Fix Your Broken Brain by Healing Your Body First -- The Gut is Key to The Ultra Mind Solution by Mark Hyman, MD

In order to encourage YOU to learn this information, to purchase the book, read the book, loan it to people you know who can help support you in your wellness, whether they are your providers or your friends or your family, I am going to select a new part of this book every day and walk through the key information as I feel is best for the education of those following Lumigrate. Bolding, below, added by me to make core words jump off the page for those with fatigued brains and eyes. So I am starting here:

From page 190: How Food Allergies Affect Your Brain is the section, within The UltraMind Solution by Mark Hyman, MD (links, above for websites for more information and to purchase (also available at all the usual places as well, I got my copy at the health food store as I like to support them having books for sale.) 

"Every part of your body and every cell in your body communicates with every other part of your body and every other cell.  .... There is a lot of talking going on between your brain, immune system, gut, and hormones. We call this the PNEI, or "psycho-neuro-endicrine-immune system". In fact the gut is called the second brain because it has its own nervous system and many neurotransmitters like the brain. It is through this system that your gut and immune systems talk to your brain. And it governs how food triggers a cascade of events through the body and the brain. 

Hidden food allergies are a major unrecognized epidemic in the twenty-first century. Despite the fact that the immune system and the brain are intimately linked and food has a major impact on your brain and body, most of us (including physicians) don't make the connection between what we eat and what we feel.  In fact, most physicians practicing today don't acknowledge the critically important role food allergies play in health. 

The result is that we have an undiagnosed epidemic of people whose lives are affected by low-grade, delayed food sensitivities or allergies. What they eat causes allergic reactions that make them feel badly, but no one is making the connection."

 Mardy, 

Great post! Nice way of tying in MLK holiday into reminding us that we are in charge of us, especially when it comes to our health. I liked your comment about the solution to our health care dilemma in the US is going to come from consumers taking the lead. I agree with you. When people talk about the Accountable Care Act and electronic health records, some think that all the problems will disappear. It's just not so!

Taking control of ourselves is the way and, as you pointed out, what we eat is so important to our health and well-being. You suggested that we as patients will be the ones informing providers what is causing illness. As Sir William Osler, the father of modern medicine said, "Listen to the patient. He is telling you the diagnosis." 

As we empower ourselves as patients, we take some of the control back and become more responsible for what we eat and ingest into our bodies. I think the whole movement with patient-centered care and engaged patients will help us all be in charge of ourselves and take responsibility for ourselves and our health. 

Bravo on a great post. Martine

Mardy,

How timely is your call to action. I was physically on the Capitol Mall in Washington DC on Martin Luther King Day along with a huge crowd of people to bear witness to the 57th inauguration day of the President.  What I got from this was a strong sense of what it takes for all of us to be a part of this country. It takes a collective action from many people to make a change and raise awareness for any issue or concern.

To make a change in personal and community health, it takes all of the people to pay attention, learn from each other and support each other in small actions steps.  I believe that each of us is capable of turning ideas into actions that support better health.  Gather your own support system and stay in touch with other people who are striving for ideal health. Ask someone to help you make some changes. Pay attention to what you eat and how you feel. Make one small change at a time. Set goals as a step in the direction you want to go. Then celebrate every day the choices that you made to support your healthy self. Commit to act. Enjoy the journey. --Gwen

This is a great place to insert a link to Lumigrate's New Years Resolutions topic, where Gwen, Robin Thomas, Dr Paula King, and Yenta had contributed words of wisdom that apply here.  I'll set a link up at the bottom of that to route people over here, so you can find your way back if you go: www.lumigrate.com/forum/balancing-body-mind-spirit-etc-old-years-reflections-make-way-new-years-resolutions

Thank you, Martine, and Gwen, for your thoughtful input here! Lumigrate.com has a really 'GRATE' Group of providers here to help educate and support people from our various areas of expertise, and we also are all learning from each other in the topics that come to Lumigrate.com, particularly in our forums, which are now focusing on having experts posting, as you both did here, and consumers emailing through the Contact Us, and I will select and post relevant questions or input. (This was essentially a natural transition that occurred over the years, so I am simply listening and following what is working!)

So if YOU are a guest/follower of us and have something to add or a question, please do a "Contact us" if you are not one of our selected/invited experts. Our 'experts', by the way, include two non medical providers who are experts in their own right: Amazing Alice and Yenta (A to Y, we didn't quite make it to Z, ).

These wonderful, wise women, contribute when they have time and energy as experts on having chronic illness and using their spiritual belief systems as tools for managing their illness and for working toward wellness. We show we welcome diversity as they are Christianity and Jewish, respectively, and certainly hope they are going to feel up to following this series in order to support them, as they are both aware, learning, and changing about foods. Alice wrote about using Lent to give up foods she was learning were likely contributing to inflammation/illness back in 2010, inspired by Yenta's writings which started fall of 2009.

We also have Beth Christianson as a professional expert related to spirituality, who is certified as a spirituality coach on top of a foundation of years of chaplain experience in hospice and elder care. Gwen, above, is a certified life coach, on top of a foundation of years of being a P.T. And Martine, above Gwen, is well on her way through an extensive formal certification program that will be required in the future for patient advocates, on top of her experiences from years of being the key person with family members with illnesses and then going on to write the books and work with others as she has. And naturally, the forward of her second book discloses the missed-diagnosis that caused her unbelievable plan and loss of function in the past, which she figured out by researching on her own then going to a provider with a diagnosis to suggest pursuing looking at, which lead to successful treatment, happily.

Suffice it to say, she knows as well as any of us the difficulty in finding the right provider for 'the mission' you are on, sometimes! Alice has written publicly about her struggles currently with breast cancer treatment related to wound healing and one of the major issues is her in-person providers lack of understanding and knowledge about nutrition supplementation, which is very frustrating to her and all involved!

Therefore, finding resources for YOU out there in America who have the interest and are looking for the providers and solutions, is a KEY that I work hard to address at Lumigrate.com. Hence, we have the team here that includes Martine and Gwen, and others who I hope will also stop by soon (or when you can and are inspired to write). To find more about them at Lumigrate, simply Search on their names here at Lumigrate's search bar, or at your search engine simply adding the Lumigrate to it. 

So today, after getting people 'primed' yesterday with our first day looking at specific messages in the book, and focusing on the base information about how foods are causing inflammation which is causing a vast majority of what people are wanting to change in themselves and their lives, I wanted to focus on the ending paragraphs of the section I focused on yesterday/above, as it talks about doing this self-help or getting help from an expert.

We're now three weeks into the New Year, and a few days into the new four-year term of President in the US, and it's no secret that when you don't have any concerns about a future election, you take a different approach than if you do, so I expect we're going to see a LOT of action and change happening now.  So Gwen's and Martine's words, above, were perfectly placed, and highlight the caliber of the providers available if you wish to pursue contacting any of us for individual assistance. (And how cool is that, she went to the Mall for inauguration! We really do have interesting providers at Lumigrate.com, I have to say that!)

What Dr Mark Hyman says in The UltraMind Solution, on page 191, under How Food Allergies Affect Your Brain (which is part of the section Key #3: Cool Off Inflammation) a continuation of the quotes, above, is this:

"There are blood tests that can help you identify problems with food allergies. These can e helpful, but they aren't always 100 percent accurate and you will have to find a practitioner of Functional Medicine to run them for you -- most traditional physicians will, unfortunately, tell you they are a waste of time and money."  

I want to break in here and clarify that Dr Hyman actually misuses the term 'traditional', above, but it's a very common mistake because so many people have misused the term over the years that it's 'catching on' and causes confusion.  I slip up on in speaking sometimes because in my mind I think 'progressive and complementary' versus 'traditional and allopathic', as a lot of people don't know the meaning of the word 'allopathic', which is what he is referring to here.  

"Traditional medicine" is actually defined as things that were used way back with people, before the discovery of pathogens (bugs) and that turned the neck of medicine in the modern world and lead to the current system that we're having to work 'around' sometimes to get what we are looking for if wanting to find and solve the reasons for the problem, which is 'functional medicine'.  I call it peeling the onion and work with people consulting with them individually to help with that process with their life/health histories and suggesting where to go next for information or provider support.)  So, that clarified, back to Dr Hyman's words:

"Or you can take some simple measures on your own to heal from brain allergies. You just have to take away the substances that most often cause allergic reactions for a few weeks and let your immune system cool down. 

Then you can systematically reintroduce these foods to test which ones you are allergic to. This is called an elmination/reintroduction diet. It is a simple, very effective solution for identifying the foods that cause your brain allergies, and it is one of the core components of the UltraMind Solution." 

Any thoughts from those who have learned about the elimination diet and tried it or DONE it, about the word "simple"?  I'll start the conversation: I did this in 1995 after having the food allergy testing done, which showed I was allergic to wheat, dairy, eggs (today there are others on the list that are high but wheat, dairy and eggs are less due to the years since of total elimination and then reintroduction. It was VERY easy for me because I was in such a state of panic about what was wrong with my health, it had been thought to be MS but was not.

So to take three things out of my diet and feeling so much better almost immediately, because I totally eliminated every little bit of it and felt SO much better in only a few days! It was like a miracle, and keep in mind it was the mid 1990s and this was unheard of information to me at that time, related to the commonly eaten foods causing inflammation and causing illness! (Previously, when only cutting back and only suspecting wheat, on the advise of a very helpful acupuncture/Oriental medicine provider as she knew who to direct me to for food allergy testing, I had zero change in symptoms.)

But I wasn't feeding kids, who sometimes appear to me to be dictating what is in the house rather than the parents these days, and my life-mate at the time was a very routine guy related to what he wanted to eat (one type of cereal and the same kind of sandwich every day for lunch, dinner out), and he was obsessive about body fat, so there simply weren't temptations in the house.  Then I went on to graduate and move and live alone with a short walk to internships at the Denver VA, and I only had to be gone 9 hours a day. I had TIME and ENERGY to focus on obtaining and making foods that were within my intentions and plans for eating. 

When I got my first job as an OT and all the driving and crazy hours, I started reverting to buying things here and there that were fast food, and for a long time felt just fine (as I'd gotten things cooled down in my body, turned around and was 'well' again). This was in 1996, Chipotle was only in Denver at that time with a handfull of stores, so if I wasn't able to reach one of them easily, I had to try to make it work. And eventually I wended up tipping the teeter totter of health back to 'ill' and I was off of 'well'.

Today, many places will make sandwiches for you on lettuce leaves as wraps, and it is easier, but I find that it is still VERY challenging to stay off of these common foods because they literally surround us. We're bombarded by images on television, print media, and now Facebook. I asked for a sandwich on gluten-free bread at what I think is the busiest grocery store in Grand Junction, and they'd NEVER had that request.  I had to give them the loaf of bread in my cart and they made a sandwich from that (and charged me as if they used their own bread, but as much time as it took them to do that extra step, I understood that.) And this is a city of essentially 100,000 shopping-wise! What are the majority of people out there in the US (and beyond) having to work around to make these changes IF they do the first step, which is to consider the information, and decide to invest the time in learning and doing it!

Simple? I don't think so, from that standpoint, from my personal experience and from seeing those I've worked with via Lumigrate the past four years, who will get on-board the information and then not get very far because it is too hard unless they have good support AND STRATEGIES up their sleeves, or in their tool boxes. One suggestion I'll share is to look at what goes right on the days that you 'stick to it', moreso than looking at what the problem was that caused you to deviate from your plan and intentions/desires. 

I look forward to what others have to say! And as always, Live and Learn. Learn and Live Better! ~~ Mardy

 There are some foods that irritate the immune system more than others. BUT EVERYONE (as with EVERYTHING) is unique and 'different'.  That's why this is has to be such an individualized process that takes the individual to become "the YOU" of your health care team and work to get resourceful people surrounding you that are in the same ballpark 'outside the box' thinking about health care in the same general way, or at least SOME of the key players doing so, other can be consultants and advisors from their standpoint. YOU ultimately have the say in what you do or do not agree to for treatment and then how compliant you are with doing it! 

These people surrounding you, as seen in the You model, above, includes sources of education and support/consultation which might be a surrogate for the ideal professional to have on your team; today it is very rare that people have access to an ideal team of providers. Sometimes people really have difficulty finding even one 'in person' provider who is as 'all over this' as they are, so you end up being creative. Use providers who work remotely. Use providers you can learn from and 'do self help' from.  

THE NIX-ABLE NINE, as I think of them, which again, are the ones that on average cause most people problems are below:  You might have to eliminate only one, most typically it's gluten and dairy, but you might have to eliminate all of them for a few weeks and then reintroduce them one by one to see which affects you adversely. And to keep you with your thinking cap on and detective's magnifying glass out, you might be reacting to something unusual that is not on this list. (My IgG testing had 'amaranth' for instance, and 'beans' (as in pinto, not as in green).

