I had brunch the other day with two of our planet's most beautiful women.  They are both oriented towards obtaining natural health support from their lifestyles and seem to think about that wherever possible.  They are richly intelligent women and their quests for improved health are long term.  They readily show the accumulation of wisdom from those years of health pursuit in their conversational knowledge.  I do so enjoy that consciousness in our species.   

One of the mature but still young women was openly describing her thoughts on how to get and stay healthy when the other, I’ll call her Shannon, interjected and enthusiastically wished to share her finding of the single most important thing she had ever come across that helped her gain and maintain more of her health potential.   

Of course we both listened to Shannon intently.  Then she said that the single most important thing she does for her health is follow my instructions on what-not-to-eat.  I felt great upon hearing that from her.  She has been one of my patients for only a few years and started out a bit anchored in her former paradigm of health.  It was obvious that the “penny had dropped” and I didn’t have to labor on helping to change her angle of thinking any more.  Her story is replicated by thousands over the years.  Some of my patients take longer than others to get the “big idea” but if given an opportunity and then by their taking the initiative to walk the first steps, most get the idea and reduce much of their long term health losses, especially lower back pain, just by changing their lifestyle alone.  

Shannon had found out through personal experience that it is not what you eat that is the more important step in maintaining health but rather it is what you do-not-dare-eat that supports the body first in its desire to thrive and be healthy.  Look about you to the young to see this, especially our breast feeding babies.   Every breast feeding mother knows that if she eats unusually, especially spicy or poor grade foods she will have a winy and colicky baby for the next few days.  Directly from mother’s milk baby may suckles stressors which stress us by twisting up and tightening intestines to shut down the inside organs.  This normal and natural defensive reaction causes the debilitating discomforts that our baby wails about.  By not eating stressors Shannon had found the ongoing comfort which reflected less stress upon her inside organs and a more competent ability of those same organs to digest her good diet and provide the thriving nourishment her nerves and muscles desire and need.  

To get healthier and to get rid of your back pain work with me from the premise that “we are what we are.”  We are not necessarily what someone else may tell us what they think we are.  No more history’s blundering with suppositions and assumptions about what health is and how to get it.  Dark aged thinking is out of vogue to-day.  Our Renaissance of health reform is upon us should we just bring it home with intelligent thinking.  Sure we have to go a little outside of the pale to get the right idea for a new health paradigm.  But watching my children with their electronics and the incredible skills and activities they perform with them is what I may call “wizardry,” not deductive reasoning.  By comparison to the children’s electronic skills, conceptualizing a “big idea of health” and using a new paradigm that we could all enjoy and share to-day as well as in the generations of our children to come should be easy for us.  

Begin to get our health back by insisting we are not just “that part” that has been described as having failed in us.  Rather start by thinking that we are a whole, a number and variety of “parts” working together in concord, with one heart.  We are what we are and only that.  We are like all other living entities on this earth in one clear way, we are a breathing phenomenon first and an eating phenomenon second, from the womb to the tomb we continuously breathe and eat.  

With respiration and elimination included that is the only thing all of the species on earth have in common.  Then think like this with me, “If we are all the same then why is it that all of us don’t get debilitating lower back pain?” And then think “How and what causes a human failure to thrive?”  

One of the first instinctive responses in a human baby is to suckle.  We see this in fetuses sucking their thumbs in the womb.  In order to create the physical response of suckling we first have to get the head, and in particular the mouth there, to where the food is.  Or, as we often see in the womb, we are programmed to bring things like the thumb and forefinger closer to the mouth.  The very first thing every newborn fresh from the womb does is breathe.  First our baby takes an enormous chest filling breath, then secondly the unstressed newborn roots about for mother’s nipple.  Our baby is driven to breathe, then to suckle and only then can it thrive.  The newborn is instinctive in this response and pushes and pulls his head around to find the nipple.  And he needs strong neck muscles and a base to do that work from.  Muscles move body structures and do the work for us.  

The base response of finding the nipple and suckling is achieved by harnessing the chest muscles and ribs first with a deep breath and secondarily levering the head with the neck muscles from there.  The chest has to support the neck actions by muscularly splinting tightly to form a strong foundation along with the ribs.  From the upper chest ribs, front, sides and back of us come the higher neck muscles which have the task of moving and stabilizing the neck and head for feeding and it requires nutritive energy to continually do this.  The baby has to desperately root about to find the breast and its nipple to release the milk so it will thrive.   

Baby’s acupuncture appendages for the chest and its splinting muscles that lash the ribs to support it’s neck for thriving are its thumbs.  That’s right the thumbs are the meridian termination for the chest, the “lung.”  Later he will hold on and tear with his thumbs, then his grasping to bring in materials close to the face to “sniff and lick” will help train his brain about choices.  Our baby is what he is and will behave in an instinctive and innate manner.  The word “thrive” comes from an old Viking word “thriven” which means to grasp or hold on.  That is what our thumbs evolved to do, they help to hold on to nutriments for the muscular chest which supports our “first step” our breath and enables the second step that of eating to thrive to occur in our Garden of Eden.  

Instinctive and innate are our baby’s responses to thrive from its first second of life on this planet.  Every one of us began like this, by drawing in a huge gasp of air and then rooting for mother‘s nipple.  Most of us got along past the first few days with nourishment from mother’s milk and quickly we learned that if we wailed we were soon fed a formula that usually fit nicely into our needs, wailing is another chest assisted response.    

