Where to start?

[somlor]

I would like to start exploring TCM, specifically herbal modalities but I'm confused where to begin.

I'm 27 years old, about 5'10" and 160 lbs. I eat way too much junk and I also smoke and drink. Lately I rarely exercise, although I've been doing Yoga on and (mostly) off for almost 10 years. I just began a Chi Kung practice a few months ago (Five Animal Frolics + Microcosmic Orbit so far) and I'm very excited about it as I can feel it's making a growing difference in my energy levels.

I frequently suffer from low energy, mood swings (depression, anxiety, anger, giddiness, elation).

The supplements I currently take (when I remember - doh!) are
folic acid, magnesium, l-theanine, tyrosine, msm, b-complex, C, zinc, flax oil.

Sorry if my question is too generic. I'd just like to get some discussion on these lines moving here and I don't know where to begin my research.

Thanks.

[James Boelter]

It wouldn't hurt to get a checkup and have your thyroid levels tested. For years I battled the same problems; chi kung and weight lifting helped and gave me some relief and a lot more 'good' days than previously, but I still had ongoing issues with low energy and anxiety and mood swings. At one point it got bad enough that I decided to consult a psychiatrist; within 5 minutes he advised me, based on some basic questions on sleeping habits and peaking energy periods, that I really needed to get my thyroid checked, because I probably had trashed it in my college years of working swing and graveyard shifts and going to school during the day. This turned out to be absolutely correct - my GSH levels were sky high, indicating that my hypothalamus/pituitary was working overtime to try to make my thyroid produce normal levels of T3/T4. After a few weeks of synthroid, I consistently felt a lot better.

Make sure your hydration levels are adequate (ie you can't always trust your sense of thirst anymore to track your actual water consumption needs) and that you are getting enough sleep. And by 'enough', I mean 9-10 hours in a dark room with no TV or blinking lights or street lights shining in through open blinds. This is incredibly important if you suffer from mood swings and will also help you lay off the junk food. Most people aren't actually hungry when they stuff themselves with sugar and starch, they are TIRED on a level that's so deep, they can't even comprehend it. (See the book 'Lights Out: Sleep, Sugar, and Survival' by Wiley and Formby).

Absolutely try to lay off the junk food, especially the sugar and caffeine. Many times, your favorite junk item actually is one you are allergic to - part of the 'buzz' you get from it is an allergic reaction to it. Allow yourself one 'cheat' day a week to indulge, but keep a food journal and log what you eat and how you feel after eating it throughout the day; you will soon notice patterns and trends, and will be able to track what stuff is really giving you fits.

Congrats on starting chi kung practice - I feel it is the single most valuable thing I do to improve the quality of my health and vitality. Keep it up!

[Connie Brown]

I'd second what James said and start work right away on restoring the basics in your diet. Then when you add the TCM and herb stuff you have a solid physical base to work from.

Here's how the junk food spiral works:

start out reasonably healthy
start eating junk cuz it tastes "so good"
get careless about protein, greens, and good stuff
body gets worse
junk makes it feel immediately better
but further depletes the body
even more careless about good nutrition
repeat steps 2-5 until the bod quits working

The way to fix it is surprisingly not to just remove
the junk because there is now some
nutrition making-up to do:

improve protein, veg, good fats
reduce junk
repeat until healthy again

The mood instability comes in part from the food.
sometimes we think they are separate but NOOOOOOO

Good luck to you! I been there.
Connie

[somlor]

James and Connie, thank you for your responses!

James, it's interesting you mention thyroid problems in connection with graveyard shift because I've been working a 5pm - 3am shift for about 2 years now and it's been an uphill battle ever since. Before I started working that shift I had been completely clean of cigarettes, alchol, all sugars, and refined carbs for almost two years and for some reason I never thought to make the connection with starting the night shift. I'll have to look into getting my thyroid checked. As for sleeping 9-10 hours in complete darkness, yikes!, I sleep during the day and don't even have curtains, just blinds making the room fairly well lit and I rarely get more than 6-7 hours sleep. So thanks for that tip as well.

As for weaning myself off junk food, can either of you (or anyone else, really) recommend a good program to do this gradually and with the least amount of headaches? It seems like there are so many variables and I'd like to be able to differentiate between rough patches that are temporary and expected detoxification or whatnot, and ones that are a result of me doing something wrong and will wind me back up at square one. I like your simplified steps Connie, and to begin with I will start adding veggies and better protein to my meals. My idea of a well balanced meal is:

A fist of good protein (ie: salmon), about an equal portion of slow carbs (ie: brown rice), double portion of veggies (ie: broccoli).

Thanks again for all your help.

[James Boelter]

Sean, Connie wrote an excellent article in this month's CST mag about progressively changing your diet in an integrated, healthy way. I am very impressed by it.

I would say your first priority is to get back onto a daytime based work schedule - (probably easier said than done in this economy) - this is undermining all your other efforts to stay healthy. And I say this as a confirmed night owl who never wanted to go to bed before 3 am for 20 years.

As for how to proceed: I would suggest that you concentrate on 'crowding junk food out' of your diet, instead of skipping or depriving yourself. First rule of thumb (taken from Dr. Batmanghelidj and his book 'Your Body's Many Cries For Water): if you are feeling a craving for junk food, before you do anything else, slowly drink 16 oz of water or so, and wait 10 minutes. This works even better if you squeeze some fresh lemon juice into the water before you drink it (note: NOT the 'REALLEMON stuff in the plastic lemon containers, but an actual lemon, squeezed into the water).
If you are still craving junk, eat a handful of almonds or a few slices of an apple, and wait a few more minutes. If you are still feeling a craving after that, it is probably a genuine appetite based hunger, and not the pain of displaced dehydration or blood sugar level crash.

