By Mary Beth McCue
Healthy life-style and trauma work are simply “life work.” Where have we been, where do we want to be, what are the options to getting there?
Preferably all for the better of humanity, and the best path for ourselves. We all interconnected with these factors in the human quest for a peaceful purposeful and joyful existence. It can and should be achieved from within.
When we experience trauma, a series of neurological events occur in the body leading to negative mental and physical impact. Trauma is our unique response to experiencing a stressful event. Depending on how we process it, or not, will determine health, and everything in our lives.
The amygdala area of the brain can (generationally) hold events, including the intensity and impulse of emotion that comes along with these memories. Many neurological series of reactions connect to the GI, but potentially all areas in the body. Discovering the areas of stress and trauma, and how they feel in the body are significant to lifestyle changes and healing.
A colleague and teacher of mine psychiatrist James Gordon, MD, founder of The Center for Mind Body Medicine (cmbm.org), shares great points in his many teachings and trainings on the role of nutrition and healing trauma. The mental and conventional health fields have generally been slow to recognize the role nutrition can play in every persons life.
This all has been changing over the last couple of decades as more and more research and clinical practice’s like functional nutrition become widely accepted and demanded from the consumer. The Smiles trial and the Helfimed study are two of many examples of how diet plays a significant role in treating depression, which is based in unresolved trauma.
Many studies have found that a functional nutrition approach to eating is foundational to health and healthy aging, along with nutritional supplements which have been proven to significantly reduce or resolve anxiety, depression, PTSD symptoms, and support the recovery of addictions.
Functional nutrition is a practice of leading an authentic life which can only be realized with health, restoration and vital living. A personalized approach includes:
1. Learning and integrating all of whom you are and reflecting this in your life choices. “Owning the good, bad and ugly” and providing grace to your human. Meditative practice is an exercise my clients experience in sessions and it supports this.
It never fails to provide people words of wisdom that create goals for restoration and a healthier life. This is one example of many that supports us to center ourselves to whom we are, and filter out who we are not. Walking in nature, floating on a body of water, sitting in silence and appreciating a sunset are examples to centering.
2. Gut and immune health. The GI was once considered the “second brain,” and now “Thebrain” because everything that informs the brain comes from this root-case area. More than 60 percent of the immune system also lives here. Stress, past unresolved trauma and lifestyle create imbalance in the GI, leading to imbalance of viruses, bacteria, yeast, and parasites that live there and which we need -in balance.
Harmony in our lifestyle can be achieved and personalized nutrition must be addressed as part of this artful equation. Common support with probiotics and other personalized nutrients can provide what is needed and many times not included in a diet for restoration and healing.
3. Decrease in Inflammation. When we increase activity, decrease stress, medications, toxins from foods and certain high-inflammatory proteins in foods, we decrease the burden of too much inflammation in the body. Common proteins that add in too much inflammation for many are casein, and gluten. Night shade vegetables may also need to be decreased. All imbalances in the body, including excess fat stores and any mental wellness challenges, are caused and maintained by too much inflammation,
4. Too many toxins create havoc in all our metabolic pathways, and decrease overall nutritional status in the body. Your body naturally desires high nutritional value organic foods that have little to no toxins or pharmaceuticals. The body was not designed for the amounts that mainstream America takes in.
5. Nutritional vibrancy can be realized through a food as medicine /functional medicine and nutrition, plant based, clean and organic, non-diet approach. Enjoying great tasting foods is very realistic and does not include stress from trying to make “perfect choices” when it comes to eating and drinking.