Can’t Stop Eating? Here’s How

 

Think of your body as a machine. If you give it the correct fuel it will run smoothly. If you give it incorrect fuel or eat at the wrong times, it will not run smoothly. It’s that simple!

Your body runs on the fuel called ‘blood sugar’. Blood sugar comes from food, real food not caffeine, sugar, or alcohol. To keep your energy stable and balanced you have to give your body fuel at frequent intervals or it will get out of balance even cause binge eating.

When you sleep all night you aren’t feeding your body so it is like a mini fast. That’s why the first meal of the day has traditionally been called ‘break the fast’ which we have shortened to breakfast. Yes, people used to eat breakfast first thing in the morning.

Now, however, times have changed and many people are not even eating breakfast let alone first thing in the morning. This can cause an energy problem all day.

I like to call it ‘the first half hour.’ This is the most important time of the day to prevent binge eating and overeating all day long. It’s the best time to gain self-control. You can do that by eating something in the first half hour of getting up. Why?

When you don’t eat your blood sugar drops; that’s the mini fast that happens while you sleep. When your blood sugar is low you will have no self-control. By eating first thing in the morning you can raise your blood sugar levels and get a great start to the day. It doesn’t take much a hard-boiled egg, a spoonful of cashew or almond butter, some celery sticks with peanut butter on them, a piece of real cheese not processed cheese food, a quarter of an apple or orange with some nuts or cheese, leftover meat or tofu from the night before. It must not be wheat, items containing sugar, caffeinated beverages, or tobacco. Part of a puffed rice cracker well chewed is also fine with a little protein with it. Protein is the key to stabilizing your blood sugar. Then exercise and eat breakfast.

If you don’t eat first thing or if you have sugary foods, wheat products, caffeine, or tobacco you can set yourself up for a day of blood sugar spikes up and down. When your blood sugar drops or if it is up and down all day, you might have allergies, anxiety, confusion, poor concentration, depression, crying spells, insomnia, headaches, lack of sex drive, weak spells, leg cramps, nightmares, fears, and anger. The list is long of the ways going without eating can create health issues for you; this is just a partial list. But one of the most interesting is that you will have no self-control. You won’t know when to stop eating and you won’t be able to pick healthy food.

Going without eating breakfast can create binge eating later on in the day. Once you set up the cycle of your blood sugar dropping and going up and down all day you will want to eat something to raise your blood sugar, and eat, and eat. Yep out of control eating. Or you might grab a caffeinated drink, something with sugar or wheat and sugar, alcohol, or even gum, something that will bring up your blood sugar right away and stop the pain or emotions that are out of hand. Unfortunately that will be a temporary fix and your blood sugar will come crashing down in an hour or so and you will once again reach for caffeine, nicotine, or a sugary or high carbohydrate snack or perhaps binge eat.

The real cure is not medication; it is eating within the first half hour of getting up. I suggest you eat a little something as described above, do some exercise, and then have breakfast. That will balance or stabilize your energy levels. Even a liquid protein drink is fine as long as it doesn’t have sugar or HFC (high fructose corn sugar or syrup) in it. If you don’t exercise then just eat breakfast. I hope you don’t skip exercise; it can bring up your blood sugar levels and keep you fit.

The ideal lifestyle would be to get up in the morning and have a small snack, exercise for an hour, eat breakfast and go about your day. Then have a small snack every 2-4 hours. Avoid caffeine, nicotine, and foods with sugar and/or wheat in them. Learn to carry a small packet of nuts and seeds with you. Pumpkin or sunflower seeds are especially good so are almonds and Brazil nuts. If you carry snacks you will always have something handy to eat to keep your blood sugar balanced. It is especially important for people of all ages to eat to balance their energy.

For snacks I like to have leaf lettuce spread with cashew butter and rolled up, individual cheese sticks, or part of an apple and 5 or 6 almonds. Baby carrot sticks are fine but can be sweet so eat some protein with them. All vegetables can serve as a snack: zucchini sticks, slices of red or yellow pepper, lightly steamed broccoli or cauliflower. I have a friend who eats beets as a snack. The first time I saw him eating a beet like it was an apple I was really taken aback, but I got used to it and now suggest it, with a bit of protein of course since beets can be sweet. Beets are in some of the supplements holistic practitioners suggest to clients to help with blood sugar problems.

