September 15, 2010

Podcast #112 from https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/2010/09/episode-112-is-there-a-link-between-emotions-and-injuries/

Introduction: In this podcast: how emotions cause injuries, can you lose weight with walking, what exactly is an interval, platform shoes for running, and are high fat diets healthy?

Ben: Hello hello folks, it’s Ben Greenfield. About 5:30 in the morning here and I’m going to sip my cup of morning coffee. My morning cup of decaf coffee with a little bit of cinnamon added. A little treat that I wake up to every morning. Well today we have a pretty cool interview with a guy named Dr. Bradley Nelson. I had no idea what to expect going into this interview and I was pretty shocked at the results of the interview and I’ll share more with you after I play the interview for you and you’re just going to have to sit back and listen in. Be prepared to be open-minded for today’s podcast, please. Now we’ll also have a Listener Q and A and before that a few special announcements. Actually just a couple more special announcements than usual but something for everyone in the special announcements and then we’ll move on to this week’s Listener Q and A.

Ben: Alright, remember if you have a question there are many ways that you could ask it. You could go over to Twitter.com and if you go to Twitter.com and follow Ben Greenfield or go to www.twitter.com/bengreenfield, you can ask your question there. you can also call toll free to 8772099439. You can Skype to username pacificfit or you can email [email protected]. Alright, one more sip of coffee and then we’re going to launch in.

Jarrett asks: I’ve been eating healthy and I exercise almost daily, but my exercise is mainly walking and jogging the streets and blocks around my neighborhood and I mainly go without any set path in mind. Is the reason I’ve been at a plateau with my weight because my body is used to walking and jogging the blocks? Do I have to start to run to lose more weight?

Ben answers: Well Jarrett, this is something that I would classify as physical activity. Not as exercise. And the reason for that is, some of you may have heard me say in the podcast before, is that most folks have been walking since a pretty early age and the body is very efficient at walking at normal speeds. Your body doesn’t burn many calories walking at normal speeds, either the time you’re walking or when you finish walking. Now for those of you who listened in to the power walking interview that I did a couple of weeks ago, there was information revealed in that interview that suggested that when you are power walking, you can burn just as many calories, if not more calories than running. As a matter of fact, a recent article that just came out in the National Strength and Conditioning Research Journal showed that the body actually produces more free radical activity and more evidence of metabolic activity at the pace of walking that’s right before you start to run. So if you’re walking at a very uncomfortable pace like a power walking style race, then technically you could burn a lot of calories and you could do some pretty good weight loss at that pace. But most people don’t walk at that pace. I would say probably about 1% of the people that I see walking are actually power walking at a pace that’s fast enough to result in significant weight loss. I’m not completely knocking walking. No rhyme intended but if that’s all you have available to do, it may be ok. However there are forms of exercise that are going to allow you to burn more calories than walking and be less metabolically efficient than walking, because remember metabolic efficiency is your enemy when you’re exercising. You want to choose things that are metabolically inefficient. That’s why even a triathlete who always swims and bikes and runs, you find yourself wanting to shed a few pounds, you may want to throw something like a pickup basketball game or some tennis or some weightlifting in. Throw something that your body’s not super used to because your body as a triathlete gets pretty used to swimming and cycling and running and those activities begin to burn fewer calories the longer that you are a triathlete. That incidentally is why people who have been triathletes for 10 or 15 years, they’re usually very good at triathlons because they’re so metabolically efficient. That’s why a lot of the Ironman champions are older individuals because they’re very metabolically efficient at those skills. Now to answer your question, Jarrett. When you’re saying that you’re walking without any set path in mind, that’s a big red flag for me. Any workout that you do, whether it’s walking, swimming, lifting, whatever you have to go in with a game plan. For example, you can say ok, I’m going to walk 3 blocks and I’m going to run 1 block at a fast pace and I’m going to do 8 repeats of that. That is an exercise session with a set goal in mind. If you have that set path, that set goal in mind as you start, if you walk briskly – if you include running which is more metabolically inefficient then you will find that you may notice more results from these walks you’ve been going on. So, next question is from Steve.

Steve asks: I do weekly bike intervals with my triathlon and road group consisting of mile loops with recovery loops at an easy pace. I also do weekly run intervals on the track which consist of a distance like ¼ mile sprint followed by a ¼ mile recovery lap at an easy pace. In my masters swim class, however, intervals mean that you  swim say a 100 meters and then you rest at the wall for whatever time you have left in that interval. It seems like the equivalent for the running and the cycling would be swim a 100 at sprint pace and then swim a 100 at recovery pace. Why is the term intervals used so differently in these different sports?

