Dr. God: The Power of Innate Intelligence (Part One)

What if you never again had to even think about your health or your weight? What if you could close the book, forever, on questions about portion sizes, which diet is best, what to do about your health challenges, and how to keep your weight and health “under control?”

What if there were an infinitely wise “bio-computer” that always knew exactly what was going on with your body and that perfectly orchestrated radiant health every hour of every day, so that you never had to worry about a thing? Or you can imagine it as a genie, with great powers to manifest your perfect weight, superb health, and vibrant youthfulness. Well here’s the deal: This genie, this dazzling bio-computer, is quite real, and it’s within you right now (but you knew I was gonna say that, right?). Some people have called it Innate Intelligence. It’s that systemic Intelligence built into us by nature or God or whatever you wish to call it (or It).

Innate Intelligence
Innate Intelligence is what formed your whole body from a single cell. It performs the trillions of functions, every second, that keep you alive, thinking, seeing, breathing, digesting and all of that cool (and occasionally disgusting) stuff. In each moment, Innate Intelligence is maintaining perfect body temperature, balancing countless hormonal functions, replacing old cells, eliminating wastes, ordering the harmony of millions of enzymatic functions, coordinating brain and nervous system operations and orchestrating chemical exchanges in the heart and lungs. Billions of such operations are taking place as you read these words. In fact, countless miraculous processes are constantly taking place within just one single cell of your body! It’s freakin’ mind-blowing madness!

And here’s what all that means: Innate Intelligence is not just the best way to create vibrant health—it’s the only way. Any other tactics, even ones that seem to work in the short term, almost always contribute to problems further on down the line. They may give you an apparently good result in one aspect of your health, but then you “mysteriously” develop a different problem in another organ or system of your body.

For example, fad diets, including “calorie cutting” deprivation diets and high protein diets, achieve their results (when they do) by creating low-level disease processes in the body. They are true Faustian bargains. That’s why the weight almost always comes back on, and with a vengeance. Drugs, and even many so-called “natural” nutritional supplements, always make you pay a price, sooner or later. There are the obvious, immediate side effects; we all know about those. But there is also a more insidious, long-term, cumulative degeneration of the whole bodily system.

Innate Intelligence and Conventional Medicine
Somewhere along the line, our medical professionals stopped trusting and using Innate Intelligence as the central principle in healing. Many doctors will acknowledge the majesty of the workings of the human body, but, most of the time, it’s purely a philosophical appreciation. Innate Intelligence is not something to actually work with and depend on down in the trenches.

Because, they might say, Innate Intelligence is spotty and unreliable. After all, what else do doctors see throughout their work days other than apparent “failures” of this supposedly magnificent intelligence? The question doctors usually neglect to ask is this: Does Innate Intelligence really just “fail,” or has it in fact been relentlessly overwhelmed, and usually for many years? Instead of asking such questions, physicians typically just persist in their fundamental view of the human body—that it is a helpless victim of random circumstances. In this conventional model of health, things just inexplicably and arbitrarily “go wrong” with our bodies. If you ask medical professionals why things have “gone wrong,” they’ll usually give you one of three answers.

The honest ones will say simply that they have no clue why you “got” that disease. In medical speak, they say it’s “idiopathic.” That means they have no idea what causes it. Currently, 97% of chronic degenerative diseases are classified as idiopathic. If you’re over, say, 35 years old, the second thing your doctor might say is that your disease is “a natural part of aging.” This gets back to our models of normal. The third thing they’ll say, when you ask them why you have this or that ailment, is…drum roll, please…it must be genetics.

The Great News About Genetics
In recent times, genetics has become the handy, one-size-fits-all answer that gets whipped out to explain a thousand ailments. Genetics is the new boogey man, the modern replacement for the “evil spirits” of Medieval times. Never mind the fact that most of these diseases hardly existed 80 years ago, so if it’s “genetics,” what caused them to begin with?

Genetics certainly play a substantial role in our bodily well being. But the Nobel winning scientist, Candace Pert, describes a simple way to understand the role of genetics in our health. She says that in the scientific community genetics is viewed as a factor which can “cock back the hammer” on the metaphorical “gun” of chronic degenerative diseases. But an unhealthy lifestyle is almost always required to “pull the trigger” and actually give us one of those chronic degenerative diseases—including obesity.

Pioneering nutritional authority Bernard Jensen, who worked with over 350,000 patients in the course of his long life, said the same thing in different terms. He said that genetics can give us compromised tissues in a part of the body—the “weak links” in our health chain—but it takes “wrong living” to exploit these weak links. So, when it comes to genetics, the holistic view says that if you were born with the healthy tissues, organs and functions (i.e. no congenital problems), you’ll only develop chronic degenerative problems from improper care and maintenance of the equipment, so to speak. There are exceptions to this, but they are rare.