But generally, the nixable nine:

• Gluten (wheat, barley, rye, oats, spelt, triticale, kamut)
• Dairy (milk, cheese, butter, yogurt coming from cows)
• Corn
• Eggs
• Soy
• Nuts
• Nightshades (tomatoes, peppers such as bell and chilis, but NOT the one that's on the table next to salt)
• Citrus
• Yeast (baker's yeast, brewer's yeast, and fermented products like vinegar -- so think about what alcoholic beverages you drink with this in mind.) 

This is a lot to think about just considering this list of 9 commonly consumed types of foods. Tomorrow we'll look at more details about gluten and the most common place we get it in the US, via wheat. 

I wanted to present something here on this topic that is a fundamental for how I go about presenting these changes. Look at all the things that you HAVE to eat still! When you're trying to make changes in your lifestyle and you have days you're more compliant than others, look at the days you're more in line with your intentions, and ask yourself what went right that day! (And also examine what the causes are on the days that are not as you want to be, naturally.) There's something in driving called 'potholism' -- if you look at the pothole and not at where you want to be to AVOID the pothole, your odds go up for hitting the pothole with your tire. Look where you want to go. "Keep your eyes on the prize", is another way of saying it.  

Exercise: Perhaps sit down and make a list of the foods you enjoy eating and just BRAINSTORM everything you can think of.  Then compare it to this list and put a mark next to the things you enjoy which are on this list.  Maybe you won't have to give some of them, maybe you can reduce some of them, just knowing that they're statistically the most problematic, and only give up the two that you think are the most likely. Will that be difficult? Absolutely, more for some, less for others! Will it be worth it if you were to feel, act, and BE BETTER? Again, look at the half of the glass that is full, not the part that is empty.  After all, the glass is full to the top with either liquid or air! 

"Dealing with food allergies is essential to creating wellness of mind, body, and brain!" -- Mark Hyman, MD, The UltraMind Solution, page 193

"...... an unhappy, chaotic, disorganized, disengaged, forgetful brain is an inflamed brain. The trail of scientific clues leads us to a few final common pathways for all illnesses, and inflammation is a key pathway." -- same guy, same page as above ... 

While there is rising awareness about gluten, translating that into people 'knowing' is another thing. This is where education and action are the next step in the process for people. And knowing if it's wheat or gluten they are allergic to. In my case, my symptoms improved so much when I quit eating wheat, I presumed it must be gluten and perhaps I had celiac disease, as I didn't want to do the invasive test to snip a part of the small intestine just beyond the stomach, which was the only test available in 1995.

Eventually I had two tests which showed it was not and a surgeon looking for the cause of abdominal pain suggested he grab some tissues to look at as long as I was being checked for the bacteria that causes stomach ulcers. So I and all doctors are thoroughly convinced now that mine is wheat, not gluten, as the IgG testing has shown both times I have had it done (ten years apart). But I hope you see how I went from one end of being convinced to the other. 

Gluten is a protein in wheat the other foods mentioned with it, above.  There are two main categories related to gluten allergy: those with celiac and all the others. With celiac disease, the autoimmune reaction occurs at the intestinal wall, when instead of digesting the gluten with the body putting out a chemical called gliaden, the cell that produces the gliaden blows up. Obviously, this is 'autoimmune'. 1% of people overall have this form, which means about 3 million Americans. 

But the 'milder forms', as Dr Hyman calls them on page 192 of The UltraMind Solution, affect about 33% of people. And keep in mind, this means ALL people; when you get into the people who are feeling not well, acting not well, or be-ing not well/sub-prime, it's more than likely they are about 100%. From the book:

While there are tests to help you identify this condition, the only way you will know if this is really a problem for you is to eliminate all gluten (sheat, rey, barley, oats, spelt, kamut, tritical) for a short period of time and see how you feel. Then eat it again and see what happens. This teaches you better than any test. See www.celiac.com for more information and help identifying hidden sources of gluten. 

Document in whatever means works best for you, what your symptoms are at least every day, if not several or more times. And when you do the re-introduction, definitely write all the symptoms you experience. Really clear your mind and plate/table/life for a period of time and reflect and "notice", then make note of it.

There are reasons people are more compliant and hold onto the concepts involved in making changes to something you do all day long with consumption of foods and beverages. Does it matter to YOU if that 'validation' information comes from YOU or a laboratory or a medical expert? It would perhaps be 'nice' if everyone had access to the tests so they could have some 'validation' from an outside source of what they experience when they do the elimination/reintroduction process on their own. But is that because we have been trained by our medical system to give our power away to outside sources? Think about it, when we were kids we were taught to go have someone kiss our "owey" or 'boo-boo", why weren't we taught to kiss it ourselves? 

"If you are suffering from a brain disorder of any kind, it is likely these substances are a problem for you. Using the elimination program in this book may help you overcome your brain allergies.  However, they may not be the only foods you are allergic to. ...in most cases the elimination diet that the UltraMind Solution is based on helps heal brain disorders, there are a small percentage of cases where you may have other allergies.

So if you get through this program and don't see all of the results you expect, it may be time for a more radical approach to eliminating food allergens. In that case, I would recommend you try The UltraSimple Diet, which offers a more detailed explanation of food sensitivities, how and why we overreact, and a more extended program that tells you how to fix all of your food allergies." 

I hope that my breaking this information out as I have into four increments has been helpful and getting us off on a good start with this step by bit process of going over this book's highlights. What has been covered so far is about 1% of the book. More tomorrow on getting your hands on a copy of the book. 

If you are seeing things you like here, I suggest you purchase the book and continue along with us as we whittle away at the various parts of the book which, overall, relate the most to people as I have experienced from working with this information both personally and in my professional life.

I am dedicated to keeping the core information at Lumigrate.com $0 because of the numbers of people who need this information who are with limited money to spend on all kinds of things. Perhaps ask your library to purchase a copy, if you cannot or do not wish to purchase one out of your personal funds.

Another idea is to approach someone you know and ask to team up and essentially be 'sponsored' financially, thinking of something you can do for them in return. This might be someone you know who hasn't known what to do for you related to your mental, behavioral, or physical state, or a business that would have an interest in supporting you in that way.

It might be a provider on your team of medical providers in the past or someone you wish to go to in the future if you had the funds. Often there are good connections made with a provider and consumer but the provider hasn't been able to do as much for the consumer/patient as they would have wanted but they're short on time and have so many other priorities in front of them to get through the busy days. I wholeheartedly agree with Dr Hyman saying this IS the future of medicine.  You'd be, essentially, a very inexpensive 'tutor' if the provider wanted to make learning a time-priority to them.   

In return, perhaps suggest you will give to them something of a summary conversation either in writing or orally (video/YouTube, phone call to them ....) and summarize how the information has helped you advance your education, and perhaps loan them or give them the book when you're able to part with it for a day or forever. Or share it -- hand it back and forth periodically, team with someone who lives or works nearby. Do you see how you, essentially, end up positively impacting ALL of their patients/clients if you do this?

In 2007, in the live educational forum I co-created and lead with the building's neuro/pain/brain psychologist, one of his patients came in one week at our meeting time with a paperback book and slapped it on the table. "I want your opinion on this book" she said, "when you have time to look through it".  It was with a nondescript and busy cover, I didn't look to see the name of the author even, but I put it on my desk at the end of the session and day and went home. The next day I was on hold on my phone, probably to a doctor's office getting clarification for a patient, and flipped open the book.  WOW, this is a good book! Who wrote this! ....  Milton Hammerly, MD, my doctor from TEN YEARS AGO when I lived on the other side of the Continental Divide of the United States, in Denver, Colorado! So I reconnected with him because of that and he's been of enormous 'behind the scenes' help to me over the years starting Lumigrate and just getting ideas as he is now the director of innovation for a big medical organization, and he provided WONDERFUL information when I was able to get The Denver Post's western slope reporter interested in doing a story for their readers to learn about additional,  more "altnerative",  thoughts about influenza in addition to the vaccination information people were getting bombarded with.

Essentially, I encourage YOU to PROBLEM SOLVE any 'things' you are putting in your way or not taking out of your way, with getting this book (or another resource) IF you're interested in 'doing this thing', as the saying goes, and taking action to start or CONTINUE changing your eating/drinking/consumption and therefore your state of mind and body well-being. 

And for EVERYONE, look at the cost of the book: $16 retail.  Weight that with if there is something or some things you could give up in order to have a copy of this book.  (I purchased mine at the health food store I frequent as I like to support their selection of books -- vote with your $, EVERY purchase you make sends a small message and the ripples turn into waves.) "I'm on a budget .... I spend so much money on books .... do I really need it? ..... Well, yeah, I think this one is worth it, and it's basically the cost of a bottle of wine.  I'll just drink less wine this week, this book'll probably tell me that I need to do that anyways!" (Stay tuned for if I was right about that or NOT!)   

About the same time as the patient became the teacher to me regarding one of my favorite books of all time about fibromyalgia, above, someone in the group who was also on social security disability income for fibromyalgia so very badly wanted to go to the naturopath in town who was helping so many people through his expertise about environmental medicine. But on $700/month or so income, that was not an easy task to afford his $350ish fee (for two hours to get history, create a care plan over the next week to the next appointment and that approintment.) And she became my great teacher that day, when she said "and I realized that if I give up my cable TV I can apply that $35/month and in under a year have the money to see him. 

How many times do you see FUNDRAISERS for people who have cancer or just yesterday it was a university music instructor who broke her leg, I guess she didn't have health insurance, an increasing issue in the US at least at this time. Perhaps find a way to fundraise for things you're really committed to doing for your wellness, if you cannot currently afford them. And I might suggest considering making it a FUNdraiser, doing something FUN, creative, etc. 

On New Year's Day, before I was even awake and up working, someone had messaged me who was rarin' to go this new year, to have better health. And we have to establish up front what a person's financial 'means' are, as that impacts what is available sooner or later (or never, in some cases.)

Living on the funds each month provided by the government for those who are disabled or older and beyond the years they can be working creates challenges for those in that position, moreso than those working, typically.

Hardest yet are those not being able to work as they did in the past and in the process of filing for and going through all the red tape and shameful process involved in being granted disability because of all the people who have tried to abuse the system. And I use the word 'shameful' intentionally, I as an American am ashamed of my country when I am reminded of the processes' shortcomings. So the New Years person reminded me to check on someone from last fall who I had assisted, gratis, as part of my 'time tithing' to give to my community of humans who can benefit from my services but cannot currently afford them.  I'm glad I did, they were 'stuck' and I was able to provide and help facilitat a solution. So far, they are getting complimentary complementary care to what their tax-funded clinic provides in the form of allopathic care! And the provider is getting something from the patient in return that helps them out. This was a person who didn't want a hand out, they wanted to give a hand too! 

In both cases, they felt like they could sqeeze $1/day setting aside money for their TOP priority of improving their wellness in 2013. I very much value their dedication and am honored to know them and be helping them with their wellness goals in 2013. In half a month they'd have the $ to purchase this on a retail shelf new. Perhaps they can find it at used bookstore or online cheaper! 

For those who have fewer financial restrictions, which is 'the other half' of people I "see out there" through my work with Lumigrate ("the haves and the have nots", as the saying goes), take a good look at where you are spending your money, and if you have a 'habit' about where your funds go related to YOU and YOUR WELLNESS.

And then consider purchasing a copy of this book, and also continuing along with this study of it, bit by bit.  I'm not going to go into all the details that the book does, obviously, but rather go around the portions of the book that overall apply to what those coming to Lumigrate are most often concerned with, so I can point them in this direction in the future or they can find it on their own in the future, as perhaps 100 of you did this first week. I believe it will be in your best interest if you have the time, energy and money to get a copy somehow, to do so.

And if not, for now at least, I hope you glean enough from what we cover here, that it furthers you down the path to health and well-being!  Either way, I'm glad you're joining us.  So today, Saturday, the day a lot of people do their shopping, that is my big message.  Tomorrow is Sunday, a day of rest for a lot of people. For some, Saturday is their Sabbath and Sunday is their day of shopping and catching up on RnR and etc.  Either way, over this weekend I hope you shop and I hope you rest and restore and address your spirit --- more about THAT tomorrow! 

 As I said, above, typically one day on the weekend people benefit from 'taking a day off'.  Back when I was an occupational therapist working in long-term care, there were therapy contract companies that saw they could make more money by having 7 day a week therapies. The facilities liked it as they made the money and they also found that it was a 'selling point', the families and patients thought that sounded 'better' that there was 'more' than at the other places.  

