The Many Faces of Stress | Part 1

By Dr. Justin Marchegiani

When I say we’re going to talk about stress today, you are probably thinking of emotional or mental stress. Struggling to pay the bills, difficulty in your relationship and the death of a loved one are all very real examples of emotional and mental types of stress. These stressors definitely take a toll on you, and it is my goal to make sure you are equipped with as many tools as possible to turn stress into speed bump rather than a roadblock.

However, there are other hidden stressors that we don’t talk much about, ones that we will be focusing on today: physiological stressors.

Stress can be simplified into three categories:

You can see that stress is more than just mental/emotional, it can also be physical/structural (like a broken bone), and physiological- nutritional/biochemical (which we will be focusing on today).

Click here to find out how you can reduce stress.

Physiological Stress:  This type of stress commonly comes from 3 areas.

1.  Food: Nutrient density, blood sugar stability, and food allergens.

• Eating high quality nutrient dense foods is very helpful in providing the raw materials your body needs to recover from daily stress.  Our bodies are in a constant balance of building up and breaking down; as long as we build up faster than we break down, we can stay in a state of “healthy aging” rather than “accelerated aging.”

Remember: The human brain is roughly 60% fat!  I find many people today are fat-phobic and are worried about fat causing heart disease.  Because of this misinformation, many patients are deficient in important building blocks and are walking around with brains that aren’t functioning optimally.

• If Parkinson’s, Alzheimer, Multiple Sclerosis, or any other neurological condition runs in your family it’s really important that you avoid common food allergens. Scientific literature and research studies repeatedly find gluten, grains, and other common food to affect and accelerate the breakdown of certain parts of your brain.  

Thankfully we now have tests that can actually predict up to a decade in advance if this is happening to you, which gives us the time to make the changes to help reverse these conditions from progressing.  Removing all grains is a good start, and if anyone interested in running these new state of the art lab tests, please contact the clinic.

• When your blood sugar fluctuates up and down, we typically will see your energy or mood fluctuate in the same pattern.  Fueling your body with with protein and fat every 3-5 hours helps blunt these blood sugar and mood swings and lowers the amount of stress hormone our body produces.  Many patients I see live their lives on a blood sugar roller coaster and don’t know how to get off this dangerous ride.

2.  Toxins:  Heavy metals, pesticides, xenoestrogens, molds, radiation etc.

• Did you know that about 2 billion pounds of chemicals are dumped into our environment every year?  Most of these chemicals are hormone mimickers, commonly “xenoestrogens,” meaning they are very similar to the estrogen hormones in our body.

The environmental exposure to these xenoestrogens throws our body into a state of estrogen dominance, which makes it easy to develop weight gain, hormonal imbalances, and PMS to name just a few.

• Heavy metals like mercury, which are common in silver filling that your typical dentist would use to fill a cavity, are known to have a negative effect on thyroid function and can cause low energy and weight gain.
• Since we are constantly exposed to these widespread damaging compounds, it’s smart to do an integrative detox program to help get these chemicals out of our body. Check out the detoxification portion of this blog post to get started.

3.  Infections:  Parasites, fungus, bacteria and viruses.

• As our immune system becomes weakened due to the stressors above, parasites, fungus, bacteria, and viruses see an opportunity to infect you.  It’s usually during stressful times in our life that we are most susceptible. It’s important to note that about 50% of people that develop a parasitic infections don’t even experience gastrointestinal symptoms.
• Travelers abroad have an increased risk of infection.  Having high quality digestive enzymes, drinking bottled water, and avoiding any local places that may look a little suspicious can also help.
• It is a good prevention tactic to check about once per year to make sure you don’t have any of these critters lingering inside.  Any time you are experiencing excessive gas or bloating, even with a healthy diet and lifestyle, it is wise to get checked.

Great Ways to Improve Recovery and Decrease Stress:

• Chamomile tea before bed.
• 800mg of magnesium before bed.
• Get your adrenal-cortisol rhythm checked (this looks at your stress hormones through the day and how they fluctuate).
• Stool test for GI infections.
• Keep “Bach Flower Essence” by your desk and anytime someone drives you crazy, take 4 sprays.
• Chiropractic treatment and/or a massage can help decrease the body’s flight or fight response, and help it to relax and repair.
• Heart Math Em-Wave2, more on this in posts to come.  I just bought one and I really enjoy it!

Stay tuned for the next post in this series on stress, which will focus on the “Physical/Structural” side of the stress triangle.

Click here for help eliminating physiological stressors.

How To Defeat The Stress Cycle This Coming New Year?

