Episode 32: pH And How It Affects Your Metabolism
Your body’s metabolism is intrinsically tied to its pH levels. Too acidic or too alkaline, and our body feels the effects. Join Haylie Pomroy and some very eager students in her kitchen...or should we say classroom, for a step-by-step guide on how to check your body's pH by doing the Digestive Reserves Test (commonly called the Lemon Challenge Test). Haylie will go over how to check your body's pH, what you can do to stabilize your pH, and her best tips for maintaining a healthy metabolism.
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pH And How It Affects Your Metabolism
I want to first welcome you to the classroom or, as I call it, my kitchen. We do have a couple of students here that are joining me in person. If any of you guys are interested at all in ever participating in an in-classroom session, make sure that you post for my team that you would like to be considered to come and raise your hand in the classroom, help me out in my kitchen, and work together in fueling your metabolism. I want to talk about a very important subject. It’s a subject that I work with all of my clients that come into the office and that we talk a lot about in our community. We’re going to talk about the pH, but like with all of my books, we’re not going to talk about the theory of pH. We’re going to actually talk about how you can do some at-home self-diagnostics. How you can challenge your body and see how it adapts to the response to that challenge, as well as ways that you can be curious and in awe of what your body tells you and what proactive approaches you can take to the variations in the pH.
The other thing that I want to cover as we’re in the classroom is I want to cover a little bit of business about different ways that you can interact with myself and my team. I hope that you already have all of your books because these are like textbooks and playbooks. These are things that actually have the practical solutions to looking at your metabolism and what’s going on in your metabolism. Maybe it’s slow or sluggish. Maybe you’ve developed some disease or dis-ease in the body because you can’t maintain homeostasis and your body’s doing the very best job that it can to create the very best health potential. Maybe we can actually exploit amazing food and incredible micronutrients to make that health potential even greater.
There’s a couple of ways to interact with us. We love having you in the classroom. It is so important that we worked together and we science geek out and discover what’s going on in our bodies. We also have a private membership section on our website. If you go to the website, HayliePomroy.com, you will see a little section that says, Members. All of you that are already members know exactly how to log on and what to do, but please join me in welcoming individuals that are considering being a member and know that I’d love to host you for 30 days for free.
Challenge Your Body Using Lemons
We do this because we feel that there is such significant value in that community where individuals can share maybe more intimate struggles, stories, and successes, trials and tribulations. Where we can work a little more practically through challenges and like a lemon challenge test that we’re going to do here in class, as well as giving the opportunity to have access when you have personal questions. We’re going to go through how to challenge your body using lemons, a very acidic substance, and seeing a way that you can test your digestive reserves.
Remember the digestive results are so important because those are what take the macromolecules like food and create the micronutrients like B vitamins and amino acids that help make all the magic and the metabolism. We’re going to be testing that. Those are the kinds of things that we do in our community. Join me free. That’s the coupon code if you’re not a member. If you’re already a member, please make a nice, lovely comment to those that are maybe just learning about their metabolism, learning about how we can actually influence the metabolism helping the metabolism affect lives. Please remember when you first started this journey, in your health and all this how awesome it felt to have people include you in the process.
The other opportunity that you have is we send several newsletters a week. As you can see by my kitchen, I’m huge about cooking and about recipes, so make sure that you’re getting our free newsletter at HayliePomroy.com. It’s simple. You sign up for the newsletter. This time we had lemon-blueberry spelt scones. They were incredible. I put on there how you could use our very popular strawberry jam preserved on top of it. I think I have lemon bars and a lot of different, great things, so make sure that you do that. The third is we’re looking for individuals that would like to work directly with us, both here in the classroom and then also in a real live event.
As we start class, I have a question for our classroom. If you would let me know, have you guys ever tested your pH before? Have you ever used a nitrogen strip and tested either urine or saliva? If you have, which one do you test? Do you typically test urine the first morning, the second void? Do you typically test saliva? What do you do when you check pH and are you familiar with it at all? I also want to know if you don’t even know what the heck we’re talking about. We’re going to start from the basics because we can always improve on what we already know and grow together so that we can again make those true lifelong changes in the body. It’s important for us because we can reach out and make sure that you get more data and more information to find out what is going on in your body.
What Is pH?
Let me talk a little bit about pH to start. When we look at pH, a lot of people talk about a spectrum. We go from being very acidic, like lemon or even vinegar. Even though we use apple cider vinegar a lot to alkalinize the body, vinegar itself is very acidic if you test it and taste it, to be very alkaline or basic is what they’re called. We have acid and we have alkaline. Alkaline is things like baking soda. Sodium bicarb is very alkaline. The ocean is very alkaline. Think of things that are very rich in minerals. They’re very alkaline. When you look at salt, table salt creates acidity in the body where sea salt can actually create alkalinity in the body.
We look at pH as a whole. What is the pH? Neutral, right in the middle is seven. Anything below a seven is considered acidic, anything above a seven is considered alkaline or basic. As I’ve gone through and watched a lot of individuals teach about the pH and the impact of modifying the pH in the body, one thing that is important that I want to make sure that we all grasp as a community is that we’re looking to create homeostasis of wellness in the body.
Our blood pH has to stay stable. The blood pH is typically between 7.35 to 7.45. We have like 1/10 of a point, which is a very small value to be able to modify the pH to create a homeostasis in the body through all of the different biochemical processes that happen. When there’s that much fragility in the ability for the blood pH to change and remember we can go from 1 to 14, but the blood pH has to stay right there, just a smidge alkaline at 7.35 to 7.45. When it only has that little bit of room there, how do we use the rest of our body to create homeostasis or strengthen that? When we go off in other areas of our body, how much stress does that cause in the blood?
The blood is the giver of life. The B cells deliver the micronutrients. We have hemoglobin, where it delivers oxygen. It is vital. It’s not something that we can do without. It’s something that if it’s healthy in the chemistry, that is healthy. It is much easier to make changes in the metabolism. With the blood pH having to stay stable, a lot of people walk around and say, “I’m so acidic. I take alkaline water to alkalinize my body.” What is it that we’re really talking about? What we’re talking about is the other excrements of our body through breath, urine and saliva. How can we use all of those variables to allow the blood to stay at homeostasis? It’s going to stay at homeostasis or you’re out of here. How do we allow it to be in homeostasis with the most harmony and the least stress as possible?
All of the organs in our bodies, the pancreas, which produces alkaline ash, the liver, which produces bile salts that are very alkalinizing, the stomach that produces stomach acids that is very acidifying, the urine, the saliva and the breath. All of those things work together, hopefully in harmony to keep that blood perfectly stable. I have a lot of doc friends that I work with that get very frustrated because, in a lot of the integrative therapies, we talk a lot about pH and the docs come in and say, “What did you do? This is crazy. People can’t modify the pH because if they did, they would die.” They’re talking about blood and what a lot of other people are talking about is other aspects of the body. That’s what I want to talk about now.
