3 biggest ‘invisible stressors’ that can damage your health

How to finally stop yo-yo dieting and focus on repairing your body.

I want to help you understand what’s the root cause of your health issues: low energy, exhaustion, tired but wired, bloating, low moods, brain fog, sugar cravings, disrupted sleep, and weight and other health problems.

Understanding how your body works helps you put into action what helps you get healthy again. Instead of going on a diet, you may need to rebalance your hormones. In order to lose weight, you may need to lower your insulin with food and nutrition, and regulating your stress, rather than 'cutting' calories. In order to fight your fatigue, you may need to get your nervous system into balance. Dieting so often oversimplifies what's happening in our body and that's why it has the ability to epically fail us.

Understanding the root causes helps you to stop searching for endless diets, go through yo-yo dieting, and feeling like nothing’s working for you or that there is something wrong with you.

If your body isn’t shedding weight despite you eating healthily and exercising, you may have an underlying problem with insulin, your thyroid, nervous system, chronic stress, liver function, the gut, and most likely poor digestion. This will need rebalancing so that your body can work well, you can feel healthier and younger, and shed the weight if that's what you desire.

Even when your body is sick, it’s doing the 'right' thing. It’s only trying to rebalance what’s not working and it’s trying to send you signals that some things needs attention. 

So, are you paying attention? Are you listening?

Identifying and removing 'invisible' chronic stressors is the fastest way to regain your energy, rebuild your immunity, and restore your body and brain to full health.

The three invisible chronic stressors that impact your health but are hard to see, are:

1.    Nutritional neglect

2.    Digestive issues

3.    Toxic overload

There are other chronic stressors such as mental and emotional stress that are also damaging, and I will address these in a separate article.

The solutions lie in your everyday lifestyle. You have choice and agency over this. 

1. NUTRITIONAL NEGLECT

You get enough calories through food but neglect your nutritional needs because you either don’t know what your nutritional needs are, or you don’t have the time for it and so can’t prioritise it.

I don't believe that you are neglecting your nutritional needs on purpose - I see it all the time with my lady clients: once they experience what food and right supplementation does for their body and brain, they never want to go back again because they feel so much better.

Living under constant stress depletes our body even faster and deeper, and our need for better nutrition becomes even greater.

Nutritional depletion is a huge problem and can only be repaired by learning how to eat and understanding your nutritional needs when you're working hard and are under constant stress and pressure. Your body transforms the way it works and your entire health improves when you have proper nutrition.

A balanced and a highly nutritious whole foods diet, combined with high quality supplementation of certain minerals and vitamins can bring your health back. The right amount and type of proteins from high quality meat, complex carbohydrates and healthy fats is what your body needs to have the energy and longevity. It’s also about the bioavailability of nutrients in the food you are eating and not just relying on supplements.

This will help balance your hormones, rebuild your immunity, and rejuvenate your brain. and it's is often the first step in the physical and brain health recovery.

2. DIGESTIVE ISSUES

85% of all disease starts in the digestive system. All the health symptoms that you have will be rooted in a weak digestion.

This is one of the biggest 'invisible' stressors. Even people who are suffering from bloating and digestive issues do not understand how important it is to strengthen their digestion – fix it, heal it, correct it – whatever you want to call it, so that they can eat all types of foods and benefit from the nutrition in the food and supplements.

It's not just about cutting out the foods that give you sensitivity or irritation. That can be such a difficult thing to do and I see it with women who are lost in what they can and can't eat because so many foods seem to irritate them. That's no way to live and it's a miserable existence when you have to spend so much of your focus and energy on eating with restrictions like this.

Cutting out foods can certainly help to relieve the symptoms but very often this is confused with sorting the problem out. Cutting out foods and entire food groups doesn’t solve the underlying problems of weakness in the digestive system. And this shows when other health issues remain because the body is unable to break down the toxins that enter it.

Cutting out gluten, wheat, grains, nightshades, or legumes should never be a longer-term solution. Because you are still left with weakness in the digestive system which makes you vulnerable to the other toxins that we breath in and ingest from our air, water and food. We have an inbuilt detoxification system in our body that helps us eliminate these toxins out of the body, but that detox system is part of the digestive system – namely the lymphatic system. So a strong digestion means strong detoxification process happening in the body.

Congested lymph bring a host of problems in the body that we see as symptoms or illness and decongesting the lymphatic system and reactivating it hugely important. Most detoxes out there do not focus on this part at all. So while you may feel better after a off-the-shelf detox, you won't have solved the problem of the weakness in the digestion and detoxification pathways remain clogged up.

The focus has to be on repairing the digestive system and cleansing the lymphs so that you can get rid of the tiredness, lethargy, food coma, bloating and water retention that’s associated with the poor digestive system.

Also, 70% of our immune system lies in our gut. Our gut is part of the digestive system – and without a balanced microbiome which we get from a healthy balanced diet and the right kind of fibre and probiotics, we won’t be healthy.

We need to stop obsessing about cutting out these harder-to-digest foods as a holy grail to solving the digestive problems and focus on the healing of the digestive system which can be done with a targeted programme that regenerates health. It's really important that it is not aggressive but is kind and gentle on the digestive system. So that our body can receive the signals from the bugs in the gut (out second brain) and so that our body can benefit fully from an increased nutrition that we’re consuming.

Resetting the digestive system starts with the mouth microbiome, the stomach acidity, liver bile, gallbladder and pancreas, intestinal lining, gut bacteria and of course, the lymphatic system.

The foods that we should be obsessed about eliminating because they truly are toxic to our body are:

-      Refined sugar and carbs

-      Vegetable oils

-      Processed meat

-      Alcohol and caffeine (in disproportionate amounts)

3. TOXIC OVERLOAD

There are 85,000 toxic chemicals in use these days that are in our air, water and soil that enter the food we eat. Plus: medication, anti-biotics, caffeine and alcohol (inadequate amounts), sugar, vegetable oils and other factory-produced artificial 'food' like substances are toxins that our body has to eliminate. It’s a lot of toxicity whether we are aware of it or not. Most of us are utterly unaware about what this does to the body that can't break down the toxins properly because of the weakness in the digestion, and inability to absorb nutrition.

Do you see why we need a robust digestive system? To break down and eliminate all these toxins and chemical out of the system. Undigested toxins enter out brain, and get stored in the fat tissue and the liver.

Eating more soluble fibre is important (soft fibre which is gentle on the intestines). Flaxseeds and chia seeds are excellent. Fibre takes the toxins out of the body. As an example: drinking the so-called ‘ABC’ smoothie juice drink: Apple, Beetroot and Celery combined is a great way to help the liver clean up.

Leafy green vegetables are great as bile movers, as well as artichokes, turmeric for liver and gallbladder cleansing. Extra virgin olive oil (EVVO) is great for bile and also for the good bugs in the gut. They love the healthy fats and EVVO.

In the spring, our body requires more alkaline foods to cleanse after the heavier winter months. These foods are perfect to repair the digestive system so eating seasonally as much as possible will do so much for your body.

And for the lymphatic system, red foods are great and red berries such as pomegranates, cranberries which are full of polyphenols and anti-oxidants. 

SUMMARY

So can you see how it’s not just about dieting or the next exercise regime? How the body needs to heal first to repair its processes and the fastest way to do that is to understand the 'invisible' chronic stressors and to remove them out of the body.

Everything that you do has an effect on your health: either in a positive way or in a negative way. That’s why it’s a bit more complex than just your diet or losing weight. Eliminating things that are chronic stressors is the fastest way to regain your health – when your body is healthy, it sheds the excess weight naturally.