Eating Well but Not Feeling Well

Just about everyone has the occasional “down time.” They just don’t “feel good” despite good eating habits. They do the vegetable bit, eat very little meat, but they just aren’t up to par. They are “kind of” stiff, tire easily, and get out of breath just walking up stairs. Why? Emotional override!

Their bodies are responding to strong emotions, and these responses are overriding the benefits of their good diet. Saliva pH results indicate whether or not emotions are the overriding influence on your physiology.

We all have stress in our lives; it goes with the territory of living. If you’re alive, you’re stressed. Stress itself doesn’t cause health problems, but how we respond to stress might be affecting our health. For most of us, the biggest health hazard of all is how we cling to past hurts and injustices we have suffered and survived. And, to make matters worse, we may not even realize we are clinging! The body responds to your feelings and emotions. The most striking example of these responses is when you are suddenly and severely frightened. Fright is emotional. Your response to fright is physical. And it’s fast. Emotions and the body are so closely intertwined that the phrase “scared to death” may not be an exaggeration.

Most of your physical responses to emotions aren’t as dramatic as “scared to death” fright. Emotions do not have to be strong to cause a physical response. Your body responds to all of your mental activities and emotions. Worry, anxiety, hate, joy, elation, and so on. Every emotion affects your body. And if you are clinging to some past stress, that same emotion is played over and over again for weeks, months, and years; your body continues to be affected the same way over and over. That’s exhausting for both you and your body.

Unfortunately, Saliva pH cannot tell you what is responsible for your stress. However, Saliva pH can help you find out if your emotions, feelings, thoughts, and memories are undermining your health.

Saliva pH isn’t any more of a diagnostic tool than urine pH. Saliva pH is a tool for evaluating whether your body is responding to internal (mental and emotional) stimuli in ways that can lead to long-term health or long-term disease.

Two-Stage Check
The pH of your saliva dances from low to high depending on what you’ve put into your mouth recently. The “normal” pH of saliva is considered to be around 6.8. However, it can go much lower and much higher than that. Chew on an orange, and your saliva pH can drop like a rock. Swish a solution of water and baking soda in your mouth (although I’m not sure why you would want to do that) and your saliva pH shoots up like a rocket. The point is that your saliva pH changes instantly to handle current conditions, including your emotions.

This is a two-stage check: before and after. The before gives you the pH of your saliva when you haven’t eaten anything for a while. The after pH shows the response to a sudden, intense “threat” of acid.

Emotions affect the pH of your saliva. The objective is to find out if the acid “threat” is more intense than any current emotional “threat.” Your pH test results will reveal if you are in a state of emotional override. If your current emotional state is demanding more of your body’s attention that a sudden “acid attack,” your health could be suffering.

What You Need:
(1) pH paper, (2) saliva, (3) a stimulant; use a slice of lemon or a teaspoon of lemon juice, and (4) notebook and pen to track your results.

To prepare for your saliva pH test, put nothing in your mouth except pure water for at least two hours prior to testing your saliva. No eating, smoking, chewing gum, or cough drops, no breath spray, toothpaste, etc.

The Saliva pH Challenge
You want to check your saliva as close to your personal “normal” as possible. For this to happen you need to be up, moving about, and contending with life as you normally would. After two hours of regular activity and abstinence from any substance you put in your mouth, except pure water, you are ready to test your saliva pH.

For this test you’ll need to be in front of a mirror. Use one strip of pH paper. Work up some saliva, gathering and moving it toward the tip of your tongue until you have a pool of saliva. Looking in the mirror to guide your hand, wet the pH paper without touching the paper to your lips or tongue. Match the color of the wet pH paper with the corresponding color and pH value on the chart. Write and date your results.

Next, the stimulant. Put the lemon into your mouth, sucking just long enough for the flavor to permeate your whole mouth. Swallow four times as you tear off an inch or two of pH paper, and then repeat the wet-paper-with-saliva routine. Note the color and write down the corresponding pH number.

Results of Saliva pH Test

Colors
The color chart has three dominant colors:

Yellow = pH 5.5 through 6.0

Green = pH 6.2 through 7.0

Blue = pH 7.2 through 8.0

Changing Numbers

Numbers Go Up
If your pH numbers go up, this indicates that your body can respond easily to strong stimuli (acid of the lemon). No matter what color your first number was, this change to higher is beneficial.

Numbers Go Down
If your numbers don’t go up, something is bothering you; stress or anxiety is dominating your physiology. Take this as a sign that your life and health could be improved with a few changes.

