Blood Sugar and Stress

According to the National Center for Health Statistics:
• One third of all adult Americans are obese (20% above your ideal body weight).
• The average weight of young American adults increased 10 pounds in seven years.
• 21% of American children are overweight (15% increase since 1980).
• Over 20% of youths 6-17 years old are obese.
• 71% of Americans age 25 and over are overweight (up from 58% in 1983).

The failure to address these specific health problems has contributed to the steep rise in health care costs. According to government studies, obesity-related conditions are costing over $100 billion a year and causing 300,000 premature deaths in America per year. The U.S. Surgeon General’s report on nutrition and health states that about 35 million Americans have serious health problems related to being overweight. Obesity dramatically increases the risk of developing heart disease (baby boomers are beginning to suffer heart attacks, driving up cardiovascular deaths for the first time since 1980, according to the American Heart Association). Obesity increases the risks of diabetes, high blood pressure and digestive and pulmonary diseases.

Everyone wants to lose weight but people are inundated with conflicting, often misleading, but above all, unstructured information about how to lose weight. There are answers and they all have to do with understanding metabolic stress. It has everything to do with becoming healthy and reducing the total amount of stress on your system. Let’s look at one kind of metabolic stress.

Blood sugar regulation is one of the most critical problems associated with metabolic stress. What does it really mean? Your body makes insulin to help you regulate the sugars you eat. Here is how it works:

Hypoglycemia. People with low blood sugar can be extremely sensitive to insulin. Sugar is quickly pulled out of the blood and either stored as fat or made into energy. Unless these people can compensate for this sugar imbalance they will have extremely low blood and brain sugar levels. There are literally no limits to the physical, mental and emotional hypoglycemic symptoms these people experience.

People are not sensitive to insulin. They produce tremendous amounts of insulin in a desperate attempt to push the sugar out of the blood into the tissues, but to no avail. The chronically high levels of insulin levels of these people set off a chain of reactions. One is Adult Onset Diabetes. Liver function goes way down, blood pressure goes way up, hormone systems are not efficient and the person begins to age prematurely because of this stress.

Now the body functions poorly. Stressfully. This metabolic stress causes overload on the entire system. You have to change the imbalances.

What do you do? Start by cleaning up your diet. I mean CLEAN it up. Stop eating junk. You must realize that 75%-90% of your diet has to be raw. Yes, out of the garden. There’s a whole other world out there. The majority of your groceries have to come from the produce section of the market. If you can get your food at a local farmer’s market, even better. Eating for health has to become a priority. Eating for pleasure has to disappear.

Metabolic stress is just one of the six major stresses that you have. It is a major one nonetheless. So let’s make it a priority this year because you have five more to go to clear out to become healthy.
By Dr Peter Lind