Many so-called diseases are the result of having blood sugar out of balance. Epilepsy type episodes, crying spells, depression, even agoraphobia. I had a client once who was so fearful of going out she was bed ridden and on anxiety drugs. She got an alarm clock and plates of snacks and kept them by her bed. Every 2 hours she had a bite or two of the snack and set the alarm to wake her to eat the snack in another 2 hours. The next day she was up and out and going shopping at the mall, something she hadn’t done in many months.

If you want more specific instructions you can find them in The Anger Cure book. There are also questionnaires to fill in to assess if you have a blood sugar problem. Don’t be a slave to sweet foods and caffeinated drinks. You can gain control of your life and stop binge eating and more by simply balancing your energy by balancing your blood sugar levels.

Kathleen O’Bannon is a Certified Nutritional Consultant and 3^rd generation healer. Her 12 books on nutrition and healing and frequent radio and TV appearances have guided thousands of people to better health in their body, mind, and spirit. Kathleen does private consultations and can also speak to your group on many topics on health and healing including: The Love Diet; Food and Mood at Home, Work, and School; and Eat Right-Feel Right. She can be contacted through her web site, now under construction:http://www.kathleenobannon.com or http://www.healthalive.net

 

Healing with Roy G. Biv

 

This system of healing has been in place for hundreds, even thousands, of years. Hildegard of Bingen used it. She was a visionary, poet, composer, naturalist, Abbess, theologian, nun, and healer who lived in Bingen, Germany from 1098 to 1179. She fought hard to maintain her position as an Abbess when women were considered no more than servants. She also used wine, mostly white wine. Often the wine was heated slightly and then diluted with more white wine and then drunk to eliminate a lot of health issues of the day. (Wine is made from grapes or other fruits.) But the Roy G. Biv system, along with prayer and other spiritual healing techniques, was her major emphasis. Most of her work, and it includes several very large compendiums of healing with plants, herbs, stones, metals, etc., is published in books, one of which has 300 chapters on healing and medicine.

Many well-known doctors and healers use Roy G. Biv for healing. I first started in 1964. I started on myself and then branched out in 1968 when my co-workers at TV Ontario started asking me about healing. Many of them were healed with this system, I’m happy to say.

Roy G. Biv is easy to apply to healing almost any disease or health challenge. And if it doesn’t heal it completely, it will improve the condition of the patient/client.

I have written about using Roy G. Biv for healing in many of my books like The Anger Cure; Whole Foods for Seniors; Sprouts; The World’s Oldest Health Plan; Nutrition and Health in the Bible; Kathleen’s Health Dictionary; and Energy, Health, and Beauty…After 50.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’m sure that most nutritionists use it, many yoga teachers teach this system, perhaps even your mother or grandmother used this system or tried to get you to follow it. Your health can benefit greatly from using Roy G. Biv for healing. It can help heal body, mind, and spirit.

By now you must be thinking something like: “I’ve never heard of this system of healing and certainly can’t imagine that my doctor or nutritionist uses it.”

Roy G. Biv Explained

It’s pretty simple, really. Roy G. Biv stands for the colors of the spectrum. Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet. These are the colors of  the most healing foods on the planet: vegetables, herbs, and fruits.

When most of your diet is composed of Roy G. Biv foods, you might have more energy, be more alert, sleep better, have fewer aches and pains, think more clearly, and even have better poops.

“But what about brown and white foods like mushrooms and cauliflower?” you ask. Yes, you can also include them as many mushrooms can be healing. Some sprouts might even be included in the white food category until they are in the sunlight and develop the green of chlorophyll. I like to include sprouts in the green category, the G. in Roy G. Biv.

I’d love to include some supporting medical information for each of the colors, but that would make this little article into a book, or a multi volumn set of books. There is a huge amount of material published on the healing power of vegetables and fruits.

