Dr. Vincent Bellonzi: So the first class in the series, if we were doing it in a series but you all know that you can join at anytime, is really more of an introduction into the idea of eating less processed foods, of learning how to take care of yourself, of learning things that you can incorporate in your lifestyle. So in the first class we start introducing some of the concepts that I want to go over as well tonight. Now one of the main things that we talk about is glycemic index and is not about being real complicated in learning how to do complexing.
Glycemic Index, you can write a whole book on it, because people have taken it to extremes like anything else. But let's just keep it very simple. I want you to eat foods that have a lower glycemic index, ideally 55 or below. If you do that, your four seed foods that are better for you, your four seed vegetables, proteins things that are going to be more accepted by your body. If you go above 55, you start getting into the processed foods. As you get higher and higher with those numbers, you've gotten into things that probably have no relationship to their origin at all.
So if I can get you to keep that glycemic index low, you are certainly force to eat better. 55 or below tends to keep you again in the more natural foods and that's another role that we talk about, we do may gross here. So if you eat foods closer to their origin then you're going to be eating healthier foods as well.
So if you eat a food that doesn't look like anything in nature, it probably has been messed with by man and it's lost, yeah Twinkies, I heard in the back there. You are eating things that your body doesn't know what to do with. If you've been to our class about sugar, remember we talked about AGEs, advanced glycation end products. Sugar changes the body structurally and functionally. So if your body doesn't function well and if structurally changed, you are going to have disease, that's where we find a lot of disease coming from. As a major theory of aging is the fact that people eat sugar, it becomes a glycation end product, and I am now changed my body for the worse.
So if you stay in that lower glycemic index, you're going to eat sugars that are more naturally occurring, the body knows what to do with them, there is no alarm stages, no problem in the body and you're going to have a better time of it.
Now another concept that we talk about is that muscle dictates metabolism. If you don't exercise what happens to muscle? You loose it, it's never static. You see they are being built up or it's being broken down. In fact, your muscles are a store house for protein. And if I need protein, my body can go to my muscles to get it. What happens if I don't eat properly? I end up sacrificing my muscle, I eat myself. So remember, most of you have promised to eat breakfast, lunch and dinner, right? If you haven't, you need to take the oaths. But I want you to eat on a regular basis because otherwise you're going to be cannibalistic; you're going to eat yourself.
And when you do that, you are in trouble. That's what the whole yoyo dieting things about.
People think, well I just won't eat those meals, I'll go on a diet, I'll start fasting. But not eating anything is less calories and I loose weight, right? It's true, it happens, the scale goes down. But if you look at the proportions of how much lean tissue you have to how much fat you have, you are actually proportionally fatter, because you burned up as much or more of lean tissue as you did fat.
So even though the scale is less, you are suddenly a fatter person. Anorexic people, they have very little muscle issue, low bone mass, they don't have much active metabolic tissue, they are not very healthy. The scale looks good, they think they are in good shape, but they really are incapable of doing anything and their body doesn't operate in a very healthy state. So we have to look at living a lifestyle that's more health instead of what most Americans live.
If I have you eat low glycemic foods, I force you to eat better foods. What that means is you are not going to cause damage, you are not going to take toxins in, you are not going to eat the processed food, again the foods closer to their origin, you are not going to have the whole setup for what's called metabolic syndrome. You're not going to have the insulin response because of the high sugar content. So you're suddenly taking yourself to a lifestyle that will make you healthier as oppose to make you less healthy, and you still can loose weight. I want you to loose weight and be healthy at the end of this, I don't want you to loose weight and just have the scale look better because that's not always the answer, in face it's never the answer. So again diets don't work because first of all, they usually cause you to be sicker when you're done.
You probably all done a diet or you know somebody -- we've all done diets, let's be honest, so you probably notice that the people that are finishing with a diet look a little bit sickly, their faces are drawn, a lot of times it look like a stick with a ball on the middle because it couldn't get rid of the gut. They just have lost all that structural fat, all the residual fat, they've lose that voluptuous shape, but they think that they are healthier because the scale looks better. A lot of times we just want people to throw that scale away.
We monitor it here but it's not what you really want to look at, you want to look at how your claws are fitting, how you look psychically. The other thing about a diet is eventually you have to get off the diet. This isn't about a diet here with the exception of the fact of recent ACG, this is about making a lifestyle change. I want you to take things that we talk about here in class and do them for the rest of your life, not perfectly. Everybody can cheat a little bit but I want you to be able to cheat without causing yourself to go down.
If you eat a pizza and you're sick for two days, something's wrong, you are right on the edge, in fact, that's another concept that we talked about, right? Everybody remember organ reserve? Nobody remembers it. Some of you will knew, organ reserve is really the concept that you can abuse yourself. Now I say that kind of kiddingly but if you have organ reserve, you could eat a pizza, you could eat something that's not so good for you, you could be exposed to something and not create any symptoms. But if you have no organ reserve, then you are in trouble, you're right at that threshold. When you are young, most kids have a huge organ reserve, they can eat dirt, they can roll on the ground, they can fall down the stairs, they just get up and keep going and you wonder how they did that? Well, they've got a huge organ reserve, not only did it not affect them that much but they repair very quickly and it's ward off the back, no big deal.
But you fall down and eat dirt, what happens? You might have to go to hospital and it's the fact that you have no reserve left. So what we are doing is building that reserve. It's a concept that I really like to use, because if I am healthier, I can do a lot of things and not be affected by them. I can walk out in a seeded growth and not be put in the ground because my nose is running on my headers, you know I can go into a house and be exposed something, not that I want you to be exposed to bad things but if you find that a small amount of stress physical, mental whatever causes you have symptoms, your reserve gone.
If you have organ reserve, you got that level of health that small things don't take you down. By doing what we are talking about in class, you want to eat better, you want to exercise, you want to watch your exposure to things, you want to take care of yourself. If you take care of yourself and you create health, you got a reserve. But if you find that you are right on the threshold and symptoms just remain under the surface, you got to do something.
Remember the symptom checklist that you did the first day, I want you to refer back to that, that sheet should be clean. If you've checked any of those boxes on the checklist, then you got a problem and it needs to be corrected. There is reason for every symptom on there and if we look, we can find it. If you correct everything, then that symptom checklist is empty. There shouldn't be regular headaches, sinus problem, fatigue, all the things on that checklist are related to a dysfunction. And we want your body function again and that's where your reserve comes from. But if you are always eating a diet, that's pushing you further out of balance.
And you are not actively exercising and you are not taking care of yourself, you're going to loose your reserve and you're going to be in that symptom mode and you're going to see more and more doctors and do more and more medications, that's for me is the wrong way to go. So we want to get some of these concepts and how we're thinking about that.
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