Time To Test Your pH Levels
When I test pH with clients and we start to look at it holistically. We’re going to start really basic. We test both urine and saliva and sometimes we also do breath and tears. We’re going to focus on the saliva and what that means. We’re going to start to unpackage how your body is utilizing the different organ systems, functions, hormone secretions and enzyme secretions to create that homeostasis with the least stress as possible. Remember when you put stress on the body or when stress has been put on the body, it takes more energy and effort to create homeostasis. You’re going to create homeostasis again in the bladder. We’re all out of here but how can we do it with as little effort as possible? When we talk about creating homeostasis with the least effort as possible, we can become more and more efficient at burning food for fuel as well as fat for energy and fuel. That’s why this is important.
This is something that I do with my clients very early on called The Lemon Challenge Test. It’s how your salivary or your upper GI digestive reserves are working.
We have pH strips. We have them on our website. They’re called Nitrazine strips. You can get these at most pharmacies and drug stores. They’re going to have a pH monitor and you can see there are all these different colors. The yellow takes it to a 5.5 on this one and the more the alkaline, it takes it to an 8.0. Remember that 7.0 is right in the middle. I never recommend you put them directly in your mouth. You want to use a plastic spoon, preferably not a Sterling silver spoon or aluminum spoon. Remember, when minerals are secreted and they are secreted in our silverware, silver can manipulate or change the pH readings. You want to make sure you get a plastic spoon and a Nitrazine strip. You’re going to spit in the spoon and you’re going to put the Nitrazine strip right into your saliva.
What we’re testing here is if I challenged the body, how much reserve does the body have to come back to homeostasis? In order to keep that blood stable, just a little bit alkaline, the saliva and the urine are ever so slightly acidic. If the saliva pH goes to alkaline, we’d have a tendency to break down the mucosal lining and we seem to get canker sores, ulcers and heartburn. You are more prone to fever blisters, viral outbreaks and things of that nature. If it gets very acidic, we see individuals that have a lot of cavity and a lot of gritting of the teeth.
Sometimes when your babies or your children are teething, you’ll see that their pH gets really alkaline in the saliva and they drool. I don’t know if you guys remember that when your kids were little. I do. We’re constantly wiping things up. Those are those proteolytic enzymes that are helping break down the gums so that the tooth can erupt. That’s a normal, natural, healthy process. Once our teeth are all in and we’re planning on keeping them, we want our pH to stabilize and only episodically when we eat and consume food should our enzymes change that pH.
You’re going to need to be at home to do this typically. I would like you to make sure that you have nothing in your mouth. Here I say, take the test approximately two hours after eating. In this test, you’re going to be measuring your saliva pH upwards of six times in one-minute intervals. You’re going to do this at home and you are going to come back post, and let us know what the heck went on in your body. You’re going to join the membership and we’re going to talk about it. We’re going to talk about what to eat about it.
Getting started, what you want to do is you want to test your pH. Again, I have not eaten for two hours. I’m testing my saliva pH prior to eating anything. I just tested my pH if I go over here, I’m right about between a 6.6 and a 6.8, maybe even a little more of a 6.5, 6.6. I think it’s wishful thinking. I’d like to see myself at a 6.8. That gives me a stable pH. What are my salivary enzymes doing? Are they acidic? Are they alkaline? When I haven’t eaten, I haven’t consumed food, what’s my baseline? You’re going to write that right on your sheet. Your pH prior to testing, I’m going to call mine a 6.6.
What we’re looking for here is whatever your baseline is, even though the ideal is a 6.8. Whatever your baseline is, how strong, how invested, or how secure is your body is in that number. The way we’re going to do that is we’re going to expose the body to a lot of acid. Again, remember lemons are acidic, vegetables are alkaline-forming, but one thing that I want to tell you is that even though lemons are acidic, you’ll see what happens in our pH challenge test. The body stimulates alkaline ash to create homeostasis. Again, it’s not what you consume, it’s what the micronutrient evokes in the body as a response to the consumption of that.
For example, I use a lot of lemon water, but I add in this Mason jar 1/4 cup of apple cider vinegar as a digestive aid. I would probably drink this about a cup every day. One of the reasons why I like to make this in a large batch and why I leave the lemon peels in there is one of the reasons why lemon stimulates alkaline ash is because there are a lot of bioflavonoids in the lemon peel, rutin, vitamin C, but things that stimulate the pancreas to produce alkaline ash. Remember that pancreas is so important in metabolism because the pancreas also produces insulin. It helps to stabilize blood sugar. It gets you into that sweet spot where you burn fat. You don’t store sugar in your fat for later.
When I first consume lemon, you will see I’ll test my pH and typically what happens immediately afterward is the body is very acidic. The saliva is very acidic and the goal here is for my body to very quickly rebound back to a 6.6. We’ll see what happens. Sometimes the body will rebound and swing the other way and go very alkaline. That’s very important to us. It’ll tell us a lot about your body. Sometimes the body will swing the other way and have a difficult time coming out of that acidity and will take minute after minute of testing where our bodies can’t rebound or create homeostasis from that challenge very quickly.
Doing The Lemon Challenge Test
In a second, I’m going to do the actual Lemon Challenge Test. I wanted to talk to you about the pH really quick again. Remember in order to create stability in the pH, we sometimes see that people talk a lot about acidity in the body. We can also go the other direction and have alkalinity in the body when you’re testing against saliva or urine. Alkalinity can mean a hyperproduction in enzymes, secretion of minerals at a rapid rate, so think of demineralization, things like osteoporosis and osteopenia are very important to test the pH, their organs and enzyme promotion like the pancreas, the kidneys, the adrenals, if you’re extremely stressed. Remember those are the glands that help regulate that homeostasis with ease. If you’ve been stressed for a long period of time, they will create homeostasis through crisis hormones, not through feel-good hormones. It’s important that we measure and check this.
This is a great way for me to be able to test the pH. I am going to take a bite. I already feel my parotid gland starting to constrict and the salivary enzymes starting to form in my mouth just from smelling this lemon. I’m going to go ahead and take a bite. For those of you that are doing this with me, I’m sorry. I’m going to check my pH. I want to show you guys the difference in my saliva pH. I’m going to see if I can set a timer here. We can do this a little quicker. I’m going to give myself a two-minute window. Typically, when we check this, we check it at the one-minute mark, the two-minute mark. You’ll see on your sheet, 3, 4, 5, and 6 minutes.
