Clear for Life

I do have one quick question for you….do you ever eat anything like a chocolate chip cookie, a piece of candy or a small piece of cake? I am not a big dessert eater but it would be nice to know that I can have a small treat once every couple of weeks or something. If you do eat those things ocassionally how often do you allow yourself to have them and do you alter your other eating for that day?

To answer your question, yes I occasionally eat those things. But I think you really want to know if it’s ok to do so.

I can’t give you a simple black and white answer to that. It depends on what you want.

Unlike many others who promote a strict dietary adherence I’m more flexible on this point.

Above all my advice is to make friends with your food. Your diet shouldn’t cause stress and neither should it make you feel deprived. I believe that both of those harm your health and skin more than occasionally treating yourself with ‘bad’ foods.

This means acknowledging that diet change can be a big thing, and that you may need to give yourself time to make the changes. Don’t push too much too quickly.

Your diet needs to be in sync with your life. For example I spend a lot of time at coffee shops, simply because they are convenient places to work. So it’s no surprise that I drink coffee. Quitting coffee and tea at the moment would be very hard. My life is just too structured around coffee shops. And I really don’t want to change this because I enjoy the freedom this gives me. So I think the benefits of coffee and the other things that come along with it outweigh the downsides of drinking coffee.

If you have similar obstacles to healthy eating acknowledge the fact and don’t push too hard against it. Take a look at your situation and figure out what’s the best you can at the moment. Then live by that. Don’t push yourself to go further than that or you’ll end up stressing yourself for no good reason. On the other hand keep it real. Don’t deceive yourself with this.

Making friends with your food also means keeping in mind what you want. Desire to simply remain in good health gives you much more flexibility than training for Olympic does, for example. Diet is a matter of cause and effect. If you are happy with your results then why would you change your diet? If you don’t like your results then consider making changes.

My diet is not optimal. It’s very good, but I still drink coffee and occasionally eat foods that are not good for me. But I’m happy where I’m at the moment and don’t see the need to make big changes.

As you can see it’s hard to give simple and definitive answers to diet questions. Right answer depends on so many things. But getting back to your question I don’t think such small treats hamper your efforts to cure acne too much.

Diet is an important part of healthy and curing acne, but you need to keep it in perspective. It’s just a part of the solution.

As long as you understand the elements of healthy diet and clear skin, such as presented in Clear for Life, and honestly do your best given your situation you should do fine.

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Clear for Life - The lifestyle for health, happiness and clear skin

In a study conducted at Albert Einstein College of Medicine researchers found that women with the highest levels of insulin had 1.5 to 2.4-fold higher risk of developing breast cancer compared to women with lower levels of insulin. The risk prevailed even after accounting for other risk factors for breast cancer, such as high estrogen levels.

As you know high levels of insulin is also linked to acne. Swinging blood sugar levels lead to increased secretion of insulin, insulin like growth factor 1 (IFG-1) and other hormones. These hormones in turn lead to increased sebum production and more dead skin cells - in other words blocked pores.

It’s no surprise that insulin and IGF-1 are linked to breast, and other types of, cancer. They are powerful growth hormones, as Dr. McDougall explains in this video.

When it comes to acne these hormones stimulate the production of skin cells and sebum. When it comes to cancers they stimulate the growth of cancer cells.

This is one more example of why I keep repeating that building health is the answer to acne. Because pimples aren’t your real problem. They are simply a symptom of the condition your body is in. And acne is but one of the symptoms.

Fighting acne (=repressing symptoms) simply pushes the real cause ‘deeper’ into the body, and later on it may pop out as a far more serious condition, such as cancer.

Finally, please don’t take this as a flimsy scare tactic (i.e. buy Clear for Life or you’ll get a breast cancer). Simply take it as a friendly reminder to focus your efforts on where have the best effect - building health rather than trying to cure acne.

With that may 2009 be your last year with acne!

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Clear for Life - The lifestyle for health, happiness and clear skin

“Help, I’m losing too much weight and my friends comment how skinny I look!”

Please cool down, you are not going to fade away : )

This is one of the most frequently asked questions I get from Clear for Life customers. Perhaps it’s on your mind also, so I wrote a detailed reply to it.

Let’s start with an ABC of body composition and weight control.

Three elements make up for your body weight: water, lean tissue and fat. Water makes up as much as 70% of our total body mass.

Water has many important functions in the body. One is that it’s used to dilute toxins to bring down their concentration to less harmful level.

When the body cannot eliminate all the toxins it has to store them. But it doesn’t store just the toxins, it also stores the water they are diluted in. Solution to pollution is dilution.

Once you stop putting toxins in the organs of elimination have a chance to catch up. The load of toxins in the body starts to go down. As the body gets rid of the toxins it also releases the extra water.

Any rapid weight loss is always water loss.

That’s one part of the weight loss issue.

Second, and this may make you a bit uncomfortable, nearly all of us are under muscled and over fat.

Here’s a quote from Dr. Graham:

“When thin people have a desire to gain weight, they usually fail to recognize that they need to gain muscle, not fat. Almost every client who has even come to me wanting to curtain their weight loss because they thought they were getting too ’skinny’ actually still needed to lose some fat…

One client, a high-end fashion model, came to me saying she would do whatever I suggested in order to extend her youthful beauty, but she could not afford to lose any more weight. She was long and lanky and looked skinny to be sure, but she was under muscled. When we measured her body fat, she was shocked to discover that it was almost 29% - at least 10% above what I would consider healthy. She did not need to lose weight; she needed to lose fat while gaining muscle.”

Dr. Graham
The 80/10/10 Diet

For most people it only looks like they have muscle because of water and fat. Water inflates their muscles. Within the muscles there’s also lots of fat, and there’s a padding of fat around the muscles.

Once the body starts to release water and fat it looks like our muscles are shrinking. But in reality we have only been stripped off our illusion of muscles. Perhaps for the first time we have to face the fact of how under muscled most of us really are.

Muscle loss happens only in two cases: you don’t use the muscles or you starve yourself. Starving is not an issue, because the body first burns off fat before using muscle for energy. If you purposefully leave yourself calorie-deficient for long periods of time (months) it may happen, but for the vast majority it’s not an issue.

So the only way you can lose muscle is not to use them. Use it or lose it. And as you start using them your muscles gain their size back quickly.

That’s another part to weight loss mystery.

As you can see it doesn’t really make sense to look at your weight and ’skinniness’ as an indicator of how well you are doing. Rather focus on how you are feeling. Do you still have energy? What about your athletic capabilities, are they still the same/improving/declining?

As long as you feel great and can perform athletically (the way you used to) you have nothing to worry about.

Initially, you may experience a drop in your athletic capabilities. That’s a result of detoxification.

Initially the body may break down more tissue than it can rebuild. So you may lose a little strength. That’s ok. It’s temporary and you will gain the ‘lost’ muscle back.

It doesn’t happen to everybody, but if it happens to you it’s important to be aware of it, and keep an eye on it. This ‘weak’ period should not last for more than a month or two. If it goes on for more than two months, you may have a problem with your diet.

With strength training you can minimize or completely avoid this weak period. I’ve noticed and heard from other people that by training your muscles you can prevent the temporary muscle loss.