Baby’s physical actions to its need to feed are automatic.  Pre-programmed, instinctive and innate nerve directed actions drive our baby to fulfill the wants and desires of one of the oldest brains within us, our brain stem.  Our midbrain, pons and medulla oblongata, our brain stem, is along with the cerebellum, part of the oldest brain region.  Our brain stem is housed deep in the base of the skull and proceeds to dwell like a Moray eel within the more cavernous upper spinal canal’s opening of the first five cervical or neck vertebrae.  The inside of the upper neck vertebrae allow a meshing ground for the brain stem to mingle its nerves with those of the spinal cord which will reach all of the tissue cells of the body.  Some nerves will reach and control voluntarily and others will control automatically every muscle and organ.  The inside space of the upper neck vertebrae is kind of like a many thousand wire breaker box.  Our brain stem also dangles separate nerves from foramen or holes in the base of the skull outside and around the spine which then reach deeply throughout the head and face, through the chest and abdomen, then all the way to the feet.  Our brain stem senses and disperses essential nerve signals that activate the baby’s instinctive responses to the need to drink, as well as our need to feed to thrive.   

The old lower skull and upper neck brain stem part of us ensures the beating rhythm of our hearts.  It causes breathing along with hunger and thirst.  Its impulses time and mobilize the muscles and tissues of our digestive organs and furthermore, and this is the lower back pain part, it is responsible for integrating and activating our skeletal muscles.  The brain stem nerve responses automatically lever us down the trail, synchronizing, activating and integrating our arms, legs, neck, chest and trunk muscles allowing us to move smoothly and in balance enabling us to better gather food or to run when needed in the Garden.  

Wickedly voracious in its nutritive needs brains and nerves weigh in at only 15% of our body mass, but they consume 25% of our daily calories from food and a whopping 80% of our oxygen.  Brains and nerves do work too, they carry energy.  And the kicker to all of this is that the calories for the brains and nerves to do work with must be in the sugar form of glucose.  Our brains and nerves will not tolerate sugars like fructose, maltose or mannose, and must spend precious energy to convert them for only glucose will do.  To attempt to feed our nerves other than glucose will create failure to thrive.  

Protecting the delicate organs of the nerves and brains are highly evolved food-sensing-systems.  The food sensing systems work for protection of our organs alongside the chest with its ability to respire and download some of the body heat generated from the large amounts of energy the brain, organs and muscles consume.  First by instinct like our baby and his suckling then later in life modified by learned responses we are drawn to foods to satiate the ongoing caloric needs of our tissues via a demanding sense of hunger.  We are drawn to and search for food by using our face.  Baby smells, senses and nuzzles his way to the nipple.  We continue on in a very similar automatic way throughout life as we feed.  When hungry our face pulls and points toward potential food and we follow with all of the body parts in tow, especially our limbs scrambling to assist the desires.   

When we come upon food and carefully snuffle and lick, assessing its potentials, we are using evolutionary protective senses.  We sense our food for texture, temperature, color and consistency.  We evaluate it further mouthing for the taste of salt, sweet, sour, bitter and finally for “umomi” or for savory, like the browning of roasted fats and proteins.  If what we are handling passes muster then we allow it to enter the sensitive realm of the throat and stomach, we swallow it.  

Once swallowed food is in a totally different and automated environment.  We no longer feel its passage through the organs, we have no idea where it is along the thirty feet of bowels or how it is achieving digestion for that is the realm of the old brain stem.  We don’t see or feel what we have eaten for another day or two.  And during that time we must rest assured that our initial screening process was adequate and used wisely.  We rest confidently that what was chosen by us and then ingested was food and that it was highly nutritious as well.  After all, historically eating well is what we became successful at and that enabled us to get here.  We became successful at quelling the harsh senses of hunger and thirst from the old brain, the “Granddad” of our sensory and motor abilities.  

Presumption that our food was good and sound is mostly based on relying on senses that came from innate responses to evolutionary tumbles which developed and placed those very same organs within us.  The sensory organs came to us by feeding repetitiously over time in an environment of stability.  To-day we still have to look, snuffle, feel and lick the materials we present to our face in an age old ritual of feeding developed over millions and millions of years of repetition.  We have become what we are through adhering to an instinctive innate procedure which has proven itself successful by our abilities to thrive, up until now.  

Researchers posit that our children will be the first generation to not outlive their parents.  The longevity clock is turning backwards for the first time ever.  Adolescent high blood pressure and heart disease is rampant.  One third of all Americans are frankly obese, not just overweight.  These poor souls are likely to become diabetic early in life and the accompanying complications will lead them to their early death.   

Most of us are in a compromised state of health now.  Most of us would fail all but the simplest of rudimentary exams determined to measure muscular control and strengths especially in the lower back and trunk areas.  Many of the young have early signs of difficulty breathing, that first step being unsuccessful in their bid to support the neck and then eat well to thrive.  Adolescent lower back pain is common to-day too.  Even those that go to the gym and work out three or more times a week fail miserably when manually muscle tested.  Many of the narcissistic body builders are failing to thrive too.  Oh yes, they may look good to the untrained eye but just like that old shiny Chevy at the curb, it too may look good but you may change your opinion of it once you attempt to “start it up!”  

Next week:  Part 3 of You and Your Lower Back Pain

Read Part 1 HERE