Equipping Your Body To Cope With Stress-- A Natural View

          Coping with stress is very difficult for most people because they do not properly equip their body to handle everyday stress or any additional stresses resulting from danger or a catastrophe.  Some people will actually do things to increase the stress.  Other people create other health problems, while they are stressed, without realizing what they have done. 

          Most people do not realize that they are eating more junk food while they are stressed.  Many people will double their junk food in stressful times.  This means that more toxins are entering their body and less nutritious foods are being eaten.  The toxins affect the blood cells that feed our body for approximately 120 days, therefore we start building our body on junk.  The body will start or finish breaking down! 

          On the other hand, many people do not want to eat anything when stressed.   They live on so much less than the daily requirements for their nutritional needs.  When they do this, their immune system starts to breakdown, their organs start to starve, and they get very weak.  This is a very dangerous situation for people with life threatening, stressful situations already.  They tend to blame their new weakness on the life-threatening situation and forget that they were not eating, and that not eating is what could be making them weak!

          Remedy to these eating problems is to eliminate the junk food and seek balanced meals to eat when stressed -- even when you don’t want to eat!

          When stressed, do you think your arteries tighten up?  Of course they do!  And this is scary because it can promote pain in the form of headaches, heart attack, or stroke if the stressed or tightened artery causes a decrease in the blood flow anywhere in the body.  Just think.  If you have an artery that is already clogged, what happens if the artery starts to tighten?  The insides of the artery will meet way before it should and possibly stop the normal blood flow, which could be disastrous. 

          In our everyday lives, so many other things can compound our mental and physical stress.  These would include our loved ones, certain noises, crowds, loneliness, hunger, illness including infection and of course pain.  Just imagining what a particular pain could mean can evoke a stress response until you either are relieved of the pain or are told what the pain is or that it can be stopped. 

          Since there are the above factors and so many more factors that relate to stress, it just makes sense to properly equip our body, feeding it in a way that it will be able to cope with these many stresses.

          The way to help equip the body is to feed it complex carbohydrates.  These are a good source of minerals, vitamins (including many B-Vitamins), and fiber. They are starches found in breads, cereals, starchy vegetables, and legumes.  These foods do not quickly raise the blood sugar and should be included in each meal to help the body deal with ongoing stress.   High-fiber, carbohydrate-rich foods cause the brain to produce more serotonin and relaxes us. Some examples of complex carbohydrates include baked sweet potatoes, minestrone soup, or sautéed vegetables over brown rice.

          Fruits and vegetables will help our body fight disease while stressed.  By increasing our intake of antioxidant-rich fruits and vegetables, we can boost our immune system.

          During times of stress, the nervous system uses extra B-complex vitamins and vitamin C. A supplement that provides generous amounts of these nutrients in a base of wheat germ, inositol, PABA, bee pollen, and herbs such as schizandra fruit, hops flowers, and passionflower, will support optimal nervous system health and help anyone cope with stress.  For help in choosing the appropriate supplement for you contact your health care provider.