On a personal note I can tell that none of this happened to me. Yes, I’ve lost some weight, but I was carrying few extra pound that I was happy to get rid of. Instead of looking skinny I have far more muscle now than I did when I was eating a more standard diet. Putting on muscle has become much easier than it used to be. I get bigger gains from doing less work - you just can’t beat that.

My body builds itself almost automatically. And all I’m doing is to follow the diet guidelines in Clear for Life and the exercise routine I learned from Roger Haeske’s Lightning Speed Fitness Program.

I never go to the gym anymore. My strength training routine takes only 5 to 10 minutes a day. I only do exercises that I enjoy - I just can’t stand boring and repetitive stuff. And I do it all in my home.

When exercise is so simple and fun there’s no need to look skinny. That’s why I recommend Roger Haeske’s Lightning Speed Fitness Program.

So to sum things up, ensure that you:

• Do something with your muscles
• Eat sufficient calories
• Keep your fat consumption under 20% of total calories, preferably under 10%
• Eat a pound of greens a day
• Drink enough water; even a slight dehydration can lead to reduced capacity for muscular work

Isn’t it funny how good things just stack up when you do the right things? The same advice that helps you to get clear also gives you a great body. It’s a total transformation from skinny and acne ridden to clear, athletic and sexy. And that really sucks when everyone else is getting fatter and lazier : )

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Clear for Life - The lifestyle for health, happiness and clear skin

Share your views and experiences about acne, getting clear and weight loss at Clear Skin Space forums: “Help, I’m losing too much weight!”

Does it feel like your skin has a mind of its own? That it feels like acne is impossible to control?

You certainly aren’t the only one. The email I got from a reader describes the sentiments of many acne victims.

My skin, overall, is good. I do not have severe acne and my breakouts are mild and comes but once in a while. But when I do get them.. I feel they are impossible to control. I also am frustrated by the red marks they have left behind. What would you recommend is best for me.

Two concerns: Control acne and fade away post acne marks. Overall I am happy with my skin. Just want to be able to be in control of it more.

First I have to say you can’t really control your skin. Not in a reliable way at least. Sure creams, lotions, drugs, supplements, light therapies and such can give you some degree of control. But you’ve probably tried almost all of those. And nobody can tell you if they work for you, and if they do for how long. It’s a bit like going to casino. You may win, but the odds are stacked against you.

A bit more advanced way is to see if some foods or substances trigger a breakout. Perhaps you have some food allergies or sensitivities that trigger acne.

But that’s about the extent of control you have over your skin. How your skin looks is largely determined what happens inside of you. If I had a pull a figure out of my hat I’d say what happens inside of you controls at least 80% of your skin. The rest being what you do to your skin.

Trying to control your acne is not the way I recommend. Simply because illnesses don’t happen without a cause. And what we deem as a health problem, such as acne, is nothing but a symptom of the cause. Pimples are not your real problem, and trying to fight pimples won’t get you any closer to curing the real problem.

Why elimination of the symptom is NOT the same as elimination of the disease
Physicians and surgeons palliate symptoms instead of removing causes

Jeffrey Levy, DVM - “The greatest harm of drug treatment is usually not so much the toxicity or side effects as it is the effects of suppression. Allopathic (conventional Western) medical thinking generally seeks immediate gratification: just make the symptom go away.

So the patient may be better in the short term, but is usually worse in the longer term. Homeopathy is just the opposite: sometimes the symptoms are worse in the short term (such as with aggravation or the reversal of a previous suppression), but the real benefit is in the longer term.

A symptom, say itchy skin, is the body’s response to a deeper problem. When a symptom is suppressed, it is only the outward manifestation of the problem that goes away. Since the deeper problem is still there, the body may, in time, produce the same symptom again.

Another possibility is that, as a result of the suppression, the deeper problem progresses to the point that a deeper, more serious symptom is produced. So the itchy skin may go away, but then chronic diarrhea develops. If the diarrhea is then suppressed as well, it may lead to, say, liver disease. But hey, at least the skin is cleared up!

I see this pattern, or variations on it, very frequently in reviewing the medical records of new patients. It is the unrecognized, and often high, price that we pay for the quick fix, for immediate gratification, for the shot or pill that seems to make the problem go away.”

Understanding Basic Healing Principles of Natural Cure

Clear for Life approach recognizes that the root cause is related to diet and lifestyle choices, and that given a change the innate healing mechanisms in your body will heal it.

In the name of honesty I have to say that the Clear for Life approach is not always a walk in the park. Mainly for two reasons.

First, it takes some work initially. Making diet and lifestyle changes you may need to make is not always easy. Though once you get the ball rolling it becomes effortless. Because you start feeling so much better you can get hooked on feeling good. Then there’s no turning back to your old diet and lifestyle (what a shame : )).

Another stumbling block is that you have to give up trying to control your skin. Going through the healing journey can be a bit of a roller coaster ride. One day your skin looks great and the next morning you wake up with horrible pimples.

Healing is a reversal of the disease process. While on it your acne may get worse (temporarily) and some of your old symptoms may pop up (again temporarily).

Going through this roller coaster ride often puts you face to face with deeper self-esteem issues (if you have any, most people do and I certainly had my fair share).

On the other hand with proper tools, guidance and support you can get over these emotional issues and emergy stronger not only physically but also emotionally.

I know this was a long and complicated answer to a simple question. But acne goes far below the surface. When one talks about true healing one cannot chop the body into pieces and deal with them separately. Everything is interconnected and when you throw mind and emotions into the kettle you can begin to appreciate the soup you have cooked.

Still I see acne as perhaps the greatest opportunity you have to drastically improving the quality of your life and getting closer to a happier and more fulfilling life.

If this a path you want to get on head on to Clear Skin Space. It’s filled with people just like you. You’ll get all the support, advice and inspiration you need.

So go ahead and turn acne into your greatest opportunity.

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Clear for Life - The lifestyle for health, happiness and clear skin

The comments for this post are moved to Clear Skin Space forums: How can I control my acne?

A common folk-wisdom saying states that one man’s medicine is another’s poison. My view is that one man’s poison is everybody’s poison. Generally speaking, of course there are some exceptions to this.

I imagine this piece of ‘wisdom’ got started on how different people reacted differently to same foods or substances. Some got better while others were worse off.

So what’s the deal here. If one man’s poisons is everybody’s poison how can this happen? Shouldn’t everybody get the same reaction?

I can think of several reasons why different people react differently to same substances.

Preexisting conditions

Allergies and other preexisting conditions can cause negative reactions to even healthy foods and substances. Tomatoes are very nutritious and healthy but many people are allergic to them.

In this case the saying is true, but this is the exception that confirms the rule. Once the person deals with these conditions (if possible) they won’t experience the negative reactions anymore.

Fruit is a great example of this. Some people say they react badly to fruits, it gives them stomach cramps or leads to breakouts. Therefore they conclude fruits are bad for them. In case of acne the real problem usually is insulin resistance. Once that’s handled fruits won’t cause acne anymore. In case of stomach cramps simply eating fruits to empty stomach (instead of eating them as dessert) solves the problem.

Going from worse to bad

Most people eat such horrible diets that switching to foods that are merely bad (in relation to ‘worse’ ‘bad’ is better) makes them feel better.