I want to show you before the lemon and after the lemon. You’ll see that there’s a bit of acidity in my saliva right now. When that goes off, we’re going to recheck it. My dream is that I have a lot of digestive reserves and that I’m maintaining the homeostasis in my blood because the rest of my body has the minerals, the enzyme secretion, the hormone balance. I had enough alkaline vegetables. It’s not that the vegetable themselves, that their pH is alkaline. What happens with vegetables is that they have phytonutrients or live enzymes in them. When you consume, especially in a raw state, it helps your body have the enzymes that create homeostasis. If you ever thought that your vegetables or your fruits still don’t have enzymes, try bruising them and watch how quickly with that microtrauma they start to break down in those areas. That is part of the live enzymatic process in your fruits and vegetables.
When you’re testing the saliva pH, why is it so important that your salivary enzymes stay stable or are functional and ever so slightly alkaline? That is because it is the first place that your body takes the macronutrients, protein, and converts them into amino acids, complex carbohydrates and SATs and turns those into micronutrients and extracts it. Remember, it’s the micronutrients that stimulate the metabolism. When I have a client come in and we do The Lemon Challenge Test, it’s interesting what we find. Remember ultimately, we do holistic pH testing before exercise, after exercise, before meals, and after meals. We do blood sugar testing and things of that nature holistically to look at the entire system. The first thing that I want to know is does this individual has the capacity to take food, preferably high-quality food and convert it into the micronutrients necessary to fuel the metabolism? Because if this part isn’t stable and we don’t correct this early on, it makes it extremely difficult to metabolize the macronutrients.
I find those clients that come in and they tried every diet and they’re eating incredibly healthy food, on the other spectrum they have created an unhealthy relationship with food neurochemically where their body doesn’t like the taste of fruits and vegetables. Their palette is very bland. We’ve got to revitalize or stimulate those micronutrients. Those are the enzymes that can create the stability that can break those down. As soon as this one goes off, there we go. We do one more test. I’m going to test my pH.
Interpreting The Results
At the first testing, I was at a 5.0. We are now two minutes in. I am already at a 6.4. I’m proud of my digestive reserve. I want to give you three things that I do to enhance my digestive reserve. We can test it one more time because I want to make sure I don’t overcompensate. I have a tendency to do that a little bit. I have a tendency to try to be a little bit of an overachiever. My enzymes have FOMO, Fear Of Missing Out, fear of not doing it aggressively well. I’m going to go one more minute here. I’m going to test it one more time and make sure that it’s stabilized. It’s not going to swing the other direction because that’s just as important of information.
What I want you to do is when you test your pH and you do your Lemon Challenge Test, I want you to make sure that you’re posting what happened, what will happen right after you tested the lemon, what happened at the one-minute mark, two-minute mark, all the way to the six-minute mark. They say if you aren’t stabilized by the six-minute mark, we’ll have you go ahead and wait 30 minutes and test it or we do it in five-minute increments in order for us to make sure that you actually stabilized.
Keeping The Balance
There are three super important things that I do. Number one is I’m very conscientious about chewing my food. Remember when you chew your food, you’re not only stimulating all the salivary enzymes, but by breaking down those macronutrients into tiny particles, you aid the metabolism. You speed the metabolism up so much by simply chewing your food because you already delivered them into the stomach and for support with the pancreas, the liver, the gallbladder in a much smaller particle. It increases the surface area for your body and your enzymes to be able to attack those macromolecules and release the micronutrients from them. Chew your food. "Happy Birthday to Me" is the song that I sing between bites. I work diligently on that.
Here is the other thing is I do support my body with digestive aids. I use things like lemon. There’s the minute mark. To make sure I haven’t swung the other way and gone alkaline, I’m going to check my pH one last time and make sure that I’d stabilized at about a 6.6. What I want you to know is that it is not abnormal at all if you’re not working on your metabolism. I have an autoimmune disorder. My kitchen is my classroom and it is also my pharmacy. I work every day diligently. I am officially at a 6.6. My pH has completely stabilized to where I started. I'm very happy with my digestive reserves. This is what’s supposed to happen. I’m glad that this happened in class. Sometimes it doesn’t work with the teacher, or it works out very well for the teacher, and this time it did. I will tell you that having an autoimmune disorder should have been turned in on the lemon law with a bleeding disorder, a chronically slow metabolism and our propensity towards hormone problems. I do work very diligently and hard on this.
Let me go over the three things that I do. One, I eat lots and lots of fruits and vegetables. In my kitchen, I have more refrigeration space for fruits and vegetables and live foods than I do pantry space. When I designed my kitchen, it was one of the things that they kept commenting on, “You need space for your pantry.” I said, “I don’t need packaged foods. I need real foods.” The other thing is I have a double freezer and that’s because my freezer is full of foods that I packaged instead of foods that somebody else has packaged. I’ve made them. I have frozen them. They’re full of herbs and spices. I always add salts and mineral base salt after I’ve cooked so I don’t break down all those amazing alkalinizing micronutrients that are found in whole salt products like sea salt and Himalayan salt. I do lots of fruits and vegetables. I do digestive aids like lemon in my water. I use apple cider vinegar. That’s a great one. I take digestive enzymes.
What Happens When You Go Over The Line?
In your Lemon Challenge Test, what happens if your body goes extremely alkaline? I retested mine. I went further, even though I had stabilized. What happens in those situations is the body has a tendency to have you hyperproducing enzymes in response to the stress response. The stress response here we’re going to call is the lemon. Imagine your body feeling grounded, strong and physically fit, and someone walks by and they nudge you. You don’t budge because again, you are strong and grounded, and they’re an opposite force to your position. It wasn’t enough to knock you over and topple you. Let’s say that maybe you’re exhausted, fatigued and have a lot of stress. In our community, we talk a lot about different things that can be stressful in the body. Someone passes you and they knock you and they can pretty much knock you down. Sometimes in those situations, you can topple over and fall down. In response, you get up and you’re angry and agitated. If you’re weak, you’ll get knocked down and you’ll stay down.
If the pH stays acidic and you can’t rebound quickly, when you’ve challenged yourself with the acidity of the lemon, what that is an indication with my clients is that there’s a lot of fatigue in the hormone system. I worked in the fertility industry for a long time. We have individuals that have elevated situations. They have irregular periods. It can be uncomfortable periods, mood swings, hot flashes and more depressive feelings. When individuals swing the other way and they have a lot of strong alkalinity response after being challenged, again those individuals typically have a lot more inflammatory responses, agitation and frustration. Both can create inflammation in the body. One has a tendency to be what we would call more fluid-filled inflammation-like swelling. The other has a tendency to be more degradative or degenerative inflammation like osteoporosis or osteopenia. It’s important that we stabilize this.