But inevitably there would be a day where the patient wouldn't want or couldn't have therapy -- perhaps a special family visit or going out for a medical appointment.  And they'd be SO MUCH STRONGER, mentally and physically the next day. I came to the conclusion that for most patients, six days in a row was the ideal. I honestly didn't see much difference in the overall length of stay compared to places that had five day a week therapy, and the advantage was they didn't have a 'substitute' one day a week either. Presuming they were doing well with me and liked me, it was better continuitiy to just have me every day and not be having to exchange information with a covering therapist or OT assistant. 

Naturally, with this process of learning and doing differently related to foods and drinks you consume, taking a day off from the new eating program is not going to be in your overall best interests but for a while as you're learning, you don't 'have to' follow it to the letter; but ahead in the not too distant future, we'll be covering here the way you get the inflammation cooled off by totally eliminating the foods (one or many) for many weeks -- which isn't forever, it's really a short period of time (but it might feel like forever....).  

In order to have the stamina mentally and emotionally and spiritually to do what is ahead, no matter how much or little you're going to endeavor with this, I suggest you make it a top priority to regenerate one day a week and not be 'learning/taking in new information'.  

Let the information you learned in the last week settle in.  Talk about it with people, think about it as you're going about doing other things, perhaps going for a walk, enjoying a movie, or curling up with a good novel. OR cooking! 

Today, I took my pet for a walk, and enjoyed that it was above freezing finally and actually into the 40s. I relished the warmth of the sun and the coolness but not COLDNESS of the air ....

I called a friend who had a birthday this weekend and who I knew had the  go off recently about dairy, so I wanted to see how the suggested replacements were going, as it was relatively simple, what goes in the morning coffee.  I wished I were there to take her out for coffee or bring over some of my favorite organic brew with dark chocolate almond milk, but I did the next best thing, and had mine while while enjoying the conversation on the phone. 

I hope that whatever YOU did today, it was in the best interests of your well-being. I look forward to tomorrow, MONDAY, and starting our second week! ~~ Mardy

If you'd like to check out something from our spirituality forum, and take a look around there, here's the FIRST piece our Bubbie (Grandmother) Yenta wrote back in the fall of 2009, where she talks about what she does to revitalize herself. FUN and stories from our wise crone are GRATE for the soul and spirit!  www.lumigrate.com/forum/it-couldnt-hurt-much

Dr Hyman outlines a quiz on pages 195/6 of The UltraMind Solution which I HIGHLY recommend you go and look at. 

When I was first looking the book over after I purchased it, I saw the list and was thinking "oh, I wish he had this online for people, I would totally like people to see this list and help them identify with this information via the MANY symptoms listed". And as I turned the page to see the last part of the list, I was so pleased to see

* For your convenience, this quiz has been reprinted in The UltraMind Solution Companion Guide. Simply go to www.ultramind.com/guide, download the guide, and print out the quiz.  

There are 41 items on the list. The scoring is 1 point/box you check. It is broken down as:

Score                         Severity                       Care Plan                                 Action to Take

0-8                            Maybe mild                   The UltraMind Solution      Do the 6 week program in part 3

9-12                          Maybe moderate           Self-Care                           As above plus self care in Chapter 25

13 and above             Maybe severe                Medical Care                      Both steps above and see a physician                                        for additional assistance. Chapter 25 outlines some options to discuss with your doctor. 

(Note: I abbreviated some of the wording to fit the space here at Lumigrate, please see Page 196 of the book or consult the information at the above link for the guide. 

I will say this: That of the 41 boxes that a person can get one point for, if I think of my WHOLE life up to and including this moment, I have had or done 27 of the items on the list! And I am happy to report that most of them are in the past and not the present.  But I hope this encourages YOU to:

• Go to the link for the guide.
• Print out the quiz if you at all have the ability to do so and if not, WRITE DOWN THE ITEMS ON A PAPER in a list for so you have made that physical connection and have that 'interaction' with the material, not just looking it over and saying 1, 2, .... 3,,,, 4, yup, that one too, 5....  And coming up with a total score #. 
• Spend some time thinking about how much these symptoms interfere with your life, or if they're products you are buying, how much that is costing you directly in $ and indirectly in the side effects. 

And then come back here tomorrow for Day #8. I'm going to close today with a great quote from page 196: "Unfortunately, while the gut is a source of great intelligence, it is also the source of great mischief for millions."

Are YOU one of them? And are you a mild/medium/severe? Are you willing to do the work and go through the discomfort potentially, of giving up foods that your body/ mind is craving, inorder to have a different looking piece of paper than the one that you have filled out with the checked boxes or listed symptoms or products you're taking/using? If so, we likely have the tools to connect you to at Lumigrate to help you with that. I'd like as many people as possible to have improved health and well-being of their WHOLE selves, and improved lives as a result.  Again, here's the link, so you can blast over to it: www.ultramind.com/guide

Live and Learn. Learn and Live Better!! ~~ Mardy 

Mardy,

What a great resource for people to use to help figure out what is causing their symptoms. There is some overlap of symptoms in the quizes, but answering all of the questions in all the quizes should help the patient/consumer and thier provider, or providers (doctor of some sort or other knowledgeable professionals) decide where to start with treatment.

Thank you, Dr Kennedy, I am liking the # of reads for the first week of this book study about this topic; over 500 people in the first week. Back when I first heard you speak and met your amazing RN wife, Liz Kennedy, of Cardiovascular Essentials today, a progessive, cash-based but low overhead progressive testing and treatment business she established after leaving insurance-based health care a few years after I did to create Lumigrate.com, I was able to 'encounter' (a health education 'census taking' word) at most 50 people a week doing insurance-based treatment plus having a once a week FREE education program in my building. So, to have 10x that on just ONE TOPIC at Lumigrate in under five years' time is gratifying and GRATE. So thank you if you're one of the select medical experts on this thread helping to educate AND learn a bit more as you're here from the others, and thank you if you're here 100% to be a reader and learner and 'taker away of informaton'.

OVERLAPPING information is something I have looked at for a LONG time, so I am glad you brought this concept into play here. I had purchased the book Wheat Belly and wanted to bring it into the conversation at some point and so will do so here. 

 "Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight, and Find Your Path Back to Health" is at the top of the cover of Wheat Belly, by William Davis, MD. 

I was actually looking for Wheat Belly at the health food store, as not only had Dr Marc Spurlock suggested it after hearing the author speak at an integrative medicine conference he was at in December 2012, when I also saw The UltraMind Solution.  I purchased both, which just feels decadent to me, $25.99 for Wheat Belly and $16.00 for The UltraMind Solution -- I was thinking "do I really need BOTH, what if I got just one or the other".  I am very glad I purchased both because of what Dr Kennedy brought up, above, about overlapping information.  

There is much Dr Davis says in Wheat Belly that supports what Dr Hyman says in UltraMind Solution, but these doctors came from such different directions figuring this information out that it makes it doubly impactful. Dr Davis goes into a lot of detail about the history of wheat and how it was modified from the ancient wheat. He also goes into a lot of detail that my eyes gloss over a bit so they scan and not read/retain that others might be more interested in related to the elements of the different types of wheat and what occurs in the body in detail to make the results you see that ends up being fat on the body.

He does specify that it's not just the belly and it's not just wheat, basically this was a very savvy way to title the book. I heard about Wheat Belly here and there, never really gave much thought to buying the book since I've been kind of 'up on this stuff' since 1995. But when one of my 'clients' told me on the phone at the start of this year, checking in as to progress overall with their education and making changes in lifestyle -- "Funny you should mention wheat, someone at the health club is reading Wheat Belly and I was interested in hearing what she says it's about", I was impressed and figured I should perhaps check it out so I could ALSO tell my client about it in addition to a someone working out at the same gym. That is SUPER important, those around you no matter how close in relationship you are, and so hopefully we will have the wagons more surrounded by my now reading Wheat Belly a bit at a time, as well as UltraMind Solution. 

Last year I was, once again, taught by Petie the OT, who you might know as one of the contributors at Lumigrate.com. She and I met when I was one of the many OTs her son has had in his now 40-something years of life, due to developmental disabilities. Then we worked at the same place and I was injured and she came to my rescue and saw as many patients as she could and I saw as many as I could, and all the patients got good therapy that week.  And we've been friends since. 

She most recently wrote on Lumigrate about her diagnosis of COPD, which occurred in December of 2011. She flew into old school Petie OT action and did a thorough old-style research report about COPD and posted it on Lumigrate. I frankly could tell from reading it and from talking with her on the phone, that she had been essentially lazo'd (roped) by the allopathic, insurance-based medical provider and she was following like a little lamb to slaughter -- treatments that beat your system down and are NOT looking for the underlying cause of the inflammation that was causing her to have her long-standing asthma go to COPD level. 

So I suggested: Since you got the memo years back about gluten and that helped you so much, the other biggie is dairy. OH NO, MARDY, I AM NOT GIVING UP DAIRY, I'D RATHER DIE, it is SO HARD to give up gluten, I just can't handle it. But 'the seed was planted'.  So I shut up and she went to her exercise class, where the instructor said 'you know, Petie, you might look into food allergy testing', so Petie then turned to her chiropractor who sold her a test but it couldn't be done while she was on the immunosupressant medications. Those caused her got to get FURTHER out of whack and thankfully her MD called her and was looking at what she had been diagnosed with, prescribed, and THANKFULLY was 'up on his stuff' (kind of) about yeast and he prescribed a yeast-killing pharmaceutical which she ran and picked up and said 'well, if it's my gut I need probiotics too', so she went to the health food store (same chain I bought both books from, Natural Grocers/Vitamin Cottage), and got not only good advise about probiotic but the clerk turned her onto the concept of alkalinity of the body and alkalanizing water.  And by fall, she had gotten to the referred pulmonologist who said 'you don't have asthma or COPD' ... though I spoke with her on New Years day and she was wheezing again.

 "Petie ... over the holidays I ate a BUNCH of wheat and dairy, as I wasn't eating at my home, I was trying to fit in with the people around me ..... did you maybe get some dairy in you, you sound horrible again...."

She said "Noooo......... the only thing I do is have a cheese stick dipped in cinnamon for a bedtime snack, that's all the dairy I have every day......"

 I thought!  That's just the! For people who have gotten their bodies out of 'whack', that amount can have some effects! But the other side of the coin is that it is really difficult to make all these changes and not have the foods your brain tells you are 'aah, I like that!', due to the chemicals the brain emits when inflammation from the gut/digestion issues gets to the brain; ironically, you end up craving the foods your body is reacting to due to that chemical cascade.  Just like in our teen year, we are, perhaps, being dominated by chemicals leading us 'astray'. 

Since then I have TWICE heard people, who have given up wheat in the past and see that is 'helping', tell me that they do not eat or drink dairy and it turns out they're doing it DAILY in their COFFEE! So it's like COFFEE becomes the delivery system for dairy.  

Who would have though when we were kids, and I started drinking coffee with milk and sugar in it when I went to first grade, that today the COFFEE would be GOOD for you (in small quantities when it's organic and etc.) and the DAIRY would be known/thought currently to be CAUSING HEALTH PROBLEMS MORESO than sugar too! 

Also, I popped over to see what Emily Deans, MD, "evolutionary psychiatrist" had to say about Wheat Belly, and she'd noticed a lot of the same things I did about the book but was more annoyed by things than I because of her ability with medicine, pointing out flaws in Dr Davis' logic on some of his examples, and basically saying she agrees about not eating wheat but doesn't agree that Wheat Belly is a source of information up to her expectations for an MD writing a book on the subject. Read what she has to say at: evolutionarypsychiatry.blogspot.com/2011/10/slam-dunked-and-wheat-belly.html. 

She writes a blog in clearly very little time she has available, and it is often as difficult for me to read as what I read that I've written at Lumigrate, if I don't go back and edit after having written at a time of day that is a good time for me in the first place.  However, what she covers in volume of things she reads and learns and digests down for us to read on her blog is extraordinary and I consider it one of the best resources I know of on the subject of diet's effects on the brain and mind and mental wellness or illness. 

I will leave you with that thought to ponder today, and will also provide the link to www.wheatbellyblog.com/

and to two Facebook pages that are about WheatBelly (Wheat Belly) and Recipes (Wheat Belly - Recipe Central): 

FUN ONE -- Go to the two FB pages and Like and see how many of your FB friends have also Liked those pages.  One on average FIVE for me! I have over 2,500 FB friends, clearly most have not yet heard about Wheat Belly so I hope this goes a long ways for getting those #s up! 