Healthy eating is more about what you don’t eat than what you eat. Adding a bit of healthy foods to a horrible diet won’t make much of a difference. But simply dropping the highly processed foods can make a big difference.

Let’s say you drink five cups of coffee a day. As a result you’ll get a migraine. You switch to defac coffee and your migraine goes away. Does that mean decaf coffee is good for you? No, it simply means caffeinated coffee is worse. And the cure has more to do with absence of caffeine than of any positive quality of decaf coffee.

Compare that to what happens to another person who has never touched coffee before. They drink decaf coffee, after which their head starts to spin and generally feel bad.

Does this mean decaf coffee is one man’s medicine and another’s poison? No it simply means that after drinking coffee for a while the other person can tolerate it. It’s bad for them also, but overtime their bodies have build defenses to minimize the negative effects. This is the reason why you need more alcohol to get drunk now than you needed when you started drinking.

Confusing symptoms with the real problem

In almost all health conditions symptoms are not the real problem. They simply reflect the underlying condition. In case of acne pimples are not the real problem. The real problem is chronic inflammation and blood sugar problems. These conditions lead to acne, and you cannot get rid of them by treating acne.

In many cases, and especially so with acne, the symptoms often get worse before they get better. They are part of the healing process. Say a person starts with the clear skin lifestyle and after few weeks their acne gets worse. A misguided person might conclude that they are on the wrong path.

Going back to their old lifestyle stops the healing process and their skin gets better. They conclude that Clear for Life was the worst thing they ever tried - it made their acne worse.

In this case one man’s medicine appeared like another’s poison. A well informed person persists through the temporary healing crisis and discovers that one man’s medicine is their medicine also.

These were just few examples off the top of my head to explain why different people can react differently to the same substance. I’m sure you can think of many others.

I hope this post helped you to file this piece of ‘wisdom’ to where it belongs: Alice’s Great Book of Dietary Fairytales. Brought to you by the Wonderland Press.

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Clear for Life - The lifestyle for health, happiness and clear skin

The comments for this post are moved to Clear Skin Space forums: Is one man’s poison another’s medicine?

Confused about fruits? Think fruits cause acne?

Some people say it’s the devil’s incarnation and nature’s candy, which others say it’s the healthiest food you can eat. In this post I explain, in detail, why most fears about fruit and unfounded and why eating fruits fixes the underlying cause of acne and many other health problems.

This is an answer to Krystal’s question at Clear Skin Space forums. She asked:

Okay, seriously, what is the deal? Everywhere I look someone is saying eat fruit, don’t eat fruit, limit your fruit, fruit should be unlimited?

So my question is this..
Does fruit cause people to break-out?

Welcome to the wonderful world of diet and nutrition. Want to get even more confused? Surf to Amazon.com and search books with ‘diet’ in title. You’ll get about 300′000 results - all with different conclusions and recommendations.

But generally the most intense battles in these diet wars are fought on the high-fat vs. high-carb front.

This is important for acne victims because blood sugar problems cause hormonal reaction that can lead to more acne. Some doctors even call acne ’skin diabetes’.

As a disclaimer I live on a high-carb, high-fiber, high-fiber diet and eat very little fat. I don’t have anything against low-carb diets. I just don’t see them as very smart thing to do. But if you are currently on one and it’s working for you then keep up with it. In the end of this post I’ll add some good points about them.

PROBLEMS WITH LOW-CARB THEORY

If you listen to the high-fat, also called low-carb, guys and gals you should shun away from fruits and carbs. Their theory goes that since carbs raise blood sugar levels, which raises insulin levels, which are linked to many diseases (acne included) one should avoid carbs.

The problem is that it’s all baloney. That theory has been proven wrong so many times, both in lab and in real life. Before writing this I again researched the issue a bit. I really loved this comment on a review study:

The purveyors of these diets [low-carb] portray them to be scientifically sound. Although there is some scientific rationale, two common devices used to support contentions include the overinterpretation of data and weaving together of unconnected scientific observations, and these processes often border on sophistry. Nevertheless, driven by the increased prevalence of overweight and obesity, these diets are increasingly popular despite a relative lack of rigorous scientific data. These diets present an attractive alternative to challenging lifestyle modifications (i.e. intentional calorie reduction and increased physical activity).

Diet, Insulin Resistance, and Obesity: Zoning in on Data for Atkins Dieters Living in South Beach by Cristina Lara-Castro and W. Timothy Garvey

Here’s another aspect of low-carb theory that’s wrong.

The entire theoretical framework of low carb diets, like Atkins and The Zone, hang upon the notion that insulin is the root of all evil and so to limit insulin release one needs to limit carbohydrate intake. Dr. Atkins, for example, has a chapter entitled “Insulin–The Hormone That Makes You Fat,”[71] Protein Power calls it the “monster hormone,”[487] and the author of the Zone Diet calls insulin “the single most significant determinant of your weight.”[72]

What they overlook is that “protein- and fat-rich foods may induce substantial insulin secretion” as well.[73] Research in which study subjects served as their own controls, for example, has shown that under fasting conditions a quarter pound of beef raises insulin levels in diabetics as much as a quarter pound of straight sugar.[74]

Atkins’ featured foods like cheese and beef elevated insulin levels higher than “dreaded” high-carbohydrate foods like pasta. A single burger’s worth of beef, or three slices of cheddar, boosts insulin levels more than almost 2 cups of cooked pasta.[75] In fact a study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that meat, compared to the amount of blood sugar it releases, seems to cause the most insulin secretion of any food tested.[76]

Low carb advocates like Atkins seem to completely ignore these facts. Recent medical reviews have called Atkins’ feel-good theories “factually flawed”[77] and “at best half-truths.”[78] “In the scientific world, books like the Zone Diet are generally regarded as fiction,” one reviewer wrote in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition. “The scientific literature is in opposition…”[79] In a medical journal article entitled “Food Fads and Fallacies,” the Atkins Diet is referred to as a “‘New wives’ tale” with a “sprinkling of fallacies.”[80]

According to a 2003 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, “Dr. Atkins and his colleagues selectively recite the literature” to support their claims.[81] When researchers take the time to actually measure insulin levels, for instance, instead of just talking about them like Atkins does, they often find the opposite of what Atkins asserted.

Phony Baloney
Atkinsexposed.org by Dr. Michael Greger

Another problem with the theory behind low-carb diet is that it over simplifies things. In the Blood sugar worries blog post I explained the concept of input and output.

THE REAL REASON BEHIND BLOOD SUGAR PROBLEMS

The main reason you get blood sugar problems is because the output side is not working well. Glucose cannot exit from the bloodstream. A condition called insulin resistance, which means that the insulin receptors in cells don’t work well, or they are down regulated. When insulin receptors don’t work glucose cannot get out of the bloodstream. Here’s how Dr. Mark Jenkins put it:

It is not hyperinsulinemia that is the problem, it is the receptor. It has been repeatedly shown in the medical literature that increasing the sensitivity of peripheral insulin receptors reduces hyperinsulinemia and hypertension. This process is termed insulin sensitization and is accomplished by aerobic exercise, low-fat / high-carbohydrate diet, and reduction of excessive body fat. Conversely, obesity and high fat diets have been shown to induce insulin resistance. It is important that the high carbohydrate diet have predominantly complex carbohydrates and also have a high fiber content.

