Articles for Health and Wellness

Can You Sleep Too Much and Hypoglycemia

People can eat too much, they can drink too much water and they can exercise too much. The reason that they cannot sleep too much is because they cannot control when and if they sleep. The body can only sleep when it needs it. You can try to sleep for 15 hours but you cannot, unless your body needs it. Some people need to sleep 24 hours a day. It is called a coma. I know a guy who was in a car accident and went into a coma for 3 months. That was years ago and he functions almost normally now. When some people are depressed, they will sleep 12 hours per day.

Many people will wake up after sleeping and feel fine. Then they will go back to sleep and wake up and feel bad. So they figure they slept too much. This is like when you stop smoking. You feel really terrible but it is good for you. Hypoglycemia (why I am I changing the subject) is actually rare. Many people will go all day without food and feel sick, dizzy, light headed and so they imagine that their blood sugar has dropped too low. But this is not what is happening. When your body goes too long without food, it goes into a fasting mode. Some will say that it goes into a starvation mode but this does not happen until after it has been in the fasting mode for about 40 days.

In the fasting mode your body is getting rid of toxins at an accelerated rate similar to when you stop smoking or stop taking heroin. Some who stop taking heroin at one time, can die. It is common for someone to have those above symptoms when in the fasting mode. So this happens when you go all day without eating and also when you sleep more than usual. Sleeping accelerates the fasting mode. When you stop your fast, it is called breaking your fast. You fast everyday and break it when you eat break-fast (pronounced brek-fist).

I told a woman, who said that she cannot fast  because she has hypoglycemia, the above. I told her that when the body goes into a fasting mode, the tongue gets coated. She went all day without food and got those symptoms that she thought was hypoglycemia. She looked in the mirror and saw that her tongue was coated so she knew that what I said was right. So she contacted me to let me know that I really know what I am talking about. The way to cure your withdrawal symptoms from smoking is to continue without smoking.

This is how you cure this problem with sleep or going all day without food. You fast. I used to have that problem with feeling bad after going all day without food. Now I can go weeks without food and feel fine. So even though it feels bad, it is good for you when you get plenty of sleep. Many people think that sleeping is waste of time. But it is not. Very important things happen when you are asleep. It is hard to understand this when you do not get the big picture.

The small picture is that you have better things to do. The big picture is someday you will die and not be able to do anything in the physical world. When you are in deep sleep, you visit that non-physical world that you are in all the time but not aware of it. It is similar to the place you go when you die. A sleeping person looks like they are dead, but the difference is that they will wake up. Since you cannot control sleep, most Americans have problems sleeping. They have to do things to let go of their stress so sleep can just happen. It is something that you cannot control, which is why you cannot do it too much.

According to a survey by the National Sleep Foundation in Washington, D.C., 40 percent of Americans are so drowsy during the day that they cannot do their work effectively. If you have trouble sleeping you may want to give up things with caffeine in it. You can try drinking Rooibos tea before going to sleep since this tea helps you to go to sleep. You can try getting exercise during the day, but not right before going to sleep. You can try things that are relaxing like reading, meditation or listening to music.

The Benefits of Fasting

Many people are afraid of not eating. There was a guy who was well known for walking on water, healing the sick and bringing the dead back to life who felt that He needed to fast for 40 days. Whether He did it for Himself or as an example of what others should do, the message is the same. It was also done by Socrates, Plato, Pythagoras, Buddha and Mahatma Gandhi. But fasting is also done by 'dumb' animals.

The New England Journal of Medicine says "Fasting is a valid experience. It can benefit any otherwise healthy person whose calories now have the upper hand in his/her life." Philippus Paracelsus, a Swiss physician and one of the 3 fathers of Western Medicine (including also Hippocrates and Galen), said "Fasting is the greatest remedy-- the physician within." Elson M Haas M.D. says on his website "Fasting is the single greatest healing therapy."

If you fast to long, you can die but if you drink too much water at one time, you can die. The most common problems of modern day people, like being overweight, having trouble sleeping, feeling tired during the day and headaches, are the things that fasting is best for. When people ask about ways to cleanse the body, others will say that you do not need to do anything because the body is always cleansing itself.

