| |
How
you Can do so Many Bad Things to Yourself and Still Function: Your Body's Metabolic Reserve and Priority
Systems
By Jimmy Scott, Ph.D.
As published in Health Freedom News, Vol
12, Nr. 2, February 1993
Uncle
Harry is no Excuse!
“Why
should I be careful about what I eat? My Uncle Harry drank like
a fish, smoked two packs a day, and ate a diet of potato chips
and soft drinks. Yet he lived to be 9O years old!” Everyone seems
to know an Uncle Harry who has broken every rule in the book, and
survived to a ripe old age. We can't deny the existence of the
Uncle Harry of the world, but you should not use them as an excuse
for bad habits of your own! What you may not know about Uncle Harry
is that he happened to be blessed with particularly good genes;
he may have led a physically active life during all his ninety
years; and he may have taken care of himself in other ways, such
as handling stress very effectively. Perhaps these weren't as obvious
as his eating and smoking habits, but they certainly are at least
as important. Even if you're not an Uncle Harry, you may feel that
you are going “unpunished” for a host of dietary and lifestyle
sins. Perhaps you drink too much coffee, or eat a lot of refined
foods, or don't get enough sleep or rest. Yet, in spite of these
violations of common sense, you seem to be fairly healthy. How
can you abuse your body as badly as you do, and still be able
to function?
A Lesson
from the Mariners of Old
A clue to the
answer comes from the experience of the mariners on the sailing
ships of two centuries ago. As we all have heard, during their
voyages, these sailors' diets were often critically deficient
in vitamin C, and many developed symptoms of severe scurvy, particularly
in some extreme cases where ships had been damaged in storms
or were caught in the doldrums for weeks on end. One of these
severe symptoms was very peculiar. A wound which might have been
completely healed for the past twenty years would reopen again,
just like a fresh wound! How could this happen? Well, scar tissue
is made up primarily of a connective tissue protein called collagen.
The production of collagen requires certain nutrients, especially
vitamin C. When the body is extremely deficient in vitamin C,
it is able to withdraw it from storage in the body and utilize
it in areas that are critical for sustaining life. In the case
of the unfortunate mariners, their wounds opened up because the
scar tissue was dissolved by the body in order to release the
vitamin C it contained. The vitamin C from the scar tissue was
transferred by the body to the heart, lungs, brain, or other
more vital spots.
Your entire
body is a warehouse that stores nutrients and other vital substances.
If you miss a few meals or suffer some other stress, your tissues
are not immediately affected because your body can draw from
its reserves. Now, if your metabolic reserves aren't one hundred
percent of what they should be to begin with, you are at greater
risk of having nothing to draw on in case of an emergency. When
your body's reserves get all the way down to zero,
then your body
will either not be able to perform a given job, or it will have
to begin tearing down other tissues to get the material to carry
out that function. When the mariners' vitamin C reserves dropped
to zero, their bodies broke down old scar tissue to obtain some
vitamin C for vital bodily functions.
This is why
we can go on for so long without noticing the harm we are doing
to ourselves through improper diet. Our body has some reserves,
which we can draw on when we are not taking in the proper nutrients.
Although we may think we are fairly normal, we may actually be
functioning at a less than optimal level. We tend to dismiss
many minor symptoms that are actually signs that tissue is deteriorating
from lack of nutritional substances. We ignore our body's warning
messages until finally it reaches the breaking point, and then “suddenly” develop
a serious disease. I have seen many clients who expressed puzzlement
at getting sick at some time long after a very stressful period
in their lives, rather than getting sick during the stressful
time. The reason, of course, is that their reserves held them
during the stressful time and they had not done what was necessary
to rebuild those reserves afterwards. If their nutrition level
was marginal or deficient, then the slightest further decrease
would cause some physical problem. For any given nutrient, the
nutrition level must be 100% before any reserves can be stored
away.
Which organ
system breaks down depends on which nutrients are in short supply.
For example, suppose that you have a long-standing zinc deficiency.
As your deficiency develops, you may at first notice increased
acne, slow healing of wounds, a change in your body odor, a decrease
in your vision, or a reduced sense of smell, but you may not
realize that these problems are all related to zinc. Finally,
if you are a man, you may notice pain in the prostate, or have
difficulty urinating. These prostate-related problems, also perhaps
due to the zinc deficiency, may finally drive you to the medical
doctor where the problem is “identified.” But all your earlier
symptoms were also early warnings that your zinc reserves had
been depleted. Many chronic diseases begin during periods of
nutritional deficiencies. Arthritis, for example, is closely
related to deficiencies in the metabolism of potassium (especially
in the proper organic form), among other substances.
Similarly,
the prevalence of heart disease in our society is evidence that
our nutritional and metabolic needs are not being met. By the
time the cardiovascular system has begun to deteriorate, many
other problems have already developed. People may ignore all
these other problems, and the end result is heart disease. By
believing that “common every day aches and pains” are normal,
we more easily lull ourselves into believing that we are healthy
and that “disease” is for other people.
How Health
Kinesiology Measures Your Metabolic Reserve
The stores
of nutrients and other vital substances in your body are known
as your metabolic reserve. Your metabolic reserve is an indication
of your overall level of health and proper nutrition. The muscle
testing techniques of Health Kinesiology, some of which I have
described in previous articles, provide an extremely accurate
way of measuring this reserve. After using Health Kinesiology
techniques to determine your body's nutritional needs, we can
begin to restore proper nutritional balance through adequate
diet and a nutritional supplement program.