The blood will stay stable. It’s not that we have to keep the blood stable, but blood staying stable and we’re out of here. We can go acidic or we can go alkaline with our breath, tears, saliva or urine. There are ways to test how our body responds to stressors. This is one test that we do. It’s a Lemon Challenge Test. The reason why we do this very early on in our visits with people is it gives us a self-diagnostic, a way to look at how we take macromolecules or food in the first place and begin to break it down into micronutrients. If we need to add any micronutrients in like potentially digestive enzymes, there’s a way to check if probiotics would be beneficial.
In an individual on phase two of the Fast Metabolism Diet, how much do you need to keep your pH stabilized when you’re increasing your protein content? That would be again dependent on your digestive reserve. You’re going to need to get some pH strips. We have them on our website at HayliePomroy.com. You can go and get some at drugstores but they are not keto strips or blood sugar strips. We do play with those when we’re looking at some self-diagnostic stuff.
The enzymes can definitely affect the test. It’s one of the reasons why we use a non-vegan-based enzyme because the goal is not to stabilize the pH by adding something in there into that chemistry experiment that is your body that it helps to stabilize it. What we want to do is put a nutrient in there that actually helps stimulate your digestive reserve. This is the one we get out of Europe, the raw ingredient, and for me and my clinic, my goal is to help heal the metabolism, not just put something in that is a long-term crutch. I guess that’s how I would look at it. If you’re taking the enzymes, you want to make sure that you wait for two hours.
For individuals that have a stable pH, we use the enzymes a little bit differently, too. Individuals that have a tendency to stay acidic longer with The Lemon Challenge Test, we make sure that they do their digestive enzymes before meals. Individuals that swing really alkaline post The Lemon Challenge Test. We have them do their digestive enzymes between meals. It would be an hour to two hours, usually about a split to two hours between the meals, so that we have some more activation or excitation in the bile salts, in the small intestine and in the pancreas. We give back the opportunity and then we come in with the digestive enzyme. You’ll see that with individuals that take digestive enzymes to reduce inflammation and swelling.
For example, I had a client that had had psoriatic osteoarthritis and she had significant swelling and inflammation. She was prone to strep infections. It was so difficult. It took us a long time to get her digestive reserves stable and her pH stable. You can get a pH tester that is electronic and you can utilize it in the urine. The Nitrazine strips are great. They’re super inexpensive. Again, don’t put it directly in your mouth. I think there are 50 or 100 of them in here. I’m not sure but there’s a lot in these packets. I have clients that test these while we’re trying to create homeostasis and they’ll even cut these in half.
If you have a tendency to start out alkaline, we want to look at things and especially if you have elevated eosinophils, we want to look at your acidic stress and candida stress. Usually, there is some underlying pathogenic stress response in the body where the body is constantly trying to secrete proteolytic enzymes to help break down or fight potential infection. The other thing to look out for with digestive reserves when you’re testing salivary enzymes is bite and fractured amalgams, especially if you have silver fillings. We can have significant alkalinity in the saliva if an individual has a cracked filling or there’s any leaking in the filling. If their bite is off or not effective, there are dentists that specialize in that. That was important. I did a lot of craniosacral therapy and they worked inside the mouth. It was amazing at how much that helped my digestion and metabolism.
Helping Your Metabolism Stay Balanced And Healthy
Everybody’s body is different. I am a proponent of digestive enzymes and probiotics are a real staple in my life and in my health. I have taken probiotics and digestive enzymes in covered wagon times. I was probably about 20 or 22 when I was first diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder. I was diagnosed at 19 after hemorrhaging from a tonsillectomy. They thought it was hemophilia, but it’s anti-platelet antibodies. It’s actually where your body attacks its own platelets.
Because of that, through diagnostics like dark field microscopy, what I found was I had a lot of what they would call in the blood or because of having a propensity towards large platelet volume, as well as low platelets in general, if I don’t work on my enzymes, I go towards inflammation very easily. Having had a car accident when I had seven procedures from this side of my face over, sometimes you’ll see it when I get tired. This side of my face gets more tired. I’m really diligent and conscientious about that. I take digestive enzymes every day. I feel like I invest a lot of money in the food that I eat and it helps me feel like I can squeeze out and extract every micronutrient from the food that I invest in, as well as it does help me personally for inflammation.
Most individuals and clients that have had years of their metabolism being off or when individuals are under extraordinary stress, we see their digestive reserves go off. If things are feeling pretty good and your metabolism is feeling pretty good, I would say that typically a high-protein meal would be a great addition and chewing your food, making sure your bite is right, making sure all your fillings are ok. There’s the test at the dentist where you put your teeth back and forth and make sure that the bite is right. There’s a Boyd Haley test that can check where they go up into the gums and can check for any dysbiosis or bacteria in the gums. There are a lot of different things that you can test for.
For myself and simply because I find when I don’t take digestive enzymes, this is what happens to the carbohydrates that I eat, except for it’s in the back pocket of my pants. I get lumpy bumpy easily, even on the front of my shins and the back of my arms. I love the complex carbs. Again, I’m very physical and very active. I lift, I buck bales of hay and lift our feed sacks which are 40 to 60 pounds. I’m hauling a 35-foot horse trailer. I need the complex carbs. My brain needs complex carbs.
One of my favorite phases on the Fast Metabolism Diet, and typically where I use most of my weight is on phase one. When I’m super stressed, I do the phase one intensive right away. That’s where I go to. I will tell you if, for me, in my body, if I don’t do that, I don’t get this lovely rebound in my digestive reserves.
I am going to summarize a couple of things. First, I want to give you options of ways to interact more with me. We will be teaching more classes. I want to go deeper into the pH. I want to hear what happens to your body in The Lemon Challenge Test in the privacy of your home as you are checking your pH and you’re biting into a lemon. I want to see all your sweet pucker photos. I want to know what other topics you’d like me to talk about. I thought I would take you through the process as if you’re a client of mine. This is one of the first most critical steps that we make sure that you can take food and convert it into my micronutrients. Because it’s the micronutrients that stimulate the metabolism, for myself and my health, it’s one of the reasons why at a very early age, I became pretty diehard on supplementation. It’s something that my family takes advantage of. We all take our multivitamin, probiotic and enzymes. It’s something that I’ve used for my clients for strategic health. One of the ways that we don’t want to just say, “Everybody should do everything,” because your body is giving us so much data and information.
When your body is struggling, don’t be mad, frustrated, or angry anymore. Be in awe that it’s doing everything that it can to create that homeostasis in the blood and pH, and know that its struggle is actually its action in saving you and saving your life so that you can have another day to learn more about your body and your metabolism. Have that intimate conversation with your body and its biochemistry and learn how to use foods, micronutrients, herbs, and supplements, dry skin brushing and sauna-ing. All those lovely things can nurture your body to evoke change without stress. That’s what we’re going for here.