Insulin, Diet, Disease and Athletes

And if you think I’m just blowing smoke out my a** just Google ‘high-fat diet insulin resistance’. Scientists have known this thing since thirties.

When researchers want to study diabetes they feed mice a high-fat diet to create diabetes. There’s even a term called ‘high-fat diet induces insulin resistance‘.

If you can tolerate more science talk, here’s what happens to mice on a high-fat diet. If not, you can safely skip this quote.

Main Findings

Unsurprisingly, the mice fed the high-fat diet had an increased body weight compared to those maintained on a normal diet. The investigators observed stable hyperglycaemia and progressively increased hyperinsulinaemia in the mice on the high-fat diet. This is indicative of progressively worsening insulin resistance. After only one week on the high-fat diet, blood glucose levels were raised and intravenous glucose tolerance tests showed reduced glucose elimination and impaired insulin secretion. This demonstrates two distinct mechanistic characteristics of impaired glucose tolerance and type 2 diabetes; namely insulin resistance and islet dysfunction. Metabolic efficiency (that is the energy intake per gram body weight gain) was raised in both the mice fed a high-fat diet and those on a normal diet. However, the increase was attenuated in the mice fed the high-fat diet. Thus the weight gain observed in the high-fat group cannot be fully explained by increased energy intake; there was also a concomitant reduction in metabolic rate.

The concentration of glucose in the blood was consistently 1mmol/l higher in the mice maintained on the high-fat diet than in those on the normal diet throughout the 1 year study period. However, insulin levels continued to rise in the mice maintained on the high-fat diet. This suggests that insulin resistance progressively increased but there were compensatory mechanisms which kept the hyperglycaemia stable at 1mmol/l. When challenged with an intravenous glucose tolerance test, there was no compensation for the insulin resistance and there was a marked deterioration of glucose elimination. This, along with similar patterns observed following an oral glucose tolerance test, highlights that insulin secretion is defective in this model. When the DPP-IV inhibitor was administered in the drinking water of both groups of mice, there was an augmentation in insulin secretion resulting in improved glucose tolerance.

Conclusions and Future Directions

This work has demonstrated that the high-fat, diet-fed C57BL/6J mouse is a robust model for studying impaired glucose tolerance and early stage type 2 diabetes, as it exhibits similar metabolic defects as are observed in the human disease.

Winzell MS & Ahren B (2004) The High-Fat Diet-Fed Mouse: A Model for Studying Mechanisms and Treatment of Impaired Glucose Tolerance and Type 2 Diabetes. Diabetes 53 (3) S215-9

DOES FRUIT CAUSE ACNE?

Now that we have paddled through a mountain of science talk we can move on to the question.

Yes, fruit can cause acne if you have insulin resistance. In that case the sugar in fruits causes a hormonal reaction that can lead to acne.

Get fat out of your blood and reduce insulin resistance with other lifestyle factors and fruit shouldn’t be a problem.

Most fruits are low to medium in glycemic index. And your body is perfectly equipped to deal with sugar from fruits. In Candida and acne blog posts I quoted Steve Pavlina who did an experiment with a raw food diet. Steve monitored his blood sugar levels and they remained remarkably stable. He said that he couldn’t spike his blood sugar levels even if he tried - even eating 19 bananas a day has no effect on blood sugar levels.

Your body is designed to run on sugar and it’s perfectly equipped to deal with it. All your cell run on sugar. The only time your body starts running on fat is if you severely restrict carbohydrate intake. This mechanism is a survival tool, allowing you to survive times of famine or when carbs might not be available. Practically the entire medical community agrees that this ketonic state is not healthy.

Even for people who say they breakout from fruits this is often not the whole truth. When they remove fat out of their diet fruits usually cause no problems. Here’s what on happy Clear for Life customer wrote to me.

Just got to say, you da man! I’m into my 4th week post paleo and my skin is doing very well. I haven’t kept to your diet and detox plan stringently, but am eating an abundance of organic fruits, greens, grains, tubers, and legumes while being very careful about my fat intake. Also maintaining a regular exercise and meditation routine while getting as much sunlight as I can manage working an office job during the rainy season in Seattle.

The first week on my diet I was quite amazed to eat levels of carbs that would have caused a carpet bombing of my face while on paleo. No such result.

After so many years of suffering from acne and then months of being chained to paleo, I’m still quite incredulous to the fact that I can have clear skin and live a normal life.

So you have my sincerest thanks for leading me to a diet and lifestyle that’s providing a long sought-after freedom.

Paleo, or Paleolithic diet, is often high in meat, healthy fats and vegetables with some fruits thrown in. Overall it’s a pretty healthy diet, but the high-fat content can lead to carb sensitivity.

NO ONE DIET FOR ALL PEOPLE

I don’t believe into blood type diet and metabolic type diet theories. These basically say that depending on genetic, or who knows what, make up some people are designed to run on carbs while some are designed to run on fat or protein. So far I haven’t found a single piece of credible evidence to support these theories. And they run against common sense, rationality and real life experience.

That said, I also don’t believe that one diet fits everybody. Yes, I believe that fruits and vegetables are the ideal food for humans. But because we have abused our bodies for decades some people have develped allergies, sensitivities and other conditions that can make eating fruits bad for them, at least some fruits. So we always have to look at the individual and not stick to a dogma.

GOOD POINTS WITH LOW-CARB DIETS

Now that you know why I choose not to eat a low-carb diet and wouldn’t recommend it let’s look at some of the good points in them.

People on low-carb diets tend to eat less processed and junk food they used to. Most junk food is carb-based. Just eliminating soft drinks, candies, pastries (trans fats anyone?) and fast foods can create miracles. I think that simply eating a diet of natural, whole foods is 80% of the solution.

Today people just eat too much of everything. We eat far too many calories. Low-carb diets often get people to eat less. That’s another huge step in reducing insulin resistance and creating health.

Low-carb diets often recommend eating more vegetables. Any diet that gets you to eat less junk and more vegetables is a step to the right direction. Points for low-carb on that.

Creates health awareness. Often when people go on a diet they also become more health conscious. So they might start exercising more and pay attention to their sleep. Diet is just one part of the solution, and in Clear for Life I explained the six elements of health you need to pay attention to. You could eat the perfect diet, but if you ignore the other elements you probably won’t make much progress in terms of health or curing acne.

Finally low-carb diets may get you clear. I know of several people who have gotten clear with a low-carb diet. Since acne is linked to blood sugar response removing carbs somehow short-circuits this mechanisms.

Still, I think high-fruit, low-fat diets are far better at allowing your body to heal itself and removing the root cause of acne. You can actually get to a point where you can eat several days in a row at McDonals and not have it affect your skin at all (unfortunately I speak from experience). Whereas on low-carbs diets such cheats lead to breakouts far more frequently.

CONCLUSION

I hope that by taking you through this long and perhaps a bit science filled journey I managed to shake off some fears you may have concerning fruits. The majority of the scientific community support the idea of high-carb, high-fiber diet in creating health. And fruit gives you both. Plus it’s filled with vitamins, antioxidants and other nutrients.

For all these reason I believe fruits is the ideal food for creating health and curing acne.