Your supplement
requirements will probably be quite high at first, to allow for
immediate repair work such as cleaning out the mucus produced
by allergic reactions, improving digestion, and so on. After
your body's toxicity has been reduced, supplements will be needed
to provide the raw materials required for the repair of damaged
tissues. Only after that is done can nutrients be stored in your
body's metabolic reserve. Using Health Kinesiology techniques — we
can monitor this process, constantly evaluating your progress
and determining where your supplements are being used.
As each stage
of the repair process occurs and you become healthier and healthier,
your supplement requirements will drop. As reserves of a given
substance are built up in the body, that supplement requirement
may be completely eliminated. Certain supplements, however, will
probably never drop out completely because these substances are
so widely deficient in our diet – for example, vitamins A and
C, or minerals such as calcium, or manganese.
Your Body's
Priority System
Your body has
a system of priorities that determine where your nutritional
intake and metabolic reserve are to be used. As we saw in the
example of scurvy above, the body will tear down tissue to meet
its immediate nutrient needs when the metabolic reserve has been
depleted. One reason why the body is seemingly able to handle
nutritional abuse so well is that it is able to shuffle substances
around to keep the most vital organs functioning at the expense
of the less important ones. This is governed by your body's priority
system. Less important tissues might include your teeth, or your
joints. You may experience problems in these areas as your body “borrows” needed
nutrients to keep more important organs, such as your brain,
your heart, and your lungs, functioning properly. Various peripheral
symptoms indicate this process is occurring.
Degenerative,
non-infectious diseases have been increasing rapidly throughout
this century, because our bodies are not being supplied with
enough of the nutrients they require. An arthritic joint isn't
as life threatening as an unreliably functioning heart, and so
people may develop arthritis as their bodies assign priorities
to the nutrients that are in short supply.
This is why
heart disease responds so spectacularly to proper nutritional
programs. The body assigns very high priority to cardiovascular
functioning, and so as soon as you begin supplying proper nutrients
to the body, they are used where they are most critically needed,
and the heart problem is repaired very quickly.
How Health
Kinesiology Determines Your Body's Priorities
One of the
great powers of the muscle testing techniques of Health Kinesiology
or Applied Kinesiology, is that they allow us to utilize the
body's own priority system to optimize what we do for the body.
We can determine what is the single most important thing that
the body requires right now, what is the second most important
thing, and so on. By this means, we can always give the body
what it wants most at any given time in order to meet its most
immediate needs. This helps to account for the phenomenal results
that can be achieved by using these energy techniques.
As an example,
suppose you go to a chiropractor for an adjustment, but after
a while your problem returns. You may go back and get it corrected
again, and then again. The reason that the adjustment doesn't
hold is that your body has a higher priority need which must
be met before your joint problem can be corrected. We can determine
through muscle testing what your most immediate priority need
is. Once that need is determined and the proper correction given,
your problem can stay fixed. For example, if the knee alignment
is the real cause of a back problem, no amount of back adjustment
will permanently correct the problem. Only when the knee is corrected
will the compensations from the back be correctable. When problems
are corrected within your body's own priority system, they will
stay fixed unless the unbalancing situation re-occurs. Eventually,
you may reach the point where even in the face of this unbalancing
event you will be able to stay balanced. For example, as we have
shown in a previous article, through Health Kinesiology techniques
we can retune your body's energy so that you are no longer disturbed
when exposed to formerly allergic foods.
Using Health
Kinesiology to Distinguish Trouble - Some Influences
It is not only
physical factors that can unbalance your body's energy. Muscle
testing techniques enable us to identify disturbing influences
that are both physical and nonphysical, and to determine which
of these areas represents your body's highest priority at any
given time.
I have identified
a number of categories of physical factors where problems can
occur. These include (a partial list) (1) exercise and rest;
(2) structural problems; (3) proper nutrition and diet; (4) allergy
intolerance; (5) body position memory (a tendency for problems
such as injuries to recur when your body is in a particular position);
and (6) miscellaneous factors such as the electrical currents
produced by metal fillings in the teeth. I have also identified
many different psychological factors which work within your body's
priority system. Briefly, these factors include emotional, mental,
behavioral, spiritual, intellectual, and psycho-physiological
functions. All these categories have precise definitions which
are beyond the scope of this article.
A final category
of problems which I call Energy Blockages, cuts across some of
the other categories, and is related to the flow of energy through
the body's tissues. A whole range of problems may result from
blockages of this energy as this blockage interferes with the
metabolism of specific nutrients within specific tissues. Allergy
is actually a special form of energy blockage. Many times when
an injury fails to properly heal, even after years, it is due
to this type of energy blockage. Pain, phantom limb sensations,
many toxic chemicals, and the like are also included here. By
using Health Kinesiology techniques, I am able to determine which
of these possible problem areas represents your body's most immediate
priority need, and we can then go on to correct that problem.
For example, we may determine that it is now time to figure out
how much exercise is proper for you, and next we may need to
work on an emotional energy disturbance. Then it may be time
for a chiropractor to adjust your back, and time to determine
your optimum diet. Everything is done in order of priority, and
in the sequence in which the body is best able to benefit from
these corrections. Using your body's own energy system to determine
its immediate needs, we are able to get the energy flowing properly
and in balance, so that you become integrated and can function
at your highest level of capability.
|