If you want to see the latest information for any food just go to www.pubmed.com and put in the name of the food. I put in cherries and got 3,657 published medical journal articles on cherries. Of course some of  the articles might be about more agricultural interests than healing, but still there are many uses for all the foods. In pubmed there are subgroups that you can select for more specific information and under cherries they listed: gout, exercise, inflammation, melatonin, arthritis, sleep, and health.

There were 61 listed when I selected ‘cherries and inflammation’. One article discussed the use of tart cherries in soothing skin care cosmetics to be applied to the skin to overcome inflammation. Inflammation is the current hot topic in nutrition and healing, and generally, articles about it mention Turmeric, but tart cherries or tart cherry juice is also helpful for reducing inflammation and a lot easier to get your family and friends to eat than turmeric.

I selected cherries because they are red, and  that’s the first letter of Roy G. Biv. You can select any fruit or vegetable and look for medical journal articles in PubMed. If you do the advanced search you can select human rather than animal or agricultural uses.

The Michigan Cherry Commission and cherry growers were warned by the FDA in 2005-6 for publishing articles in the newspaper extoling the virtues of eating cherries for your health. This seems rather silly when you consider that there are so many articles showing that cherries can contribute to better health and better sleep. However, the FDA said if they continued talking about the health benefits of cherries they will have to register them as drugs, as if drugs actually did healing.

Generally the FDA only comes down on companies that publish health information for their product, not for fruits or vegetables. In many cases companies cannot even say what their food product is good for because it will be considered prescribing their product for a health problem and that is only allowed to be done by doctors. The FDA also has allowable claims that can be made for food products. A product or food item has to go through rigorous testing, and lots of expensive paperwork, to show that it will do what they say it will. Which is good when there is a new food or food product, but a lot of foods have healing powers attributed to them from centuries of use. That doesn’t count as far as the FDA is concerned. Your grandmother could be in trouble with the FDA if she tells you that eating beets is good for you and can clean toxins out of your liver. Ooops, that’s a health claim that is not allowed by the FDA even though people have been prescribed beets for cleansing by holistic doctors and nutritionists for decades.

Many herbs are now outlawed from mentioning their health-giving properties because the FDA doesn’t allow it to be said because they haven’t approved the claim. If a company or grower doesn’t spend the time and money to produce the required tests and paperwork to obtain an official claim, nothing can be said about the health properties of that food.

That’s why you can find out for yourself many of  the healing properties of food by researchng the published articles and clinical trials on pubmed.com

The Roy G. Biv healing system is simple: Eat vegetables and fruits of these colors every day. The more fresh vegetables and fruits you eat, the better you will feel. I have had people tell me that a sprout formula I developed for five network marketing companies had healed them of the following health challenges: 3 kinds of cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes, MS, lupus, insomnia, frequent colds, and more. Sprouts are green vegetables, the essence of the plant.

If you want to feel younger and more vital, reverse aging, sleep better, and get more out of life, please consider following the Roy G. Biv system of healing and eat 6-10 servings a day of fresh fruits and vegetables. The official definition of a serving is a half cup, 4 ounces. Even a small bottle of veggie juice is at least one serving of vegetables.

An easy way to start is with parsley. This healing green food is high in vitamins, minerals, and chlorophyll. Start by adding freshly chopped parsley to your current meals, even oatmeal! Gradually add in sprouts like alfalfa or fenugreek. Have a salad with your evening meal that is made with Romaine, butter, or leaf lettuce. Add beets, tomatoes, cucumbers, red and yellow peppers, onions, garlic, and lemon juice and olive oil. Have a baked sweet potato at least every week. For dessert have fresh fruit and nuts. Put fresh fruit on your cereal. Have tomatoes with your eggs. Grab a bottled juice in the grocery or gas station that has fresh fruits and vegetables in it.

There are a lot of ways to follow the Roy G. Biv system of healing. Just eat more vegetables and fruits and you’ll be on your way to vibrant health.