Recommended reading:

Fruit Controversy - A free, 30-page report from Frederic Patenaude dispelling the myths about fruits. You have to give your email-address, but Fred sends out good material and doesn’t spam you. And if you really don’t want his emails you can just not confirm your subscription, that way you won’t get any emails from him but still get access to the report.

Atkins exposed.org - A thorough review of science for and against Atkins and other low-carb diets.

Clear for Life - Well, of course you need to read my book : )

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Clear for Life - The lifestyle for health, happiness and clear skin

The comments for this post are moved to Clear Skin Space forums: Fruit… what’s the deal??

Do you often have ‘bad skin days’? Those days you just don’t want to go out because of acne.

What if I told you those bad skin days are just in your head? That you create all those bad feeling, and you could just stop doing it.

That everyday could be what I call a ‘happy skin day’. I don’t mean that your skin would be perfect everyday but that no matter what your skin looks like you could be happy and optimistic. That you could face people with confidence and look them into eyes - even if acne carpet bombed your face the previous night.

Would you smack me on the head and call me an idiot, or would you want to know more?

If you want to know more, read on. If you choose to smack me on the head… well… luckily you can’t find me, but feel free to use the comment section to express yourself.

OK, I realize that may sound like a ridiculous claim. That you could be happy no matter what your skin looks like. If so, let it be ok. Because I’m going to tell you something 99.99% of the population doesn’t know.

All emotions are self created.

Whatever you happen to feel you created it yourself. Maybe it happened unconsciously. You may not know how you did it. It may have happened so quickly that it looks like the outside events caused those emotions. It may have happened against your conscious will; you may not want those emotions.

Nevertheless, you created those emotions and feelings.

You probably think I’ve smoked way too much pot lately and hallucinate these crazy theories.

Well, despite what you think of my drug habits, do this little thought experiment with me. It shows you that you do create your emotions, and a bit of how you create them.

I want you to think of a time when you were out in a public place and started feeling bad because of the way some stranger looked at you. You know just from the way they looked at you, you knew they were looking at your acne. And that made you feel bad.

We’ve all been through a situation like that. So just allow one to pop into your mind. And if you can’t think of any, just imagine one. Just imagine that you are in a public place and some stranger just looks at you a bit too long. And you know they look at you because of your acne.

How does thinking of that situation make you feel? Pretty bad I can bet.

Now let’s twist things around a bit. Imagine the same situation, but in that case imagine that the person was checking you out. That they were interested of you. Of course make sure that the person is of legal age and attractive to you.

How does that feel? I bet it feel different. Maybe even good.

So here we have two identical situations with completely opposite emotional outcomes. One made you feel bad; the other made you feel good.

You know what was different about these two situations?

Assumption = meaning = feelings

If you said your assumptions about the situation, good thinking. In one case you assumed the person was disgusted because of your acne, while in the other you assumed they were attracted to you.

“But I know they were looking at my acne“, you may object. “I just can’t hallucinate through my life that everyone who looks at my acne is attracted to me.”

Well, did you really know they were looking at your acne? I mean, did you go and ask them ‘Hey are you looking at my acne? Is it really that horrible?’

No you didn’t ask them. You just assumed they were looking at your acne, or to use your words, you hallucinated it.

And you don’t have to imagine everyone is attracted to you - though it might do good for your self-esteem since most of us imagine strangers think we are ugly. To stop creating bad feelings you just have to stop hallucinating those bad things.

Let me explain how this works so you’ll understand it a bit better.

Most people think emotions work like this: event –> emotions. Meaning something happens and that something causes the emotion(s).

How you create your emotions

Well that’s how it looks, but there’s one more step. Here’s how the process really works: event –> subconscious filtering –> emotion.

In reality all external events have no meaning. They are like a blank canvas. In our example the event was some stranger looking at you. Stop, the end. That’s what happened, and that has no meaning until you assign meaning to it. And that’s what these subconscious filters do (among other things). They assign meaning to whatever happens to you based on your past experiences.

I call these filters your Internal Map of Reality. That’s a term I learned from Bill Harris at Centerpointe.com. Your beliefs, values, ethics, language and memories are examples of these filters.

Without going into detail how these filters work they delete, distort and generalize whatever happens to you so that it confirms to your beliefs, past experiences and image of yourself.

You couldn’t go through life without this subconscious filtering. Here’s a simple example of how they help you.

Say you check into a hotel room in a city you’ve never been to, perhaps even in a foreign country. Could you open the door to your room? Of course you do. Because even though you’ve never seen that door before your mind has plenty of experience with doors. So it generalizes, and it could go something like this ‘This is a door. Doors usually open like this. Nope, didn’t work. OK sometimes they open the other way. Great that worked’.

It can also work the other way. Let’s say you had a problem with an authority figure while you were young. If it was dramatic enough, or happened many times, you concluded that authority figures are potentially dangerous. So when you see one, a cop for example, you get a bit stressed. You feel there’s something you need to watch out for. Your mind pulls those past experiences to warn you about this potentially dangerous situation.

Now let’s say you have some self-esteem issues (like we all do). Perhaps you don’t think you are that attractive or lovable. You might even think acne makes you unattractive or unlovable. So when you see some stranger looking at you your mind takes that information and deletes, distorts and generalizes it until it fits the way you see yourself. If you believe you are unlovable your mind fits the external event your belief by assuming they were looking at your acne. Out of the thousands of possible interpretations it picks the one that fits your beliefs.

Any evidence to the contrary is immediately deleted and distorted. So if (s)he actually comes and talks to you, you immediately assume the worst.

This is the exact same process people use to convince themselves that aliens have taken over their fridge, urging them to prepare for the arrival of the mother ship. If there’s a scratch on the milk carton the aliens made it - no matter that there’s also a cat in the house.

This same process fuels all the food fights, politically correct term is diet debates, that rage in forums and in the media. People have gotten their heads so wrapped around the idea that their diet is the only right one. Whenever a supporting study comes out they parade it like it would be the definitive word of God. Whereas opposing studies are immediately accused of having serious flaws and biased researches who fudged the numbers. Therefore such studies cannot be trusted. No matter that the same flaws and bias probably apply to the study they believed.

You only see what you believe.

So how does this relate to your acne and happiness?

If acne makes you feel miserable (even a little) it’s because of your Internal Map of Reality. Something that happened to you in the past caused you to form unresourceful beliefs about yourself. Those memories often have a lot of emotional charge (I like to call it emotional garbage). When triggered your mind drags that emotional garbage from past memories into your current experience. And you get the benefit of feeling lousy.

You know the saying pushes his/her buttons? This is the meaning behind it. We all have these buttons that the world just keeps pushing. Those buttons are ‘wired’ (in your subconscious) into negative memories. When pushed your mind drags the emotional garbage from your past into now, and you act accordingly. That’s why some people can get very angry from seemingly small things. It’s not that the event was such a big thing, it’s the fact that the button was wired into lots of emotional garbage.

The same thing happens to you when you make yourself feel bad.

The event that ‘made’ you feel bad is often not such a big thing. It’s that it triggered so many emotional memories from the past. Taking cue from those memories your mind then layers the event with negative meaning so that you can experience even more of that emotional garbage.

OK, so far this has been interesting theory, but let’s move onto how to use this to make yourself feel better. Into creating those happy skin days.

