https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/029-eating-confused-trying-to-use-food-to-heal/id1133835109?i=1000578624056
How many people do you know who struggle with their health? Chances are, whether they show it or not, most of the people in your life do. And chances are, you're one of them.
Whether you're dealing with anxiety, depression, endometriosis, acne, eczema, autoimmune, thyroid, Lyme, brain fog, fatigue, or any other symptom or condition, you're far from alone. Living with symptoms has become the new normal. So no more guessing games.
It's time to get answers. Welcome to the Medical Medium Podcast. I'm Anthony William.
We're talking about digestion. Digestion has been a mystery to research and science since the beginning of research and science. And nowadays, it's all about our gut.
All their problems are because of our gut, we're told. But what do we really know about our digestive system? How much do we not know?
Where does it matter? Where does it make or break us from healing or dying? What about more things happening inside our gut than we could ever even imagine that science research has no clue about right now?
In this episode, we're going to be talking about the nitty gritty. We're going to talk about things you've never even heard. Fasten your seatbelts, get your herbal tea ready.
We're going for a ride.
Hey, where's my station? I got to hurry up and sit down. I got a pile of hot dogs.
Yeah, no, it's my first contest. I mean, I usually just I'm with my friends when we watch like a football game or something. And I usually like 20 hot dogs really fast in front of them.
They always laugh, but I'm really primed for this one. The last guy I heard, he ate 150 hot dogs. Yeah, and the guy, it didn't even look like it phased them.
I just know when I'm up to about 40 hot dogs, I know that I've winned it, but I'm going to push through. Oh, wait, wait, I got to sign this paper. Am I signing my life away in this bar?
Okay, no, it just says if you get injured, will you hold no responsibility? Okay, I'm, all right, I just signed my name. Okay, I'm sitting down.
All right, oh my God, there's my aunt, my aunt and uncle.
You ever been to an eating contest where someone eats like 10 pies really quick and they're gobbling it down and there's a line of people there and one pie after another and they got it all over their face and they're gobbling it down and jumping it down? Or better yet, maybe an eating contest where it's a hot dog eating contest, right? Where there's this plate in front of the person that has like 100 hot dogs and everybody's lined up.
And the goal is to eat the hot dogs as fast as possible. And you see some guys, they shove the hot dog down and the whole hot dog slides down their throat. They didn't even chew it more than once.
Then they just got to shove it in as fast as possible. Or maybe there's a, what is there? There's other ones too, where a whole bunch of tacos, I saw one on TV, it was a whole bunch of tacos.
And a guy ate like 100 tacos. And you couldn't leave a mess on the plate, they said, at the end of the contest, like during the contest, they said the whole plate has to be cleaned. And one guy didn't clean the whole plate so he lost.
There was like a couple of tomatoes left and a little bit of guacamole and some beans and some meat sauce all left in the plate. And then there's restaurants that say, you can eat for free. If you finish what they're selling, right?
Like you look on the menu and they sell something called the Big Boy. And it's 10 pounds of chopped meat with like 50 meatballs wrapped around it, pile of sausage, and I don't know, and a whole barrel of beans, right? And if you can finish that, your whole family can eat for free, but you gotta be one person sitting there at the table and they only give you like two hours.
So you sit there eating it. And if you can get to the end of that, then the whole family eats for free. You know, a friend of mine, he didn't do that, but his friend did that at a restaurant where they brought out this massive 20 pound steak.
I don't know what it was. It was just so huge, he said. And he sat there eating, his friend sat there eating it and eating it so that they would be having a free meal.
He would win in the end and he was eating it, eating it. They had to rush him to the hospital because he had this stomach cramp that was so bad. My friend told me that he fell on the floor and he was in fetal position on the floor trying to pass gas.
And everybody in the restaurant got scared and the whole crowd gathered around him as he was trying to push gas out of his stomach and he was farting. And then he was kind of like in agony, moaning and yelling, my friend said, it was so bad they had to call emergency services, 911. Now, this guy was only halfway through his steak and he was a really big guy, meaning like he was six foot four.
He was like 240 pounds. He had some muscle on him and everything. But he was known by his friends to be able to eat a lot as much as he wanted and drink too.
So he can drink a whole bunch of beer and eat all that. Now, he said, this is from him, he said that the reason why it happened was because he ate something before this big dinner he was eating and he knew not to do it. It's like one of those things where you know better and you know you shouldn't have, or maybe postpone it and do it another day at the restaurant.
But he said he couldn't help it, he wanted the challenge. But he had something before it. He had a cheeseburger an hour before it.
And he said that didn't sit right on top of what he was putting down in. And like I said, this guy was a big guy, six foot four, body mass like big, which leads me to this other thing, which makes me scratch my head, confounds me really, is I saw an eating contest, and it's a bunch of people lined up, it was on television, it was like many years ago. And there was this woman with a bunch of men, so there was a bunch of men and they're all big guys.
And then there was this woman, she was in the contest sitting at a table, and they're all going to eat the same thing. It was like, I don't know, a five pound burger, something crazy, it was something that you just can't eat, it's actually scary. And she won the contest, which was crazy to me because she was with all these other guys, they were big guys, some of them were like six feet tall, six foot like five, or just really big guys, and that means their stomach was probably really big.
She was like 105 pounds. And when I think about that, it just boggled my mind. I watched it, and I was like, Spirit, just tell me what's going on here.
And what was amazing is she could stretch her stomach. Her stomach was stretching. I always knew that.