 

Kathleen O’Bannon is a Certified Nutritional Consultant and 3^rd generation healer. Her 12 books on nutrition and healing and frequent radio and TV appearances have guided thousands of people to better health in their body, mind, and spirit. Kathleen does private consultations and can speak to your group on many topics on health and healing including: The Love Diet; Food and Mood at Home, Work, and School; and Eat Right-Feel Right. She can be contacted through her web site, now under construction: http://www.kathleenobannon.com

 

The Cause of Most Headaches

If you suffer from headaches you have probably tried many different remedies including prescription drugs, treatments, chiropractic, and even herbal and homeopathic remedies. There are at least 150 different kinds of headaches known to allopathic doctors and even more known to homeopaths.

The descriptions can range from pressure in the sinuses, pain behind the eye, pain that starts in the eye and travels behind the ears or just debilitating pain so bad you have to stay in bed or keep moving to blot out the pain. In homeopathy they talk about how the actual pain feels like a metal band tightening around your head, or a nail hammered into your skull.

Many years ago I had massive headaches. Screaming, in bed, rolling up in a ball pain. Nothing helped. Sometime there was vomiting. Often my husband had to take me to hospital to get an injection to stop it. There were many things that might have triggered it. His cigarette smoke, mold in the basement, weather changes, trigger foods. I looked into them all.

I had been to see an MD who was supposed to be a natural practicing doctor who told me if I didn’t get rid of them he would have to shave my head and attach electrodes and more scary things that sounded like worse torture than the headaches. I was a certified yoga teacher and did yoga every day for at least an hour sometimes more. Even my strict yoga practice didn’t eliminate the headaches.

Until I met Dr. Elmira Buxton. She was a gentle soul and a Seventh Day Adventist doctor who was into nutrition years before it was popular. She took one look at me, asked a few questions and declared that she could help with some simple dietary changes. She had me eat certain foods and test my urine and saliva and alter my special foods accordingly. It really helped.

It opened my eyes to nutrition! I had always eaten a good diet, no junk food to speak of. And then she told me why I had them and to study about it. Yep, that’s how I became a nutritionist. I studied with Adele Davis, the Mother of Modern Nutrition; Dr. Abram Hoffer; and Paavo Airola. I met with herbalists and studied herbs. I foraged for wild food in the woods and ate only organic. And this was in the early 1970s when it was difficult to get organic foods in Toronto. I had to travel out of town to get food that was grown with no chemicals.

I devised a kind of log that I kept of what I ate, what I did, and how I felt and discovered a pattern that was the key to the headaches.

When I was in middle and high school I often had headaches on Saturday morning. “Let down headaches” they called them. They postulated that when you have been rushing around all week and then you sleep in and rest on Saturday, it causes a headache. Well, I had that as a teenager many Saturdays, but it wasn’t as intense as the headaches I had in my early 30s.

Many people have frequent headaches and sometimes they are severe and almost crippling. Many of my students at Kathleen’s Cooking and Nutrition Centre in Toronto complained of headaches. Many had found no way to stop them. I’m not talking about the headaches after a night of drinking alcohol or overeating. These are obvious. I’m not talking about true migraines that can be triggered by certain foods like sharp cheddar cheese or red wine or severe changes in the atmospheric pressure. I’m not talking about headaches that might come from a sensitivity to certain foods or spices like chocolate or MSG. What I’m talking about is something totally outside of most doctors’s understanding.

This is the severe headaches caused by low blood sugar or blood sugar and energy fluctuations. Sometimes articles report this as ‘tension’ headache. And it might be from tension. But what I look at is the reason for the tension.

It’s really simple: Every part of your body runs on a fuel we like to call ‘blood sugar’. Blood sugar is made in your body from food, not sugar. When you don’t eat or eat the wrong things it can throw the balance off in your body and create the problem.

I have met people who have been bed ridden in pain because of this. I have met people who had agoraphobia because of this. I have met people who had depression and terrible headaches because of this. So many health problems are directly related to keeping your blood sugar stable that I can’t mention them all here. But I can say that headaches, depression, overweight, addictions, allergies, confusion…the list goes on and on, all can come when you let your blood sugar get imbalanced. Yes, fluctuating blood sugar levels can cause headaches and a lot of other intense pains.