Theory into practice

With few reasonably simple mental processes you can ‘deactivate’ your buttons, clip the wires. So that even if something pushes the button it doesn’t lead to all the emotional garbage and your mind layering negative meaning on the events. Instead the event remains neutral. Someone looking at you and nothing more. And you don’t have to go through all the bad feelings.

The detailed explanation of this is just too much to cover in a blog post. Just the bare boned and practical how-to explanation took me 40 pages. And few audio-files to guide you through the mental processes. That’s essentially my upcoming book. It doesn’t have a name yet, but maybe I’ll call it Happy Skin Days: How to be happy and optimistic before you get clear. Few of my customers are currently testing the draft version and getting great results.

Anyway, this is not just a sales pitch for the new book. I’m going to give you something very valuable here.

The root of the problem is that this whole thing happens unconsciously. As long as it happens unconsciously there’s not much you can do about it. Your first challenge is to know it happens. And then to start noticing when and how it happens. To start noticing the situations that make you feel bad.

Your focus creates your feelings. When you focus (think) on someone looking at your acne and feeling ugly you get to feel bad. Focusing that you are attractive and lovable makes you feel good. Luckily your focus is always under your control. Most people just don’t exercise that control. Their focus runs on autopilot.

Your biggest challenge is to notice when the autopilot drags your focus on something negative and then consciously choose to focus on something positive.

Practical steps to happiness

Here’s a good way to do it. Carry some 3 by 5 cards without all the time. When you start feeling bad make a note of the situation. Look at what was going through your head that time (what you were thinking) and make a note of it. Do this every time you start feeling bad.

Since your focus runs on autopilot initially you won’t catch yourself very often. But as you keep up with it you train your mind to recognize these situations and bring them to your awareness. Once in your awareness you can consciously choose what to focus on. Little by little you start gaining more control over your emotions.

Lily’s success story

And once those buttons are gone incredible things can happen. Lily has been testing my upcoming book, and here’s what she wrote to me.

well, the incredible has actually happened! I am very happy to say that I managed to change my belief about how embarrassing it is to have skin problems and having to hide from people! I tried the folder swapping technique on Friday evening (before going to be) and I felt a bit relieved afterwards, which at the time was a bit weird to think about. I wrote down an affirmation about that particular belief and it’s like I woke up a different person the following day.

I am not even thinking about my skin’s condition anymore, I wear clothes without considering that I have to hide my chest behind big jumpers/coats etc and for the first time in years I refuse to cover up any spots/redness with makeup. It’s like I don’t care about it anymore…or rather I am accepting who I am with my flaws and everything! And what’s more, I don’t even get worked up or depressed when I see other women around me with flawless skin…I think they are lucky but it does not get to me! I just look in the mirror and smile regardless of what my skin looks like… The last time I remember feeling/behaving in such a way was when I was on Accutane (it did really produce some amazing results at the time).

All I’m saying is that for the last 4 days I have felt liberated and relieved…not only because I don’t obsess about my skin (I am following the clear for life guidelines because we all want to be cleared of acne in the end-I’m just not letting this affect me and make me miserable) but also because I feel happy with who I am!

Be well,

Seppo

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Clear for Life - The lifestyle for health, happiness and clear skin

In my earlier posts about Candida I’ve often referred to Dr. Graham and what I’ve learned from him. Now you have an opportunity to hear it from the man himself. Naturalnews published an excerpt of Kevin Gianni’s interview with Dr. Graham.

Dr. Graham explains the blood sugar issue and how fat affects it perfectly. I really recommend you read this. This is reprinted with permission from naturalnews.com, and the title of the interview links to the original article at naturalnews.com.

Author Dr. Doug Graham (Part II):
Fats, Sugars and Your Body

by Kevin Gianni, citizen journalist

 

(NaturalNews) This interview is an excerpt from Kevin Gianni’s Renegade Roundtable, which can be found at http://www.RenegadeRoundtable.com. In this excerpt, Dr. Doug Graham shares on fats, sugars and the body.

Renegade Roundtable with Dr. Doug Graham is a lifetime athlete and 27-year raw fooder. He’s been an advisor to top performers including tennis legend Martina Navratilova. He’s also the author of the lifestyle book 80/10/10.

Kevin That was a great answer to that question. I want to move into fat, because there’s a lot of talk in the raw food community where there’s more than one camp. One will say high fruit, low fat, low protein. Another one will say no fruit, greens and high fat. What are some of the challenges with eating a high fat diet?

Dr. Graham: Well from a medical standpoint we know that high fat diets have been linked to cancer and heart disease, diabetes and chronic fatigue. Even candida and most digestive disorders are all linked to the over consumption of fat. I agree, too much fruit is bad for you. People ask me all the time, “Isn’t too much fruit bad for you?” Yes, of course it is. Too much of anything is bad for you. That’s what the phrase means, is that you have a problem. As does the phrase, “Too little.” Part of the problem with too much fat is that you invariably also get two few carbohydrates, so you end up with a double whammy. As soon as you end up in that ‘too’ category, meaning too much or too little, you’ve got both sides of that seesaw swinging out of control. When you don’t eat enough carbohydrates you invariably end up with cravings. This is why over 70% of all of the eating disorders in the United States are associated with binging on complex carbohydrate foods. Because when you try to reduce your carbohydrate intake below that from which we are designed as a species, which is 80 plus, you invariably start to crave that for which we are designed. It would be like holding your breath. If you try to hold your breath you’re going to invariably really start wanting to breathe, a lot, soon.

So in the Standard American Diet where we’re eating about 40% of our calories from carbohydrates, we still see a tremendous number of people with disordered eating. But when we go to the standard raw approach, when the carbohydrate intake is halved again down to 20%, then we see massive challenges with binging, people going to refined sugars, relentlessly going to candy and alcohol and dried fruits and chocolates and anything that’s a refined sugar source, in order to make up for the lack of carbohydrates that they’re not eating through fruit.

Kevin You mentioned candida, let’s talk about that. There’s all sorts of approaches for this. One is to starve the candida with no sugar and the other is eliminate the fat.

Dr. Graham: Well, I think there’s a variety of approaches. We have to understand enough about candida to at least make some sense. Candida is a microorganism that has a very short lifespan. We’re talking hours, days is not even common. We’re talking hours. If you have a candida problem and you’re trying to get rid of it and you’re trying for more than a couple of days, you’re not trying an approach that’s working because it shouldn’t take more than a couple of days. You’re still feeding the candida.

What you have to look at is what does it do, what does it feed? It feeds on sugar, no question. It feeds on sugar and fats. All the cells of the human body are fueled by sugar. All the healthy cells, all the sick cells, all the cancer cells, all the damaged cells, all cells of the human body are fueled by sugar. Which means that there has to be a fuel delivery system to all the cells and that fuel delivery system is the blood stream. This is why doctors can measure what is known as your ‘blood sugar.’ All humans carry blood sugar. If your blood sugar level was zero, you would be dead. Therefore it is actually impossible to starve the candida of sugar by not eating sugar. If you’re on a diet of strictly olive oil, if you’re on a diet of strictly protein powder, or if you’re on a diet of strictly powdered sugar, if your pancreas is healthy and the rest of your system is healthy, the doctors should be able to measure your blood sugar and find out that it is within normal limits, in the normal ranges. It’s going to be the same whether you’re on a fast, not eating anything, or whether you’re on the Standard American Diet. It’s going to run, in American numbers, somewhere around 90-100. What we see is that everyone always carries blood sugar, that’s always there.

