate the symptoms.
Probably the simplest plan for weight loss and health improvement is: no white foods. That's it! If it's white don't eat it. There are a few exceptions which I will point out at the end of this post.
No white foods means no white flour products including white bread and pasta, no white rice, no white sugar, no white (refined) salt, and no white potatoes. Watch for these foods to be "hidden" in processed food products. If it looks white, it's white and not on this dietary program.
The problem with white foods is that they are very simple carbohydrates and are converted very quickly in the body to sugar. As a result of the rapid rise of sugar in the blood, the body produces insulin to try to balance the blood sugar levels. The sugar control mechanisms become stressed over time. In response there will be increased food cravings, fat deposition around the mid section, metabolic syndrome, insulin resistance, high blood triglycerides, and eventually type 2 diabetes can result. White foods accelerate this sequence of events.
White foods are usually highly processed. It can take many chemicals and procedures to remove so many of the components that give food colour. It is often the coloured things that contain the nutrients that made the original food good for us. Not only are white foods quickly converted to sugar but they are devoid of most nutrients. They have become empty calories. Additionally, chemicals used in the processing often remain in the food. So these white foods can also be toxic.
So, if a food is white just avoid it. The beauty of this approach is that it is so simple. No calories to count, no portions to weigh, just look at the food and if it's white don't eat it. Simple.
Please note white foods that do not fall into this plan are white fish & chicken, egg whites, and cauliflower. These foods are nutritious and do not have the detrimental effects discussed above.