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Your body’s metabolism is intrinsically tied to its pH levels. Too acidic or too alkaline, and our body feels the effects. Join Haylie Pomroy and some very eager students in her kitchen...or should we say classroom, for a step-by-step guide on how to check your body's pH by doing the Digestive Reserves Test (commonly called the Lemon Challenge Test). Haylie will go over how to check your body's pH, what you can do to stabilize your pH, and her best tips for maintaining a healthy metabolism.
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Watch the episode here:
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pH And How It Affects Your Metabolism
I want to first welcome you to the classroom or, as I call it, my kitchen. We do have a couple of students here that are joining me in person. If any of you guys are interested at all in ever participating in an in-classroom session, make sure that you post for my team that you would like to be considered to come and raise your hand in the classroom, help me out in my kitchen, and work together in fueling your metabolism. I want to talk about a very important subject. It’s a subject that I work with all of my clients that come into the office and that we talk a lot about in our community. We’re going to talk about the pH, but like with all of my books, we’re not going to talk about the theory of pH. We’re going to actually talk about how you can do some at-home self-diagnostics. How you can challenge your body and see how it adapts to the response to that challenge, as well as ways that you can be curious and in awe of what your body tells you and what proactive approaches you can take to the variations in the pH.
The other thing that I want to cover as we’re in the classroom is I want to cover a little bit of business about different ways that you can interact with myself and my team. I hope that you already have all of your books because these are like textbooks and playbooks. These are things that actually have the practical solutions to looking at your metabolism and what’s going on in your metabolism. Maybe it’s slow or sluggish. Maybe you’ve developed some disease or dis-ease in the body because you can’t maintain homeostasis and your body’s doing the very best job that it can to create the very best health potential. Maybe we can actually exploit amazing food and incredible micronutrients to make that health potential even greater.
There’s a couple of ways to interact with us. We love having you in the classroom. It is so important that we worked together and we science geek out and discover what’s going on in our bodies. We also have a private membership section on our website. If you go to the website, HayliePomroy.com, you will see a little section that says, Members. All of you that are already members know exactly how to log on and what to do, but please join me in welcoming individuals that are considering being a member and know that I’d love to host you for 30 days for free.
Challenge Your Body Using Lemons
We do this because we feel that there is such significant value in that community where individuals can share maybe more intimate struggles, stories, and successes, trials and tribulations. Where we can work a little more practically through challenges and like a lemon challenge test that we’re going to do here in class, as well as giving the opportunity to have access when you have personal questions. We’re going to go through how to challenge your body using lemons, a very acidic substance, and seeing a way that you can test your digestive reserves.
Remember the digestive results are so important because those are what take the macromolecules like food and create the micronutrients like B vitamins and amino acids that help make all the magic and the metabolism. We’re going to be testing that. Those are the kinds of things that we do in our community. Join me free. That’s the coupon code if you’re not a member. If you’re already a member, please make a nice, lovely comment to those that are maybe just learning about their metabolism, learning about how we can actually influence the metabolism helping the metabolism affect lives. Please remember when you first started this journey, in your health and all this how awesome it felt to have people include you in the process.
The other opportunity that you have is we send several newsletters a week. As you can see by my kitchen, I’m huge about cooking and about recipes, so make sure that you’re getting our free newsletter at HayliePomroy.com. It’s simple. You sign up for the newsletter. This time we had lemon-blueberry spelt scones. They were incredible. I put on there how you could use our very popular strawberry jam preserved on top of it. I think I have lemon bars and a lot of different, great things, so make sure that you do that. The third is we’re looking for individuals that would like to work directly with us, both here in the classroom and then also in a real live event.
As we start class, I have a question for our classroom. If you would let me know, have you guys ever tested your pH before? Have you ever used a nitrogen strip and tested either urine or saliva? If you have, which one do you test? Do you typically test urine the first morning, the second void? Do you typically test saliva? What do you do when you check pH and are you familiar with it at all? I also want to know if you don’t even know what the heck we’re talking about. We’re going to start from the basics because we can always improve on what we already know and grow together so that we can again make those true lifelong changes in the body. It’s important for us because we can reach out and make sure that you get more data and more information to find out what is going on in your body.
What Is pH?
Let me talk a little bit about pH to start. When we look at pH, a lot of people talk about a spectrum. We go from being very acidic, like lemon or even vinegar. Even though we use apple cider vinegar a lot to alkalinize the body, vinegar itself is very acidic if you test it and taste it, to be very alkaline or basic is what they’re called. We have acid and we have alkaline. Alkaline is things like baking soda. Sodium bicarb is very alkaline. The ocean is very alkaline. Think of things that are very rich in minerals. They’re very alkaline. When you look at salt, table salt creates acidity in the body where sea salt can actually create alkalinity in the body.
We look at pH as a whole. What is the pH? Neutral, right in the middle is seven. Anything below a seven is considered acidic, anything above a seven is considered alkaline or basic. As I’ve gone through and watched a lot of individuals teach about the pH and the impact of modifying the pH in the body, one thing that is important that I want to make sure that we all grasp as a community is that we’re looking to create homeostasis of wellness in the body.
Our blood pH has to stay stable. The blood pH is typically between 7.35 to 7.45. We have like 1/10 of a point, which is a very small value to be able to modify the pH to create a homeostasis in the body through all of the different biochemical processes that happen. When there’s that much fragility in the ability for the blood pH to change and remember we can go from 1 to 14, but the blood pH has to stay right there, just a smidge alkaline at 7.35 to 7.45. When it only has that little bit of room there, how do we use the rest of our body to create homeostasis or strengthen that? When we go off in other areas of our body, how much stress does that cause in the blood?
The blood is the giver of life. The B cells deliver the micronutrients. We have hemoglobin, where it delivers oxygen. It is vital. It’s not something that we can do without. It’s something that if it’s healthy in the chemistry, that is healthy. It is much easier to make changes in the metabolism. With the blood pH having to stay stable, a lot of people walk around and say, “I’m so acidic. I take alkaline water to alkalinize my body.” What is it that we’re really talking about? What we’re talking about is the other excrements of our body through breath, urine and saliva. How can we use all of those variables to allow the blood to stay at homeostasis? It’s going to stay at homeostasis or you’re out of here. How do we allow it to be in homeostasis with the most harmony and the least stress as possible?
All of the organs in our bodies, the pancreas, which produces alkaline ash, the liver, which produces bile salts that are very alkalinizing, the stomach that produces stomach acids that is very acidifying, the urine, the saliva and the breath. All of those things work together, hopefully in harmony to keep that blood perfectly stable. I have a lot of doc friends that I work with that get very frustrated because, in a lot of the integrative therapies, we talk a lot about pH and the docs come in and say, “What did you do? This is crazy. People can’t modify the pH because if they did, they would die.” They’re talking about blood and what a lot of other people are talking about is other aspects of the body. That’s what I want to talk about now.
