Why Sugar is Not So Sweet

I can't believe I haven't written about this yet.  Sugar is my "pet subject" at the moment.  I'm constantly talking about how horrendous it is.  So I thought it was time I wrote something here.

Sugar has only been widely consumed in this country since the 19th century.  Before that, we would mainly have sweetened foods with honey.  Only the very rich would have been able to afford sugar and its price would have meant that it was eaten in moderation.

Over the last few decades, sugar consumption has risen drastically.  Sugary snacks - chocolate bars, biscuits, cakes, sweets and fizzy pop and available in most shops (even those not selling other food) and often positioned right by the till.  We are sold it at cinemas.  We watch it being advertised on TV,  We even herald the Christmas season by a certain fizzy drink ad appearing on our screens.  Sugar is firmly in our culture.

Now, let me talk about sugar.  It either comes from sugar cane or sugar beet, but we're not eating a vegetable when we consume it.  The sugar crystals we eat are a highly processed substance. And therefore they are a lot stronger than what we would every consume directly from nature.

And that is where the problem starts.  By consuming such a strongly sweet product, many of us get a "hit" as the sugar releases neurotransmitters in our brains.  Unfortunately when we eat some more, our brains have re-regulated their neurotransmitter release and the hit is much lower.  This leads sugar to be one of the most addictive substances around as people crave that original surge of pleasure.

If you disagree with that last statement, try giving up sugar completely.  And if you are one of the lucky people in today's society who don't have an addictive personality, try asking your friends to give up sugar and see what their reaction is.

I've heard it said that sugar wouldn't be legal if it was discovered today, but it's very difficult to make a decision against a substance when many of the decision makers will be addicted to it.

Addiction is a complex issue and not one I'm going to tackle here.

However, I am going to talk about the negative effects sugar has on our body.

Let's start with teeth.  I remember as a child going to the dentist and seeing wrappers from chocolate and sweets and cans from fizzy drinks pinned up on a notice board along with clear bags containing the amount of sugar they contained.  It was quite shocking.  I also distinctly remember a poem by Pam Ayres tell the foolish what would happen if they didn't look after their teeth.  Both stuck wth me.

Sugar will rot your teeth.  Since more or less giving up sugar, my teeth are the most healthy they've ever been.  My dentist is amazed and even he, when I tell him my lack of sugar, stares at me with disbelief and admits he couldn't do without it.  Strangely, the bags of sugar are no longer pinned to the notice board.

Then there is the effect sugar has when you eat it.  We like it because it gives us a "hit".  If we're tired, we may eat a biscuit or a chocolate bar to give us some more energy.  But this is a short term hit and if we use sugar in this way, we are likely to be stuck with a slump fairly soon afterwards.  Either that, or we have to continue to eat sugary snacks.

The pancreas is designed to regulate our blood sugar levels by releasing insulin.  This works fine if we consume just a little amount of sugar, but when we over consume it, more pressure is put on the pancreas which eventually wears out and leads to type-2 diabetes.  

There are many different types of sugars.  Glucose is the type of sugar our bodies use.  When we eat healthy carbohydrates, eg starchy vegetables, the body breaks them down into glucose and this is used directly by our organs.   However refined sugar has a high fructose content and this cannot be used in the same way.   Instead, it gets broken down by the liver.  If we are just consuming a small amount, say in fruit, for example, our livers cope fine.  But if we are consuming the sorts of amounts found in fizzy drinks and sugary snacks, then our livers can become overwhelmed.

This process in the liver produces higher amounts of uric acid.  This puts more pressure on the kidneys and can raise blood pressure.

Fructose doesn't trigger insulin in the same way as glucose, so our bodies don't register when we are full up.  That and the inefficient way it metabolises, leads it to be converted and stored as fat in the body.  Refined sugar is the fastest way to put on weight.

And on top of this, refined sugar contains no useful nutrition.  All the vitamins, minerals, enzymes, proteins and fats have been stripped out.  So when we consume it, we are eating empty calories. Then in order to metabolise it, the body has to take certain nutrients from our cells.  In this way, it strips the body of nutrients rather than putting them in.   Unless, you are in the middle of a famine with nothing else to eat, there is no good reason to consume refined sugar.

So before you reach for that next slice of cake, consider what you're doing to your body.

The Powerlessness of Rescue

I love creating the titles for all my blogs, but this has got to be one of my favourite.

Firstly, when I talk about rescue, I'm not referring to rescue from massive environmental disasters, or the sort of essential help we receive when we're ill.

What I'm talking about is the need some of us have to rescue people from their problems - the sort of problems they go round and round in circles with - the sort of problems that can impact on our lives by the very behaviour others exhibit - the sort of problems that the other person doesn't recognise as a problem.

The thing is, no-one can fix another person.  Their journey is just that - their journey.  As hard and as painful as it can be to see someone suffer, nagging them to change or rushing over to make everything as painless as you can is often not the best of most constructive help you can give.  I'm going to focus on some of the consequences of doing this.

Firstly, it can be very annoying.  I remember when I was struggling with various things in my life, people would offer "helpful advice" and then get annoyed with me when I explained why it wouldn't work.  The truth was that, although the advice was logically sound, I wasn't ready to make that step.  I needed to sort other stuff out first and no-one else but me could possibly know what order I needed to heal areas of my life in.

Secondly, it can be very dis-empowering.  If you're rescuing someone who laps up the help, it can lead to reliance on the helper.  Also it can lead to low self-esteem if the person feels they can't fix things his or herself and this can lead to a reluctance to even try.  This something I've been taught all the way through my professional training.  Do not encourage clients to become dependent on their therapist in the long term.

