60 Diet Wise
often enough. How often is enough? The interval can vary from as little
as one or two hours to forty-eight hours or more; on rare occasions it can
exceed seventy-two hours. Remember that if you suffer from constipation
or diarrhea these intervals can vary up or down. I have seen patients who
start getting a headache and feeling depressed if they don’t get a cup of
coffee every couple of hours or so – just look at some of the people in
the queue at Starbuck’s! You’ll see plenty of tense faces and irritable body
language!
Now you may understand the very common experience: that of
feeling pretty rough first thing in the morning. Many people wake tired and
irritable and are slow to start their day. It seems that until they have eaten
breakfast, they behave like a bear with a sore head. Well, by the time we
awake, many of us have been off food some 10 – 14 hours. That’s easily
enough to set up withdrawal symptoms. That oh-so common feeling is a classic
diagnostic sign of one or more hidden allergies.
The victim eats some wheat (toast), corn (cereal), soaked with
milk and sugar (two of the commonest culprits), and drinks a coffee or tea
(caffeine); one or more of these fixes the withdrawal symptoms, winds up
the individual to full capacity and off they go, fully restored for a working
day. Or at least for a few hours, until they need some more coffee, a cookie,
or whatever!
The proof of what I am sharing with you here is so easy to establish.
You’ll do it for yourself, following the plan in the book. When you give up
the offending food or foods, you’ll probably have some terrible withdrawals
at first. But then, after about five days, you will end up bouncing out of bed
with zest and hit the ground running each morning. Then you will know for
sure, I’m right.
Selye’s General Theory of Adaptation
These observed food masking effects are easy to explain, using Hans Selye’s
General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS for short). If you haven’t read Selye’s
very capable book, The Stress of Life, you should. He postulates three stages
in coping with stress. This progression would be exhibited by any organism
in response to any form of stress, from an amoeba living in slightly tainted
water all the way to a pressurized executive in a demanding, harassing job
that is giving him ulcers.
At first the organism reacts strongly to the new unpleasant stimulus:
it fights it, and it is this struggle that we recognize in terms of “symptoms.”