Colorado Springs Functional Medicine

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Incredible Insulin

Pure and simple, the better you are at regulating insulin, the better life you will live.  I’m not talking about destroying your body to the point where you have to check your blood sugar 3x/day and regulate the spikes with an extra injection of insulin.  Even if you’re a type 1 diabetic with an insulin pump, your choices can have a dramatic effect on the amount and frequency of usage.

If I’m speaking at an event and the topic of insulin arises, which it most likely will, people are quick to blurt out, ‘it regulates sugar.’  Yes, you are correct but this just scratches the surface to how insulin will impact your life, for better or worse, in sickness and in health.

Weightloss Rollercoaster

Yes, it is true that insulin reacts to elevations in blood sugar. As blood sugar levels rise, this is a signal to your nervous system that you have more energy than is needed at this point in time.  You can either drastically increase your energy demands by sprinting and doing box jumps or you can rely on insulin to store it for later.

Your body will first store it in the liver and muscles in the form of glycogen.  If you added up all the stored energy in your liver and muscles, it may last you 24 hours.  This is why exercise alone, though fantastic for brain development and nervous system regulation, often fails as a weight loss strategy for many people.  Someone is looking to burn off that spare tire.  Unless you plan on exercising non-stop for 24 hours, you may not get past the stored energy in your liver and muscles to touch the stuff around your midsection.

Female Athlete Is Performing Box Jumps At Gym

What kills your 6 pack dreams even more is that you reward yourself for all that hard work you just accomplished.  You know better than to eat garbage.  Instead you go for the ‘healthy’ low fat, low calorie goods.  In reality, you just ate a 1/2 cup of sugar, which gets redeposited back into your liver and muscles.  Since you didn’t use ALL your stored liver and muscle glycogen during exercise and just consumed more sugar than you burned off, you added another layer of insulation for the winter.

The stored energy that targets the butt, gut, and thighs isn’t glycogen, it’s stored in the form triglycerides.  You’ve seen these on your lab work.  Because it’s fat, I’m sure your well intentioned cardiologist told you to eat a diet high in complex carbohydrates and low fat.  “If we need to eliminate fat, than we have to lower our fat intake.”  The only thing that cardiologist did was keep himself in business with advice that resembles assisted suicide.  Since ‘diet and exercise’ didn’t work for you, then you have no hope other than taking drugs.  Sound familiar?

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Getting worse before getting better? Here’s why?

Many times when people undergo treatment for something, they experience getting worse before getting better.  I’m not talking about the obvious chemical poisoning like with chemo therapy.  I think most people realize why they get worse before getting better.  It’s literally poison.

What I’m talking about is when you start doing things that are good for you; adding purity and sufficiency into your life.

To understand this, you have to look to the nervous system.  The nervous system coordinates EVERYTHING in your life.  Every second of every day your nervous system is organizing life to keep you functional and going.  It doesn’t matter if you’re awake, asleep, happy, sad, drunk, or in the middle of running a marathon.

Your nervous system is organizing and coordinating how to best respond to temperature change, oxygen levels, heart rate, pulse, neurotransmitters, nutrient assimilation, waste excretion, communication, and thousands upon thousands of other stimuli each and every second of the day.  All this is happening subconsciously; you don’t have to think about any of it.  All this is happening while you’re consciously reading this post.

Pretty freakn’ amazing, right?  As conscious as you are of life’s busyness, if you had to juggle what your nervous system juggles consciously, we would all be in a mental wards or no one would live past the age of 5 because we would probably forget some major function to coordinate.

The more we add more stimulus from physical, chemical, and emotional inputs, the more our nervous system has to juggle.  No wonder people can’t concentrate, can’t sleep, and medicate themselves to ‘just keep going.’

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Failure…The Story Behind More Health, Less Healthcare

Every company, every success, and every movement has a story.  This is the story of More Health, Less Healthcare.  It may be long and boring to you so here is the take home message.  Instead of asking, ‘what could I accomplish if I knew I couldn’t fail?’  Ask the question  ‘what is WORTH doing even if I do fail?‘  Failure is an option.  

Sometimes you need a reminder of the journey so this post is more for my benefit of getting it down on paper to see and recount the obstacles that have happened.   You may not care about it but maybe you’ll glean some hope out of it to keep fighting for that thing you want badly but hesitate because you fear failure.

Childhood

I remember being sick.  I remember almost every February in grade school, a friend delivering all my Valentine’s day cards because I was absent from school.  It wasn’t just that day, it was multiple days and sometimes a week at a time…or so I remember.

I remember ear infections, bronchitis, strep throat, laying on a rubber heating pad that looked like a whoopee cushion, and I remember lots of antibiotics.  I also remember when they finally figured out I was allergic to Penicillin.  I remember not being sick for so long after they realized that.

I remember writing a report for school on what I do after school and the report listed all the TV shows I watched from the moment I got home until dinner time.  I remember also listing the bowls of potato chips and cookies I ate.  Then I remember my parents getting called in for a parent-teacher conference.

I remember moving and going to a new school.  I was not only the new kid, I was the ‘husky’ new kid.  I remember my mom and I school shopping for husky jeans.  I remember thinking husky was a brand name, like Bugle Boy, instead of a code for ‘fat kid’ jeans.  I also remember bragging to my friends that I wore husky jeans like they were the latest pair of Jordan’s.  I also remember sucking in my gut for school pictures because I was embarrassed of my weight.  I remember I was only in 5th grade at the time.

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