Your stomach stretches. Absolutely. People can eat a lot more and you stretch your stomach more.
But there was a vast difference here with who was at this table. There were people that were much, much bigger. Men, large stomachs, eating a lot.
And she was small, petite, and ate the same thing. And that's the miracle of the human body. That's the miracle of our digestive system.
That's the superior strength of our stomachs. The world's not an easy place to live. Confrontation, obstacles, trials, losses, hardships, betrayal, that's a big one right there.
So many people get betrayed all through their life. And in this, we tend to use food as a drug, a pill to sweep us away into a safe place. Stress can do this.
And some of us, we overeat. Everybody experienced that before. It's easy to do.
Just run across a little bit of stress, have a little bit of hardship, hard times, and you see something, and there it is. There's that chocolate cake, there's that bagel, there's that double-decker whatever, there's that croissant. Whatever it is, it's easy to fall prey to it.
It's not even just that. You might be saying, I don't eat croissants, AW. I don't eat double-decker cake, whatever that is.
I eat a whole big batch of macaroni and cheese, and I can't stop, and I keep on shoveling it in. I eat a whole pizza, not a half a pizza, or I eat too many slices. Everybody has their own method.
It's a survival method. We tend to overeat. Hey, no judgment, that's just life here.
And wait, you might be somebody that doesn't overeat like that, but you under-eat. You don't eat. Stress comes along, some confrontation, some hardship, some adversity.
Maybe just a difficult time in your life. Maybe you were betrayed, and it felt so terrible in the pit of your stomach. Food was the last thing you wanted.
And even as time kind of went by, and the betrayal kind of eased off, you still weren't that hungry to want to tank or eat a large amount of food at once. So you're the kind of person to just eat a little bit, kind of just for survival along the way. That happens too.
A lot of people run into this, and they just have that pit stomach, nerve, nausea, the upset. You feel like your heart was swallowed, and it ended up in the pit of your stomach, and the last thing you want to do is actually eat. Now, why am I even talking about all this?
Because our stomach has to do what we tell it to do. It has to do whatever we say or do. It doesn't matter.
It has to listen. It has to obey. Because it's sitting there, it's not going to be able to stop you.
It can't say, hey, don't do that or whoa, you're stretching me, man. You're stretching me way too far. Or hey, I'm shrinking.
I'm shrinking over here and I'm getting smaller and smaller. Or whoa, you stretched me way too fast. Whoa, that was a lot you put in there just now.
Or oh my God, I'm shrinking so much. I think I'm going to disappear on you right now. I think you got to put something in the tank.
I know you got some emotional stuff going on right now. I know you got hardships, but you got to put something in me. Our stomach is under our beck and call.
It's under our roof. So when we swallow something, it has no say. No say to what's coming down the pike.
It just has to grin and bear it. Take the brunt. And maybe you're someone that doesn't think I'm right about this.
You're thinking I'm off the mark. But I think we got to have some respect for our stomachs because our stomachs get disrespected. I'm wrong?
Well, you know what? I think about those stories you always hear out there where it's college, it's a party, someone sticks a pipe down their throat, someone's standing on a ladder or a chair, and they're dumping all this beer and alcohol down the pike, and someone's on the floor on their knees looking up, pipes in their throat, and they're trying to send it all down into their stomach one shot, and then everybody's screaming, and then the pipe flies out and spit goes everywhere, and it's like, do it again, and someone else gets there and does it again, and then a few hours later, shove a pizza down the pike, down the gullet. Think about that person's poor stomach, but people don't really think about people's poor stomachs, they think about people who are like, oh wow, that person had a great time, or that person overdid it.
That person did, yeah, that person did way too much, oh, they're kind of sick the next day, but no one's saying, hey, that person's stomach is shot today. Hey, that person's stomach is really not feeling great today. That person's stomach went through hell last night.
You should talk to that person's stomach.
Hey, stomach, are you okay in there?
No one's doing that, no one cares. I get it, I get it, this isn't you. You don't binge out or you never did anything like this.
You're more balanced. You're more moderation or self-care day, right? So yours is about, well, here's my self-care day or here's my cheat day or here's my moderation day.
But you're the one governing it, right? Your stomach still has to be at your beck and call. Your stomach still has to be at your mercy, at your mercy.
And maybe your cheat day, oops, sorry, maybe your self-care day or maybe your balance day or moderation day, because everybody is calling it different now, different things, it used to be called cheat day. So maybe your self-care day is different than somebody else's self-care day. Or maybe your stomach doesn't like your self-care day, but you like your self-care day.
Maybe you like your moderation day, but your stomach is like, moderation, this isn't the moderation I need right now. A lot of people out there will tell you what they need, like what their needs are for what they want to eat. Doesn't mean it's their body's needs are being met.
Doesn't mean their stomach needs are being met. It's kind of like whatever their consciousness is, right? If we were raised on a different planet and they only gave you so much food, like this or this or this, that's all you would have.
But humans tend to make concoctions. We like delights. We're raised on chicken fingers.
We're raised on fish sticks. We're raised on burgers. We're raised on fries with oil.
We're raised on melted cheese that gets all crusty and brown in the oven. We're raised on ice cream. We're raised on a lot of different foods, abominations.
You might be somebody saying, he's wrong. I listen to my body. No, you listen to your consciousness and what it was trained to eat.
Our consciousness, the very thing attached to the emotional centers of the brain. That means food's emotional. We get emotional.