Thirdly, we need to be aware that rescue might be fulfilling a need in ourselves to be useful, to be appreciated, to be the one who's indispensable.  If these needs are left unchecked, what will happen if the person we are rescuing gets better.  Will we suddenly have a gap in our lives?  Does part of us need them not to on some level?  Or will we transfer our rescue on to someone else?  Some people have a pattern of helping good causes.  This is fine if it's in balance, but it can also mask a problem of not wanting to focus on ourselves.

If you find yourself in this situation, I invite you to think about the following questions.

Is the help you're offering life saving?  Obviously this is a no-brainer.  We're not suggesting leaving a loved one to die or have serious injury, but are you the best person to be dealing with it.  It might be more relevant to phone the emergency services and leave it to them if it happens repeatedly.

Are your worries for the future realistic or are you considering the worst case scenario?  Often our fears surpass what is likely to happen.  If you're not sure, reach out to someone else for an opinion that isn't clouded by the emotion of the situation.

What would you choose to do if your fear wasn't there?  Did you already have plans which the rescue would interfere with.  Maybe someone else go to help this time or maybe they could wait a bit until you're free to go.

What kind of help do you think is expected of you?   Is the person even asking for help or are they just letting you know what's happening with them?  If they are wanting help, do they mean they want you to drop everything and rush over to fix their whole life or do they want something a lot smaller from you?

Remember the best help is that which is given for our greatest and highest good.  Sometimes things have to get worse before they get better.  Sometimes it's in the low points that we find the courage or the reason to change. I know that  I often have low points when I don't want to face something about my life, or I don't want to take some kind of action that would be beneficial.  No-one is a higher authority on our journey than ourselves, so be careful not to seem to be taking that authority away from another person.  The best thing we can do for another person is to support them in their journey with love, whilst focusing on our own needs.

Time to Heal

We heal when our buried past surfaces and can be released.  We all have some buried blocks as we've all had stress in our pasts which we couldn't resolve, but for the most part they stay buried.

We carry on with our lives, our often very busy lives and we tell ourselves we don't have time to relax, let alone be ill.  However sometimes that's exactly what we need to do.

When blocks start to surface, they often feel uncomfortable.  Sometimes we don't understand why we're feeling that way and even find that we can't actually pinpoint our exact symptoms. We're not exactly "ill", but we're definitely not feeling ourselves.  This is often the time we reach for our addictions: a bar of chocolate, a cigarette, a glass of wine or even a pattern of behaviour.  These addictive behaviours may make us feel better in the short term, but what they're doing is numbing us to what's happening and pushing the blocks back down into our bodies.  Be warned, however, our bodies want to heal, so they will resurface again and again until we release them.

Space also encourages our blocks to come up. This is why some people feel uncomfortable when they find themselves on their own with a whole day to fill and no clear objectives. We may moan about the pressure we find ourselves under in our lives, but it keeps us safe from having to deal with our past and having to feel the discomfort that can arise.

However, I find that this discomfort is usually worse if we resist the process.  If we give ourself the day off, listen to our body and address its needs, whether that's a day in bed, or a long walk, or curling up with a good book, the process will progress all the more easily.  If we can't give ourself a whole day off, an hour each evening when we do nothing can be extremely beneficial.

Also, it's important to remember that these emotions can't hurt us.  It's our associations with the feelings and our resistance to the emotions that cause the problems.  Also our panic that we don't know what to do about them.  The word emotion comes from energy in motion and the motion bit is important.  In fact, all we have to do is notice them, breath and watch as they flow through us, probably changing a few times on the way, and eventually go.

And to do this, all we really need is time to heal.

Phobias, Addictions and Obsessions

What do these three things have in common?

The answer is fear.

Phobias are pretty self-explanatory. We fear something to such an extent that it causes us problems in our present lives.  They may have come from a past trauma.  Maybe we were bitten by a dog when we were young and still become very frightened when a dog barks or bares its teeth. They may also be inherited from another person.  Maybe your mother screamed every time she saw a spider, so you learnt very early that spiders were something to be scared of, even though you didn't know why.

Addictions are habits we have developed in our lives, that produce a negative emotional response when they are taken away.  Often they are something we take into the body - common examples are cigarettes, alcohol or drugs.  However we can be addicted to patterns of behaviour or to people.  What happens here is that we are blocking a negative emotional response by seeking so-called "pleasurable" behaviour.  However, what that does is push the negative emotion down into our body, so it isn't resolved.  Every time it re-surfaces, our bodies tell us we want the addiction.  This gives us a positive "hit" and the pain is pushed aside for a while.  The trouble with this is that the pain will keep trying to resurface in order to be healed. So often we need bigger and bigger "hits" to keep it suppressed   Alongside that, we can have a physical response to addictive substances, but this is much easier to deal with if we've dealt with the emotional residue.

Obsessions are fears projected into the future.  This time there will be an initial negative experience from our past which we worry about happening again in the future.  Like the phobias or addictions, it could be experienced by us or learned from another person.   Things like believing we'll get ill if we don't clean things several times a day or worrying we'll forget to do something.  Often we create rituals to cope with these things; checking something several times or obsessive cleaning.  Alternatively, we avoid the triggering situations altogether, for example, not being the last to leave the house so we don't have to check the door is locked several times. Superstitions also come into the category of obsessions.  These are usually learned from another person. Like addictions, if we treat the underlying fear, then the ritual becomes a simple habit which is much easier to break.

So, if these patterns are causing you problems in your life, kinesiology can help you find and clear the root cause and take back control of your lives, even if you have no conscious idea of where they came from.