This is true but if the toxins are going in at a faster rate than the body can get them out (cleansing), then they will grow larger and larger. This is similar to the two opposite medical processes that take place in the human body called anabolism and catabolism. This is the building up and the breaking down that is constantly taking place in the body. At the same time that the body is cleansing itself, you are eating and bringing in more toxins or creating metabolic waste to use medical jargon (2: the technical terminology or characteristic idiom of a special activity or group).

So when they say that you do not need to do anything to cleanse the body, the quickest way to cleanse the body is to do nothing, meaning to eat nothing, drink water and rest. Fasting gives your body a rest or vacation, especially the liver, digestive and elimination systems. Your body knows how to fast. When you are not using your mouth to bring in food, the body makes it into an organ of elimination. That is why your tongue gets coated while fasting.

Gabriel Cousins, MD, says "I often observe in the fasting participants that by four days of fasting, concentration seems to improve, creative thinking expands, depression lifts, insomnia stops, anxieties fade, the mind becomes more tranquil and a natural joy begins to appear. It is my hypothesis that when the physical toxins are cleared from the brain cells, mind-brain function automatically and significantly improves and spiritual capacities expands."

John Tilden, M.D., who fasted thousands of people in his Denver center, said "I must say in all seriousness that fasting when combined with a properly selected diet is the nearest approach to a 'cure-all' that is possible to conceive-- profoundly simple and simply profound!" With juice fasting, people can still work a job during it. During the water fast, it is best to just rest.  Alex Carrel, M.D. (famous scientist) says "The elimination of waste products by fasting increases longevity."

Prescription for Natural Healing by James Balch M.D. and Phyllis Balch CNC says "Fasting is an effective and safe method of detoxifying the body...A technique that wise men have used for centuries to heal the sick. Fast regularly and help the body heal itself and stay well. Give all of your organs a rest. Fasting can help reverse the aging process, and if we use it correctly we will live longer, happier lives. Fasting is the best thing for anti-aging.

Each time you complete a fast, you will feel better. Your body will have a chance to heal and rebuild its immune system by regularly fasting. You can fight off illness and the degenerative diseases so common in this chemically polluted environment we live in. When you feel a cold or illness coming on or are just depressed-- fast!" That is why you lose your appetite-- your body is telling you to stop eating.

Bring More Traffic to Your Website

There are many ways to bring more traffic to your website, but I will tell about my favorites. One way is going to forums (that allow it) and answering questions and putting up a link to your website.  This is the closest thing to helping someone in person with a problem that they have. On some sites this can give you links that will help the search engines to send more traffic to you. Some people on these forums may be asking for exactly what you have.

Someone on a forum wanted to know what Kevin Trudeau's miracle cure for being overweight was before spending all that money for his book. I sent him to my site and he read about it. Then he thanked me for saving him all that money which would have made him feel like a sucker who was ripped off. Since then, the F.T.C. (Federal Trade Commission) has gone after Kevin Trudeau for saying that you can eat whatever you want on the infomercial while the book says that you cannot eat any unhealthy food.

Another way to create more traffic is by finding directories online and putting your link on their website. There are some companies that you can pay to do this for you. Some require you to put a link back to your site, but some do not. These links can help you get more traffic from the search engines.

There are hundreds of these directories out there. Some allow you to use the code to make a keyword (or term) the link instead of the address of the site. So you can make "vampire antidote" the link to your site. Then this will help you when someone does a search on a search engine for "vampire antidote." This is better than a link that just says "www.henderson.com."

Another way is to write articles and submit the article to article sites like with what you are reading right now. In exchange, they put up a link to your website. The link is usually in the author or bio information. Some only allow text, so you have to just put up your url like "http://www.henderson.com." Some allow html where you put in the code so the link will say "vampire antidote."

Some of these article sites gets lot of traffic so you can even get people coming to your site from the article. Others get only a little bit of traffic but may help you get more traffic from the search engines. To see how much traffic a website gets, see the Alexa.com site. Also you can check on a site's Google PR rank to see how much a link from them will help you with the search engines.

There are hundreds of these article sites and they are growing everyday. I may put up a list of them on my website in the future. Also I may create my own article site in the future. These articles create a great deal of free information on the world wide web. Sometimes you can get some valuable information from reading these articles. Also when you get one of these articles put up on a site (published), you can say that you are a writer who writes articles.

This way the information that is out there is not just controlled by the publishers, but it is controlled by the people, like you and me. It is a great example of the first amendment of the United States Constitution at work. The world wide web is still relatively young and it will be interesting to see what changes come about do to it. Many of the founders of the U.S.A. were writers.