Live and Learn.  Learn and Live Better! (and learn to eat and drink better along the way!) ~~ Mardy

Note: I called Petie to ask her to look at this in case I didn't have something right, or as she'd like it to be said. She wanted everyone to know, she's doing GREAT and simply has not written because of all the medical appointments and other things she did for her health last year, and with the COPD diagnosis, which was a rather temporarly diagnosis, she got on the stick about end of life planning to set things up for her adult son who has developmental disabilities. She hopes to write about that in the future, as it's just staggering, what all has to be done to prepare properly, and all the nuances with how monies can be spent and etc. I'm just glad she's getting herSELF taken care of, then her family, and we'll have many people who can benefit from what she will be able to tell us about all that in the future. 

 I wanted to 'stay with' Wheat Belly information for another day, because it is so supportive of Dr Hyman's information with The UltraMind Solution, but since the whole book is dediated to focusing primarily on wheat and gluten, it naturally has more details. Plus what interested or was found by the two researching information on this food and wellness of the brain and body differed. 

"Lose the wheat, lose the weight" is a great slogan on page 54 of Wheat Belly.

Why? Wheat acts as an appetite stimulant. It generally makes people -- YOU -- want MORE OF THAT -- more things containing wheat as well as things without wheat, such as soda, tacos, candy.... For some people, wheat literally acts in the brain like a drug, yielding drug-like neurological effects that can be reversed with medications used to counter the effects of narcotics.  

The details of this are covered in the book, and I found the information presented as to WHY this happens in the body, and the history of how this was discovered and figured out by researchers, beyond 'fascinating'. I found it helpful to reinforce for me personally, why I want to maintain a commitment level to being gluten/wheat-free. 

"So this is your brain on wheat: Digestion yields morphine-like compounds that bind to the brain's opiate receptors. It incudes a form of reward, a mild euphoria. When the effect is blocked, or no exorphin-yielding foods are consumed, some people experience a distinctly unpleaseant withdrawal." (exorphin-yielding foods meaning those with wheat). -- Page 50

"Wheat, in fact, nearly stands alone as a food with potent central nervous system effects. Outside of intoxicants such as ethanol (like that in your favorite merlot or chardonnay), wheat is one of the few foods that can alter behavior, induce pleasureable effects, and generate a whthdrawal syndrome upon its removal. And it required observations in schizophrenic patients to teach us about these effects."

From withdrawal effects to psychotic hallucinations, wheat is party to some peculiar neurological phenomena. To recap:

• Common wheat, upon digestion, yields polypeptides that possess the ability to cross into the brain and bind to opiate receptors. 
• The action of wheat-derived polypeptides, the so-called exorphins such as gluteomorphin, can be short-circuited with the opiate-blocking drugs naloxone and naltrexone.
• When administered to normal people or people with uncontrollable appetite, opiate-blocking drugs yield reductions in appetite, cravings, and calorie intake, as well as dampen mood, and the effect seems particularly specific to wheat-containing products.  (Page 51)

What is in this grain, wheat, that worsens abnormal mental health behaviors, such as found in people with schizophrenia, ADHD, autism -- symptoms are exacerbated by the consumption of wheat, and are reduced or eliminated by the elimination of wheat.  

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) studied this, headed by Dr Christine Zioudrou.  They took gluten and subjected it to acids and enzymes that are found in the stomach, which is obviously midway in the human digestive system. (Digestion starts with chewing, remember!) Gluten turns into a mix of polypeptides (chemical chains), and the dominant ones were isolated an administered to laboratory rats. These were found to have the unique ability to penetrate the blood-brain barrier, that normally separates the brain and the bloodstream!

The blood-brain barrier's purposes are many, but essentially the brain is highly sensitive to the many things that get into the bloodstream. Think of the brain as you would the most sensitive part of your computer, and think about sitting your computer in a place with filtered, clean air versus the air in a woodshop or when doing hardwork and 'stirring up dust'.  Substances reaching the amygdala, hippocampus, cerebral cortex and other brain structures can wreak havoc on your body, which the brain is part of, keep in mind. 

At this point, I am going to hop off and let you digest this amount of information for today. I ask people reading this to think about the APH axis, or adrenal-pituitary-hypothalamus axis, and the hormone system. If you have or know someone who has adrenal fatigue/exhaustion, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, or other chronic illnesses that are thought of more as 'autoimmune' -- MS, lupus, to name two -- or ANY of the 'mental health' conditions from OCD and ADD/ADHD to bipolar disorder to schizophrenia and the personality disorders (borderline, narcissistic, obsessive compulsive personality disorder (which is different than OCD, but has some similar features) ... does this segment today help paint the picture as to why GLUTEN, which is typically consumed in the US as WHEAT, might be one of the biggest factors in our individual and collective problems in the United States today (and beyond).  

It might seem strange to you that I'm going to 'beat the schizophrenia drum' here so much, but there are reasons for it. We're ALL impacted by schizophrenics at one level or another; many people I know have at least one member of their family with one of the schizophrenia's.  I am not exception, my father was adopted by one in the 1920s; she lived into her 90s, dying in the 1990s, undiagnosed and untreated and leaving in her wake a son whose only confirmation from a professional to alleviate his wonder about what he'd put up with his whole life came from her primary care doctor near the end of her life who said 'has she always been like this?'  

In my internships to become an OT in 1996, I had the most amazing education and work experience of my life in the locked psyche unit of the Denver VA hospital. The patients were a mix of about 2/3 men and 1/3 women in the timeframe that I was there. The diagnoses were evenly mixed of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder.

Those folks where there 24/7, locked in, there were some padded rooms when someone needed to be sequestered for everyone's safety, and I was taught on day one how to do a five point take-down, and got to observe one in the three months I was there. I was threatened in a 'testing me' way by a new patient who I sat next to in order to show that I wasn't scared of him, as I'd been briefed, as I was every morning, about the new admissions who would be in our group for therapy. He turned to me and remarked about the lanyard around my neck having a breakaway function because of people like him who would stangle me otherwise with it. (Think about it, that's not why the breakaway feature is there, he could have strangled me with it the way it was if he was able to, which wasn't possible with the way the security of the staff is set up to all be trained and everyone stays aware and ALSO, everyone floats in a calm, serene way to keep from ruffling people's feathers, so to speak.)  Suffice it to say that I felt safer at work there than a lot of other situations in my life before or after; everyone 'had your back' and you had everyone else's. 

My greatest teacher about schizophrenia was a man who had come in to be tapered off a very helpful medication for his schizophrenia because it had a side effect of causing problems with your body/blood, that were very dangerous. He was able to accomplish, while 'sane', graduate work in mental health and work with people. He was able to verbalize to me his fears of what would happen if the new medication didn't work for him, and in the short term, just the process of going from well to ill in order to transition him to the new medication. He would come and join 'the guys' that came in for group every day at noon, and couldn't contribute to the conversation and would leave after a few minutes, as he couldn't track normal conversation so he'd go be alone somewhere. Then he came in with tin foil from the baked potatoes on his glasses, trying to bring in the signal better of the voices he heard. That was the day he thought I was his wife. Last I saw, the new medication had not been helpful to him.

I often wonder what could have happened had the VA gotten on board the information I had access to as a civilian and found in 1995, about foods causing these inflammatory processes in the body. And so, it is not just for anyone out there who has a family member who has delusions or maybe hears a little bit of extra information in their minds that I belabor this 'schizophrenia stuff' here, it is for our veterans, all of them, who served our country and whose country, in my opinion, has let them down grossly when it comes to mental health treatment, because it seems impossible to me that they'd not have moved forward on the wheat/gluten and dairy/cassein discoveries LONG AGO, unless there's been money and big business involved with basically not acting upon the evidence ALL THIS TIME. 

They ate a 'government issue diet' there, in 1996, as did children in schools, as did children in homes, as did adults, as did everyone who was following suit with what not only the government health organizations told us was good for us, all the major nonprofits followed suit.  Think about the big associations for cancer, heart disease, diabetes, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue. They were all basically following the recommendations of the government about foods and nutrition.

I had, in 1995, been suspected to have MS for a while, and pursued food allergy testing when MRI and spinal tap were inconclusive to the neurologist, finding the IgG reactions I had/have to wheat and moreso, dairy, as well as a few other things. Seeing how MY health had changed so much for the better when I removed a few things from my diet, I had wondered what the VA would be serving to it's residents/patients they are called there. Lots of wheat and dairy.

But look, below, if you chose to read on about this to deepen your understanding of this information about wheat and the mind (and brain and the rest of the body too, we'll get there, I promise!). Look how far back 'the law of the lamp-post' was shining on wheat as a culprit! Where was the 'hammer'? (The law of the lamp-post/law of the hammer, that I refer to, is included in Dr Young's video from day #1 at Lumigrate.com, about how allopathic medicine goes about things.)  

IS IT POSSIBLE THAT INFORMATION ABOUT WHEAT BEING NOT GOOD FOR US WAS KEPT FROM GETTING "Out There?"  And IS IT POSSIBLE THAT today, with the power of the Internet and people having access to it and with our protection in the US to have freedom of speech and now a tool to reach more people with the same random concerns, we'll be able to change things?  

I hope so.  But this is a CALL TO ACTION from me to YOU. Weather you change what you eat is up to you, naturally.  But PLEASE consider investing a little TIME and ENERGY into UNDERSTANDING THIS enough to tell others somewhat articulately, and then tell them to Search on Lumigrate and the keywords that will get them here. 

The Newtown, Connecticut (USA) shooting in December (2012), was clearly the day the United States 'tipped'. On the heels of an election that had people 'dividied' and a lot of people griping about the sky falling, with others fa-la-la-ing about what can occur with a President who doesn't have to be concerned about the next election, and all the money givers that go along with any kind of policy decision. (Thank about it: BigPharma/BigMedical influences what information is on Websites and in publications, etc., the same 'system' has lead to the problems in politics that we have in medical!)  IT IS TIME FOR THINGS TO CHANGE.  

I personally have utilized astrology as part of my spirituality and belief system in helping me figure life out, and the 12/21/12 'thing', to me, was going to be the end of one era and the beginning of another. In general, the turningpoint was going to be solstice in the winter of 2012. I merely offer that to you if you're reading to not only remind that 'spirit' is just a much a part of wellness as 'body' and 'mind', which is what we're dealing with extensively discussing foods and the brain and rest of the body, and how that affects the mind. In the past, people who were mentally ill were thought to have evil spirits influencing them.  The Salem Witch story is so fascinating as it was a mold on the rye, it was later discovered. 

But I also mention it because I was mentally prepared for 'something' to happen around that time, and that things were going to really shift. I felt and still feel that the tipping point came with Newtown. I will provide, below, a link to what I wrote the very next day on Lumigrate.com and violence and diet. Essentially, I provide information from Emily Deans, MD about violence and trans fats, but there obviously was more to the story which had to do with diet overall, and wheat in particular. My take-home message was this: TODAY, change your diet.

YOU!  Change your diet. Devote time to learning. Form your opinions, own them. Take action. If you wish to enter the debate about the 2nd Amendment and gun violence, please do that as well.  But don't just do that; do this! People need to feel there is something they can do to make themselves safer. Look at what you're putting in your body, or re-look at it. I had gotten lax over my adherence to eliminating wheat and dairy (gluten and casein) because when I've been super compliant, I feel and see no effects from having some. And then some here and there can become some every day.

So I took action! Aside from three days in a row surrounding Christmas Day, where I was invited to join others, or on the last day, out to dinner at a place that makes a specialty of macaroni and cheese with interesting meats inside, after I'd eaten movie theater popcorn with added 'butter food-like substance' AND a soda (with sugar, less toxic than the sugar-free), I'd been 'buckled down'. And as always, it takes some self-discipline, but if you focus on the 'prize' -- how much better you 'are' with mental clarity or physical symptoms, insomnia, etc., it ends up being not that difficult to maintain. 

Now that we got to Day 9, above, and dipped into the schizophrenia information, I wanted to stay with that another day and bring into play what Emily Deans, MD, has to say about it at her blog. An evolutionary psychiatrist, which is a specialty are of evolutional medicine, Dr Deans' website has been up about as long as Lumigrate has, and she's ammassed a nice complement of information about mental and behavioral health related to diet.  

(Psychiatrists are the ones that have completed medical school and specialize in the brain and mental illness that causes behavioral problems, and they typically prescribe a lot of medications in recent times.  Psychologists and other mental health providers are the ones in recent times you go to and talk about your life and they teach you various skills, presumably, to act differently within the reality you have in your brain and body and life surrounding you.) It is so refreshing to find a psychiatrist who is taking the time to step outside the box and take the functional medicine approach where you're looking underneath a problem/issue/symptom for the cause and then address that!

So I am going to include this whole topic from Dr Dean's blog so you don't have to take a trip away today to read and see what 'goes on' at her blog. I include (with a little editing to save space) the comment thread as well, as there are excellent tips given and discussion.  I hope this allows you to see what is going on at this site, and take the link at the bottom and go explore more! You'll notice that she has a sense of humor and that right away, she uses the word "exorphin", which we learned yesterday!