And then our consciousness plays tricks. It's interesting. It's like, no, I'm intuitively eating.
Well, I've seen people say they're intuitively eating and what they're eating. I'm like, whoa, okay, if that's intuitively what you're eating, I got all the respect for you. But man, that's scary with what you're eating.
Or if somebody that says, well, I'm eating in moderation, or I heard someone said you could eat in moderation, their consciousness then adopts that. And it's like, well, it fits into what I want to eat. I could say I'm eating this in moderation.
I could get away with it. But our consciousness can learn bad or good. It can learn bad and not so bad, and halfway bad and pretty bad or really bad.
Or it can learn bad, pretty good, not so bad. Or it can learn bad, all bad. Or it could be like, whoa, good, bad.
Good, good, bad, a little bad.
Good, good, good. Your consciousness can learn all the good things. And then it can connect to that emotional center of the brain and relearning can happen.
But there's something you need to know. Your consciousness can be tricked. You don't think so?
Well, apple cider vinegar. Any apple cider vinegar likers out there that get mad at me instantly when I even say it? Yeah, if you like it, yep.
If you think it's healthy for you, yep. If you use it every day, yep, you've been tricked. I know there's some of you guys out there that don't like vinegar or know apple cider vinegar is not the best for you or maybe your body reacted when you took it at one time.
So you need something better than that, right? Let's do another little test. Hey, it's a test.
This is fun. Chocolate.
Chocolate. That's a good one right there. You like it?
You've been told it's good for you. It's yummy. You get the dark chocolate with no additives and junk in it, right?
You get the healthy chocolate bar. Oh, you get the cacao nibs. You've been told it's good.
Feels good. When you eat it, man, you're flying. Feels wonderful.
And what about coffee? That's another one right there. People like it.
They enjoy it. We get addicted to it. We have it every single morning.
Some people have it three times a day, four times a day. We're told it's good for us. We're told organic coffee is actually really good for us too.
And our consciousness is tricked once again. But that might be your moderation or your intuitive nature or your balance or your self-care day or your self-care hour every single day, which is you sit and have your coffee. You're liking it.
Your consciousness is liking it. Doesn't mean your stomach's liking it. Doesn't mean your stomach likes it at all.
You see those people out there? They just eat what they want. You watch them.
They go to any restaurant. They could sit down at the restaurant. They can order like surf and turf.
They can order lobster. They can order clams, mussels, oysters, lobster. Move that over after they finish some of it.
And then big old juicy steak comes with butter on top. Whole bunch of onion rings on the side. Maybe some other appetizers, crab cakes.
All of a sudden they're eating crab cakes, right? Or maybe they're eating something else, like some kind of just soup that's loaded with oil on top, has dairy in it, cheese, Parmesan cheese, all sprinkled over it. Maybe it's just a big bowl of pasta with cheese, or just fettuccine Alfredo.
Maybe it's just cookies, cakes and donuts, ice cream and some pizza. And then they get sick. Now, it doesn't mean the food made them sick really in the end.
It could have been anything, pathogens, viral load, Epstein-Barr, bacteria like streptococcus, immune system problems, toxic heavy metals, chemical exposure. It could be anything added all up and bundled up, and then the foods did not help. A lot of people head to the doctors when they're not feeling good and they're getting sick.
And they may go through a lot of doctors before they even start changing their diet. Sometimes they'll see two or three doctors or more. Doctors these days will tell you to get off the sweets and the junk and any of the processed foods, and that's a good place to start.
But in the end, it's not too far from what they were eating previously. Even if they go to the best functional medicine doctor these days, they're still going to be eating pretty much close to what they used to eat, except they'll keep a lot of the processed food out, the sweets, the junk. But the protein will be there.
All the fat will be there. They'll still be eating the meals they remember. They always remember.
They'll still have their chicken. They'll still have their meat. Now, if they're a vegan, they're still going to have their nuts.
They're still going to have their seeds. They're still going to have their oils. They're still going to have their beans.
They're still going to have their vinegar. And they're still going to have their chocolate. Whether vegan or animal protein eaters, they're still going to have all those things, but they're going to put the brakes on the processed foods.
And many people get improvements because they clean up so much nasty stuff in their diet. So they start to improve in different ways. But then there's a lot of people, they only improve so much or none at all.
And they're on the search for something different because they go to another doctor, to another specialist and another. And the diets are all kind of relatively the same. Even if they hit a food elimination doctor, in the end, you still got to eat, you still got to live.
So it turns out to kind of be the same old thing. Maybe you can put a name on it. Keto is one of the names, it could be another name.
A lot of people are naming things differently to try to be their own way. But it all ends up the same kind of food, but just done a little differently. And whatever portions you've been eating is relatively the same as well.
So it's not just the advice from your functional medicine doctor or doctors about getting rid of the processed foods, the fried foods, the greasy foods, cleaning things up, looking out for what you're doing. It's more than that. It's kind of the portions are still kind of relatively the same.
You're trying to survive. You're eating what you've known your whole life. The amount you're eating is kind of what you've known your whole life since you were a kid.
And your consciousness is still programmed to what it's always been your whole life, even though you've cleaned up your diet a little bit. And maybe it's not just your functional medicine doctor. Maybe it's your nutritionist.
Maybe it's your health coach. Maybe it's your trainer. Maybe it's your healthcare advisor.
Maybe it's your dietician. Or it's something you read or seen an influencer do. And that's what you adopted through your consciousness.