I have been checking out my links from these sites and most of them put up active links. Once in a while a site will not have an active link and I will write them and let them know that it is part of the requirement or condition for them to have the article on their site. Sometimes they are having trouble with doing things on their article site. Once in a while they use the code rel="no follow" which means that they have the intention to benefit from using your article without you benefiting as far as the search engines go

I click on VIEW and then SOURCE to look for this code. You can tell the sites doing this that you do not appreciate it and to remove your article. You can also tell them that you will spread the word about them. You can even write an article about it and they may even put it on their site without realizing what they are doing. A few days ago on a forum I saw someone asking if the article sites actually put up a link to you or just use your article without doing anything for you so this has answered that question.

Why is Wheat and Rice So Unhealthy

Sugar and Other Sweeteners

To start with, the artificial sweeteners should be avoided like the plague. They are many times sweeter than sugar and have had very bad effects on people including making people fatter. They are not foods and are more like drugs. Now the sugar cane is not really bad for health. It is what they do to it.

This is similar to what they do with wheat and rice. They take the nutritious part of the sugar cane out. It is a thick black liquid called blackstrap molasses. It is sweet and sold in the health food store. It is very nutritious with lots of iron and chromium. The part that is left is called sugar and has calories but no nutrition. They advertise for people to buy chromium supplements since it is needed to metabolize sugar. 

The sugar robs your body of the chromium and other things. If blackstrap molasses is sold in the health food store, where is the sugar sold? It is sold in the fat and sick food store. Health food stores now have Succanat or dried cane juice. This is the sugar cane without taking out the good stuff. It is the ingredient in some health foods. It is not brown sugar. Brown sugar is regular sugar with a little molasses added. It is not healthy.

The big manufacturers use the cheapest ingredients to save money regardless of what it does to you. So they like using artificial (chemical) sweeteners and corn syrup which is slightly worse than sugar. There are healthy alternatives that health food stores have and they are ingredients in some health foods. Some have the ingredients called sugar cane and invert sugar cane. The former is regular even if it says organic sugar cane. The latter is just like corn syrup.

The healthy sweeteners are raw honey,  pure maple syrup, agave (from a cactus), barley malt, stevia ( a healthy herb that is sweeter than sugar) and rice syrup. The dried cane juice may not be the healthiest sweetener but it is fine as an ingredient in something. The blackstrap molasses is healthy. The sugar that is already in foods, like in fruit, are the healthiest sweet things.

This information is for ingredients when making something or buying something and reading the ingredients. It is much healthier to eat sweet fruit on an empty stomach like watermelon, strawberries, blueberries, kiwi fruit, mango, pineapple, apples, oranges, pears and grapes. Try to get organically grown fruit when it is possible.

The Truth About Protein, Fats and Carbs

People know that by eating a high protein and low carb, low fat diet, they will lose weight. But it is not worth it. When you eat too much of carbs or fats, you store it as body fat. When you eat too much protein, where do you store it? Your body cannot store it. The body has to get rid of it. It breaks it down. People eat way too much protein. When the protein is broken down, it creates toxins and acids. The body becomes too acidic which leads to many health problems. The American Dietetic Association says that vegans [they eat no animal foods-- no meat, fish, fowl, eggs or dairy] eat twice the amount of protein that they need.

A cup of navy beans has 19.7 grams of protein and 5 grams of fiber.  It has all 8 amino acids and the smallest amount is 233 mg of tryptophan. The above comes from the book, Nutrition Almanac, 4th Edition (1996). It says that histadine is an essential amino acid in infants and it has been added to the 8 essential ones for adults. But it was added after they tested hundreds of foods for the 8 amino acids. A potato has 4.7 grams of protein, 1.2 grams of fiber and all 8 amino acids with the lowest being 73 mg of tryptophan and methionine. Four ounces of pistachio nuts have 23.2 grams of protein, 2 grams of fiber, 8 amino acids with the least being 320 mg of tryptophan.

The magic is in the thousands of different phytochemicals that are in plant foods that prevent blindness, prevent cancer, prevent heart attacks and that prevent strokes. More than 900 different phytochemicals have been found in plant foods and more will be discovered. For example lycopene that makes tomatoes, grapefruit and watermelon red. Also there is lutein, resveratrol, indoles (indole-3-carbinol), anthocyanins and many more.