At that point we have to look at why does blood sugar rise and how does that affect what’s going on in terms of the candida issue? Essentially it’s like this, we have to bring sugar to the cells of the body. We do so through the delivery system of the blood stream. When we want to get more sugar to the blood through the blood stream, out of the blood stream, to the cells, this is done through a carrier system, essentially a doorman, that we call insulin, produced by the pancreas.

When the pancreas gets tired or when the pancreas isn’t working fast enough, it will receive assistance by a backup system called the adrenal glands. The adrenal glands, for instance, you’re walking up a hill and walking up the hill from the other direction is a bear. You both get to the top of the hill at the same time and whoa! You get a surge of adrenaline because you need fuel like crazy. You don’t actually have to outrun the bear but you have to at least outrun the other people that you’re with. So off you go, a surge of adrenaline. The adrenaline causes the pancreas to squirt out even more insulin and bam, you get an extra dose. What the insulin does is it attaches itself to the sugar in your bloodstream, helps it cross the membrane out of the bloodstream, helps to cross the membrane into the cell and it becomes essentially a doorman that opens the way for sugar to get out of the bloodstream.

When there is excess fat in the bloodstream, we bump into a problem because fat functions as an insulator. That’s what it does. It insulates us from jarring, it insulates us from electricity, it insulates us from hot and cold, it insulates us from bumps and bruises, it insulates in a wide variety of ways. Fat’s primary role is as an insulator. Does it have other purposes? Sure. But it’s primary role is as an insulator. It’s actually what creates the waterproof barrier of each cell that allows the contents of the cell to stay in the cell and the contents of whatever is outside, the extra-cellular fluid, to stay outside the cell. Fat is the essential barrier, an insulator.

If you pour a thimble full of fat, a thimble full of olive oil, onto a swimming pool, it will coat the entire surface of the swimming pool, creating a barrier. It’s a Please really good insulator. If you had a huge tube full of marbles and you poured in a little bit of oil and shook it up just a bit, that oil would coat every single marble, completely. It does the same thing to the cells inside the bloodstream. The fat starts functioning as a barrier as it coats itself around the insulin and coats itself around the sugar molecules, it makes it less effective for the insulin to find the sugar, for them to hook up. Now you’ve got a situation where there’s sugar in the bloodstream but it’s not getting out of the bloodstream. So the body produces a little bit more insulin. But the fat is blocking it. This is what’s referred to as insulin resistance. It’s actually not that the body is insulin resistant it’s that there’s too much fat in the bloodstream. Take away the fat and the insulin resistance goes away instantaneously, 100% of the time.

If the pancreas can’t produce enough insulin then we have a type I diabetes situation. Occasionally what will happen is that the adrenal glands will come in and they’ll kick in and try to help out the pancreas. That works fine except we can’t do that all the time or the adrenals become fatigued, what we refer to as chronic fatigue. Eventually what you end up with pancreas in the hole, adrenals in the hole, everybody falling down on the job and you’re still ending up with blood sugar levels that are too high.

Fortunately, our bodies are redundant in their design and there is a backup system for the backup system. There is a microbe that lives in the blood stream that literally consumes the excess sugar. The beauty of it is that in a one-all situation the microbe consumes the excess sugar and then as all species do when there’s an excess of food, it then blooms. The bloom creates a massive increase in population but there’s no more food supply so they just as quickly a die off. This is referred to in science as the balance of nature.

In this case what we see is that they’ll be a surge candida that eats the excess sugar quickly. It multiplies, it blooms, but now there’s no more excess sugar. The situation is resolved. There is candida in all human blood.

It’s a matter of how much candida. There’s no way to prevent sugar from being in human blood, so you can’t literally starve out the candida in that way. What you can prevent however is blood sugar becoming excessively high.

Since 1959 when the first studies came to light on this issue of ‘what is it that allows sugar into the bloodstream but does not allow it out of the bloodstream,’ it has been taught in science, in medical school and in health class that the problem is one of fat functioning as an insulator, preventing sugar from exiting the bloodstream. By lowering the fat we invariably allow the sugar out of the bloodstream and resolve a potential candida issue.

The funny thing is that the different approaches that we’re seeing are actually all the same approach. The approach used by some people for candida is to go on a fast, on a water-only fast, consume absolutely nothing for week or two, and give the adrenals a chance to recover, give the pancreas a chance to recover. While the candida issue itself goes away within 48-72 hours anyway and then doesn’t return.

The second approach is to go on a diet of eating almost nothing but greens, in which case blood sugar levels remain the same, the amount of fat in the bloodstream goes down and at the end of the week or two of eating nothing but greens you no longer have a candida problem. Unfortunately, you also don’t
have a healthy eating plan to follow through on.

The third approach is to eat all the fruit you want, eat all the vegetables you care for, but avoid the consumption of overtly fatty foods for a week or two, and allow your body to heal itself because you’re no longer causing the problem.

To read the rest of this transcript for free as well as access a full archive of information by health experts on abundance, optimum health, and longevity just like Dr. Doug Graham, please visit http://www.renegadehealth.com/inner-cir… for a free 30 day trial.

—End of article—

Though this is just an excerpt of the interview it does cover everything there was about Candida. I listened to the interview and after that they went to other topics.

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Clear for Life - The lifestyle for health, happiness and clear skin

Time to strip off the layers of make up and see what the celebrities really look like.

People at Zug started a celebrity acne Photoshop contest. The idea is to pimplify a celebrity photo. Here’s my take on Jessica Simpson with acne - aka what happens when Proactiv doesn’t work.

Go check out the contest. Most of the entries are not very good, but there are few good ones. Here’s the link.

http://www.zug.com/live/80421/Celebrity-Acne-Contest.html

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Clear for Life - The lifestyle for health, happiness and clear skin

In this post I want to touch on Candida in bowel, how it affects your acne and health and what I think is the best way to deal with it.

I haven’t talked about Candida in bowels because I don’t think it’s an issue you should concerns yourself with. Not because I dismiss it but because it takes care of itself when you follow the diet and lifestyle guidelines in Clear for Life.

This was probably a mistake because it left some unanswered questions. Here’s one comment I got few days back.

As I wrote on one of your blogs, you dismissed some valid concerns a few candida sufferers have about following the method of upping carbs and reducing fat. In one lesson I was informed that insulin resistance due to high fat diet was really the culprit of candida, however later this was proven to only be applicable to the naturally occurring candida in the bloodstream- the back up plan our body has as you said. In another lesson you discussed the concept of leaky gut syndrome that could arise in individuals whose intestinal flora is unbalanced, increasing harmful parasites and yeast such as candida. The candida (as i have confirmed through extensive research) then morphs into a more invasive fungal form, and compromises the integrity of the intestinal wall allowing toxins (and quite possibly the fungal candida itself) to enter the bloodstream. Your reply to my query was that sugar has no effect on the growth of candida and the only chance of eliminating hostile candida was to go on a low fat diet…which makes absolutely no sense b/c if as you said the insulin is unable to (at the moment) stabilize blood sugar, blood candida will have to do the job and the sugar will also feed the candida in the gut…so really you are asking all of us with Candida infection to give the lil buggers a feast.