I'm going to try that. But in the end, it's still close to what you've always done in the way you've always done it. And then you're still not better.
And then something inside of you tells you, you have to go further. You're desperate. You're on your hands and knees.
You're praying to God at night. Wondering if you're going to live your life the way you want to. Wondering if you're still going to live at all.
Because the symptoms get to you. It's breaking down your mind. It's breaking down who you are.
People around you aren't happy. You're being looked at like you're a complainer or you're somebody that's just a hyperchondriac. And you're just like, I can't take this anymore.
And nothing seems right to what you're doing. And then something happens, you break a barrier. You break down a wall.
And you're like, I have to find something. Something. Doesn't matter what it is.
Maybe fruit is okay to do, but I've been told it's so bad. I hear Medical Medium Information has healed a lot of people, but it's fruit involved. And I've been told fruit's awful, but every single functional doctor and trainer and dietician that I have to be very careful and just have a little fruit once in a while and a certain kind of fruit.
And, but I need to heal. And then you look into it, and maybe you grab a book, maybe you read Cleanse to Heal, and you see smoothies in there, but specific smoothies. And then you see more fruit, and then you see leafy greens and wild foods and herbs.
And the whole thing seems foreign. Maybe you didn't learn it from Medical Medium. Maybe you learned it from somebody who learned it from Medical Medium 20 years ago.
Bring in more fruits, more vegetables, more living fresh fruits, more living fresh vegetables. Or maybe you picked up some tips from a vegan, more fruits and vegetables. And then whatever version you found out there, you tried, you did it.
Something didn't feel right, something didn't sit right in your stomach, weren't feeling that great, kind of confused about it all. Tried it for a while, and then wrote it off. It didn't work for you.
And you saw something out there, like, I'm going to eat intuitively, or what my body needs, or moderation, or orthorexia. Whatever it was, you were turned off. You didn't understand it, what you were putting in your body, how your body works.
You didn't have all the details. And you didn't know that what your consciousness believes or wants is much different than what your body needs or wants. Now, all these years, your consciousness was trained to eat the way you were eating.
And your body was adapting to what your consciousness was training your body to do. They were working together all those years in the past. Now you're trying something new.
Your consciousness is struggling to what you're trying to learn. It's used to what it used to know in the emotional center of your brain, right? Comfort foods, eating a certain way your whole life.
It's different now. And your body was adapted to all that for many years. So your body's like, whoa, this is different too.
So it can feel uncomfortable both mentally and physically. But here's the key, you're sick. You haven't been well for a while now.
You got symptoms, conditions. You've been seeing lots of doctors. You're burnt out.
You tried so many things. You've been there. You've done that.
So you're desperate. You know you have to push forward. You know you have to try something new.
Your body doesn't feel good because it's used to what you used to do. Your consciousness doesn't feel good because that's used to what you used to do. And you already don't feel good because you're sick.
You got all these symptoms. You don't know if you're coming or going. You don't know if it's a food that did that one day.
Or you don't know if it's actually a new symptom. You don't know. Well, your doctor said it might be these things and your friend said it might be this.
And you're thinking like, what is wrong with me? Was it something I ate a couple days ago? Is it something I'm doing wrong?
Wait a minute, that symptom feels the same as it always was. Hey, that's a symptom I had two years ago, I think, when I journaled it. I don't know.
I'm losing my mind. To remember the thing we talked about earlier, the stomach stretching and the stomach shrinking. Well, that's a part of all of this.
It's the part when you're gravitating to a new type of eating, a way you really never ate before in your life. Much different than the small, condensed, high-fat, high-calorie meals you were used to all these years, or the large, condensed, high-fat, high-calorie meals you've been used to all these years. Some people eat a lot more of that.
Some people eat a lot less of that. The people who are eating less of that, their stomachs shrinking. They live their life with their stomach really shrunk small.
And then there's people who eat a lot of that. They're walking around with their stomachs expanded, stretched every day. Either way, they're both eating relatively the same kind of food.
So let's start with the person who has a stomach that's shrunk all these years. They walk around with a shrunk stomach. Did you ever run across a person who had a banana?
One big banana? They couldn't even get the whole thing down. They peeled it.
They're eating it. They're moving through the banana, and they all of a sudden have a look on them like, oh my God, this is just so much. They get down to the bottom of the banana, and they ate it, and they're like, that was a lot.
Do you want me to eat another one? Are you crazy? I can't eat two of those big bananas.
Now, if you chopped up that banana, or sliced it up, or sliced up two bananas, and put it on a plate, lined it up all against each other, it's gonna be roughly around the same amount of food as a chicken breast. It's not gonna be the same amount for a lot of reasons, but it can look the same volume, maybe even more. And so what happens is someone who has a shrunk stomach is used to a small chicken breast, and that's what they're used to.
They're not used to a watery banana because a banana has water in it. It's got pulp, fiber. Yes, it's got protein in it.
Yes, it's got a little bit of fat in there. But it's protein, fiber, water, sugar, and it's voluminous. So someone with a shrunk stomach could be like, oh my God, it was hard to eat two whole bananas.
That was really hard. I just want my chicken breast with a little cheese on top. Well, that chicken breast with a little cheese on top or a sauce that's fatty and oily is really dense.
Really dense in caloric action too. Now, there's fat in there. There's calories too, but there's fat.
You got the protein, but it's dense in the stomach and it feels like it's a weight. So when you eat it, it's all you need to someone who's got a shrunk stomach who's been eating like that all these years. Then when they peel a big old banana back, then they're eating it.