Americans Lack Self Esteem Since They Are Brought Up Wrong 

This is not because American parents do not love their kids. It is because they never learned how to raise infants. The way that kids are raised is described in the book, Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem by Gloria Steinem (© 1992). This tells how children are alive to serve the parents and the parents are perfect and always right and it goes on and on.

But this starts with the terrible way that infants are raised. This information comes from the book, The Continuum Concept, by Jean Liedloff. It tells how for thousands of years babies have been raised a certain way. The way that the infant knows it is loved is by being held or being against someone. The other senses are underdeveloped and it takes time to learn how to interpret things. 

So the baby goes by its sense of touch. When it is against someone, it feels loved. When it is not with someone, then it feels unloved. In many Asian countries, they make sure the infant is held all the time and it sleeps with its parents. By not feeling loved, it never gets the self-esteem it needs.

A sling can help you carry your baby with your hands being free. Dr. Martin Seligman was president of the American Psychological Association and he has written many books on psychology. His wife has  many degrees in psychology. They slept with all 4 of their babies. If you are drunk or on drugs, this is not a good idea since you may roll over onto them.

So here is the worst thing about raising an infant. The parents believe they need to break its spirit. This is what you try to do when torturing someone. They believe that this makes them a good parent. You put the baby in its crib to sleep at night. It starts to cry and you let it cry for hours until it cries itself  asleep. It may then have a future of crying itself to sleep for the rest of its life.

The author, Jean Liedloff, says that nature never makes a sound (like the baby crying) like someone is being tortured unless that is actually the case. So by the baby, not being held, it makes it feel that it is unloved and this is the foundation of the person having a severe lack of self-esteem. According to Gloria Steinem's book, lack of self-esteem leads to many problems.

Before I heard of this book, I did many personal growth seminars. I am more into self-improvement than anyone that I ever met. At these seminars I was very surprised how all these people had a severe lack of self-esteem compared to me. I had no idea how I ended up so different. Then I read this book. My mother got divorced after I was born and moved into her parents house. This book had not been written yet but my grandmother would hold me all the time.

She did this because, even though they were wealthy, her favorite thing in the world to do, was to hold me. This is why people find babies so cute, so they will want to hold them. Once I was babysitting for a 3 month old baby. I sat down with some neighbors. There was a mother with her 7 year old girl and the mother's female friends. The girl kept grabbing at the baby.

So I said to the girl, "Do you want to hold him?" The mother said "Are you crazy?" I told her that I would also be holding the baby like making sure the baby's neck was supported. So the girl held the baby  for 5 minutes and was happy. Then the mother asked if she could hold the baby and she held Liam (the baby's name) for about 5 minutes or more. Then this was repeated by the other 4 women there. So that proves what that book was saying.

Babies brought up this way are very calm and have a lot of self-esteem. Also they are much more mature because instead of being in a playpen, they are around other people all the time learning about how to interact. They now have this term after the baby is born as the 4th trimester.

The baby is outside the body, but still needs to be in contact with another body. So even though the infant is outside of the body, it is treated as if it were attached to someone's body. The author learned this after spending a couple of years with a tribe that had been bringing up babies the same way they did for a hundred thousand years. She saw the results of babies being brought up the right way.

Postpartum Depression

The book has an interesting theory on the mysterious postpartum depression. If you have a child that dies, do you hold it for months? No, that would be sick to carry a dead baby being eaten by maggots. Instead you bury or burn it. Now your body was programmed to hold a baby the same way your breasts start to produce milk. Now when you do not hold the baby a lot, like you were programmed to do, you get depressed.

But this is great. It is fantastic. You mourn the loss of the baby. Also you cannot hurt your baby since it is already dead. But if you do not hold your baby a lot, it is telling your body that your baby is dead and you get depressed. Your body is reacting to your baby being dead even though it is alive. Also you are feeling that something is wrong with your baby being alive. Now if your baby is taken from you and is being brought up by someone else, it is normal for you to get depressed and again you cannot hurt your baby since someone else is raising it.

To make this whole thing more complicated, when babies are brought up the right way or mostly right, then their instinct will tell them to hold their baby. But when these babies are brought up being held very little, as adults they will have problems holding their babies. Their instincts have been subverted. [Subvert-- to pervert or corrupt by an undermining of morals....]

Copyright 2007 by Chuck Bluestein