Take a look at this list of symptoms that can be caused by low blood sugar. (I’m not talking about diabetics who are using insulin. If you are under a doctor’s care for diabetes, you must keep him or her informed of what you are doing in your lifestyle. Do not go off any medications without checking with your healthcare provider.)

Take his test and see if you can relate to any of these other symptoms that might be causing your headaches and many other health issues.

 

LOW BLOOD SUGAR TEST

 

Put 0, 1, 2, or 3, on the line next to all the symptoms that in any way apply to you, no matter how mild they seem to be. The value to you of this survey depends on your honest, objective answers. Take your time!

 

• Use “0” if you have never had it. Or just leave it blank.
• Use “1” if it is mild—you have it once or twice a year.
• Use “2” if it is moderate—you have it monthly or several times a year.
• Use “3” if it is severe—you have it daily or weekly or you may not always have the symptoms, but you are always aware that you have the problem.

_____ Allergies

_____ Anger/rage

_____ Anxiety

_____ Blurred vision

_____ Cold sweats

_____ Compulsive eating

_____ Confusion

_____ Convulsions

_____ Crave sugar/starches

_____ Crying spells

_____ Depression

_____ Dizziness/tremors

_____ Drowsiness

_____ Excessive hunger

_____ Exhaustion

_____ Faintness

_____ Fears

_____ Forgetfulness

_____ Headaches

_____ Indecisiveness

_____ Insomnia

_____ Irregular meals

_____ Irritability

_____ Lack of sex drive

_____ Leg cramps

_____ Muscle aches/pains

_____ Muscular twitching

_____ Nervousness

_____ Nightmares

_____ Personality changes

_____ Poor coordination

_____ Sighing/yawning

_____ Skip breakfast

_____ Staggering

_____ Weak spells

_____ TOTAL SCORE

 

What’s Your Score?

Add the numbers together—2 + 3 + 1 = 6 and so forth—until you have the total number. What was your total? 105? 75? 53? 25? 15? This may surprise you, but if you scored higher than 15 on this test, chances are really great that you have fluctuating blood sugar problems that contribute to your and headaches.

(This quiz used by permission of the author from The Anger Cure: A Step-by-Step Program to Reduce

Anger, Rage, Negativity, Violence, and Depression in Your Life, Basic Health Publishers.)

 

What is the Solution?

 

The simplest solution is to eliminate sugar and anything made with it, white flour, caffeine, alcohol, and processed foods. Eat small frequent meals starting with something within the first half hour of getting up in the morning. Many people find  that they cannot eat bananas or drink juice because the sugar throws off the levels of their blood sugar and creates this chemical imbalance we have called ‘low blood sugar’ for four decades.

A simple diet of whole foods spaced evenly throughout the day can be the first step to solving your headaches. It is important to eat a lot of fresh vegetables throughout the day, including sprouts and other live foods. It is important to eat every 3 hours. It doesn’t have to be much: a small handful of natural or sprouted nuts and seeds, a firm cooked egg, lettuce with nut butter. Always carry your snacks with you to avoid going too long and creating the problem.

A small meal might be a hard cooked egg, a piece of cheese not cheddar, leftover meat not processed, celery and cashew butter, the list of snacks and meals is endless, as endless as your imagination.

You should find that you have more energy, fewer headaches or even eliminate them altogether. If you want more details you can find them in The Anger Cure. Don’t let the title fool you, this program will help eliminate your headaches, and perhaps a lot of other health issues in your life. All of the symptoms listed in the quiz above can be eliminated by following the plan in The Anger Cure.

When I see the ads on television for erectile dysfunction or insomnia, it makes me know that many people need to follow this simple plan. Eliminate the imbalance; don’t cover it up with drugs!

The Anger Cure also has instructions for keeping a log to tell which foods and lifestyle habits might be causing the headaches.

 

You can change your life and your health!

 

Kathleen O’Bannon is a Certified Nutritional Consultant, international speaker, author, and radio and TV personality. She is available for speaking engagements and private consulting through http://www.kathleenobannon.com.