The Biggest Health Block I See Every Day
This is something I see every single day with clients. They can't understand why they are feeling so tired, cranky, bloated, etc when they are often taking nutritional supplements, drinking water, exercising & supposedly 'being healthy'.
It's FOOD. Or more correctly - food your body is sensitive too.
Now this can be different for each person. Some people will thrive on raw milk for example & for others it will be one of the biggest factors keeping them from getting better.
Just last week I had a client who had recurrent tonsillitis as a child, eczema and now has severe chronic constipation with fatigue and occasional headaches. Looking at the history & symptoms I was pretty confident there would be a dairy sensitivity but to what extent I wasn't sure until testing.
Unfortunately it turned out that even raw milk was not good in this case & yet they had been told that raw milk is healthy & people can tolerate it better than the homogenized milk.
Soy is one of the most common foods that trips people up. Soy flour is now in so many products that it has become the number 1 ingredient I find people overlook. Of course not everyone will be super sensitive but for those that are (& there are many) it will quite often stop their progress.
I have seen this in many cases but one in particular comes to mind with a breastfed baby with eczema who was sensitive to wheat & soy. The mum cut out these foods from her diet (or so she thought) but no progress was made until we discovered the gluten free bread she had switched too has soy flour in it.
Most commercial breads & other processed foods containing wheat have soy flour in them & unfortunately a lot of gluten free products do to.
Venerdi's, Dovedale & a few other Gluten free brands have soy free choices.
If you have been trying to loose weight & have fluid retention as well, you may have a food sensitivity preventing you from achieving your goal. The body will store toxins in the fat away from your vital organs in an effort to protect you. I have seen 'cankles' & other areas of fluid retention decrease significantly when a food sensitivity is identified & removed from the diet. Of course there can be many other reasons for these conditions too.
The older you are & the longer you have been eating foods to which you are sensitive the more likely it will be that you will have developed other health issues due to the inflammation in the gut.
If you develop constipation then the food sits in the bowel rotting & in effect is self poisoning. This is why headaches, arthritis, skin issues quite often are associated with gut issues too, the bowel toxins get reabsorbed into the blood, overwhelm the livers capacity to detoxify these toxins & then depending on what your underlying health weaknesses are you see all sorts of symptoms appear.
Some people get diarrhea instead as the body attempts to rid itself of the food that it is sensitive to. These people quite often develop nutritional deficiencies also as the food isn't in their system long enough to extract sufficient nutrients.
Either way the intestinal lining becomes inflamed, irritated & this can move right up to the upper digestive system so you can experience reflux, heartburn, poor dental health including receding gums, bad breath, ulcers & tooth decay.
If you are not sure what foods you might be sensitive too then book in for a Food Sensitivity Test which covers the main food allergens.
Otherwise try & limit the amount of processed foods you eat as this will eliminated a lot of food additives, try sourdough bread as it is much more digestible & choose butter & pasteurised (or raw ) only milk. Avoid soy unless you know you can tolerate it or it is fermented like good quality soy sauce.