Numbers Don’t Change
Before and after numbers that are virtually the same are the strongest indication that emotional distress is a key factor. It’s time to take action. Emotional habits need to be re-examined and modified.

Changing Colors, how to interpret the colors

Green – Blue, Preferred response.
Saliva pH that starts out green and moves up to blue indicates that you handle stress well, and your alkaline reserve is adequate. Keep up the healthy diet and attitude. Check your saliva pH occasionally to make sure you continue to stay in the blue.

Yellow – Green or Blue, Not the best, but okay.
A yellow reading that changes to either green or blue indicates two situations. First, your alkaline reserve is holding its own. Second, stress, anxiety, or similar emotion is keeping your body “on guard” most of the time. Although improper diet isn’t your main problem, make sure you are kind to your body nutritionally by eating less meat and dairy products and more fruit and vegetables.

Blue – Green or Green – Yellow, Wrong Direction.
Your pH results indicate that your body is moving toward exhaustion, which opens the door to disease. The problem isn’t too much dietary acid. The problem is chronic stress, perhaps worry. You may be experiencing continued ongoing low-level stress. A change in lifestyle and attitude is more important right now than a change in diet. However, replacing acid-forming foods with more alkaline-forming foods could help.

Blue – Blue, Not Desirable
True-blues have a tendency to be worriers. Diet isn’t a major problem; however, the negative fallout from worry and anxiety overrides the positive benefits from your good diet. Consequently, your body is headed toward exhaustion.

Green – Green, Less Desirable than Blue – Blue
The steady-state green group is also combating emotional override. Chances are you have very “strong emotions”. Anxiety, fear, anger, or rage are constant in one form or another. End result: physical and physiological exhaustion. The biggest challenge will be to change your long-standing negative attitudes and allow your body to rest occasionally. You need to make a substantial change in diet to reinforce your alkaline mineral reserves. Eat less acid-ash foods such as meat and refined processed foods, while integrating more raw and cooked vegetables, salads and fresh fruit into your diet.

Yellow – Yellow, Serious Problems
Most people who are seriously ill are yellow-yellow. Regardless of your present state of health, your diet and attitudes need to be restructured immediately. Yellow-yellows are essentially up-tight. You may need pills at night to fall asleep and coffee in the morning to get going. You sleep, but your body never truly rests. Sorting out your emotional and nutritional life needs to be top priority if you want to heal. Eat plenty of soothing, steamed, rather than raw vegetables. Yellow-yellow indicates a lack of digestive strength making raw fruit and vegetables potentially difficult to eat at this time. Changes in diet should be made gradually.

Reach Your Potential for Health

So there you have it. The rousing story of pH. Monitoring urine pH can help guide your menu selections. Periodic saliva pH testing can help you determine if emotional override is heavily involved in your overall picture of health. Yet there is little point in monitoring either urine or saliva pH if you don’t act on the information. The purpose behind pH monitoring and this guide is to offer information that you can use to devise a personal plan of action for improving your health.

Your body’s potential for health is built-in. The potential is there. Only you can cultivate or suppress it. You have seen how the types of foods you eat require your body to respond in particular ways. Every response your body makes is required for it to survive the conditions it faces. Everything your body does depends on the circumstance it’s given, so you can’t blame “poor health,” or even “good health” for that matter, on your body. Your body doesn’t think and it doesn’t plan for the future. It works with the materials you give it. That’s the good news.

You have more control over your health than you had thought. That’s cause for hope! You don’t need to wait for disease to strike before you “do something” about your health. It isn’t necessary to depend on someone else, like a medical doctor, to “keep you well.” Health is your job, not the doctor’s. Doctors are great in emergency situations, when you need help fast, or when illness has reached a critical point. They are also experts at helping to relieve symptoms. Generally, that’s what doctors do – relieve symptoms. And they do their jobs well.

Some crises are unavoidable; however, many diseases are unnecessary. To make disease unnecessary in our lives and our pocketbooks, we must take responsibility for our health and implement preventative action.  When you realize that your body responds to everything you put into your mouth, eating takes on a whole new flavor. And when you realize that your body responds to your attitudes, you realize your thoughts and feelings are “things” that affect health.

Monitoring your personal pH is a tool. Monitoring your urine and saliva pH can help you take charge of your health. In the final analysis, you, and only you, can lead your life in ways that promote health or prevent health. Health is not an accident.

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