It's hard for them to get down to the end of that banana. God forbid they have two or three bananas, never mind a smoothie with three bananas, wild blueberries, oranges, maybe some leafy greens in there. The person with the shrunk stomach, the small stomach from all these years of eating small condensed meals is going to think that's a large amount of food.
So if it was a smoothie with all that in there, it would be too much. They would only be able to have half a glass of that smoothie or a glass of that smoothie at best, and they would nurse it. It's just way too much food instead of a hard-boiled egg, something they are used to.
A lot of people that have the shrunken stomach where it's small and shrunk all these years, they're used to like a poached egg, a hard-boiled egg, a fried egg with a little piece of toast, a couple of strips of bacon on the side, maybe a cup of coffee, maybe a little chocolate treat later, or they'll eat small little meals throughout the day of treats and things they like until they have their dinner, which is a small chicken breast again, or a small four-ounce piece of meat. And here's the problem. The banana is not going to have enough calories to match that slice of toast, believe it or not.
The poached egg, the two strips of bacon, the little chocolate treat. The banana won't equal that. Two bananas won't equal that.
The calories that they're used to are fat, they're dense, and then they sprinkle about little treats with sugar, like the bad sugar in it throughout the day. So they're getting their little sugar highs, they're getting their adrenal and caffeine highs, while they're doing their dense little meals and having little treats in and around it. But they're not eating a large amount of food, or they're not eating larger amounts of food.
Their stomach is shrunk, their stomach is small. They eat one banana, it's not enough to get them by, but yet the banana is too filling. It's taking up too much space.
Two bananas, three bananas, taking up too much space. A whole smoothie is too much for them to drink in the morning. They're used to a hard boiled egg, two strips of bacon, little piece of toast.
They don't even finish it all. They have a cup of coffee. They have a treat somewhere in the middle of it all.
They'll have a treat in the middle of the day. They'll have sugar in another cup of coffee later to get some calories. But they're not having a large amount of food at once.
So you have a smoothie, it has less calories, but it's the foods you need to heal. Here they are, they're sick. And they need to move to these fresh living, juicy fruits.
And they can't get there. The thing is, is that smoothie could be more food than they've eaten in a whole day. Not more calories than they've eaten in a whole day.
Just the volume, a big old smoothie of all that liquid in there, the juice in there, the pulp, the fiber. And they're not used to that. And that could be more food, in that smoothie, than anything else they've done in a whole day.
Now, we're not even talking about the salad now. What about a big salad? People have small salads and they have small salads with dense things in there.
They'll have feta cheese. They'll have tuna in their salad. They'll have salmon in their salad.
That's really popular. Hard boiled eggs in their salad. Ham in their salad.
Cheese, hard cheeses in their salad. Croutons will be thrown in there, a few of them maybe. But the salad isn't a lot of greens, like lots and lots of greens in their salad.
So what if we have to do that now? We have to get a salad, and then we have to have things on there that adds into it too. It's a lot of food.
What they usually do is they'll have this little salad with all these dense things on top, like the egg and the ham and the tuna and the salmon, also added oil. So they'll have oil on top of that dense, small salad, a fatty dressing. Once again, really dense, small portion.
Their stomach is still shrunk. Their stomach's small. And the smoothie is already, beats out anything they've had all day as far as size.
And then the salad, properly done, where you have lots of lettuce, a decent size bowl of spinach, three or four tomatoes, cucumber, steamed Brussels sprouts, steamed potatoes, steamed red potatoes, steamed sweet potatoes, steamed asparagus or raw asparagus chopped up and thrown on top, raw onion on there, squeeze of lemon, orange juice squeezed on top of the salad. All of this, way too much. And if they only ate a little bit of this meal, a little bit of that salad with all those fixings on it, and just a little bit, they would be starving.
It wasn't going to meet the caloric nature of the dense, caloric foods, the small, caloric, dense, fatty meals that they eat and what they're used to eating their whole life. So they'll need to eat more of the salad. They'll have to learn how to stretch their stomach, even if it's just a little bit.
So they could have more of these healing foods. Now, even if it was just a salad that had tomato and cucumber on it, it would definitely not be enough calories for them. They would be starving.
They would be looking for sugar somewhere. They'd be going to their famous treats that they usually do. And this is why I like the avocado.
It's a transition food. It's a great food to transition somebody who has a shrunk stomach from eating dense small meals their whole life, but yet needing foods that are juicy and vital to heal, but can't quite make that transition. The avocado is a great way to do that.
So they have their small salad, and then we put an avocado on that salad. Avocado has that dense nature. And if you do have a little bit of steamed vegetable or a steamed potato or steamed sweet potato, the combination of a little bit of that steamed potato and the avocado and anything else that's in there with the lettuce becomes much more denser because you have that fat slick on that salad, something there so ingrained that they've known about in their diet system their whole life, having that dense fat or that oily dressing or that cheesy topping.
You treat the avocado as if it was an egg. That's how you get by. That's how you use it as that transition for them.
It feels like it was almost like an egg or something. It was almost like something dense and fatty. As you're working on making your salads bigger, more leafy greens, more tomatoes, more cucumbers, or a bigger smoothie in the morning, or more fruits, or just a half a papaya and eating the whole thing, or one or two big mangoes.
