If you are overweight, doubtless you are blaming your excess weight on one of two conditions: your first thought is that it is because you eat too much of the wrong kind of food. And your second thought is that you don’t exercise enough. Your last thought is probably that it is because of both: you eat too much of the wrong kind of food, and you don’t exercise enough. But scientists believe that other factors are involved in the sudden and dramatic rise in obesity over the last few decades. These additional factors are sometimes easier to change than the amount of food you eat and the number of times a week you exercise. Some of them may surprise you. They are:
● The amount of sleep you get
●● Your body’s acid-alkaline balance
●●● Amount of calcium you ingest
●●●● The level of toxicity in your body
●●●●● The amount and quality of the water you drink
●●●●●● The amount and quality of oxygen we breathe
●●●●●●● The condition of your colon
●●●●●●●● The color of your food
●●●●●●●●● Emotional conflicts having to do with depression, loneliness, boredom, anxiety, low self-esteem, grief How and why are these factors important?
● Not enough sleep:
People who sleep less than seven hours a night tend to have a higher body mass index (BMI) than people who sleep more. Sleep deprivation alters metabolism: leptin, the hormone that signals satiety, falls while ghrelin, which signals hunger, rises — and this boosts appetite. As well, too little sleep radically decreases the sensitivity of insulin receptors, which will then raise insulin levels. This is a surefire way to gain weight as the insulin will seriously impair your body’s ability to burn and digest fat. (It will also increase your risk of diabetes.) A recent study by M.P. St Onge found that sleep deprivation (sleeping 4 hours a night for 6 nights) caused the study participants to eat about 300 calories a day more than normal and to choose more junk and fast foods. Sleep deprived women ate an average of 66 more extra calories a day than did the sleep-deprived men. Since more than 40% of Americans say they very rarely get a good night’s sleep during the work week, the researchers suggested that sleep deprivation may be playing a significant role in our obesity epidemic.
●● Your body’s acid-alkaline (pH) balance: fat is an acid problem
The term “pH” stands for “potential for hydrogen” and is a measure of how acid (when the pH is lower than 7) or alkaline (when pH is higher than 7) your body’s chemistry is. Healthy people are slightly alkaline; sick and unhealthy people have an acidic body environment. Your pH level influences every biochemical process in your body. The pH Factor can explain why you have not succeeded in losing the fat and the inches you desire to lose (as well as explaining why you have no energy, lack stamina, and in general, just don’t feel good). Researcher and clinician Robert Young has shown that fat is actually an over-acidification problem. What does that mean? The body creates fat cells to carry acids away from your vital organs, so these acids literally don’t choke your organs to death. Fat is saving your life! Fat is actually a response from the body to an alarming over-acidic condition. For instance, the pH of blood must at all times be between 7.3 and 7.4. If blood pH is altered, major health problems, including death, are imminent. Therefore, the body has multiple buffers in place to make sure the blood pH remains constant. The primary buffers the body uses are: sodium, calcium, and body fat. When acid is present in the blood, the body looks to neutralize it with an alkaline substances (sodium, then calcium). The body actually steals calcium from the bones in order to neutralize blood acid. (We call this process osteoporosis.) Another mechanism the body utilizes to protect the blood pH when the acid cannot be easily neutralized is to store excess acid in the fat cells. That creates a major weight-management problem. The body’s wisdom knows that it cannot allow itself to burn fat because this would then release the stored acid into the system, thereby putting blood pH out of balance. This is yet another reason why diet plans with sudden weight loss lead to feeling tired, depressed and often sick: the release of the acid from the fat cells renders the body becoming yet even more acid than its previous already overly acidic condition.
●●● Amount of calcium you ingest:
Dr. Robert Rowan calls calcium the “miracle weight-loss mineral.” He cites a host of research showing that increasing the amount of calcium you take accelerates your loss of weight, raises metabolism thus burning more calories and prevents fat storage. One study showed that low calcium ingestion (255 milligrams a day) gives an 84% chance of being overweight. Other studies show greater weight loss (an increase of 70%) by merely increasing the in-take of calcium through yogurt. A recent study showed that overweight people who ate three servings of yogurt daily lost 22% more weight, 61% more body fat and 81% more abdominal fat than people who ate the same number of calories with no yogurt. Dr. Robert P. Heany analyzed data in a study and concluded that “the prevalence of obesity…could be reduced by 60-80% by ensuring adequate calcium intakes.”
●●●● Level of toxicity in your body:
Long-term exposure to many of the chemicals in our environment has been strongly associated with weight gain. Even low levels of industrial chemicals such as pesticides, dyes, resins and solvents can lead to weight gain. Mice given small amounts of the pesticide dieldrin more than doubled their body fat, and hexachlorobenzene, another pesticide, caused rats to gain weight even when they only ate half as much. Intensive detoxification procedures have been shown to release these toxic chemicals from their storage places (cells, tissue, muscle, or fat) in the body.