Wheat and Schizophrenia

This is February 1, 2013 I am writing this, a new month, and it's FRIDAY of Super Bowl Weekend! On Sunday, Americans typically are in front of their televisions later than usual and many of us who don't typically watch football join in for the commercials ... and the FOOD! 

So let's have some FUN today.  Go get a beverage of your choice when you have about 10 minutes to devote to an exercise about YOU. 

Gather/get whatever it is you write with ... your phone, your tablet, a scrap of paper and a crayon .... whatever .... and have some FUN today remembering times in your past when you were feeling WELL. Days that stand out in your mind.  

Mine that just came to me was a day when I was maybe four, and it was early summer, the piles of mountain snow had melted and the ground was no longer muddy. It was mid-morning or late morning based on where the sun was as I recall, and I had gone outside and was trotting along the pathway and was by the kennel's wired 'run' with the dogs in that run and all the others, bounding along with me, yipping a bit or talking in their way when they thought someone was going to let them out to run free on the property or go on a hike.  I wasn't big enough to supervise them and I don't remember anything more than the warmth of the sun hitting me and having this joy in every fiber of my being, or so it felt!

I never walked anywhere until puberty, my father would say for the rest of his life. I was just happy, I don't know why --  I was REALLY into catching butterflies back then, but I didn't have my net with me at that moment, maybe I was just chasing a butterfly with no net.  And it was always a question -- why did I stop running? I went from being the fastest runner in my class in first grade to trying to participate in intramural track in junior high and it just 'not agreeing with me'.  I stuck to going home after school, having a snack and watching some TV and going outside to hike with the dogs, or snowshoe in the winter, do their maintenance and that of the horses, and then come inside and help cook dinner with my mother, eat dinner and listen to my parent's distorted sense of entertainment -- political arguments -- clean up when they were finally done with their bizarre interchange, and do my homework and go to bed, then peeling myself out of bed in the morning, exhausted and not realizing the signs of 'adrenal fatigue', and doing it over again. How much of that had to do with breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks having wheat involved typically? There is no way to know; but it was certainly a part of the body/mind (brain) aspect of losing ideal wellness, along witht he mind stress and spiritual stress that was part of my formative years as well.  

Wellness comes from the body, mind, and spirit, so you might have had a FUN time when you were in a stressful time period, or you might have had a FUN day when you were very not feeling well.

Example: When I was a teenager, 'the party of the summer' with BOYS coming to it, fell on the Saturday evening I had two wisdom teeth pulled first thing that morning. I still scrambled on the rock outcropping with the boys and girls from my class, and I think I remember it more for the throbbing of my face AND eating my GERBER BABY FOOD!   

Oh, man did those hamburgers they were BBQing in the outdoor pit on that outcropping smell good. 

This was around the time, age 14 or 15 or so, that I had my first blood glucose tolerance test, which revealed a dramatic blood sugar rise and then fall and at three hours it was dropping but above the line that is determined 'hypoglycemia'. Unfortunately, the adults involved didn't push harder at that time for a repeated and longer test to see what happened after hour #3; when it was repeated 2 years later when I was having the same symptoms and even more pronounced (blacking out every time I stood up, which was more orthostatic hypotension which is, we now know, part of the 'adrenal fatigue' picture) the five hour test showed the same high and then drop and it kept going to leveling out at 37, which is extremely low blood sugar.

And yes, medical detectives, they were not doing the right tests for my stymptoms, so clearly I didn't have physicians or parents who could problem solve what was going on and in that day I didn't have access to medical information to learn on my own. I would like to think if we had the Internet today I would have been allowed to use it and find information to help lead to solutions. (I had a 17 year old contact me through Lumigrate who was being proactive in her search to solve medical problems despite oppression from parents, it was very encouraging.) 

Simply put: some people are not going to be proactive until they're in a disaster and the situation is finally clear to them that they're in a fight for their lives. It's like waiting for your house to catch fire and calling the fire department. You have to be aware if you're reading this information related to someone you care about, or even about yourself, that this phenomenon exists.

Sometimes (not always) people are not wanting to get rid of the problem -- they want the firemen to come. That can be the medical providers who show concern for them, or family members who hop in to help. NOT that everyone with chronic illnesses are not doing everything in their power to change their wellness; but if you see people who are 'resisting' embracing something as convincing as this evidence about foods and illness, the next step is always to figure out 'why'. And that can be easier for someone a little more 'objective' to see; I learned in my life with my family of origin in the past after becoming an occupational therapist in my mid 30s -- it's much easier to see what's going on with OTHER family team/systems than your own. 

It's called 'secondary gain'.  I worked this into the discussion because a young professional in the nutrition realm of health care recently asked me after reading this thread at Lumigrate, about when people don't seem to want to get well.  Read the recent days' above about the way the brain gets addicted to what comes to it from the breakdown of gluten....., and realize that can also be 'just' physical addiction to what goes on in the brain when the chemicals from the food digested reaches the brain, if it penetrates the blood-brain barrier or has another impact on the brain chemistry.

Also, important to note, there are all the personality 'disorders' which are really personality 'conditions' if you ask me.  Almost everyone has them these days... again perhaps in part from the years and generations now of eating foods that are 'changing us' behaviorally and genetically, as Dr Deans/above and others specialize in studying and reporting/educating about. Naturally, that is only the physical side of the equation, not the psychological that people typically think of related to why people have the personalities and behave as they do:  pressures from their current life on top of when they were raised by parents to "perform", childhood trauma/abuse, etc., and additional spiritual stressors in many cases, as well. 

Part of my motivation about this comes from the torturous decline of both of my parents' lives, from very different conditions that I believe were both caused by wheat/gluten plus dairy/casein and other factors, (remember, body, mind, spirit), now that I know more about it. As one of their two children, a lot 'trickled down' to me, and contributed to my health issues, and fortunately I have been able to shore things up through progressive information I came across --- all the way back to the 1970s, I was reminded today!

Today on Facebook, on a conversation that started out about whackadoodle people offending one of my longest and dearest FB friends, I suggested people are really all out of sorts in all kinds of ways today, and I think it has a LOT to do with the foods people are eating. And one of her FB friends, who is now my FB friend , reminded me of the FIRST BOOK I read about food, as he'd just read it: Sugar Blues!

My father was diagnosed and treated for basically all of the symptoms, partially, including hypoglycemia, or more specifically 'prediabetic hypoglycemia'.  Therefore he suspected I had the same problem and I was tested, as I reported, above, and at least finally got good advise in terms of what was going on related to the conventional wisdom of the time about blood sugar.  

While that wasn't the whole picture, at least taking care of one aspect of the symptoms kept me 'out of the drain' and functioning relatively normally. While I was 'underachieving' for my abilities and desires, I was at least not missing more school that an average student at that time, and getting acceptable grades, though they were far under what I now know I was capable of. Having parents who were both 'ostriches' and didn't want to 'solve and address problems', sweeping things under the rug and only dealing with things of the level of 'the house is on fire', left me in the receivorship position as a minor. Once I was off to college I rapidly became a take-charge patient with the limited skills I had in my tool box for that. Everyone starts somewhere, and we are all on the journey to improving our skills as consumers and generally as humans, so embrace where you're at, is my recommendation, today, and work on the simple exercises I'm suggesting. 

I suggest that this weekend you take some time to look back on your life. Reflect on your family of origin. Your family traditions. Your daily eating.  I mean, I was eating at least 2 pieces of bread a day! My dad made oatmeal every day and I thought that was just gross, I loved, loved, loved bread.  

Keep in mind that the advise you got at the time was 'conventional', and very much dictated by what the Federal government and others, such as BigMedical were teaching your providers.  Today most people are aware of the influence of BigPharma and BigMedical on the education medical students and experienced providers obtain. So look backwards with some scrutiny on what you've been told if you've consulted with providers about health issues over your lifetime. And keep in mind, modern medicine has incredible tools for us to utilize when that is clinically the right answer to incorporate. But the 'real deal' is solving the underlying causes for the body to be needing a medication, rather than relying solely or primarily or even secondarily or thirdly .... on chemical medications. 

Put on a different pair of glasses to look at your life behind you, as you write on your paper about the days you felt well and happy in the past. Put on many different kinds of glasses -- critical ones, sunny/rose colored ones, etc.  

And then take a good look at what you're doing today -- and how you're feeling on ALL LEVELS -- how happy are you? How are your relationships going, is anxiety or 'your picky personality' getting in the way of things? I've seen people literally say "Never mind me, I'm just OCD" .... "How's that workin' for ya'?" as Dr Phil would say.

I prefer to say "If you keep doing what you're doing, you're going to get what you got."

Sunday with the Super Bowl will be a very telling and educational day.  Take it in and look at what our 'traditions' are, and how that affects us on a daily basis. Eat and drink to your heart and mind's content and then see how you sleep, how you feel the next day and next week. And perhaps you'll do as I plan to do, and take something gluten free and eat in a modified way. Good for you.  But good for you as well if you are still looking at this information and forming your opinion and then take action on Monday. Or whenever. It is, after all, entirely up to YOU. 

What is 'normal'? Just as my FB friend's post today that caught my eye about someone angering/huring her feelings made me say 'that's normal anymore, people are in so much pain, but they don't even know they're in pain (emotionally, mentally, physically, spiritually....).  

Define 'normal'? It means 'the norm'. So yes, it is 'normal' today that we're all not really 'well', increasingly.  WELLNESS is the key word.  Do you want to be  NORMAL for a person today of your age ..... or do you want to be NORMAL FOR A PERSON WITH WELLNESS.  

And for those who have a long list of illnesses, who cannot even IMAGINE being 'well' again, or perhaps, like me, you weren't REALLY well as a child, don't strive for 'well', perhaps you can imagine yourself back at a wellness/illness level that is 'turning back the hands of time'.  Would giving up wheat/gluten be worth it for that? Why not consider trying it for a little while and see, by the end of February you ought to have a good idea of if it's making your life better or not -- your mind better, your body better, having a positive impact on those around you .... . 

As Yenta would say --- Try it! It couldn't hurt! ENJOY A GREAT WEEKEND EVERYONE!! ~~ Mardy

I could NOT have planned this better! Yesterday I had suggested people reflect back on moments that were standout 'GRATE' in your lives -- really starting to get the image in mind of how you once were, if today you're not as well as you have been in past times. This is because you're going to ALSO want to visualize and imagine yourself in the future as you want to be -- creating your reality is a mind/body/spirit phenomenon at Lumigrate.

Books by doctors, and doctors in general, tend to focus on 'the facts' and only address the 'body' aspect. So it was refreshing to see Dr Hyman collaborating with people who teach Emotional Freedom Technique, a.k.a. "tapping". While it is not 'the whole enchilada' about mental health or the mind/body connection, it is a very easy and interesting technique to learn, and this group I'm highlighting here does a nice job with presenting it. And they use Dr Hyman as one of their few experts!  

For this step in the process of 'working our way into 'doing this' food changing thing' in a major way, as we're so far kind of 'easing into it',  I wanted to find something to provide that was about 'the present' and I found it on Facebook. (You see, I not only have looked over the rest of UltaMind Solution and I know how difficult it is going to be, what lies ahead with weeks and weeks of totally leaving out ALL things you suspect are causing the most inflammation in your body/brain. And I went 'hard core' like that in 1995 for more than two YEARS, and I know how much self-discipline is involved AND why it is besides 'self discipline' that people have difficulties changing how they eat. So, it's time to bring in some ideas for 'tools' to have in your 'toolbox'. 

Also, it's just like anything else you change in your life, you're perhaps not going to get it exactly right the first time, and you'll have to get up off the ground or out of the ditch you find yourself in, and examine WHY you fell short of what you were wanting to accomplish. Figure out what resource you need to study or consult or practice more/spend more time with and do that work, and then go back to another attempt, and if you keep doing that and don't give up, you'll eventually succeed.

Remember, it took you this long to go from a healthy being to where you're at today, there might be a LOT to 'undo' and 'redo' in a different and better way. Keep in mind, Gwen, above, and I are available for consultations (in a similar and different way, she does overall coaching and I focus on The You Model with people and getting them ushered to the providers and information that would be of benefit to them, which can include someone like Gwen.) 

