Health Tip

by Peter Ragnar

How Tired Do You Have To Be To Not Know You're Tired?

Dear friend,

You have probably seen folks that look like death-warmed-over. You certainly wouldn’t expect them to be health advocates. Yet, oddly many are. In fact some of them might even look like they just escaped from a concentration camp. Some are raw foodists with a little skin, stretched kite-like over a bone rack.

You must be thinking, “Strange talk from one who promotes the raw diet!” It is my observation there is nothing wrong with the diet, but something wrong with the devotee. Raw foodism has become the new fad religion. As these new age evangelists frantically seek converts, I must ask this pointed question . . .

“How tired do you have to be to not know you’re tired?”

When you are cleansing your body you become catabolic. Cleansing is much like recuperating from an illness. Cleansing, like illness, is a stress. When your body is under stress, high levels of corticosteroids or stress hormones are releases. These hormones increase your blood sugar levels and accelerate your heart rate.

This is wonderful if you’re being chased by a tiger. In fact your body can’t distinguish the tiger from your boss, hurricane, or stock market. The down side of this fight or flight reaction is that other systems in your body shut-down. Your immune system is a classic example. That’s why after periods of high stress you’ll almost always get sick. When you are sick you are catabolic. You lose muscle.

Now here is the bomb, stress hormones do not just dissipate, evaporate, or disappear from your body. They hang-out like unwanted house guests. This stress hormone exposure eats organs and muscle tissue like a piranha in the Amazon.

Remember, a healing crisis and illness are the very same, except for the outcome. You can recover from only one! And now you must survive your stress hormones. Stress hormones accelerate nitrogen loss. Nitrogen is essential for protein production that leads to muscle mass. Remember, you assimilate amino acids from even the best organic raw foods while in a catabolic state.

You’re saying, “What can I do to reverse this?” Increase your body’s growth hormone levels. Growth hormone can prevent nitrogen loss in sick as well as in healthy people on highly cleansing diets. You need to ingest only the healthiest of foods and stay anabolic. Otherwise you’ll exhibit the muscle wasting of the chronically ill. How do you prevent this? By exercise, sleep and diet. I’ve read that some researchers have discovered exercise-induced “spiking” of growth hormone levels. Also they noticed when adolescents go through their growth spurt that there is an increased demand for sleep.

Growth hormone is released during deep sleep. Since deep sleep cycles occur by hours, not minutes, it is vital to get to bed early and sleep uninterrupted unitl you naturally awaken. Personally, I find myself in bed by around 8:30om. I go to bed early and sleep late.

You may try to deceive your body by what some haggard and hurried executive calls a ‘power nap’. There is no way you’ll rid the red road map lines from the sclera of your eyes by a nap. You’ll only revitalize yourself by sleeping long and late. No, you’ll not as some people say, “be sleeping your life away”. You’ll be in a second adolescence, growing younger and sleeping longer.

So, how tired do you have to be to not know you’re tired—So tired that you look like death? So tired that you somnambulistically stagger along with the rest of the sheep. So tired that you race like a rat on a perpetual motion wheel. So tired that you rarely sleep in the same bed twice. Unfortunately the ego never tells you how tired you really are—but your lean muscle mass does.

Bless you in peaceful repose and rejuvenation.

Peter Ragnar

Previous Health Tips

August 25, 2004

September 01,2004