 

Two Candidas - one solution

There are two issues here.

• Insulin resistance and other blood sugar problems that allow, or demand, Candida in the bloodstream to multiply.
• Overgrowth of harmful bacteria, Candida and pathogens in the digestive track, also called gut dysbiosis. This can lead to leaky gut syndrome, where toxins from the bowel leak into your body and increase inflammation and overload the elimination organs.

Both of these are important for acne sufferers. If you want to permanently cure your acne you need to deal with both of them. Blood sugar problems lead to constant stream of hormones that increase sebum production. Leaky gut syndrome leads to constant stream of inflammatory toxins into your bloodstream. Both must stop before you can get clear.

I haven’t separated these issues because the same solution works for both problems.

I’ve beaten the issue of blood sugar problems and the role of fat to death, but I’ll touch on it briefly here since she (the person sending the comment) was still concerned about it.

First, high-fat diet is not the only reason behind insulin resistance. Your other lifestyle choices affect it also. Anyway, cutting out fat from your diet is one of the best ways to increase insulin sensitivity. This inevitably means eating more carbohydrates. And since fruits are the healthiest source of carbs, it means upping your fruit intake.

 

Keeping blood sugar levels stable with high-fruit diet

Second, I never said that sugar has no effect on Candida. Obviously it has. But you need to understand that the key is blood sugar levels, not how much sugar you eat. High and erratic blood sugar levels = Candida, stable blood sugar levels = no problems. And as you’ll see eating sugar doesn’t lead to high blood sugar levels, contrary to what 99% of Candida websites tell you.

In her comment she said that upping carb intake makes no sense because insulin cannot transport the glucose to cells. If this were true it eating more fruits wouldn’t make sense. It would be a very stupid idea.

But it’s not true. As you eat less fat, and fix all the other lifestyle choices that affect insulin sensitivity, insulin starts working again. Yes, you have to go through a transition period, but for most people it’s very short. Like few days. New Clear for Life customers frequently email me telling that the oiliness of their skin reduced almost overnight after switching to Clear for Life diet and lifestyle. A clear indication that their insulin sensitivity improved.

 

19 bananas a day, no effect on blood sugar levels

When your insulin receptors work well glucose won’t stay in the bloodstream long enough to feed Candida overgrowth. You can eat all the fruit you want and your blood sugar levels remain stable. Steve Pavlina commented about this in his raw food diet trial. Here’s what he had to say.

I monitored my blood sugar using a blood sugar testing device, the same kind diabetics may use. It showed no discernible spikes in blood sugar throughout the trial whatsoever — absolutely none. In fact, my blood sugar remained incredibly steady throughout the trial. My highest blood sugar reading of the trial was 94, which is still medium-low. All that sweet fruit in my diet simply did not have any adverse effect on my blood sugar.

Eating this way gave my blood sugar more consistency than ever. I couldn’t spike my blood sugar on this diet if I tried. Even eating 19 bananas in one day made no difference.

http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2008/02/raw-food-diet/

19 bananas a day, and no effect on blood sugar levels! All that evil sugar and yet where’s the spike on blood sugar and insulin levels all those Candida websites claim will happen? It flew out the door with the fat.

So you are not giving the lil buggers a feast by eating lots of fruits. And neither are you feeding the Candida in the bowel, as I’ll explain later.

Note, processed sugar is still evil. It has no nutrients and eating it forces the body to dip into its reserves to digest it. So stay away from processed sugar but eat all the fruit you want.

 

Candida in the bowel

Now let’s talk about the other issue of Candida. Candida in the bowel.

The prevailing wisdom is that Candida turns invasive because the harmful bacteria in the gut overwhelmed the probiotic (beneficial) bacteria. The solution to the problem is to help probiotic bacteria grown and ‘rebalance’ the colon micro flora.

Bowel dysbiosis can happen for many reason, such as:

• Frequent use of antibiotics and other drugs
• Pesticides and other chemicals in food and water
• Poor diet and lifestyle

I want to focus on the diet aspect here.

 

Indigestion = leaky gut = Candida

In the Acne 101 lesson where I talked about leaky gut syndrome I explained that indigestion is the main dietary cause for leaky gut syndrome. Undigested food enters the gut where the bacteria ferment and putrefy it, which leads to many toxic compounds. What happens in the gut depends mainly on two things:

• Substances (foods) available for fermentation/putrefaction; for example when bacteria feast on meat they create different toxins than when they feast on vegetable matter. As a rule of thumb, fiber from fruits and vegetables supports the beneficial bacteria, whereas most other foods help the harmful bacteria grow.
• How long the food stays in the gut. Obviously the longer the food stays in the gut the more time the bacteria has to feast on it. Also if the transit time through your digestive system is 48 hours the bacteria have more food than they would if the transit time would be 18 hours.

So your goal is to give the beneficial bacteria as much food as possible and to make sure that the bad stuff doesn’t stay there too long.

 

Raw food diet helps probiotic bacteria

This just screams for increased consumption of plant fiber. More fruits and vegetables.

First because the fiber in fruits and vegetables contains prebiotics, substances that feed the beneficial bacteria. This article has lots more on the topic (I recommend you read it): http://www.jacksongi.com/DIETS/Colon-Gas-Flatus-Prevention/colon_gas.aspx

Second, plant fiber reduces the time food stays in your large intestine and it scrubs your colon clean of any impurities. So there’s less food for the harmful bacteria.

This is another reason why standard Candida diet advice borders idiotic. By reducing carbohydrate consumption you need to eat more meat and fats - the exact substances that feed the harmful bacteria. And the food also stays longer in the gut. On the positive note they often recommend eating more vegetables, which at least partially corrects this.

Finally, raw fruits and vegetables are the easiest foods to digest. Your meal is completely digested before it enters the gut. Sugar and other things the harmful bacteria and Candida could eat are absorbed before they can get their hands on it. The only thing that’s left is the fiber, which feeds the probiotic bacteria.

Compare that to meats and fats the dominate the standard Candida diets. These foods are hard to digest. Digesting them demands lots of time and effort. And when eaten in poor combinations, which almost everybody does, they are never digested fully.

So standard Candida diet gives plenty of food for the harmful bacteria to produce toxins that just prolong leaky gut syndrome and your acne problems.

 

Conventional Candida diet is plainly irrational

Here we have the standard Candida diet that:

• Perpetuates insulin resistance by saturating blood with fat
• Feeds the harmful bacteria in the gut and allows leaky gut syndrome to continue

Then we have the diet that makes sense. A diet that:

• Helps to increase insulin sensitivity and reduce blood sugar problems
• Helps the beneficial bacteria to kick bad bacteria butt

None of this information is in anyway controversial or difficult to understand. All of this is easily available from public sources, makes perfect sense and produces very quick results.

But for some reason people have just been blinded with the fear of sugar and cannot see these glaringly obvious and very rational points. And so we have saturated the Internet with Candida websites that offer advice that is irrational and borderlines idiotic - and keeps recreating the very problem they propose to solve over and over.

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Clear for Life - The lifestyle for health, happiness and clear skin