Missed factors – nutritional imbalance and toxicity
Where there is physical dysfunction there is often some type of physical imbalance. Often your medical practitioner will not look to see if you have a nutritional imbalance because when questioned you will say that you eat healthy foods and therefore that aspect should not be causing a problem. This is a false assumption for several reasons.
People often say they eat healthy foods but actually don’t.
People eat foods from a particular part of the food spectrum which means they may have a vitamin or mineral imbalance. For example vegans may eat healthy foods but be missing sufficient protein and this can also be the case with vegetarians. As a result they are lacking in certain vitamins (like B12) and minerals.
Those who eat meat may be having it in moderation but what they have is high in fats.
Excess sugar in the diet is often difficult to detect when foods are advertised as being good for you and containing x% of your daily requirements of particular vitamins and minerals. Excess sugar can lead to higher levels of inflammation in the body.
You can also eat healthily but then consume too much coffee or alcohol thereby depleting your body of water soluble vitamins (B & C) and mineral (zinc & magnesium).
Blood tests for minerals are not particularly accurate because minerals sequester themselves in the tissue and come out into the blood to keep it in balance. Therefore you may have low or high tissue levels of a mineral but this is not detected. Generally vitamins and minerals work at the cellular level not in the blood. Mineral imbalances can be a major factor in cellular dysfunction.
The body’s ability to clear toxic metals and chemicals is impaired by vitamin and mineral imbalances and stress. Again these may not be detected in a blood test because they are in the tissue not the blood.
The Effects of Accumulated Stress
From the moment we are born we are accumulating information about our environment and interpreting that information. Everything that happens to us and our emotional responses is stored in our unconscious mind. Not only our emotional responses but our mental constructs (beliefs) which follow the event or emotional response. Think about your unconscious mind as like a huge caldron which gradually fills over your life time. The higher the stress levels the quicker it fills. The conscious mind is about the size of a twenty cent piece in comparison to the unconscious mind. The conscious mind cannot access all at once the information in the unconscious mind. Think of your unconscious mind as being a large protector scanning the environment looking for threats and matching up information it has stored away to your current situation. Often you have reacted to a situation without thinking. This is your unconscious mind at work. Even if the situation you are presented with doesn’t exactly match something from your past your unconscious mind fills in the blanks.
When confronted each day by the same stresses we start to fill that caldron very fast. When it overflows it affects our energy system. Your thoughts and feelings do not, in my view, live the neurons in your brain. They certainly affect them. They inhabit the energetic aspect of you and they affect that aspect which then affects physical function. For example if you have a lot of worry and anxiety, difficulties in communicating your views and also have a belief about yourself that your work performance is never quite good enough it is likely you will develop (among other things) right sided low back pain with one leg shorter than the other. This is because the caldron which is your subconscious mind will spill the energy into the kidney (worry), large intestine (worth and value) and small intestine (communicating the essence of self) meridians among others. Muscle associated with these meridians are hip stabilizers. Digestive issues may add to the problem.
Some of your issues will be in your head – it happens to everyone
When people say to someone “it’s all in your head” it carries the connotation that the person is at best unstable emotionally or mentally and at worse they have significant mental issues. This statement has a certain stigma attached to it. There is no doubt that some people do have mental health problems. However, everyone has something happening in their head that affects their function. When you have stress whether physical, emotional, mental or spiritual it affects the physical function of the body. That is because it affects the energetic body which then affects the physical. So part of just about every health issue is happening between our ears.
Perceptions of our environment drive our function
Just about every aspect of our physiology (function) is affected by our perception of our environment. We perceive a threat (like a deadline I just have to meet at work otherwise the boss is going to have an explosion) and our limbic system immediately fires off a message to the hypothalamus (master gland) which sends a signal via the nervous system to the adrenal medulla to produce adrenaline. All that and much more is happening just because of our perception of the environment and our unconscious reaction to the stress. That reaction is happening without our conscious thought. So much of your life is conducted in this manner. We think we are thinking but we are actually reacting and our unconscious mind is in the driver’s seat not our conscious mind.
Kinesiology can help you identify nutritional imbalances and to start emptying the cauldron which is your unconscious mind. It can also help you identify the stress triggers and the automatic reactions you have to situations you confront regularly in your life. Understanding these triggers can put your conscious mind back behind the wheel and reduce your stress levels.