You work on getting that volume in you that's filling up your stomach, stretching the stomach a little bit, and gently, it may not feel comfortable. You may be confused at first, but it's allowing more calories of the healing foods so they don't run scared, run hungry, think their intuitive nature's off, thinking they're not doing balance or moderation right, and then running into a snag, finding some trend out there, going in opposite direction, never healing and getting stuck. This is where the details matter, because I've seen people out there, they were sick, and they had to find a way to heal.
And then when you taught them about, hey, here's the smoothies, here's the bananas, here's the steamed potatoes, here's the leafy greens, here's the wild foods, here's the frozen wild blueberries, next thing you know it, you get a call from them, and they'll be like, I can't do this. I'm starving to death. I need protein fast.
I'm going to my keto doctor immediately. I just can't do this anymore. And you're like, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait, wait, what did you eat yesterday?
I had a half a mango in the morning. In the middle of the day, I had a salad, and I can't do this. That's just too much.
Like, wait, how many bananas did you have? None yesterday. I had a banana three days ago, though.
It's like, that's not enough. Not enough calories. It's like, well, it seemed like enough when I ate it, and I just can't do this.
I have to have my chicken, and I have to have my other stuff, and my eggs, and I have to have my cheese. I can't do this anymore. And I'm like, wait a minute, we have to have more calories.
You got to put more banana in you in the morning, more papaya in you, get the smoothie in you maybe. Your salad can have some avocado on it. Let's do a whole avocado.
And even then, they'll be like, a whole avocado? A whole one? Okay, that's kind of a lot.
And what they don't realize is that even if they went back to their small dense meals, with their stomach being shrunk and their small intense high fat, high calorie little meals, they'd still be looking for all their sugary treats all day long in between their pieces of chocolate and their sugar and their tea and any kind of other treats and snacks, maybe small amounts of it, but they would still be looking for those little bits of sugar high in and out of it. So either way, they need their calories somewhere. And so we have to find them in good places, like the steamed potato and the fruit and the winter squash.
But we have to stretch the stomach a little bit more than what they're used to. Now, don't get confused when I say stretch the stomach. You might think, why do I want to look bloated?
Why is this guy trying to stretch my stomach? I don't want to have a stomach sticking out. It doesn't work like that.
It doesn't mean just because you're stretching your stomach a little bit internally, it doesn't mean your abdomen is going to be sticking out and reaching out. Not at all. It'll just look the same.
It'll be the same flat stomach if you have a flat stomach. Now, if you don't have a flat stomach, you already got bloating. That's a different story.
You're already bloating. Stretching your stomach has nothing to do with you bloating more or bloating less. If you're bloating, that's another problem.
That's other issues that's already happening and that's going to be there. And if you're already bloating, you already have all kinds of other things like low HCl, low hydrochloric acid, which is why what you're doing with your diet is so helpful because this takes you to a place to eventually fix and correct that problem. But a lot of people are bloating because they have streptococcus bacteria inside their gut.
They got ammonia. They got petrifying proteins from years and years of food they've eaten that didn't digest well. They got liver problems, stagnant, sluggish fatty livers.
They're bloating for a whole bunch of other reasons and stretching your stomach a little bit to get some healing foods in to fix everything isn't what's creating that bloating. Now let's talk about the opposite side of the spectrum. An expanded, stretched stomach.
Now we're not talking anymore about a shrunken stomach from small condensed meals and the stomach shrinks and gets small. We're talking about a stomach that gets big. Talking about an expanded and stretched stomach.
This is from somebody eating larger portions, and it doesn't have to even be that much larger, but larger portions of the same condensed meals. Instead of one drumstick, they want two drumsticks every night. They want four drumsticks.
They want four drumsticks and two chicken wings. Or instead of two slices of pizza, they want half of a large pizza instead of two slices of a medium pizza. Or say it's somebody that wants a macaroni and cheese, but not just a bowl of macaroni and cheese.
They go in for their second bowl and their third bowl and their fourth bowl, because they want a big bowl of macaroni and cheese. And so that's how they do it. Or maybe a big bowl of pasta instead of a small bowl of pasta.
Or when they make scrambled eggs, they don't do two scrambled eggs or one scrambled egg. They do six scrambled eggs. And so what they're used to are large, dense portions of the same foods.
And then they still need their treats and their sugary treats and their chocolate. And maybe they need a lot of food because they've had a hard time feeling satiated. Something in their mind, meaning wasn't connecting to something physically in their brain.
They needed more calories. They needed more glucose. They needed more calories because they're going through some hard times.
They're struggling. They're under stress. Their adrenals are running.
They had a hardship. They had a loss. Maybe they're being abused.
Maybe they were betrayed. And the need for more fuel came in or they're working so hard or they have a little bit of insulin resistance. They're not getting enough glucose to the brain.
So they're just requiring more. But either way, their stomach is stretched. They're used to eating larger condensed meals, condensed fats, but larger portions.
And they're even gaining weight. And they don't even have to gain weight. Maybe it's somebody that didn't gain weight, but they're still eating this way.
And then there's somebody who gained a lot of weight and they're eating this way. I know people that eat larger portions of condensed foods they've been raised to eat and eaten their whole life. But they eat larger portions because they're up against so much stress, hardship or losses, or they've had a hard time in their life, they're under stress, and they're taking care of a bunch of people.
They're working really hard. Maybe they have two or three jobs. They're not sleeping much at night.
They're working a lot of hours a day, sometimes seven days a week. So they require more. And there's people that aren't working that hard, don't have a really hard time, but they're requiring more too.