●●●●● The amount and quality of the water you drink:
Over 99% of all chemical reactions in the cells are facilitated by water. Drinking appropriate amounts of water is essential to body balance, weight loss and being healthy. Water is the most important element required in establishing and maintaining proper pH. Since the body is 70% water, and you lose a lot of water each day just through normal bodily functions, it is extremely important to constantly replenish your supply. Drinking alkaline, mineral-rich water in liberal amounts hydrates the body which then helps to neutralize stored acid wastes and cleanses the body. Alkaline water also acts as a conductor of electrochemical activity from cell to cell. Ideally, water should have a pH between 9 and 10, and you should be drinking 3-4 liters of it daily. Food cravings (especially for sweets) are often the body’s misread cry for water.
●●●●●● The amount and quality of oxygen you breathe:
Oxygen has long been known to help thin the blood, increase circulation and speed up your metabolism, thus burning more calories just through the act of breathing! The human body is sometimes called an “oxygen factory”. Oxygen is important because it is the fuel that cells in our body use to function. In essence, it is the “food” for our cells. If there is enough oxygen around our cells, then our organs and tissues have plenty of “food” and most likely will function properly. If our cells are not properly nourished, the message to our brain is “feed us.” Because 90% of our energy is derived from oxygen, and the other 10% is derived from food and water, the more oxygen we take in, the less hungry we feel.
●●●●●●● The condition of your colon:
Surprisingly, the average person, who is neither overweight nor noticeably reactive to allergies, is carrying around 7 to 25 pounds of dried fecal matter in their system. Overweight and allergic people usually harbor more. The toxins from this accumulated waste are responsible for many imbalances in the body which can cause weight problems. In fact, one of the most common complaints men and women have about their figures – a protruding belly – is a classic sign of colon toxicity. Virtually all weight challenges can be traced to imbalances in the colon and digestive tracts as either a primary contributor or secondary problem.
●●●●●●●● The color of your food:
Why green? Chlorophyll is the bloodstream of the plant. Like blood in the human system, chlorophyll carries nutrients to all parts of the plant. In fact, the analogy is even more precise: the chlorophyll molecule is almost precisely the same as the hemoglobin molecule, the main constituent of blood. The two molecules differ only in that the mineral nucleus of the blood molecule is iron; in chlorophyll, it is magnesium. Chlorophyll has a direct effect on calcium. This is important because calcium is the first line of defense against disease. The trick is to make sure that the calcium is in an activated form that can be carried to each cell in the body and, as well, in a form that is easily assimilated by individual cells. Chlorophyll is the best way of affecting this function of calcium.
●●●●●●●●● Emotional Conflicts:
La Casa believes in psychotherapy. (Our Founder, Jane, is a psychoanalyst.) Emotional conflicts are often behind eating disorders. We absolutely encourage you to do emotional work with a skilled therapist. However, there’s more than one road to Rome: when neurotransmitters in the brain are properly balanced, not only do brain functions change, but so do the emotions that are concomitant with brain functioning.
Why all your previous attempts to lose weight have failed:
The answer is quite simple: because all other diet plans are about what you CAN’T do. They leave you feeling deprived. And while human beings can exist in a state of deprivation for limited periods of time, there is almost always a rebound effect, and when that happens, desire comes back with a vengeance.
Why La Casa’s Weight Loss Program Does Work:
It goes without saying that the less you eat of junk and processed foods, the better you will feel, and the more your weight will stabilize at its healthiest state. The principle of decreasing these foods is the importance of controlling insulin levels in the body. Refined foods, grains and sugar raise your insulin levels . When insulin levels increase, you are telling your body to store carbohydrates as fat and to not release any of the stored fat. This makes it very difficult for you to use your own stored body fat for energy. So the excess carbohydrates in your diet not only make you GAIN WEIGHT, they make sure you keep that weight on. By reducing the amount of grains, processed foods and sugars from your diet, you will not only tame your weight but also fight illnesses. But, what makes La Casa’s program effective is not just what you do at home; it’s also the therapies performed at La Casa that give you the extra edge. All of the weight-loss therapies at La Casa, and the additional work you will do at home between spa visits, address these causative factors:
● Better sleep: Therapy: Floatation
●● Balancing Acid-alkaline (pH): Therapy: Young Living Mineral Salts (at home) Young Living pHour Salts is a combination of four powerful carbonate salts (sodium bicarbonate, magnesium bicarbonate, potassium bicarbonate, and calcium bicarbonate) that help maintain the alkaline design that we are meant to have. These salts are naturally occurring in all fluids of the body, and, thus, aid in the reduction of acidity in the lymphatic, circulatory, and gastro-intestinal systems.
●●● Calcium: Therapy: Raw Yogurt (at home)
●●●● Detox: Therapy: Super-Enriched Oxygen Bath
●●●● Detox: Therapy: Salt Sauna
●●●●● Water: Therapy: Hydrate and Vibrate
●●●●●● Oxygen: Therapy: Oxidative Exercise
●●●●●●● Colon Cleansing: Therapy: Intensive Colonic
●●●●●●● Colon Cleansing: Therapy: Multi-Cleanse (at home)
●●●●●●●● Greens: Therapy: Super Greens (at home)
●●●●●●●●● Emotional Conflicts: Therapy: session with Dr. Jane Goldberg