It’s vital to understand that none of this, either in the case of your own health or that of your children, is cause for blame or guilt. In our culture, we are not educated about these matters. On the contrary, we are proactively “educated” in quite the opposite way. People just don’t have the information about health and how health really works. Most people, and especially parents, do the very best they can with the information they have. Not only that, but some of the lifestyle factors behind these chronic degenerative diseases are environmental toxins, many of which we don’t know about or can’t do much about.

Here’s the take-away lesson: You are not genetically “destined” for illness or for being overweight. You’re designed for perfect well being. That “blueprint” shines bright in every cell of your body. Eating a rejuvenative diet of whole, nutrient-dense foods (along with exercise and stress reduction, of course), will give you radiant health and slimness your whole life long.

(For those keeping score at home, yes, it's true, the image I chose has nothing much to do with the post, except, um, y'know, it's Medieval, which I sort of mentioned...And it looks cool. Shiny objects and all.)

Abby normal

I’m always studying why we Americans eat so astonishingly bad. What on earth keeps us committing suicide by fork? I’ve come up with about 9 major reasons so far, and one of them is a massive and deadly confusion about what’s "normal.” To wit:

I had this client some years back. We’ll call her Nancy, on accounta that being her name and all. Anyway, Nancy had been retired for almost a decade when she came to see me. She wanted to learn to eat better to lose a stubborn thirty pounds, something her doctor had encouraged her to do. Nancy also told me that she had high blood pressure, aching joints when she woke up—especially in her hands—and osteopenia, the precursor to osteoporosis. Sometimes she suffered from a little indigestion, headaches and heartburn. All kinds of stuff. The usual suspects.

Over the course of our first discussion, Nancy revealed she had one of the nastiest little myths you can carry around with you, and it’s a belief that’s epidemic in this country. She believed that her ailments were “normal.” After all, every one of her friends had a list of health challenges just like hers. Our country is so plagued with poor health that most Americans have come to see chronic degenerative diseases (and a thousand other “minor complaints”) as normal. And the constant bombardment of pharmaceutical ads only drives the message deeper into our minds.

Headaches, indigestion, heartburn, fatigue, hypothyroid, hemorrhoids, aching joints, high blood pressure, constipation, IBS, gum disease—all normal as can be. They just "happen." Business as usual. Nothing to see here, folks, move along. Diabetes, heart disease, asthma, arthritis, osteoporosis, cancer—these are things we should all expect. Yippee!

There’s a funny way in which we even regard being overweight as normal. Yes, we say that obesity is caused by how we eat and by not exercising. But there’s an odd sense we have here in America that our body is always somehow “trying” to get fat. That’s why most people think they’re supposed to go through all sorts of struggles, their whole lives, to stop that from happening; to engage in the constant uphill battle to stave it off. It’s a very strange belief when you think about it. And it is big-time outer space silliness. When you eat clean, pure, whole food, with lots of raw plant food (fruits & veggies; nuts & seeds) you can eat virtually as much as you want, never counting or measuring anything, and remain always lithe and radiant.

Why? Because human beings are made for perfect health. All around the globe there have been cultures who show us this. These are peoples I’ve mentioned on this blog before, like the Hunzas of Northern Pakistan, the Vilcabambans of Ecuador, the Abkhasians or Georgians of Eastern Europe and many others. Chronic degenerative diseases—even dental cavities—were, at one time virtually unknown to these peoples. Before they became “modernized,” like us, illness of any kind was all but nonexistent. They were strong and vital and sharp into their hundreds! You can find photos of the Hunzas in their 90’s and even hundreds playing volleyball! These people aren’t mythical. They’ve been studied a lot and the conclusion is unavoidable: vibrant, dynamic health, including effortless slimness, is normal for us homo sapien types. It’s just how we’re made. It’s how you are made. I know it sounds odd, but you really have to work to get ill and overweight.

Here in the U.S. we’ve had many examples of this kind of health. These are people like nutritional pioneer Norman Walker who died at age 97. He drowned while doing one of his favorite activities: surfing. Or Paul Bragg, who, after his daily gardening work took his regular afternoon nap and died peacefully in his sleep. He was about 120 years old. Or Jack La Lane, who at age 95 is an incredible dynamo, lecturing around the world and working out two hours a day. There are countless examples like these. They are not the flukes or anomalies. They are examples of our true normal; the massive super-health we are structurally designed for. All we have to do is stop obstructing it, and a diet of fresh, whole, nutrient dense foods is the foundation and centerpiece of it all (exercise and happy emotions are key, too).