Try very hard to keep your insulin levels steady - keep a supply of almonds, filberts, hard green veggies (like cauliflower and broccoli florets etc) on hand for a first resort. Designer Nutrition now makes a variety of energy bars that actually have more whey protein grams in them than anything else, and seem to keep my blood sugar levels steady - they go under the brand names of 'Detour' (a Snickers analog), 'One Way', and 'U-Turn' (a Mars Bar analog). They seem to work very well for me. and are somehat more 'portable' and convenient than Tupperware containers full of broccoli.

As for the daylight in your bedroom - take the time to go to a hardware store or window treatment place and have real 'room darkening blinds' and curtains installed in your bedroom to take the place of the 'privacy' blinds and curtains that are there by default.- the staff will know what you mean by this. This will be some combo of wooden venetian blinds and heavy curtains, etc. It won't solve the problem completely, but it will make your bedroom markedly darker in the morning when you are trying to sleep by 30-40%.

This will be a good start. Good luck!

[Connie Brown]

Your meal idea is really great.

Again I would second James' idea of crowding out the junk.

For a stepwise program that helps you understand each variable at a time, I would recommend Kathleen DesMaisons' work on addictive nutrition, website www.radiantrecovery.com. It is really neat how it works - there is a way to focus on each interacting variable at a time and really understand how it is impacting you. It covers not only steady blood sugar but serotonin (aka impulse control - the knee jerk see it, eat it thing) and beta-endorphin, the craving chemical and the same one that interacts with exercise.

James - the idea of broccoli in tupperware - that made me laugh. Healthy, earnest, and ghastly

Connie

[James Boelter]

A mildly amusing anecdote based on broccoli florets in Tupperware containers, at least I hope it is amusing :?

5 years ago, I finished reading Adele Kuhn's first published diet book, in which she advocated a couple of snacks of hard green veggies, etc., to keep the blood sugar stable between meals. It sounded great to me, so I picked up some broccoli from my local hypermarket, washed them, chopped up the florets and put them in a sealed container in the refrigerator to take to work the next morning.

The next morning, sitting in my cubicle at the front of a 'programmer's corridor' at work, I saw it was 10:00 am and time for my 'hard veggie' snack. I pulled out my container and unsealed it. I got a vague whiff of something unpleasant for a second, but didn't think much of it, since it didn't recur.

15 seconds later,vehement shouts of dismay and displeasure burst all up and down the aisle; people were gagging and complaining and asking what the heck that hellish odor was and where it was coming from. A minute later 5 people crowded into my cubicle where I was innocently, if glumly, munching on my little broccoli florets, demanding to know what I had done.

A little post mortem analysis (and I do mean post mortem, because they were ready to kill me) revealed that the 'whiff' I had gotten was a released cloud of emissions from my sealed container that had whooshed right by my head and proceeded to gag everyone in the row behind me.

It turns out that one of the reasons that broccoli is 'good for you' are the sulfur compounds it contains. Put a bunch of broccoli in a sealed container for several hours, and those emitted sulfides and sulfites will have no place to go, and will accumulate and concentrate in the container , with predictable results when you unseal it. Essentially, I unleashed a sulfur bomb on my colleagues. (I have since learned that soaking the broccoli in water over night will prevent most of this problem).

I got a lot of kidding, both good natured and otherwise for about 6 months, after this little incident - no lunch of mine was considered safe.

[Connie Brown]

oh man - I read this while sitting in my own cube at the cube farm and can't stop laughing.

blanching will help too (dipping in boiling salted water for 1 minute)

[somlor]

Thanks again for all the great advice!

Connie, I actually did the PNP/SARP program for over two years and had good success with it. Funny enough, I was actually the moderator for the radiantguys group for awhile *sheepish blush*. I'm thinking a combination of night shift, some other stressors in my life at the time, and honestly a natural desire to test the validity of the program led me to start experimenting again, and by all indications my "progress" seems to verify Kathleen's views on SS, addiction, and the inability of certain body types to moderate properly. It's funny, after I posted my question about how to gradually remove junk from my diet I thought to myself "I already know how to do this", and your post just confirms that. Maybe it's time to slowly start working through the steps again, but I'm not sure I will take the entire program on as much faith as I did previously. The whole idea of defining myself as more or less "defective" never quite sat with me right and I am not a big fan of some of the 12 step philosophy I feel is infused into her approach. Also, and there is most certaintly the argument that this is the "addiction" speaking, I really do want to feel like there can be a time and place to enjoy a piece of cake or a glass of wine guilt free without considering it a "relapse".

In any case, I dug out a jar of George's Shake for my breakfast and I'll keep you posted on my progress.

James, on a somewhat related note to your broccoli story, during the first week at my present job I decided to fry a piece of salmon in the kitchen. Unfortunately the kitchen was poorly ventilated and I stunk up the entire company. I had people from every department, including my boss, swinging by the kitchen to check out the smell. It was mortifying, and like your case, I didn't hear the end of it for about 6 months. :oops:

[Connie Brown]

Sean I did not recognize your last name! so nice to see you here. Isn't this forum and clubbells just the best?

I hear you about buying into accepting "defective' - I sure don't and won't. but I do think that some of the physical responses I have are "in the hardware" so to speak.

and yes there are other programs who can speak to cutting out the junk without the 12-step overtones. Have you read "Breaking the food Seduction" yet? I haven't but a lot of veg friends like it. The approach there is that once you cut the junk the problem is gone. I believe.

[somlor]

Yes, I really enjoy this forum. I haven't experienced the Clubbells yet although they look very intriguing as does all of Sonnon's stuff really. :D I ordered the Body-Flow videos (which should arrive any day now) and we'll see where it goes from there.

And I will be sure to check out that book. Thanks for the recommendation.