So: Tapping is one tool I present to just open up your brains to tools to help you with changing your 'mind' about what you're doing with foods/drinks (diet). I saw that one of my FB friends, a massage therapist, had shared about a marketing event put on about EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique, a.k.a. "Tapping"), which involved Louise Hay ... hmmmm, THAT sounds like something I want to be checking out!  And "lo and behold", who was on video #2 of the pre-series, but Dr Mark Hyman? 

thetappingsolution.com/2013tappingworldsummit/VS1c-Louise-Hay7.php

I created a new topic in the 'brain/mind/psychology' area/forums of Lumigrate about what I found at The Tapping Solution.com.  I hope that my overview (with another link out from there) might help you decide by reading my overview whether it is something for YOU.  www.lumigrate.com/forum/tappingeftemotional-freedom-technique-solution-summits-or-otherwise-expert-nick-ortner-and-sis

Aaah, the perfect link for today, in my opinion, is something which brings Steve Gleason into the picture. In 2006, he was part of a famous play in football history. By 2011 he was diagnosed with ALS, and is on permanent disability from the NFL, and for the rest of his life will receive $10,000/month in disability pay. I learned about him from watching HBO Sports, and found the segment about him very well done. It showed a LOT of technology that is available for people today if they have the resources, for compensating for the effects of a progressive neurological disease.

The 'OT in me' (graduated 1996 from Colorado State Univeristy with a bachelors in occupational therapy) likes to see this type of thing, and I was reminded of my pre-requisite volunteer work which included working with people with disabillities in the water, in outdoor activities such as camping and rafting/canoing, as were shown in the HBO show. The wheelchairs ... I cut my teeth the hard way, with a $12,000 powerdrive chair parked next to a pool which I was trusted with to park after the client/participant transferred to the water with the help of those in the pool already.  was me! Then , I did it! 

After his diagnosis, Steve and his wife decided to have a baby, who is named 'Rivers', a boy. His father has what is called 'one of the ugliest diseases', as it has no impact on the function of the mind as most other progressive neurological conditions have. You might know of the famous book Tuesdays with Morrie; Morrie had ALS. It is a blessing to others when motivated people connect up together when one of them has ALS because so much education and awareness can come from it.  

Today, I'm just doing my little part with that. It is SuperBowl Sunday and we're taking the day OFF from learning new information we have to digest about foods and eating and drinking/consumption, but working to stay on our desired way of eating and drinking AND spending our time watching the game .. or not.  It's not for everyone! And neither is making changes related to how you eat and drink in order to change the outcome of your well-being in the present or future. 

Steve reports that creating a child and a foundation to help others with ALS, based in New Orleans, have given him a 'sense of purpose'.  The organization is www.teamgleason.org/; it is an INCREDIBLE Website, please take a moment and check it out. You might learn something about neurological signs and symptoms, from no less than NFL players! The players have 'gotten on the bandwagon' about the effects their chosen profession has on their bodies, and that includes the brain, which then translates into the 'mind' as well. 

Steve Gleason does a brilliant job speaking about cumulative brain trauma, such as occurs with football; naturally there's more to it than that, or else everyone who ever played football would have ALS, or Alzheimers, or Parkinsons, or...... It's the genes you have that get 'tweeked' by a variety of things, concussion/force being one of them. And is there a component that has to do with other factors? Toxins? ALS has been service-connected recently for WW-II, Korean, and Vietnam war-era veterans. And by the way, their widows/families can get benefits to this day, so if you know anyone this applies to check with their family to be SURE they know! This weekend I spoke with the daughter of a Veteran who died from ALS decades ago whose mother is now going to receive funds from the government for his service-connected illness.

But are we overlooking the more common everyday source of inflammation that comes in our foods? Just something to think about! 

Enjoy your Sunday, SuperBowl or not! Eat well, be merry! "Live and Learn. Learn and Live Better!" ~~ Mardy 

www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/25/steve-gleason-saints-als-punt-block-katrina-nfl_n_979872.html

I really enjoyed the SuperBowl this year.  I mean, the lights went out ..... there was a long delay, and that threw in a different perspective to think about that I found interesting.  I thought it was really going to be a hard thing on the brain/endocrine (hormone) system to have that 'downtime' at that point in the game. So it was interesting to see how the game played out.  I was happy to see people appeared to be playing a pretty honorable game, which naturally reduces the injuries of all kinds, not just to the brain part of the body! I was glad that the team SO far ahead at the time of the blackout ended up being victorious in the end. 

Perhaps it was because it was the only game I watched all year because of my 'silent protest' (voting with my time, attention, energy and money) related to the NFL and the short and long term issues for players when it comes to brain injuries for the brain concussing on every play, more or less. Our brains concuss every time we take a step; the brain and cranium is simply not made for the forces involved with many sports. I don't 'enjoy' knowing what I know from working with people who have the various progressive neurological and other chronic illnesses which are brought on by our modern-day lifestyles -- activities, diets, etc. 

But I was invited to a gathering and people were aware I was on this 'mission' about gluten/wheat, etc. And rather than it being 'well, I don't have a clue what to do about gluten free', I heard "I want to learn more about that, I do need to cook that way for potlucks for someone I know" from the hostess. Then on the other end of the spectrum there was the person who merrily ate the foods but didn't ask any information about gluten, and when there was an identical looking cracker choice, chose the wheated rather than trying the potato cracker while they had the opportunity to try something new. 

So to me these situations are always something for me to learn from, as much as people might potentially learn from me. As much as I wish ALL people would grab onto the information right now, this is just not the time for them, in some cases. And ultimately, there are different types of thinkers -- some just don't want to take in new information and change. Others will be 'on it' from the very first time it's something they become aware of -- they go to being educated right away, and changing rapidly. And everyone else is somewhere in between. "I've been meaning to ......", "We've been thinking about and talking about making change...." -- I hear those ALL the time. Or "I'm interested in that but I don't know where to start", which ultimately translates into it hasn't become a priority yet. Time is such a limiting factor and many things complete in busy people's lives. So ultimately people need to commit to taking things OFF their plates related to other priorities and activities, and adding in more learning time. People typically can budget/spend their time differently and have the time it takes to learn and make changes in their health and therefore lives. 

If you're reading along here and aren't yet committed to 'doing this' and making a change of what you're eating for a short time, I will, once again, ask you to reconsider what's holding you back. Perhaps this is not the source for YOU; Lumigrate and I (and our other experts, who are commenting on this topic as well) are certainly not 'for everybody' and there are lot of places elsewhere to get the information.  I've worked to provide as much of a 'do it yourself' on this topic for those who cannot afford or do not want to pay for coaching and advising such as the experts on Lumigrate, myself included, provide. 

So perhaps this is just one step for you, and more will follow elsewhere. Thank you for being here to glean what you do. 

But just as the NFL players who won or lost yesterday are getting to start kicking back a little bit for their off-season, it will be time for us to start really getting into it after today. Again, weekends, we'll relax a little -- not on what we're eating as that will impact your "inflammation vacation" process, but like we did this weekend, where we look at people's lives which have been impacted in order to reinforce the information here.  It is said that people often only make change when they are 'afraid' of something.... and that is true for some people, so yesterday I presented the website to look at disabled NFL player who was 'struck down' by ALS at the peak of his career. 

Other people can find their way to higher places for wellness not through fear but through getting to their center and 'spirit', so bringing that aspect into it on weekends is an important thing as well.  

But what I saw at the house party I went to yesterday encouraged me. I saw overall the increased awareness about gluten free! Not only was there GF baguette used for a wonderful appetizer, it was so good it really wasn't a 'downgrade' for people who are used to eating wheat bread that naturally contains gluten! Even the most closed-minded appearing person there seemed to enjoy it. People who make this switch today have it SO much easier than the first time I really got on this 'wagon' about wheat/gluten back in 1995. 

I didn't want to even try to compare what I went through back then on the same day as I was talking about Steve Gleason and ALS, but I do want to share here something which I find helps people when I speak with them about foods and inflammation and why I get so motivated about it. I had been very healthy for several years after a good comeback after chronic fatigue syndrome, or so I thought. Everything seemed fine outwardly and I was accomplishing a lot, I was very happy, it was probably the greatest period of my life up to that point. I worked out every day almost, Rollerbladed (and I skated on Rollerblade brand, I even did promotions collaboratively with the company's area marketing representative related to brain and head/cranium injury prevention.  Safe skating techniques were taught secondary to helmet safety and other protective equipement's benefits. (You'll actually skate with a better state of mind if you feel safe, which increases safety, interestingly.) 

Then I went to the gym one day and I couldn't lift as much with my dominant arm or leg.  That was a change for me.  That continued, and I had a tremor too. My cousin and her boyfriend from California came to town and wanted to go ice skating and I got on the ice that I learned on 30 years before and spent hundreds of hours skating on, becoming a fairly good skater, and was the worst of the four of us! And the other three had never been on ice! (My significant other was from Canada and it was funny that he had never skated for whatever reasons... lots of jokes about THAT one!)  

I had a college friend who I'd lost touch with and met back up with at a funeral a few years ago, kind of like a wholesome Big Chill event which was odd as I'd seen The Big Chill with the friend who died and we'd talked about what it was going to be like when the first of us died.  The friend who I re-sumed a friendship with had gotten Guillion-Barre, and the first sign was on skates going to play hockey as every week.... the same phenomenon I'd experienced in 1995 on the ice at Evergreen Lake!  I honestly had never put that day together with the neurological things that came on around that time, I just attributed it to being used to the sticky rubber wheels on asphalt or cement and my feet 5'7" away from my brain 'forgot' ice skating. 

The primary care doctor and the neurologist I was referred to by the PC physician both suspected, as did I, it might be MS. MRI showed lesions in my brain but not where you normally see them with MS, so a spinal tap/lumbar puncture was performed and I not only had the long wait to rerun the MRI after getting the IV team to come put in an IV of contrast to light things up in the brain for a second MRI, I had the months of getting results back. I 'bargained' with G-d in the MRI, I recall it clearly: "Please make this not be MS, I will do anything I have to in order to correct it." So I got my wish, it wasn't MS but the neurologist didn't know what it was. I had a feeling that foods were part of it, at least, and pursued 'outside the box' expert advise about food allergies/ sensitivities. And found it, with an MD 15 minutes away. All I was significantly getting a reaction in my blood from, of ALL the foods they tested in one blood sample (through what is called a "boutique laboratory" by the allopathic medical laboratory businesses at least), were wheat, dairy and eggs. 

And yes, it WAS hard to take those things totally out of my diet. It was 1995, nobody had heard of 'gluten free' hardly, though the health food store had a book about wheat as a contributor/cause of MS.  I bought the book, I felt that I was 'on the continuum' perhaps to go down that path, or something neurologic like that. And I saw such dramatic differences in just DAYS! I was SHOCKED, I thought it would be 'maybe in a month I'll see a little improvement and that will be GREAT!'  So when you have that 'experience' in your won skin, so to speak, you never forget it.  

And as an educator and concierge of information and providers to direct people to at Lumigrate, I hope I have 'enthusiasm' for this for people who wish to embrace the information, learn and try it! And so for those who go forward from here, I'm asking that you be dedicated to the process. It's NOT going to be easy but we have people to support you if needed, and I'll be setting up additional resources as we go as well! But it's going to be a LOT easier than the alternatives.

I saw Dr Spurlock has a new quote he made up and put his name on: it was a good one.  Something about the cost of health care -- you're going to pay now or pay later, either way you're going to pay! He was talking about the cost of supplements in that example, if I recall correctly. I'm referring to more the indirect cost to your brain and body of continuing to have significant amounts of inflammation, and what that ends up, over time, sooner or later, causing in the majority of people! Yes, sometimes you hear of a granny or grampy that lived to be 100 or so and never had a bit of health problem, even arthritis. 

It came up at the Super Bowl gathering about West Nile Virus -- a story about a seemingly well person who got it and became disabled, gave up their home and went to live with a supportive parent, which was not their preferance to do. I was trying to help people understand that a lot of people got infected with that virus, just like any virus that 'goes around', but the underlying health of the 'host' sometimes is presumed to be 'well' but they've not realized they're not 'well' because they were perhaps bringing their system down by the foods they ate every day! Plus the other culprits like heavy metals and other toxins we 're exposed to in the environment. And remember, body, mind and spirit -- people can be toxic, they're known as 'energy vampires' for a reason! .  (Sorry, I don't have a vampire emoticon! but this is more for 'boo/hiss/bad', don't take it literally!)

I am encouraged by the feedback I have gotten so far from people who have been following this series, so please, if you've gotten this far and are reading this, Contact us and let us know, or find me on Facebook and PM me! I'd love to hear from you and know 'who's on the team' going forward from here! You don't have to be doing this in 'real time' either, you can do this entire thing self-study, so if this isn't the day after the Super Bowl and you're reading this -- it applies just as much to YOU as it would if you were reading it on Monday, February 4, 2013.  Glad you're here. I look forward to 'putting the petal to the metal' a bit tomorrow. "Live and Learn. Learn and Live Better!" ~~ Mardy

Here's the quote: ‎"You are going to spend money on your health care as you get older. You have no choice! But you do have a choice on what you spend it on.... You can spend it on ILLNESS or you can spend it on WELLNESS. But you are going to spend the money." .......... Wm. Marcus Spurlock, MD

I wanted to add this to the conversation as well: 

Probiotics protect your intestinal tract from many things. One of the most important things that probiotics do is to accumulate around the "Peyer's patches" in the intestinal tract. The Peyer's patches are our immune system in the intestinal tract, and it is the largest part of our immune system, due to food being our biggest exposure to infections.