By Dr. Justin Marchegiani

It’s that time of the year again where everyone is trying to conquer their New Year’s resolution. These resolutions range from:

• Losing weight
• Improving health
• Increasing energy
• Enhancing relationships
• More free time with family and friends
• Developing an exercise routine

On average, only about 8% of people actually achieve their New Year’s resolution. If you are one of those people that want to be part of the 8% and improve their health in this coming year, then this article is perfect for you.

The “Stress Bucket”

Below is a picture I created called “the stress bucket.” This picture depicts how the cycle of stress accumulates over time and slowly starts to deteriorate your health. All of stress sum-mates (adds up)  from all different areas of your life.  It’s easy to see how a little bit of stress over a lot of different areas can add up in your stress bucket.  Stress tends to accumulate in the following categories: physical stress, emotional stress, and chemical stress. Below are an example of a few common stressors that tend to affect the average person:  If stress goes ignored your health will inevitably break down as you can see in the viscous cycle below.

This is the typical experience a medical doctor encounters with their average patient:

Medications

Prescription and over-the-counter drugs are notorious for causing mineral and vitamin deficiencies and putting an increased burden on the liver and kidneys. Many of these medications are also notorious for having side effects, as these side effects occur patients tend to go back to their doctors who prescribed more medications for the original side effects. As you can see in the picture above, this tends to be a vicious cycle where the root of the problem is never addressed and the stress in our stress bucket continues to overflow causing more and more symptoms eventually leading to disease.

Chemicals

There are many household chemicals including cleaners detergents soaps and personal care products that are loaded with toxins. One of the simplest things you can do to remove your toxic burden is to find safer household and personal hygiene products such as the soaps you use to clean your dishes, the sprays you used to clean your counter-tops and improving the quality of soaps and skincare you use on your body. Using the website www.EWG.org, is a great reference to refer to see if the personal care products you are using on your skin and hair are toxic. Your body absorbs more toxins and chemicals from your skin so the last thing you want to be doing is adding more chemicals to an already overburdened body.

Emotions

The root cause of many health issues actually stem at an emotional level. People that are dealing with toxic relationships bad bosses, being surrounded by energy zombies and difficulty with children can have a tremendous weakening effect on the immune system. When the immune system is weak, our body’s natural force fields are lowered, this increases our chance of encountering an infection which can further weaken our adrenals and our immune system making us prone to a whole host of health issues down the road. Using simple techniques such as EFT or the body code can be very helpful to neutralizing these emotions at an energetic level.  Feel free to Google these techniques for more information on them.

Toxic food

Many people’s diets actually consists of food that is toxic such as gluten, dairy products, legumes and refined sugar. These foods tend to be genetically modified loaded and loaded with pesticides and other chemicals that burden our detoxification systems. These foods are also known to be very inflammatory and can cause leaky gut issues as well.  Especially when dealing with grains, these foods are very nutrient poor and actually rob nutrients from our body.

Heavy metals

According to the World Health Organization, one of the biggest sources of heavy metals actually comes from our mercury amalgam fillings.  Some people may know these referred as silver fillings but they are actually over 50% mercury.  The next common source we see is from vaccines, mainly the flu vaccines. These vaccines are recommended on a yearly basis and if you look at the ingredient label on the back of the vaccines insert (ask the pharmacist for it) you’ll see it contain about 50 µg of thimerosal.  Thimerosal is a preservative consisting of 50% ethyl mercury, one of the most toxic Mercury substances known to man. If you are trying to avoid getting sick this winter season there are many other natural alternatives that can boost and enhance your immune system without adding a significant toxic burden to your detoxification system.  Please see previous blog post titled, “What to do when you get sick.”

Below is a great picture showing our body’s ability to adapt to stress.  One interesting thing to note is that many people don’t go and see their doctor until phase 3. At this point, the symptoms have been going on for years and prescribing a medication does not do anything to help our body adapt. Medications usually work by blocking and or suppressing physiologic pathways while doing nothing to up-regulate the body’s ability to adapt to stress and express optimal health.

Click here for help in determining the underlying cause of your stress

To really address the underlying cause of why your body isn’t adapting properly is to go back and look in your stress bucket and see what areas of stress are starting to add up. As you start pulling the right stressors out of your stress bucket and supporting your diet, lifestyle, sleep and exercise your body will start to regain its ability to adapt. Many people need help to find out where to start and this is where it’s great to find a skilled functional medicine doctor who can figure out the best place to start while creating an individualized program for you.

Simple solutions to reduce your toxic load and help your body adapt to stress:

1. Eat whole foods

Organic, non-genetically modified, free range ideally fresh should be the staple of your diet. Buying things in bulk help reduce the price and buying vegetables frozen can be very helpful as well. It’s very important you make your health a priority and this is the first place to start.