Time To Test Your pH Levels
When I test pH with clients and we start to look at it holistically. We’re going to start really basic. We test both urine and saliva and sometimes we also do breath and tears. We’re going to focus on the saliva and what that means. We’re going to start to unpackage how your body is utilizing the different organ systems, functions, hormone secretions and enzyme secretions to create that homeostasis with the least stress as possible. Remember when you put stress on the body or when stress has been put on the body, it takes more energy and effort to create homeostasis. You’re going to create homeostasis again in the bladder. We’re all out of here but how can we do it with as little effort as possible? When we talk about creating homeostasis with the least effort as possible, we can become more and more efficient at burning food for fuel as well as fat for energy and fuel. That’s why this is important.
This is something that I do with my clients very early on called The Lemon Challenge Test. It’s how your salivary or your upper GI digestive reserves are working.
We have pH strips. We have them on our website. They’re called Nitrazine strips. You can get these at most pharmacies and drug stores. They’re going to have a pH monitor and you can see there are all these different colors. The yellow takes it to a 5.5 on this one and the more the alkaline, it takes it to an 8.0. Remember that 7.0 is right in the middle. I never recommend you put them directly in your mouth. You want to use a plastic spoon, preferably not a Sterling silver spoon or aluminum spoon. Remember, when minerals are secreted and they are secreted in our silverware, silver can manipulate or change the pH readings. You want to make sure you get a plastic spoon and a Nitrazine strip. You’re going to spit in the spoon and you’re going to put the Nitrazine strip right into your saliva.
What we’re testing here is if I challenged the body, how much reserve does the body have to come back to homeostasis? In order to keep that blood stable, just a little bit alkaline, the saliva and the urine are ever so slightly acidic. If the saliva pH goes to alkaline, we’d have a tendency to break down the mucosal lining and we seem to get canker sores, ulcers and heartburn. You are more prone to fever blisters, viral outbreaks and things of that nature. If it gets very acidic, we see individuals that have a lot of cavity and a lot of gritting of the teeth.
Sometimes when your babies or your children are teething, you’ll see that their pH gets really alkaline in the saliva and they drool. I don’t know if you guys remember that when your kids were little. I do. We’re constantly wiping things up. Those are those proteolytic enzymes that are helping break down the gums so that the tooth can erupt. That’s a normal, natural, healthy process. Once our teeth are all in and we’re planning on keeping them, we want our pH to stabilize and only episodically when we eat and consume food should our enzymes change that pH.
You’re going to need to be at home to do this typically. I would like you to make sure that you have nothing in your mouth. Here I say, take the test approximately two hours after eating. In this test, you’re going to be measuring your saliva pH upwards of six times in one-minute intervals. You’re going to do this at home and you are going to come back post, and let us know what the heck went on in your body. You’re going to join the membership and we’re going to talk about it. We’re going to talk about what to eat about it.
Getting started, what you want to do is you want to test your pH. Again, I have not eaten for two hours. I’m testing my saliva pH prior to eating anything. I just tested my pH if I go over here, I’m right about between a 6.6 and a 6.8, maybe even a little more of a 6.5, 6.6. I think it’s wishful thinking. I’d like to see myself at a 6.8. That gives me a stable pH. What are my salivary enzymes doing? Are they acidic? Are they alkaline? When I haven’t eaten, I haven’t consumed food, what’s my baseline? You’re going to write that right on your sheet. Your pH prior to testing, I’m going to call mine a 6.6.
What we’re looking for here is whatever your baseline is, even though the ideal is a 6.8. Whatever your baseline is, how strong, how invested, or how secure is your body is in that number. The way we’re going to do that is we’re going to expose the body to a lot of acid. Again, remember lemons are acidic, vegetables are alkaline-forming, but one thing that I want to tell you is that even though lemons are acidic, you’ll see what happens in our pH challenge test. The body stimulates alkaline ash to create homeostasis. Again, it’s not what you consume, it’s what the micronutrient evokes in the body as a response to the consumption of that.
For example, I use a lot of lemon water, but I add in this Mason jar 1/4 cup of apple cider vinegar as a digestive aid. I would probably drink this about a cup every day. One of the reasons why I like to make this in a large batch and why I leave the lemon peels in there is one of the reasons why lemon stimulates alkaline ash is because there are a lot of bioflavonoids in the lemon peel, rutin, vitamin C, but things that stimulate the pancreas to produce alkaline ash. Remember that pancreas is so important in metabolism because the pancreas also produces insulin. It helps to stabilize blood sugar. It gets you into that sweet spot where you burn fat. You don’t store sugar in your fat for later.
When I first consume lemon, you will see I’ll test my pH and typically what happens immediately afterward is the body is very acidic. The saliva is very acidic and the goal here is for my body to very quickly rebound back to a 6.6. We’ll see what happens. Sometimes the body will rebound and swing the other way and go very alkaline. That’s very important to us. It’ll tell us a lot about your body. Sometimes the body will swing the other way and have a difficult time coming out of that acidity and will take minute after minute of testing where our bodies can’t rebound or create homeostasis from that challenge very quickly.
Doing The Lemon Challenge Test
In a second, I’m going to do the actual Lemon Challenge Test. I wanted to talk to you about the pH really quick again. Remember in order to create stability in the pH, we sometimes see that people talk a lot about acidity in the body. We can also go the other direction and have alkalinity in the body when you’re testing against saliva or urine. Alkalinity can mean a hyperproduction in enzymes, secretion of minerals at a rapid rate, so think of demineralization, things like osteoporosis and osteopenia are very important to test the pH, their organs and enzyme promotion like the pancreas, the kidneys, the adrenals, if you’re extremely stressed. Remember those are the glands that help regulate that homeostasis with ease. If you’ve been stressed for a long period of time, they will create homeostasis through crisis hormones, not through feel-good hormones. It’s important that we measure and check this.
This is a great way for me to be able to test the pH. I am going to take a bite. I already feel my parotid gland starting to constrict and the salivary enzymes starting to form in my mouth just from smelling this lemon. I’m going to go ahead and take a bite. For those of you that are doing this with me, I’m sorry. I’m going to check my pH. I want to show you guys the difference in my saliva pH. I’m going to see if I can set a timer here. We can do this a little quicker. I’m going to give myself a two-minute window. Typically, when we check this, we check it at the one-minute mark, the two-minute mark. You’ll see on your sheet, 3, 4, 5, and 6 minutes.