It is critical that you keep your gut/intestinal tract healthy with happy flora, and in large numbers. There are many things which negatively impact the flora, including meats that often contain antibiotics that kill the probiotics. (Many people are aware of when they 'directly' take antibiotics, so think about the meats you eat that come from animals fed antibiotics. (Red meat, white meat, fish and seafood all vary in terms of how they are raised.)

Make sure you take probiotics (capsules, yogurt, and other fermented foods, etc.) daily!

Thank you, Dr Spurlock! Well said. One of the reasons I value this aspect of health, related to diet/consumption and wellness/illness, is that there's very little money needing to be spent, in many cases people spend less money. The biggest factor is 'time' and the 'energy' for not only learning new information, but for making the changes.

The hostess of the gathering to watch the big game the other day, who has been aware of gluten free for months if not years, opted to use my coming as an opportunity for learning more and 'progressing' her knowledge and abilities with gluten and casein-free living: "It takes forever at the store, to read the labels".  That gets easier as time goes on, and my response was also that people who want to slowly transition for a while, if that's the only way they're going to "do this thing", is to change one item you purchase each trip to the store. Example: Alternatives to dairy to replace milk or half and half in coffee, or 'creamer' which is one of the food-like substances. That alone could take 15 minutes in that area of the store on top of whatever you do online. The lovely thing about increasing use of smartphones is you can look things up right from the store! 

In my consultations with medical consumers/clients, one of the first questions I want to have the answer to is essentially "how much might your insurance pay for and how much might you pay for out of your pocket." I try to get an idea of what the person's financial status is, not so much 'what will you pay for', because THAT aspect is where I do a lot of my 'work' with people.  Finding where people's priorities lie, and areas they might 'shift' resources (all three ... MET).  

In the past, my customers were 'patients' when I was working as an occupational therapist (which I transitioned out of early in 2008 from an allopathic, insurance-based outpatient clinic in a large, modern allopathic medical building in Grand Junction, Colorado, for those who are unfamiliar with my history), and the people had all gone to the 'doctor' and gotten an 'order' and they had validation by the doctor and the order that it was important for them to come to therapy, and they had self-initiated to go to the doctor, unless it was workers' compensation in which case they had a different 'deal', often being MORE motivated because the injury or condition was potentially going to change their vocation and ability to make money.

At that point it was part of their 'job' to come to appointments, so they were typically some of the more compliant patients -- their energy and time for coming to therapy and doing their home program were simply shifted from producing whatever they did for their employers to producing something related to THEM.  

Here at a website like Lumigrate, our typical 'user'/customer/guest is 'self-initiating', although providers who are aware of Lumigrate do refer patients/clients to Lumigrate as well, giving it that added measure of 'this is what I recommend you do', similar to the prescription 'ordering' a patient to see me for occupational therapy services in the past.  This might be a good place for readers to pause and think about why you're here.  How committed are you to the learning process? How committed are you to the CHANGING process? If you're 'wanting to change' and you're having trouble with that... please consider staying with us, it's more than likely you've just not had the information AND support you need in the past to make change. Perhaps this time will be different!

I've spent two weeks, with the additional input from you and the other experts you see, above, 'easing into' this 'change your mind through changing your body through changing your eating/drinking ---- once again, someone telling you that changing your diet will change your life.' Encouraging people to take a look at their lives -- are they complacent and 'stuck', or have they been dabbling with trying different things but haven't yet gotten somewhat committed... I was wanting people to come with us on an easy journey to this point -- learning the 'why I might consider this' is one thing. DOING IT -- spending the money, the energy, and the time, is another! 

In this process from here, I will assure you that MONEY is the least of what you are going to be spending -- it is ENERGY and TIME.  If you're 'interested' in this so far but you've not been that 'actively involved' -- why not? What can you give up out of the way you spend your time and energy resources to devote more E/energy and T/time to this? 

If you read up above a few days back, to take out a paper and write some things about your goals and you didn't take the TIME and ENERGY doing that -- WHY NOT? Maybe you're not needing to go further in this process at Lumigrate with anything more than passing curiosity. Did you follow the links of various things to go look at? It might be that you're totally "checked out" and not "checked in" about investing your time and energy into this for YOU, or it could be that the way I go about things is not a good fit for you, which there is "no harm, no foul" in that on either of our parts. I suggest you don't spend any more of your time reading along with what I'm suggesting, and instead, take your MET resources elsewhere; hopefully I have at least set you up with some ideas of where to turn. 

It is a matter of TIMING as well -- it might be that right now, the TIME isn't right for you -- you need to mull it over longer.  This will be here when, and if, you want to return.  And if you're here right now having participated in the topics, above, then let's keep moving forward, shall we?  

Unless you just came out from under a rock and went there at a very young age, you have a history of making changes in your life. You will have grown or advanced, and you will have instances as well where you shrunk back or regressed. Whether you're moving forward overall or backwards overall simply is a matter of how many steps forward and how many backwards you have made.  "One step forward, two steps back" versus "two steps forward, one step back". 

None of us, essentially, are 'clean slates'. I have spent a lot of time in the last year or two thinking about why my health level hit a high point in 2007 and then didn't keep on the path that the momentum was going. I remember how ultra motivated I was when my health issues first presented as a 'problem' (though I now recognize my health problems did not start in my 20s when the doctors were baffled by my ongoing symptoms, they started with birth trauma and likely before, due to 'habits'/addictions of my biologic mother).

Looking back, I thought 'this one thing I'm going to do is going to fix it and make it better and I'll be like I was before'.  That was looking in the rear-view mirror too much, my goal was to get back to being like I was and not realistic -- I'm not a time traveler. It's good to know and remember the road behind you, but stay focused where you are right now, and also be looking ahead far enough down the road to have an idea where you are going more than likely. That might change in an instant if something happens with "your vehicle", in this case your body (mind and spirit included). 

Realizing: "It's not just one thing causing these symptoms, you're going to have to address several things, and they're going to take resources: MET (money, energy, time)." One of those things is making the diet changes, which is what this piece is focusing on and not all the other factors, such as exercise and relaxation. And it will depend on what you want to eat and what you have been eating if this is going to be different MONEY-wise for you (or if you want support from a professional which would have a fee for the service), it is going to take TIME and ENERGY.

And it takes sustained effort to eat differently than you have in the past and the people around you are eating. I hope I have presented enough convincing evidence for people to want PREVENTION for ther families and they will also change their eating habits. But in reality, there has to be an incentive from within each person making this change in diet.  

It's a long, long, long road for some of us with complex medical conditions, as it's to do with all aspects -- the body, the mind, and the spirit. It's sometimes hard to tell what helps or hinders. There are some people who had to start in childhood, addressing issues with weight (being under or over), mental functioning and behaviors, etc. 

Sometimes we're kind of 'numb to' the reality of what is going on with us. The other day someone who seems completely uninterested in ever doing anything to change their life's wellness level, unless it is others changing theirs (I'm sure you've all known this type of person), mentioned their blood sugar issue. They've likely had that issue since before anybody really knew WHY, and they don't see that it's affecting their behaviors, their relationships, their whole life, or major portions of it. They've embraced having that 'issue' and doing the band-aid solution to fixing the immediate problem if they realize they're having a low blood sugar 'moment'. 

There is a tendency in our society to put effort into getting 'out of the ditch' and finding a new level of functioning that is comfortable to the person, and then say 'wow, that was a lot of work, I'm glad I'm back on the road', and that's all they're going to do.

Another common one is parents who have had their child it's whole life, typically, acting as it has developed to act, and they accept that their child has learning disabilities and has this or that strategy for it (often medications), and they maybe dabble in some of the obvious food things such as sugar, but are they willing to hop onto this and say "THIS is WORTH TRYING!" Peel the onion --  dig down a layer and look at this evidence-based information about WHY.  

"I've tried all kinds of diets over the years" is another one I hear a lot -- but this is really a fundamental and huge PROBLEM with the food supply in the United States, not to be compared with diets that have flooded the market in my lifetime. 

So today, as we literally 'roll up our sleeves', please get out whatever it is you record your thoughts with, and list from the top of the page to the bottom, years since you were born.  Turn it over and use the back or get a second sheet if it doesn't all fit on one page. To the right, list significant things you did with the intention of 'changing' things about your body, mind, and spirit.

These tend to fall into categories such as food/drink/diet, exercise and activities for fun, and stress reduction. 

As an example to get you started, I was born in 1960 and my blank page would look like this

Year                         Nutrition/diet                   Exercise/activities                  Stress reduction

1960    

61

2

3...

1970

71

2

...

Now, for the next DAY, keep the sheet with you/close by. Share it with someone if you wish, BRAINSTORM what it is that you have done over the years to 'work on' YOU.  When you get to 

2013   --- what do YOU want it to have next to it? If you're 'stuck' and not writing "eliminate gluten and dairy (or whatever) and see what happens" -- why not? There ARE no right and wrong answers here --- but YOU are the one who has the answers, and they might take some reflection. Go for a walk and think, make a cup of tea or pour yourself something 'stronger' if that's what you want to do. Light a candle or two and 'create some space' surrounding this. (In other words, make it a priority and put some energy and time into it.)

There, was THAT so bad?  You thought I was going to be like boot camp or something and set you up with something HARD perhaps.  Again, my intention is to step people who want to do this through as seamlessly as possible, at least enough to get them started. I have heard someone say 'I want to do it, I just don't even know where to start', and so we'll be able to provide some ideas in the near future, related to REDUCING gluten for a family and being able to eliminate it for the person in the family wanting to do a cessation trial. So that person's homework today will be easy as for 2013, they're already onboard wanting to have 2013 say they did a reduction/elimination of gluten. Go ahead, write your history or your herstory, and then turn your attention to your present and short-term future!

I know EVERYONE knows how important water is, you've heard it before. Have you LEARNED it though? If you haven't, or if you need a refresher (drink pun intended), or simply wonder what Lumigrate's experts have to say about water, here's the link to the topic about it: www.lumigrate.com/forum/lumigrates-experts-opinions-drinking-water-whats-good-better-best

Whether you do that or not, please have some water at this point in time.  Whatever you normally drink is fine, save looking into what ideally to consume for another time (the above link will set you up with that, naturally.) Even if it's a few sips, it does make a difference if you're well hydrated when you do anything which requires your brain and nervous system to 'perform', and that's what we're going to be doing today! 

I was encouraged to see a comment on our FB page for people with chronic illness concerns (Lumigrate: Fibromyalgia) say she'd ordered to book. I wanted to remind the rest of the 'class' reading this today that my purpose of covering "UltraMind" on a daily basis is not to 'replace' obtaining the book, but to help people who are interested enough in this subject get started using the book, and naturally, to encourage anyone who finds it to consider getting 'invested' in doing this, if it is the right thing for them! 

Read up at the beginning of this topic thread, I gave my suggestions for getting a copy of the book if you do not have the financial means to purchase it ($16 retail price, it's a paperback, so inexpensive and will be within most people's means; however, some people do not have the funds and I got creative with suggestions.)

Check in with yourself as to 'why not' if you have not by this point, as you've been reading for a while. Perhaps you're wanting to read further along and THEN decide whether or not to do this or not -- 'how hard is it going to be?' which is GRATE!  BUT it might be that you have some 'issues' about how you spend money. You might have 'resistance' or 'pushback' from YOU about 'investing' in this with money. Have you been following this but are distracted into looking into other things? Why are you doing that? Is this truly not 'the place for you to be', or are you finding this the path of 'more' resistance, and you've distracted by the path of least resistance?  So that's my thoughts for those who might be dabbling and dragging their feet, so to speak. Now, back to business for moving forward:

On February 4th (two days ago for me writing this), The Tapping Summit began, so I created a piece that is in the head/brain/mind/psychology forum about it and reviewed their website and videos. (You can see above about it and their link, as Dr Hyman is one of the primary experts they used for marketing of the technique, and I've put the link there to where I cover it with more detail in the other forum.) If you're finding yourself kind of 'stuck' about aspects of this, it is a very easy to learn, easy to do technique and it makes sense to me how it impacts people's minds positively.

I've always started people with mindfulness meditation exercises and that is what I am going to do here as well, but BOTH is likely a more powerful combination and working with people 1:1, I might opt to teach Tapping first because some people's brains had SO much difficulty even staying "focused on the breath" for longer than a few moments. 

