One thing has become clear to me over my 15 years of clinical experience as a women’s health & wellness expert: women are suffering. They are not thriving with wellness the way they deserve. Rather they are walking around feeling ‘good enough’ (translation: they are functioning at about 70-80% of the optimal wellness). That is unacceptable to me and it should be unacceptable to you especially if you’re one of the women suffering.
At the root of this epidemic of mediocre health are a few things, but most likely your beliefs about your body. You see, your beliefs dictate your behavior and your behavior dictates your health. Even more, science shows us that the thoughts we think, such as, “I feel exhausted” or, “I feel overworked” or “I feel stressed out” or “I feel so out of sync with my body” or “I feel like I’m on a treadmill and I’m barely surviving” actually impact our neurophysiology and ultimately impact the health and behavior of the 37 trillion cells in our body. I consider it a case of cellular hostility and it typically manifests itself as an autoimmune condition. Yes, if you are walking around feeling unwell, you could be dealing with an autoimmune condition that is rooted in cellular hostility, or said another way, your body attacking itself- cellularly and emotionally.
Did you know that the incidence of autoimmune diseases have tripled over the past 40 years, affecting women 75% more than men. In fact, it is estimated that 30 million American women have at least one autoimmune condition, many of them completely unaware of it. As a licensed acupuncturist and herbalist, I became obsessed with autoimmunity as my clinical focus became women’s hormonal health. After writing my second book, Yes, You Can Get Pregnant it became very obvious to me that scores of women who are having hormonal challenges (from irregular periods to fertility issues to migraines and acne) are actually dealing with an undiagnosed or mismanaged autoimmune condition. As I just stated, the incidence of autoimmunity has tripled since the 1980’s and that has everything to do with our environment–from our stress levels, to the foods we eat, to the products we apply to our skin to the thoughts we think. Plain and simple our genes can’t shift this fast so it has to be the world we live in and how we treat our bodies that is behind this upsurge of illness. But, the good news is you have to the power to support your body in its healing process and get back to thriving health.
My latest book, Body Belief: How To Heal Autoimmune Disease, Radically Shift Your Health & Learn to Love Your Body More (Hay House), has all the tools to empower you because you deserve to feel good, you are worthy of abundant health and most importantly, you are capable of healing yourself. Below is an excerpt from the chapter “Autoimmunity: A Hostile Takeover of Your Body.”
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Your Brain, Beliefs, and Autoimmunity
The conversation you have with yourself in the privacy of your own mind affects your health at the cellular level. Why? Because your brain hears everything you say to your body. As there are 37 trillion cells in your body, the question becomes: Are you cheering them on with loving thoughts, or verbally abusing them with toxic thoughts? If the root of autoimmunity is your body attacking itself on a cellular level, are you attacking yourself with toxic thoughts on an emotional level?
Your thoughts create chemical messengers in your brain, and your body responds to them. If you think, “I am happy,” a chemical messenger then conveys that to your body and all of your trillions of cells. The same thing happens if you think “I am stressed out” or “I am so unhappy” or “I hate my body.” It also happens if you are thinking things like, “I hate my job” or “I am always sick” or “My body never does what I want it to do.”
Contemplate the following from stem-cell biologist and author of The Biology of Belief Bruce Lipton:
The cells [in your body] are maintained by a culture medium, popularly known as blood. The brain is the regulatory organ that regulates and maintains the chemical composition of the blood. The brain’s control of the blood’s chemistry is linked to our perceptions (mind) and emotions (reflecting chemical signals in the blood). When you have a perception of love, the brain releases oxytocin (love hormone that regulates body’s metabolism and supports growth), serotonin and growth hormone, ALL chemicals that when added to cells in a culture dish will enhance growth and health of the cells. In contrast, when a person is in fear, their brain releases stress hormones (cortisol, norepinephrine and histamine) that shut down a cell’s growth processes and inhibits the immune system, which happens to be completely unsustainable for life.
The average person has about fifty thousand thoughts each day, and each thought influences the chemical messengers in your brain and how your body functions. That means your thoughts are a part of your illness and your wellness. The Body Belief plan will reconnect you to yourself and renew your body beliefs so that you can begin to hear the conversation you are having with yourself, change the tone of it from one of hostility to one of kindness, and create a loving environment in your body for your health to thrive.
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Want more? Click here to for more information on Aimee’s book, Body Belief: How to Heal Autoimmune Diseases, Radically Shift Your Health, and Learn to Love Your Body More.