I want to show you before the lemon and after the lemon. You’ll see that there’s a bit of acidity in my saliva right now. When that goes off, we’re going to recheck it. My dream is that I have a lot of digestive reserves and that I’m maintaining the homeostasis in my blood because the rest of my body has the minerals, the enzyme secretion, the hormone balance. I had enough alkaline vegetables. It’s not that the vegetable themselves, that their pH is alkaline. What happens with vegetables is that they have phytonutrients or live enzymes in them. When you consume, especially in a raw state, it helps your body have the enzymes that create homeostasis. If you ever thought that your vegetables or your fruits still don’t have enzymes, try bruising them and watch how quickly with that microtrauma they start to break down in those areas. That is part of the live enzymatic process in your fruits and vegetables.
When you’re testing the saliva pH, why is it so important that your salivary enzymes stay stable or are functional and ever so slightly alkaline? That is because it is the first place that your body takes the macronutrients, protein, and converts them into amino acids, complex carbohydrates and SATs and turns those into micronutrients and extracts it. Remember, it’s the micronutrients that stimulate the metabolism. When I have a client come in and we do The Lemon Challenge Test, it’s interesting what we find. Remember ultimately, we do holistic pH testing before exercise, after exercise, before meals, and after meals. We do blood sugar testing and things of that nature holistically to look at the entire system. The first thing that I want to know is does this individual has the capacity to take food, preferably high-quality food and convert it into the micronutrients necessary to fuel the metabolism? Because if this part isn’t stable and we don’t correct this early on, it makes it extremely difficult to metabolize the macronutrients.
I find those clients that come in and they tried every diet and they’re eating incredibly healthy food, on the other spectrum they have created an unhealthy relationship with food neurochemically where their body doesn’t like the taste of fruits and vegetables. Their palette is very bland. We’ve got to revitalize or stimulate those micronutrients. Those are the enzymes that can create the stability that can break those down. As soon as this one goes off, there we go. We do one more test. I’m going to test my pH.
Interpreting The Results
At the first testing, I was at a 5.0. We are now two minutes in. I am already at a 6.4. I’m proud of my digestive reserve. I want to give you three things that I do to enhance my digestive reserve. We can test it one more time because I want to make sure I don’t overcompensate. I have a tendency to do that a little bit. I have a tendency to try to be a little bit of an overachiever. My enzymes have FOMO, Fear Of Missing Out, fear of not doing it aggressively well. I’m going to go one more minute here. I’m going to test it one more time and make sure that it’s stabilized. It’s not going to swing the other direction because that’s just as important of information.
What I want you to do is when you test your pH and you do your Lemon Challenge Test, I want you to make sure that you’re posting what happened, what will happen right after you tested the lemon, what happened at the one-minute mark, two-minute mark, all the way to the six-minute mark. They say if you aren’t stabilized by the six-minute mark, we’ll have you go ahead and wait 30 minutes and test it or we do it in five-minute increments in order for us to make sure that you actually stabilized.
Keeping The Balance
There are three super important things that I do. Number one is I’m very conscientious about chewing my food. Remember when you chew your food, you’re not only stimulating all the salivary enzymes, but by breaking down those macronutrients into tiny particles, you aid the metabolism. You speed the metabolism up so much by simply chewing your food because you already delivered them into the stomach and for support with the pancreas, the liver, the gallbladder in a much smaller particle. It increases the surface area for your body and your enzymes to be able to attack those macromolecules and release the micronutrients from them. Chew your food. "Happy Birthday to Me" is the song that I sing between bites. I work diligently on that.
Here is the other thing is I do support my body with digestive aids. I use things like lemon. There’s the minute mark. To make sure I haven’t swung the other way and gone alkaline, I’m going to check my pH one last time and make sure that I’d stabilized at about a 6.6. What I want you to know is that it is not abnormal at all if you’re not working on your metabolism. I have an autoimmune disorder. My kitchen is my classroom and it is also my pharmacy. I work every day diligently. I am officially at a 6.6. My pH has completely stabilized to where I started. I'm very happy with my digestive reserves. This is what’s supposed to happen. I’m glad that this happened in class. Sometimes it doesn’t work with the teacher, or it works out very well for the teacher, and this time it did. I will tell you that having an autoimmune disorder should have been turned in on the lemon law with a bleeding disorder, a chronically slow metabolism and our propensity towards hormone problems. I do work very diligently and hard on this.
Let me go over the three things that I do. One, I eat lots and lots of fruits and vegetables. In my kitchen, I have more refrigeration space for fruits and vegetables and live foods than I do pantry space. When I designed my kitchen, it was one of the things that they kept commenting on, “You need space for your pantry.” I said, “I don’t need packaged foods. I need real foods.” The other thing is I have a double freezer and that’s because my freezer is full of foods that I packaged instead of foods that somebody else has packaged. I’ve made them. I have frozen them. They’re full of herbs and spices. I always add salts and mineral base salt after I’ve cooked so I don’t break down all those amazing alkalinizing micronutrients that are found in whole salt products like sea salt and Himalayan salt. I do lots of fruits and vegetables. I do digestive aids like lemon in my water. I use apple cider vinegar. That’s a great one. I take digestive enzymes.
What Happens When You Go Over The Line?
In your Lemon Challenge Test, what happens if your body goes extremely alkaline? I retested mine. I went further, even though I had stabilized. What happens in those situations is the body has a tendency to have you hyperproducing enzymes in response to the stress response. The stress response here we’re going to call is the lemon. Imagine your body feeling grounded, strong and physically fit, and someone walks by and they nudge you. You don’t budge because again, you are strong and grounded, and they’re an opposite force to your position. It wasn’t enough to knock you over and topple you. Let’s say that maybe you’re exhausted, fatigued and have a lot of stress. In our community, we talk a lot about different things that can be stressful in the body. Someone passes you and they knock you and they can pretty much knock you down. Sometimes in those situations, you can topple over and fall down. In response, you get up and you’re angry and agitated. If you’re weak, you’ll get knocked down and you’ll stay down.
If the pH stays acidic and you can’t rebound quickly, when you’ve challenged yourself with the acidity of the lemon, what that is an indication with my clients is that there’s a lot of fatigue in the hormone system. I worked in the fertility industry for a long time. We have individuals that have elevated situations. They have irregular periods. It can be uncomfortable periods, mood swings, hot flashes and more depressive feelings. When individuals swing the other way and they have a lot of strong alkalinity response after being challenged, again those individuals typically have a lot more inflammatory responses, agitation and frustration. Both can create inflammation in the body. One has a tendency to be what we would call more fluid-filled inflammation-like swelling. The other has a tendency to be more degradative or degenerative inflammation like osteoporosis or osteopenia. It’s important that we stabilize this.
