hit a brick wall!!! ???

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Don Bennett on June 10, 2011 at 1:00pm

.
Mandy,

It's important to realize that when making dramatic changes in lifestyle practices, changes that allow the body to start doing some major overhauls, housecleaning, and repairing, often we can feel worse before feeling better (much, much, much better). This is one of the "humps" that you must get over.

Two of the "reasons for not succeeding" in my recent newsletter article are thinking that what are actually symptoms of detox are a sign that all is not going well and not giving healing and health restoration enough time.

What you are experiencing probably makes you feel like resting. If that's how you feel, that's what you should do. When trying to regain lost health and vitality (even if you didn't think you've lost any), some important tools are learning what the body can tell you, learning what it is and isn't saying, and then listening to your body.

Another huge tool is respecting your body. If your body is saying "rest" and you start talking back to it saying how you can't rest because you've got to go to work or school and can't miss any days etc., your body is not going to reply, "Oh, I understand, okay, I'll get it done without your cooperation somehow, don't worry." The things it needs are non-negotiable. If it wants you to eat lightly or stop eating all together, it doesn't care that you're being told to eat X number of calories a day. If it wants you to rest, it doesn't care that you want to exercise every day. So if the program you're following is not in sync with what your body wants, the gains you're seeking cannot manifest.

So my advice is to give it time. If your body is in any kind of ill-health, it didn't get that way overnight, so resolving that lack of robust health will not happen overnight either. Also, if you are tired, rest, and certainly don't push yourself to exercise if you really don't feel like doing so, for this is counterproductive (if you're eating enough carbs, a reduced exercise tolerance is a sign that you need to rest). So patience and respect are key.

You may experience any one of a number of symptoms of detox in the beginning. And sometimes if you push yourself, detox is prolonged. It's best to get it over with in a timely manner. One thing that will stall and/or prolong detox is doing more digestion than is warranted. If you're eating more food than your body wants, this diverts precious nerve energy away from the healing/repairing/rebalancing process.

So be of good cheer (seriously), keep in the forefront of your thoughts that you are on the right path, even though this part of the road can be bumpy sometimes. Think about how it'll be once you get past this part of the road to the part where it's smooth and all downhill.
.

Permalink Reply by mandy mandarine <3 on June 10, 2011 at 1:21pm

i do agree wiht this.. and it makes sense

but why is it that freelee and DR say to eat 3000cal + and if u feel unenergised to eat more fruit!

ur information kind of contradicts with what they are saying...

Permalink Reply by Don Bennett on June 10, 2011 at 2:41pm

.
What can sometimes happen when someone is new to a LFRV diet, is they don't eat enough food. This is because the (unhealthy) diet they were eating was a diet of calorically dense foods (low water content, high fat / high complex carbs). Then when switching to a diet of healthy foods, the "calories per bit" goes down. This is because fruit is a high water content food. So if the person tends to eat the same volume of food as before, they'll get less calories. Now, this is fine if the person has some weight to lose, but once they are at their ideal weight, undereating on calories will lead to unwanted weight lose, and can result in lowered energy levels. Since this is a common occurrence, you will hear a lot about "eating more fruit".

But obviously this is not your situation. You appeared not to be undereating. So I'm sure you can see that eating even more food is not the answer in this case. This is where a thorough understanding of what can happen when you make dramatic changes in your diet comes in handy. And because of all the known problems with an animal and grain based diet, and all the conflicting dietary information, diet tends to get a lot of focus when decisions are made to improve health. But diet is just one spoke in the wheel of health. If you are not paying equal attention to all the other equally important requirements of robust health, it is physiologically impossible to be as healthy as you are capable of being.

Plus, keep in mind that the caloric requirements of someone who maintains an "athletic" level of activity - like DR - is going to be far more than someone who is sedentary. And if your level of activity is more than sedentary and less than "athletic" (i.e. "active") your caloric requirements will be somewhere in between. But this is assuming your body wants you to be active. If it wants you to dial yourself down so that you require less calories, so that you eat less, so that more nerve energy can be available for much needed housecleaning and repair because there's less digestion to do, and you don't heed your body's need for rest, this is very "unbalancing" to say the least.

If your body is having a hard time dealing with a hard-to-deal-with bacterial pathogen, the body will raise its temperature (called a fever) to make it easier to eradicate the bad bacteria. You know what happens if you eat something when running a 104 degree temperature, right? Your body has to make a choice: stop the fight against the bacteria so that enough nerve energy can be available for digestion, OR continue the fight and no digestion. But if the food remains in your stomach and isn't acted upon by the body, and doesn't go anywhere, it will start to rot/ferment and you could die of food poisoning. So if the body decides to continue the fight (and it most certainly would if the fight was serious enough for you to have a fever), it will toss that food back out.

I mention this scenario to show what can happen when the body doesn't make you hungry, and you eat anyway. But this was a very serious situation where the body would not tolerate any food/digestion. In scenarios where the body would like a rest to deal with something it would like to take care of (but not life-threatening), and it doesn't make you hungry so you won't eat as often or at all, but you've been eating X number of calories hungry or not, and you continue the practice, the body has that same choice to make. But since what it's trying to accomplish is not that serious, rather than throw the food back up, it chooses to stop the work it was doing and digest the food you ate, and it'll try again later to continue its work. This is obviously very disruptive of the healing process.

This is why it's good to know about how the body deals with health restoration so you can make educated decisions about what to do. I've found that it's best to do what the body wants. But to do this, you need to know what's going on, or you need to follow the advice of someone who knows what's going on. If you try to behave according to something you gleaned from the mountains of information on the internet regarding the adoption of a healthier diet, and you either misunderstood some correct information, or correctly followed some incorrect information, it could derail your health creation efforts, or at the very least, make things more difficult than they have to be.
.

