DRUNK ON SUGAR?

Can It Really Happen?

Did you ever dream it was possible to get drunk on sugar or too many carbs? One woman did. Just before this last Christmas she was arrested for DWI, but she had not been drinking. The charges were dismissed because it was proven that she had a syndrome that “causes substances in the gut to ferment food into ethanol, thereby causing a person’s blood-alcohol level to spike. While the story of food-turning-to-alcohol in the body may seem like a convenient tale for the police, doctors have found the rare condition in multiple patients.” Dr. Richard Peek told ABC News. “When [yeast] ingest a meal that has a high amount of carbohydrates, they metabolize the carbohydrates into ethanol.”

Do You Want to Be Healed?

There are many reasons why we get sick. Harmful emotions caused by hurtful situations can cause us to end up in a state of dis-ease. Stress is a “killer” for sue. But poor diet, toxins, lack of exercise, and lack of nutrients are among the top causes of disease.

At least one major study, conducted in the 1990s, found that 40% and possibly as high as 47% of deaths in the United States were caused by behavior patterns (diet, lack of exercise, tobacco, alcohol, etc.) meaning they could have been prevented.1 “At least 70 percent of health care spending is related to lifestyle,” The Milken Institute Review reported last year. “While genes cause or contribute to some disease, our excess weight, tobacco use and poor exercise habits are far more damaging,” the publication noted.2 The American Journal of Medicine reported in 2007 that more than 62% of all bankruptcies in the United States stemmed directly from medical debts or the loss of income due to illness.3

If you want to turn your health, your energy, your life around, it’s time to do something different. Albert Einstein said, ”Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Your life is priceless! What are you doing to protect your health or turn your health around?

Juicing, cleansing your body, learning new ways of eating, exercising, and de-stressing are all important components of healing and a healthy lifestyle.

Notes:

Poor Diets, Little Exercise Leading Cause of Preventable Illness and Death – Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (June 2004).
Health Reform – The Milken Institute (First Quarter 2010) By Michael Milken.
Medical Bankruptcy in the United States, 2007: Results of a National Study – By David U. Himmelstein, MD; Deborah Thorne, PhD; Elizabeth Warren, JD; and Steffie Woolhandler, MD, MPH.

Food Cravings & R-Brain

Cravings and food addictions may have a lot to do with your brain. The “R-brain” or reptilian brain, as Dr. Paul MacLean has called it, is the primitive brain.1 It drives your fundamental need for food and survival. It must be controlled or it will control you. It doesn’t learn from mistakes and will take control of your behavior if you allow it, like a tech can take control of your computer to fix it. There is also the limbic system, or emotional brain. It’s what makes you feel what you do when you are exposed to certain stimuli. Outside influences can trigger this system. It creates chemicals that connect your memory to certain triggers. For example, seeing an ice cream cone picture can cause you to want that treat before your reasoning mind can give you rational input. The picture tapped into emotions that may go way back to childhood. You don’t know why you “have to have” that ice cream, but your brain releases chemicals that motivate you past reason.

We are wired for creating pleasure and avoiding pain as much as possible. This emotional part of the brain is responsible for controlling a lot of our behavior steering us toward pleasure. The neocortex, or “thinking brain” is our reasoning part of the brain. It can easily be overridden by the other two parts of the brain—survival and emotions. Understanding your emotional triggers and how they connect with the survival R-brain is very important to overcoming cravings that are prompted by emotions and the need to survive. Then you have a major set up for overeating or eating the wrong foods that adversely affect your health but give you pleasure. Food is a very powerful trigger. It’s built into our brain to keep us alive. If we did not have that desire to eat, we’d die. Letting go of known and buried emotions and memories is a key to letting go of cravings and food addictions.

Do you have feelings “buried alive” that are manifesting in your life? It’s time to let them go. There is hope. You don’t have to be a slave to your reptilian brain. You can learn to engage your frontal lobes, and be a rational thinker. You can make choices that are healthy and life-giving.

My husband, Fr. John, who is a psychotherapist and behavioral medicine consultant, teaches two excellent classes at our Juice & Raw Foods Retreats —Emotional Detox and Mental Detox — that have helped many people get free of long-standing emotions and thoughts that have held them captive and addicted. We partner his classes and exercises with the raw foods diet and three days of juice fasting, which makes it much easier to ditch the emotions and memories that may have plagued people for years.

Notes

1 http://www.eruptingmind.com/beating-the-reptilian-brain/

food addiction

DRUNK ON SUGAR?

Can It Really Happen?