For the purposes of answering the question 'why am I not wanting to spend my resources getting that book so far ... what is up with that?', I don't think it's necessary to be working with a mental health professional; but if you are a person with a history of trauma of significance, this might be a time to be looking at getting someone to hop onto your YOU model to help clear that stuff up. There are resources on Lumigrate about it in the psychology forum, and, as always, "contact us"/me for further guidance also.

MINDFULNESS MEDITATION and Jon Kabat-Zinn, PhD.  This is what is in the Resources area at the end of The UltraMind Solution: "A pioneer in mind-body medicine and bringing mindfulness tools to medical centers, has a wonderful guided mindfulness audio program. I recommend his program called Series 3." Link:   www.mindfulnesstapes.com -- and I noticed there's a nice PDF you can download there about daily practice suggestions, among other things, so please go after we're done here today, and explore this website. 

"Meditation" --  some people's faces look like that when I suggest it. Don't think you're going to be expected to sit for 20 minutes with a blank mind right now. It simply doesn't work like that. You might get to that point, but Dr JKZ basically simplified classic meditation for American's mass consumption, way back in the 1970s. He did groundbreaking, 'old fashioned' research too, and is simply considered the groundbreaker and to this day, the gold standard. 

Sit, stand (if it is safe to do and relax, eyes closed), lie down ... do whatever you do to be the most comfortable. simply take deep breaths, from your belly not from your 'chest'. Slowly in, slowly out and close your eyes when you feel safe to do so. Concentrate your mind on the in/out/breathing. That's all there is to it! You'll likely have thoughts pop into your head, jot them down perhaps, to come back to when you're finished. Monitor how you're feeling and you'll know when it's time to stop for that session. You might note and keep a little record somewhere of how many seconds or minutes that was, and look to see if you see a pattern to your brain's ability to be mindful. Does it have something to do with what you're eating or other factors in your life?  This will have a positive impact on your wellness each time you "practice" - so now you have your 'mindfulness practice' underway!  Very easy! Again, you might also learn EFT/Tapping and do both as I can see how they 'facilitate synergy'. (1 + 1 = 3 is synergy, basically, facilitate just means to make something happen easier, basically.)

(I have to laugh at that website address as it's 'tapes' -- but that is how far back I go with him, after purchasing his book "Full Catastrophe Living" in the early 1990s. I am so glad I had that 'tool' in 'my toolbox' in my early 30s; my health was really rebounding after chronic fatigue syndrome flattened me in 1989, partly because of meditation (and exercise, and diet and recreation/balancing life well....). When I returned to university and had the very difficult neurology and anatomy classes to 'weed out' the not as intelligent or capable intellectually students, my health failed again and went into fibromyalgia this time. I was not only 'grossed out' about meat due to cadaver anatomy, I was getting 2 hours of chemicals/day, M-F, and I dropped my health club membership, etc due to 'saving money' when I quit my job to pick up my education.)

This is where my having had a chronic illness since before I had my occupational therapy degree (and board certification) made me a 'better' therapist in some ways. (In others, it impacted me negatively. Keep in mind, your providers are people too! We're often struggling these days to maintain our mind/body/spirit wellness as much as anyone!)  

I respected the benefit of "having the mind/body connection", to deal with pain or anxiety or irritation at things you're dealing with everyday. More importantly, I saw that when you get accomplished enough with meditation, you get in touch with the 'best doctor you have', which is the one inside of YOU. The one which can lead you in the right directions. And the one which can help give you the strength you will need to make these types of changes in how you eat. 

At Lumigrate.com, we ALSO have a wonderful resource for you which is there for people for FREE related to the concept of 'resistance'.  Paula King, PhD provided us with a seminar which I/we videotaped and produced to be part of the toolkit at Lumigrate.com, it is titled Strategies for Lasting Change.  Currently you will need to register as a user and download it to your computer; soon they'll be at YouTube in 15-20 minute segments, replacing the 'teaser snippets' we put there four years ago when we were creating Lumigrate.com to be on the Internet. She tells us why it is difficult to make "lasting change" by showing a fun handwriting exercise using dominant and nondominant hands. She also provides a 'guided imagery' exercise which allows a person to have an inner conversation with their 'wiser guide' and get some 'fortification' from it.

(Go to the "videos" tab if you're interested in looking at the snippet and then follow the instructions from there. Call if you have problems, Lumigrate's # is 970/773-7921. Don't worry about the hour, it'll go to VM if it's not work-time for us and I will get back to you in about the same timeframe Dr Hyman describes his nutrition experts strive for, for those who subscribe to their plans for that support, which is $20/month at the most. I will be talking about THAT in the future as I delve into 'checking that out' personally.)

"Engage the mind, and the body will follow" is 'the' quote about occupational therapy, which in it's original form was a beautiful, incredible component to allopathic medicine. I will always fondly remember how relieved I was at age 22 after struggling in college with 'what do I want to 'be'/study?', to learn of it, not through an advisor but through purchasing a place to live, who was graduating and moving out of the college town to the real world. I worked from 1996 until five years ago this month, as an occupational therapist and maintain my national board credentials, but currently am not a practicing OT. Lumigrate obviously has more to do with health education, and so my consulting work with people is focused on "The You" in the model you see, above. Going over things such as what I set you up with yesterday to do as self-study related to your history, and simply teasing out with another pair of eyes and ears (and the brain they go to), what might be the next step for someone. I also use my 'gut' and that came from my practice over the years after I started meditating and focusing more on a 'spiritual practice.' 

I'm going to also provide the exercise on page 278 of The Ultramind Solution, related to the vagus nerve, and tomorrow I'm going to talk more about WHY and WHAT the vegus nerve is and does.

"Right now take a deep breath into your belly to the count of five, pause for one second, then breathe out slowly to the count of five. Keep your belly soft. .... do this five times. Notice how you feel in your body and mind.

Acetylcholine is a key neurotransmitter in the brain, responsible for learning and memory. It has an effect of relaxing and calming. "And it is the neurotransmitter the vegus nerve uses to send messages of peace and relation throughout the body."

Acetylcholine is also a major factor in regulating the immune system; since brain inflammation is linked to behavior, mood, memory, attention, and neurological diseases, acetylcholine is a key player in immune function. 

So when you stimulate the vegus nerve, as in the exercise, above on day #16, it sends acetylcholine throughout your body, causing relaxation and also decreasing inflammation. It balances the sympathetic nervous system.  

Increased stress therefore contributes to inflammation, aging, dementia and depression.  (This is from page 279, by the way, I hope you have a copy of the book to refer to, as there is MUCH more detail and great information, I am covering one highlight per day.) 

There is new research that Dr Hyman goes into, which indicates that the effects of stimulating the vegus nerve ends up repairing brain tissue and leading to regneration in the body as well. 

So I hope something in this summary today inspires you to practice these techniques again today and tomorrow and the next day and ......

Apologies for having hopped off for a few days. Lumigrate was involved with a community outreach opportunity on the weekend before today, Valentine's Day, which lead to a few other things with my time, plus, like so many others, I caught a bug and put my priorities into laying a little low while I did my best to not let it 'get me'.. which I did successfully, thankfully.

I would like to think my ease of getting through the bugs I am exposed to like everyone else is, are not as 'big a deal' today because I am recovering the health of my gut, and my adrenals and just 'overall everything'.

There is much more in this forum on the gut about other things to look at with the gut (probiotic, prebiotic). ITC Pharmacy's co-founder and co-president, Allan Jolley, RPh, ND is a guru of the gut, and I recommend you look into what he has to say at Lumigrate about the gut and wellness. That includes detoxing the liver and 'routine maintenance' for people who are well or ill; naturally, it's general guidelines he's providing and everyone is different so that's why he's available for inquiries. You know how the pharmacist is available for consult at your 'regular pharmacy'? Same goes with compounding pharmacies, and in ITCs case, he oversees the other pharmacists who are making products for patients as well as the overall process and business but is the primary person available for questions that cannot be answered by the very capable 'front office staff'. 

When it comes to the gut, please don't overlook 'water', and I'll be back to talk more about water, specifically. In the last year I really upped my game about water quality, and don't drink water when out of the house that hasn't been filtered by the business serving me in a way to remove the chlorine AND fluoride.  That fluoride part is the hard one, as the cheaper/basic filters do not remove it as they do chlorine. "IT ALL ADDS UP", and the more I learned about fluoride the more I was astounded and offended that it was being added to the water I pay for to come to my house/tap. And so taking some time to 'focus' on water at this time is another suggestion I'm leaving you with here, about a month into this process of focusing on healing the mind and the body. 

If you were following along with this daily as I was creating it in a very 'disciplined' manner, to get the 'attention' of my current followers, your books are ordered and the way to you, or you have purchasing them on your list. That is partially why I set up so many links here to engage people if they were going to 'join the process' we're laying out here on Lumigrate. The other reason is that, just like building a house, you have to get the foundation under you when doing this kind of work.  It is VERY DIFFICULT WORK, changing drastically how you eat. So let me be clear: I selected inside Lumigrate and outside resources to set up here because of my personal and professional experience with 'stepping with people' through this process.  I speak from personal experience related to being part of a family or home with different diets going on, as well. 

Thank you for your interest, at a month into this thread it's had 1,000 reads which is a 'good showing'.  In my opinion, this is worth our efforts if it helps impress upon and educate people about foods and chronic illnesses of the body, and that includes the brain, which affects the mind (behavioral / psychological health) AND spirit, if you ask me! 

Live and Learn. Learn and Live Better! ~~ Mardy

For almost four weeks I have been utilzing this link when working with individuals related to improving their wellness (or reducing their illness if you prefer to look at things from that direction). It is very difficult for people to embrace this much change, and learn this much information. Sometimes people have gotten 'stuck' and are really feeling so rotten mentally that this is 'too much' to delve into and with the Internet at hand, going around to look for a quick fix seems to be their next step. Others perhaps need more time to hear this type of information from other sources and accumulate the reinforcement before they 'invest' themselves in this process. 

I hope that I have set up, above, a good foundation to get people started. I am setting up a link here that will take you to the lifestyles forum at Lumigrate, where there is a video by Dr Hyman set up, as well as the corresponding blog at his website for taking an inflammation vacation. Again, if you're at all interested in the UltraMind Solution that I have presented quite a lot about here, there is no substitution for getting the book (which is in paperback, it can be obtained inexpensively and used copies abound, naturally as well). So I am going to hop off at this point related to covering the 'how to' and 'why to', but I will be returning with some case examples which I hope will inspire. 

So please go and then catch the links out to YouTube and Dr Hyman's blog related to The Inflammation Vacation, as I call it. In the book he suggests doing it for consecutive weeks and 1-2 months, ideally. You'll see that at his blog he talks about doing one week. I think that is a good first step, but cleanses typically are three weeks to do a thorough job, per naturopathic protocols that I am familiar with, and I know someone who found the offending item in their diet which was added/new just before symptoms of weight gain started, and their holistic healer said six months later there was still some inflammation remaining. 

www.lumigrate.com/forum/toxins-mind-body-spirit-and-taking-inflammation-vacation

In March I was continuing my 'homework' to share here, and found a wonderful website by psycho-physiology experts in Australia who basically assert something congruent with Dr Hyman: Once you resolve the problems with the diet consumed by a person and do proper supplementation as needed, the body -- and that includes the brain, remember -- begins healing and the person and their team if there are professionals helping, can address the behavioral aspects in future months once 'well' physiologically.

This can take up to one to two years if the person had also been using drugs which contributed to the brain/mind's dysfunction, so 'when' is a big variable. but they provide a SELF HELP program for people to undertake once they have done that FIRST STEP of healing the brain. Dr Hyman's program goes up to that point, where it's 'the brain and mind are now working fine' but there is, naturally, the reality of what has gone on in the person's life when they were not well. 

This is the link to the forum that topic is in, I hope you find it helpful, and that this unit on Lumigrate is of benefit to you. Again, we're here at the Contact Us if you need

www.lumigrate.com/forums/integrative-medicine-parts-make-whole/therapy-behavioralmental-health/-head/brain-body/mind-p

"Bumping" this thread to the top of the topics in this forum as I'm going over the website and making sure that the topics that are REALLY the nuts and bolts of that particular aspect are clearly apparent. There are a few forums on Lumigrate that are more 'packed' with gems than others, though I find value in content in ALL of them, so they remain. 

This forum is one which I'm putting in a topic about the highlights and overview about "Lyme", in the environmental wellness / environmental illness forum/ section. Naturally, the gut is key if you think of yourself having 'fibromyalgia', an eye infection, sinus infection, cold, flu or chronic bacteria in the body (and brain too), such as Lyme / Borrelia.