Permalink Reply by Aysel on June 11, 2011 at 5:41am

Hi Amanda,

 

Hang on there, I am in the same situation now. This is the detox part and I agree with Don. 

Just keep going on! You can try to drink 3l of water instead of 2l. 

 

 

Permalink Reply by Don Bennett on June 15, 2011 at 7:52am

.
Summer, not having a history from you, I'll have to answer in general terms. When your body needs to deal with something semi-serious or especially serious, it needs a lot of "nerve energy" for the task. Digestion is the most energy intensive process we have (see this video), so if your body wants you to rest for that reason, it will usually dial down your hunger. Of course if you're eating ahead of hunger, you won't be aware of this.

But if your body wants you to rest simply because of over-work, you'll probably still get hungry.

An interesting article to read about caloric needs is here. It should help answer your questions. If it doesn't, post back here.
.

Permalink Reply by Don Bennett on June 15, 2011 at 11:52am

.
Summer, glad you liked the article.

A lot of times the problem with weight loss isn't eating when hungry (because that's always good to do), it's eating too much during the meal. That's why not only is it a good idea to be aware of hunger, but it's good to also listen for the STOP sign. And logic dictates that it's better to stop a little too soon rather than later when trying to lose weight. If you don't eat enough you will simply get hungry again sooner. But if you overeat, it can make it more difficult to lose weight, and it will cut down the variety in your diet (less meals during the month).

Even though you are getting more in touch with your body re: diet, it still might be educational for you to log what you eat for a week at a time to look at average daily calories consumed and the ever important ratio of carbs-to-fats-to-protein (as an average for the week; daily readings are meaningless). You could then correlate your intake with your weight loss to look for correlations both good and not so good.
.

Permalink Reply by Noodles on June 18, 2011 at 12:00pm

Hi Mandy,

      I’m on my third week on this 811 diet and had a similar experience with my energy level dropping. Just recently, I added salt to my salad and felt like my energy had increase.

     I’m hoping that Don Bennett would drop in again to determine if someone on the 811 diet would need a sufficient amount of sodium in their diet to maintain their energy level.

Permalink Reply by Don Bennett on June 19, 2011 at 1:34am

.
Noodles, while you didn't mention how you were adding salt to your diet, I should say that even if you need some additional sodium, table salt has poisonous qualities and should be avoided like the plague. And there is a huge difference between the inorganic form of sodium, sodium chloride (as in table salt) and the organic form of sodium found in the fruits and veggies we eat. If you actually had to add salt to your diet (which is unlikely) you'd be better off making celery salt (dehydrated celery made into a powder that is then added to food).

An explanation of the added salt's effect can be this: Anything that is ingested that "ramps up" the body in an effort to deal with the item's negative effects can make someone who is currently not in optimal health feel "better". This is known as a stimulatory effect. If this item is ingested when the person has robust health, they will feel worse. A family member of mine used to love dipping his sushi in wasabi mustard because of how it made him feel, even though his body didn't like it at all. As a teen, I loved riding the roller coaster because it made me feel "great", but it was a form of the stimulatory effect. Now that my vitality is very high, I discovered that the same coaster ride is overwhelming, and I did not enjoy it at all. This illustrates how relative it can be.

There are many reasons for an energy level that drops when someone makes positive, health-enhancing changes to their lifestyle, especially dietary ones. Some of the reasons indicate that the person is doing something un-right and needs to correct this (like not getting enough calories), but a reason for a drop in energy levels can be appropriate (stepped up healing warrants maximal nerve energy which requires you to rest and the body dials you down), but if the person misinterprets what is going on and sees this as something to correct, they will just throw themselves out of balance and handicap healing/rebalancing.

Another factor for a drop in energy can be when someone stops eating processed foods that were fortified with certain nutrients, and starts eating an all natural diet of foods that are lacking in some of the nutrients that they had been getting via fortification (because of poor soil quality and/or early harvesting and/or long delivery/storage times). If you're being active enough which warrants eating a normal amount of food, which will supply you with more nutrients than if you're a couch potato eating a lot less food, this can help prevent this. But I have found that nutritional supplementation can also help when nothing else does.

For starters, I would ask, what was it that made you add salt? And were you also experiencing any irritability, headaches, water retention, or loss of appetite? (All signs of insufficient sodium.)

It's true that foods that are good sources of natural sodium, like tomatoes and celery, won't be good sources if the soil they are grown in is sodium insufficient. Sodium is one of the nutrients that significantly affects the taste of these foods. I recently got to try some home grown tomatoes that were grown in super nutritious soil, and these were the best home grown tomatoes I've ever tasted. So when eating celery and tomatoes, be picky; try to find ones that taste really good, even if you have to go out of your way to get them.

One of the reasons a sodium test can show insufficient sodium is not because you're not getting enough, but because you're drinking too much water (hyponatremia). Too much physical activity, especially in hot weather, can also unbalance sodium levels because you'll either be under-hydrated or will be drinking more water than you would if you were being appropriately active. So be mindful of these issues.

Bottom line: If you are living in a health-enhancing manner, it should not be necessary to supplement your diet with sodium. And energy levels during transitioning are affected by many factors, least of which is a low sodium level.
.

Permalink Reply by Noodles on June 19, 2011 at 6:23am

Hi Don

   

Thank you for the detail response and to answer your question regarding on what made me decided to add salt to my diet. Well during the second week on the lfvd, I did some research on why my energy level was dropping. I happened to came across a response from a forum (can’t remember the name of the site) that he or she added salt to their diet which helped them restore their energy. However, like you said, there could have been many factors that could have contributed to my lower energy level such as not enough calories.

Like always Don, thank you again for the information. I hope to continue to learn more from you and the others in order to become more knowledgeable.