Because they need it for fuel for their brain because they have other issues. Their brain has other problems. So it's not like someone wants to eat large portions.
They may be eating larger portions because of other issues. And it's what they've adapted to in order to survive. And let's just say this person gets sick.
The person who's eaten larger portions their whole life and they have a stretched stomach or even just a little bit more stretched stomach than someone with a shrunken stomach. And they get sick and they need to find healing. And you give them a salad with a cucumber and a tomato on it and a slice of potato or something.
Or you give them a smoothie and it's just two bananas and some wild blueberries. They're going to look at it and be like, well, I might need more than this. They're not going to do the opposite of the other person who said, oh, this is way too much.
I can't eat a whole banana. A lot of people who have stretched stomachs get derailed when they're eating healing foods, when they're trying to bring in these healing techniques and healing tools in food. And they derail because it's not enough for them.
So you have to be like, look, you need to eat more calories. You need to eat more because you used to eat these dense meals, but these larger dense meals and your stomach stretched. So you have to make sure we do more.
We do a few bananas in your smoothie with your wild blueberries, have some apples later on in the morning. Or you might have to bring in more steamed potatoes, not just one little steamed potato. And that happens to a lot of people where they just start with this little steamed potato.
They're used to eating more larger portions of dense cooked meals with lots of fat in them. But when you say, hey, look, have steamed potato, you take a look and they just put a little tiny steamed potato, they chopped it up, they threw it in their salad, and they're like, oh my God, I was okay for a little while, and then I got really hungry because they needed two or three potatoes, or four steamed potatoes is what they needed. Now, steamed potato, if anybody needs to know right now, it's a healing tool, it's a healing food.
I talk about it all the time. So it's not that we're against animal protein in the moment, it's not one of those shows where no animal protein or no this and no that. We're talking about healing, cleansing, healing foods.
A steamed potato is a very healing food. There's no fat, there's no overt fat right there, so you don't have to worry about all this fat inside of it. So in order to heal, a lot of people need to lower their animal fat consumption, just like vegans need to lower their nut fat consumptions and oil fat consumptions in order to heal as well.
So it's all in that field. What's hard with somebody with a stretched stomach is that they're used to those larger amounts of calories, the cloric action, the dense fats. So when you dial it back, you have this other food now that's not as high in calories, it's not as dense in fat.
So then we have to eat a little bit more of these foods, which could leave them feeling unsatiated, like hungry. So if they go to bed a little bit more hungry than usual, and they're not used to that, it's foreign to them. They were on 10,000 calories a day, now they're on 3,000 calories a day, and they're confused.
Or they were on 5,000 calories a day, and now they're on 3,000 calories a day, or 2,000 calories a day, depending on how sick they are. What's really wrong with them too. So that's another thing to equate into this, but usually there's people, they don't know it.
But even though packages and calorie counts are certain ways, if you look online or anything, they're not accurate. So none of those calorie counts are accurate when it comes down to dense, caloric or dense fat foods. People don't realize nuts are more calories and more dense and fat than people really know.
So how many grams of fat or how many grams of whatever, people don't realize that there's more to it than that. And it's not quite correct. Some people walk around eating 10,000 calories a day, 8,000 calories a day, but don't know they met that level.
In the health world, alternative health world, it's one size fits all. If you haven't noticed out there, here's a prime example of how it's one size fits all. When you look at chicken and you say, well, how many calories are in two ounces of chicken?
How much fat's in two ounces of chicken? And you look it up, they're just looking at two ounces of chicken, but they're not looking at two ounces of whose chicken? What chicken?
Right? The conventional world and alternative world, they work together. I don't know if you've noticed it either.
They're both in bed together. It's all one size fits all. Here's the example.
A chicken in one farm could be raised entirely different and have a much higher fat content, much higher calorie content. A chicken in another farm could be really lean, could even be lean and mean, lower fat, lower calorie. But no one's ever looking at this.
They just look at the record book, how it's institutionalized for alternative medicine, believe it or not, where you go and you look, fact check, oh, two ounces of chicken equals this and this and this. But that's not reality. People walk around eating a lot of calories and a lot of fat.
They don't even realize they're eating. That's why you can be tanking down 6,000, 7,000 calories a day, 8,000 calories a day and not even know because the chicken you could be eating from the farms you're going to eat them at could be really, really high in fat. Same goes for any food.
That's how strange it is. Fish, same thing. Eggs, same thing.
Cheese, same thing. No one has the right number. So if we're all about, like, it's got to be science.
It's got to be scientific. Even a study, so that means if a study itself is doing something where they're studying, like, the amount of fuel a mouse needs, they're not even equating to what the mouse is even eating. Like, the science is never straightforward.
It's never really factually right. It's not. It's because we go by the one size fits all world.
It's never exact. So when a bodybuilder or exercise buff or trainer is counting calories, counting macros, and they're really trying to keep track, and they're portion controlling, and they're counting everything, they're not even counting anything right. Because if they're using the one size fits all ruler, the one that says, here's exactly how many calories are in a banana, but there's different bananas from different farms, from different regions that have entirely different things in them.
And then there's different chickens from different places around the country and around the world. There's different pork. There's different lamb.
There's different beef. There's different eggs. There's different cheese.
There's cheese that's very thin. It's got less fat in it, more sugar in it. And there's cheese that's all fat.
But they're not counting any of that. And all those things matter greatly. How was the cow fed?