The blood will stay stable. It’s not that we have to keep the blood stable, but blood staying stable and we’re out of here. We can go acidic or we can go alkaline with our breath, tears, saliva or urine. There are ways to test how our body responds to stressors. This is one test that we do. It’s a Lemon Challenge Test. The reason why we do this very early on in our visits with people is it gives us a self-diagnostic, a way to look at how we take macromolecules or food in the first place and begin to break it down into micronutrients. If we need to add any micronutrients in like potentially digestive enzymes, there’s a way to check if probiotics would be beneficial.
In an individual on phase two of the Fast Metabolism Diet, how much do you need to keep your pH stabilized when you’re increasing your protein content? That would be again dependent on your digestive reserve. You’re going to need to get some pH strips. We have them on our website at HayliePomroy.com. You can go and get some at drugstores but they are not keto strips or blood sugar strips. We do play with those when we’re looking at some self-diagnostic stuff.
The enzymes can definitely affect the test. It’s one of the reasons why we use a non-vegan-based enzyme because the goal is not to stabilize the pH by adding something in there into that chemistry experiment that is your body that it helps to stabilize it. What we want to do is put a nutrient in there that actually helps stimulate your digestive reserve. This is the one we get out of Europe, the raw ingredient, and for me and my clinic, my goal is to help heal the metabolism, not just put something in that is a long-term crutch. I guess that’s how I would look at it. If you’re taking the enzymes, you want to make sure that you wait for two hours.
For individuals that have a stable pH, we use the enzymes a little bit differently, too. Individuals that have a tendency to stay acidic longer with The Lemon Challenge Test, we make sure that they do their digestive enzymes before meals. Individuals that swing really alkaline post The Lemon Challenge Test. We have them do their digestive enzymes between meals. It would be an hour to two hours, usually about a split to two hours between the meals, so that we have some more activation or excitation in the bile salts, in the small intestine and in the pancreas. We give back the opportunity and then we come in with the digestive enzyme. You’ll see that with individuals that take digestive enzymes to reduce inflammation and swelling.
For example, I had a client that had had psoriatic osteoarthritis and she had significant swelling and inflammation. She was prone to strep infections. It was so difficult. It took us a long time to get her digestive reserves stable and her pH stable. You can get a pH tester that is electronic and you can utilize it in the urine. The Nitrazine strips are great. They’re super inexpensive. Again, don’t put it directly in your mouth. I think there are 50 or 100 of them in here. I’m not sure but there’s a lot in these packets. I have clients that test these while we’re trying to create homeostasis and they’ll even cut these in half.
If you have a tendency to start out alkaline, we want to look at things and especially if you have elevated eosinophils, we want to look at your acidic stress and candida stress. Usually, there is some underlying pathogenic stress response in the body where the body is constantly trying to secrete proteolytic enzymes to help break down or fight potential infection. The other thing to look out for with digestive reserves when you’re testing salivary enzymes is bite and fractured amalgams, especially if you have silver fillings. We can have significant alkalinity in the saliva if an individual has a cracked filling or there’s any leaking in the filling. If their bite is off or not effective, there are dentists that specialize in that. That was important. I did a lot of craniosacral therapy and they worked inside the mouth. It was amazing at how much that helped my digestion and metabolism.
Helping Your Metabolism Stay Balanced And Healthy
Everybody’s body is different. I am a proponent of digestive enzymes and probiotics are a real staple in my life and in my health. I have taken probiotics and digestive enzymes in covered wagon times. I was probably about 20 or 22 when I was first diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder. I was diagnosed at 19 after hemorrhaging from a tonsillectomy. They thought it was hemophilia, but it’s anti-platelet antibodies. It’s actually where your body attacks its own platelets.
Because of that, through diagnostics like dark field microscopy, what I found was I had a lot of what they would call in the blood or because of having a propensity towards large platelet volume, as well as low platelets in general, if I don’t work on my enzymes, I go towards inflammation very easily. Having had a car accident when I had seven procedures from this side of my face over, sometimes you’ll see it when I get tired. This side of my face gets more tired. I’m really diligent and conscientious about that. I take digestive enzymes every day. I feel like I invest a lot of money in the food that I eat and it helps me feel like I can squeeze out and extract every micronutrient from the food that I invest in, as well as it does help me personally for inflammation.
Most individuals and clients that have had years of their metabolism being off or when individuals are under extraordinary stress, we see their digestive reserves go off. If things are feeling pretty good and your metabolism is feeling pretty good, I would say that typically a high-protein meal would be a great addition and chewing your food, making sure your bite is right, making sure all your fillings are ok. There’s the test at the dentist where you put your teeth back and forth and make sure that the bite is right. There’s a Boyd Haley test that can check where they go up into the gums and can check for any dysbiosis or bacteria in the gums. There are a lot of different things that you can test for.
For myself and simply because I find when I don’t take digestive enzymes, this is what happens to the carbohydrates that I eat, except for it’s in the back pocket of my pants. I get lumpy bumpy easily, even on the front of my shins and the back of my arms. I love the complex carbs. Again, I’m very physical and very active. I lift, I buck bales of hay and lift our feed sacks which are 40 to 60 pounds. I’m hauling a 35-foot horse trailer. I need the complex carbs. My brain needs complex carbs.
One of my favorite phases on the Fast Metabolism Diet, and typically where I use most of my weight is on phase one. When I’m super stressed, I do the phase one intensive right away. That’s where I go to. I will tell you if, for me, in my body, if I don’t do that, I don’t get this lovely rebound in my digestive reserves.
I am going to summarize a couple of things. First, I want to give you options of ways to interact more with me. We will be teaching more classes. I want to go deeper into the pH. I want to hear what happens to your body in The Lemon Challenge Test in the privacy of your home as you are checking your pH and you’re biting into a lemon. I want to see all your sweet pucker photos. I want to know what other topics you’d like me to talk about. I thought I would take you through the process as if you’re a client of mine. This is one of the first most critical steps that we make sure that you can take food and convert it into my micronutrients. Because it’s the micronutrients that stimulate the metabolism, for myself and my health, it’s one of the reasons why at a very early age, I became pretty diehard on supplementation. It’s something that my family takes advantage of. We all take our multivitamin, probiotic and enzymes. It’s something that I’ve used for my clients for strategic health. One of the ways that we don’t want to just say, “Everybody should do everything,” because your body is giving us so much data and information.
When your body is struggling, don’t be mad, frustrated, or angry anymore. Be in awe that it’s doing everything that it can to create that homeostasis in the blood and pH, and know that its struggle is actually its action in saving you and saving your life so that you can have another day to learn more about your body and your metabolism. Have that intimate conversation with your body and its biochemistry and learn how to use foods, micronutrients, herbs, and supplements, dry skin brushing and sauna-ing. All those lovely things can nurture your body to evoke change without stress. That’s what we’re going for here.
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