When blood sugar is more than just sugar - all stress summates
After working as a personal trainer I found myself sicker than I have (hopefully ever will) been in my life (read my story here) and I searched for a more holistic look at health and fitness thru the Chek Institute in the USA. Two things really stuck with me still: one is the Chek totem pole and all the ‘ways in’ health can have in our bodies and the other is that all stress summates. It’s the latter that we’re talking about now, especially mid Sugar Intervention.
When you’re stressed, your brain’s adrenal medulla releases a cascade of stress hormones that flood your body within seconds. These stimulate your SNS (sympathetic nervous system, otherwise referred to as fight or flight system), which rapidly redirects the blood from your organs to your muscles so you can defend yourself or run.
This leaves your organs without adequate blood for nourishment, and it reduces the amount of available oxygen to them too.
As your body reacts to stressors, the natural wave-like movements of the organs are greatly reduced, which all but stops digestion and elimination. The body is designed to cope with this only for a short time. Yet we all live in a ready set world and never really go … (but that’s got another post).
It’s at this juncture where the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS), often referred to as the “rest, digest and eliminate” functions that help your body accumulate energy, become affected.
Not surprisingly, chronic stress leads to an inability to digest and eliminate food, quickly triggering an energy deficit.
The result: A dirty, clogged-up organ system in which you can’t acquire enough energy from food, nor can you effectively eliminate waste.
Yet stress can be either positive or negative. Positive stress is a product of activities and situations we choose to become involved in because we enjoy them, and find them challenging in a rewarding way. It stress strengthens us and drives us forward in life. Negative stresses are those which are imposed upon us and which we feel powerless to control. Both can come in the six different forms in the diagram above.
That all stress summates simply means that you body and it’s systems do not differentiate between mental stress from a work deadline, physical stress from a HIIT workout, or chemical stress from processed foods. Stress summates and the total amount of stress has an overall effect on our entire body.
We all need a ‘profit and loss’ statement for our daily stress. A seasonal Sugar Intervention can help you reassess where you’re at in the delicate balancing act, daily meditation, movement and mindset tools like journaling, drawing, writing for no one but you, can help balance all the stress in with some soul growing out!