2. Get a good water filter

Please see my partner page for excellent recommendations on some of the best filters out there. You can easily start with an affordable car top filter they can pull out pharmaceutical drugs, pesticides, bacteria, and heavy metals. This really does a lot to help decrease your toxic burden. Look here for an easy solution…

3. Indoor air tends to be very toxic

Getting high quality air filter can also help reduce your toxic burden. Look here for an easy solution.

4. Movement

Starting an exercise routine can be a great start. I recommend making a commitment that you know you can stick to such as working out three times a week for 30 to 45 minutes versus being overly ambitious and trying to work out every day for an hour. People that are very overly ambitious and can’t stick to their plan, tend to fold and stop altogether. You’re much better off setting a very easily achievable goal and once you’ve maintained it for a month then gradually increase your commitment.

If you are ready to get your health back this year, then click here to take the next step!

The Many Faces of Stress | Part 1

By Dr. Justin Marchegiani

Stress comes in many sizes, shapes and forms.  Many people only equate stress in the category of mental or emotional.  Things like paying the bills, difficulty in a relationship or a death of a loved one etc.  Theses stressors are very damaging, but there other hidden stressors that may fly under the radar of most people.  Some stressors may be a little bit out of our control, but my goal is here is to make sure you are equipped with as many tools as possible so the stress that you can control becomes a speed bump and not a road block in your life.

Stress for the most can be put into 3 categories (like a triangle):

This picture really sums up my working philosophy.  So as you can see outside of the “Mental/Emotional” stressors there are 2 other sides of the triangle that go commonly ignored.  Today’s blog will focus on just the physiological stressors, and simple things we can do to address them.

Click here to find out more about stress.

Physiological Stress:  This type of stress commonly comes from 3 areas.

1.  Food: Nutrient density, blood sugar stability and food allergens.

• Eating high quality nutrient dense foods are very helpful in providing the raw materials to help your body recover from daily stress.  Our body’s are in a constant balance of building up and breaking down and as long as we build up faster than we break down then we can stay in a state of “Health Aging” instead of “Accelerated Aging.” Remember 70% of our brain outside of water content is fat.  I find many people today are fat phobic and are worried about fat causing heart disease.  Because of this scare many patients are deficient in important building blocks and are walking around with brains that aren’t functioning optimally.
• If Parkinson’s, Alzheimer, MS or any other neurological condition runs in your family it’s really important that you avoid common food allergens that are repeatedly found in the Scientific literature to affect and accelerate the break down of certain parts of your brain.  Thankfully now we have tests that can actually predict up to a decade in advance if this is happening to you, which gives us the time to make the changes to help reverse these conditions from progressing.  Removing all grains is a good start, and if anyone interested in running these new state of the art lab tests please contact the clinic.
• Every time your blood sugar fluctuates up and down or high to low usually we see people’s energy or mood fluctuate in the same pattern.  Fueling your body with with protein and fat every 3-5 hours helps blunt these blood sugar and mood swings and lowers the amount of stress hormone our body produces.  Many patients I see live there life on blood sugar roller coaster daily and don’t know how to get off this dangerous ride.

2.  Toxins:  Heavy metals, pesticides, xenoestrogens, molds, radiation etc.

• Did you know we have about 2 billion pounds of chemicals are dumped into our environment every year?  Most of the chemicals are hormone mimickers, meaning they are very similar to estrogen like hormones in our body.  When our body is thrown into a state of estrogen dominance it is very common to see weight gain, hormonal imbalances, and PMS to name just a few.
• Heavy metals like mercury which are common in silver filling that your typical dentist would use to fill a cavity.  These heavy metals are know to have a negative effect on thyroid function and can cause low energy and weight gain.
• We are constantly exposed to these wide spread damaging compounds it’s smart to do an integrative detox program to help get these chemicals out of our body.

3.  Infections:  Parasites, fungus, bacteria and viruses.

• As our immune system becomes weakened to many of the stressors above we tend to see these opportunistic infection gain a foothold into the body and can cause many problems.  Usually during stressful times in our life are the times we are most susceptible.  It’s important to note that about 50% of people that develop a parasitic infections don’t even experience gastro-intestinal symptoms.
• Travelers abroad have an increased risk of infection of these infections.  Having high quality digestive enzymes, drinking bottled water and avoiding any local places that may look a little suspicious can also help.
• It is good prevention to check once per year to make sure you don’t have any of these lingering critters.  Any time you are experiencing excessive gas or bloating even with a healthy diet and lifestyle it may be a good time to get checked.

Click here to find out more about eliminating physiological stressors.