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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.
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