There's grass growing in regions that have less protein in it. There's grass that grows in regions of the world that have less fat in it. Traces of fat, yes, that are in grass.
And so cows are eating differently. Their meat's designed differently. So when we do the one size fits all thing, it's completely distorted and all wrong.
So nobody knows really how many calories they're even eating, which leads to a problem because they could be eating more calories, more fats than they ever even knew. They think they're counting their proteins, fats and carbs. They think they're doing their macros right.
They're counting their macros right. But they're not. They're totally off the mark.
They're flying blind. This is one of thousands of mistakes made in the health world. If you're starting anything, healing, doing healing tools, healing foods, you don't have to do it all at once.
You don't have to do the whole thing, throw the kitchen sink in there altogether. You could do baby steps, incorporate one thing at a time, little bit at a time. Take one day at a time.
Be easy on yourself. You don't have to think, oh my God, I got to stretch my stomach. No, I don't have to even think about it.
But you got to think about this though, what you're feeling as you're doing it. Got to be easy on yourself there because a lot of people, they're so inflamed in their intestinal tract, their vagus nerves are hypersensitive. Not just their vagus nerves, but little tiny nerve endings come off their vagus nerves going to the intestinal tract lining so that when food's moving through your intestinal tract, through your gut, you're feeling it.
You're feeling it massage the walls of your intestinal tract, which could kind of feel uncomfortable if you're somebody that's highly inflamed. So then you're like, oh wait, my food's not digesting. That banana I ate isn't digesting.
That salad I ate isn't digesting. And so you kind of get nervous. You don't know if it's working because you might be somebody that's used to bread and butter.
Bread and butter just kind of moves through you like a sticky gummy glue. Doesn't massage anything. You might be somebody that's used to eggs.
Eggs kind of liquidify into a weird liquid paste that sits in the middle of the intestinal tract and doesn't touch the walls of the intestinal tract. It doesn't massage. If you have a banana, a banana moves through and gently massages because it's working on healing the gut.
So you might feel a banana move through you. A lot of people, they'll eat some papaya and then be like, huh, you know, I can kind of feel something different. I have a different feeling inside of me.
And they're confused at that different feeling, and it might not even be uncomfortable at all. It just might kind of make you aware. And when it makes you aware, you might get scared because you're changing your diet.
You're eating different foods. The foods are actually touching things inside of you, massaging things. There are fiber, everything, the pulp, all of it.
And healing foods do things inside of us that help us. And we end up feeling that they're cleaning the mess up. So these foods are cleaning things up.
They're cleaning all the junk in us too. They're loosening up pockets of bacteria. They're moving around deposits that were stuck on the walls of the intestinal tract and colon that are putrefied and rancid and hardened and clung to the walls of the intestinal tract.
These healing foods are waking things up, moving and shifting things, feeding the nerves that attach to the intestinal tract linings. While all this is happening, healing is happening inside the body, and it might be scary. It might be like, what's going on?
I'm kind of getting aware of this. This is a different feeling, I feel. What is this?
Then you might get scared. You might be like, huh? I can't tell.
Meanwhile, detoxification, cleansing, healing, purging of the liver is happening. See? All these things are going on, and we can sense them, we could feel them, and it could make people go the opposite direction sometimes because they're used to being inflamed and sick, but not feeling the food move through them.
Instead, they're used to just being bloated, sick, maybe crampy in constipation, maybe IBS and other problems, but they're not used to feeling their food so much. This is new sensations that happen when you do it right, when you do it right, when you know how to use these foods to cleanse, when you know how to use these foods to heal, and you understand your stomach, how to protect your stomach, and then when you bring in celery juice, and you can baby step that, you can start small and not have to go to 16 ounces on an empty stomach or 32 ounces on an empty stomach yet. But when you bring in the tools, like the lemon water and the celery juice and the smoothies and the heavy metal detox smoothie, and you bring in your leafy greens, and you bring in your steamed asparagus and steamed Brussels sprouts and steamed potatoes, and your wild foods and your herbs, and you bring it in, baby step it in, something changes, you end up moving forward, and you discover and unlock the healing process in you, and your consciousness, the consciousness that adapted all these years to what you used to eat all those years ago, starts to change, and the emotional centers of your brain connect to the new consciousness of your body healing, and it's the most powerful thing you could ever do.
Our consciousness is not who we are, because our consciousness can become something else, something we don't want to be. Our consciousness is powerful, but it's not something that defines us to exactly who we're ever going to be, because we can use our consciousness to change and grow. If someone is living their life, and they make mistakes along the way, through hardships and hard times, and they make decisions that they believe was not a good thing, they have to be easy on themselves, because our consciousness in that moment was only doing the best it could with the capacity of what it's learned throughout the years.
But we can turn to another direction, and our consciousness can grow. It can become something different. It can help us make decisions that's right for our body, right for our needs.
And then it becomes our best friend, our best ally, not our enemy. Seeds become planted within our consciousness. Seeds of things that aren't good for us.
Seeds of things that don't make us better. They take us down along the way. We get told all the time what's good for us, what we should do, what feels good.
Listen to your body, and do the things that are trendy out there. The trend train doesn't care about really what's going on inside someone. It's all about making somebody else's consciousness happy in a different way.
But we can take control of our own consciousness, and we can lead it into a direction of safety and well-being for what we truly need. Instead of our consciousness filled with noise and busy words controlling us, we can reteach and infuse knowledge and wisdom into our consciousness and support the supernatural resource so it becomes a star that lights the way.