By: Dr. Michelle Irwin

This month has been on how overconsumption of food and medication can lead to an unhealthy life. This week I want to summarize what that means.

Something that comes up when we talk about health through subtraction is a concern that we are talking about taking it to the extreme. We are not talking about starvation but rather flooding our bodies with high quality nutrients that will be able to perform their functions and then giving our body the time to process these functions before beginning another cycle.

When we are constantly restarting the cycle by grazing, eating small meals through the day, or eating large meals that weigh us down for a long time, our body never gets to complete its journey to better health. Just like taking medications for too long without working on the problem we get stuck in a loop that never gets to completion.

As we were developing as a species, we did not have food at the ready like we do now, nor did we even have medications as we know them today. What that did was allow our metabolism to thrive in times of fasting or not eating for periods of time in the day or even for a few days in a row.

If you have been religious at all in your life you know that there are practices around fasting for religious purposes throughout the year. This is because we knew that as food became more available, we still needed to have times of less.
Now, we know that these times of fasting allow the body to perform functions of clearing old cells and growing new cells for growth and rebirth within ourselves. This allows the body to run cleaner.

Cells get the right signals to go through their lifecycle and not live forever as in cancer cells and they are able to pass on the correct information to the next generation of cells so we can be fresh for living our lives.

When our cells and bodies can function better, we are able to take less medication to make up for the processes that are not working correctly. Most medications are supposed to be temporary while our body recovers the function that was not working properly anyways.

All too often we are taught to cover up the problem rather than work to find a solution to it.

You may have noticed as well; when we are feeling sick, we lose our appetite. This is our body’s way of taking us into a healing fasting state when stem cells can be produced, and old cells can be eliminated to recover.

Medications stop this process and then we become stuck in cycle that is neither healing nor healthy. A process that allows us to function but not at our full potential.

It is okay to have times of scarcity in our lives, there is purpose for this. We are learning more and more every day about what those are and why ancient wisdom still holds true today!