Ben answers: So basically what Steve is asking is it seems when he’s biking, he’s biking for a set period of time and then doing active recovery and the same when he runs. He’s running for a set period of time and then doing active recovery. But when he’s swimming, he’s doing interval training or a hard set and instead of doing active recovery, he’s just resting at the wall. Well one of the primary reasons for this is if you look at the history of competitive running and competitive cycling for distance, for something like a triathlon, a lot of the workouts that are associated with those are done for longer interval periods and anytime you’re doing a longer interval, you don’t require as much recovery and you don’t require being completely still for recovery because long intervals don’t allow you to go hard enough or fast enough to need complete rest. If you look at the history of competitive swimming, competitive swimming primarily is slightly shorter effort. Even if you look at an Ironman triathlon, swimming doesn’t comprise a very large portion of an event like that and competitive swimming in general covers shorter distances for shorter periods of time than endurance running and cycling. So because of that you’re typically doing shorter, more high intensity intervals and those high intensity intervals require either longer rest periods or rest periods in which you’re not moving quite as actively. However, one of the things that I would caution you against is that a lot of masters swim classes are not necessarily designed for endurance swimming. They’re designed for masters competition at the 50, the 100, the 200, the 400 or even the 1000 meter effort and not necessarily the 1.2 or the 2.4 mile effort. So although I personally do swim intervals that do consist of 50 or 100 or 200 meter efforts followed by resting at the wall, I also on a weekly basis include a swim session that really is continuous swimming with active rest for the intervals. And I want to tell you about one of the workouts that I do. This is one of the workouts that appears pretty frequently in the Triathlon Dominator program. But you get in the water and you swim 100 meter, a 200 meter, a 300 meter, a 400 meter and a 500 meter effort at kind of an aerobic pace, close to race pace. But then in between each of those efforts you do 100 meters hard, all out. So basically what you’re doing is hard endurance mixed with easy endurance efforts and then you can ladder back down. And I’ll do that continuously for an hour without stopping. For a full 60 minutes and I’m never resting at the wall. Now when combined with traditional interval training like the type that you’re doing in your masters swim class, that can actually really assist with building endurance more properly for the 1.2 or 2.4 mile swim that you might encounter in a triathlon. So I hope that answers your question. Next question is from spoonsister and spoonsister asks via Twitter…

spoonsister asks: What about all these basketball strengthening shoes? Walking might be ok but couldn’t they jack up your running gait?

Ben answers: Now what spoonsister is referring to are the shoes you may have seen advertised in magazines, especially men’s fitness or men’s health magazines or sporting magazines in which the shoe has a platform underneath the toe and so essentially what the shoe does is cause you to walk around on your tip toes all day long or whenever you’re wearing the shoes. There are also specific training sessions that come in a program that accompany those shoes that have you doing jumping and running and sprinting activities in those shoes. So the idea is if you think about something like the Newton running shoe that we talked about a few weeks ago on the show, the Newton running shoe shifts the rotation of the shoe slightly forward so that you’re staying just a little bit on your mid to front foot. Well these shoes take that concept and put it on steroids – these basketball strengthening shoes, by actually putting your toes up on a platform and really elevating your heel so that there’s a ton of calf stimulation and calf work being done, the idea being that because your calves really assist you in the jumping motion, the stronger that your calves and the extensors of your legs are, the higher you’re going to be able to jump. And they actually do work pretty effectively.  The problem is that if you start to use these as a triathlete or an endurance athlete then you’re going to be teaching yourselves to be using your calves quite a bit and that’s actually metabolically inefficient. We talked about inefficiency earlier. We’re going to talk about it again. When you’re using your calves as you run, you end up using one of the weaker leg muscles in your body especially when it comes to running for distances. You want to be running using your glutes and your hamstrings. When you run using your calves, you tend to prematurely fatigue your lower limbs and technically your running form is inefficient if you’re constantly pushing off, utilizing your calves. As a matter of fact in the book Chi Running which is a book by Danny Dreyer about how to run more efficiently, one of the techniques that he teaches is how to keep the calf relaxed and how to keep essentially the area from your knee to the end of your foot fairly relaxed as you’re running. So it’s just swinging underneath your body and most of the work is being done by your butt and your hamstrings. For basketball or for explosive sports, these types of platform strengthening shoes would be good. If you want to save your money, you could just strap a 2×4 to your shoe or walk around on your toes, but ultimately what it comes down to is you have to consider the metabolic needs of the sport that you’re doing before you rush out and purchase a piece of training equipment that really might be training you to use the muscles that you might not be want to be using for the sport you’re competing in. Now the next question is from Graeme.

Graeme asks: As part of your Bioletics testing protocols they told you that you were a Protein type or Fast Oxidiser. (For those of you who have no clue what Graeme just said, go back and listen to any of the recent episodes with Bioletics. Just go to www.bengreenfieldfitness.com and do a search for “Bioletics.) Have you decided to amend your diet based on this? And specifically what are your thoughts on adopting this recommended diet which includes higher proportions of animal fats than a lot of other diets. Metabolic typing like this seem to discount cholesterol concerns as a major issue.

Ben answers: Well, the first part of your question Graeme is easy to answer. I have drastically amended my diet. I have cut almost all grains and processed carbohydrates out of my diet. And I consume primarily a plant, protein and fat-based diet. And I have to tell you that I feel fantastic on that. It’s not for everyone. That’s the idea behind metabolic typing. There are carbohydrate types out there. My wife is a perfect example. She feels horrible and her energy levels just drop when she’s not doing things like salad and toast, but I simply do not operate well on those types of foods. Now, the other part of your question is a little bit more involved, the fact that a higher protein type of diet does typically include higher proportions of animal fats than a lot of other diets and seems to discount cholesterol concerns. Well, this is basically based on one giant myth. The fact that saturated fat and cholesterol might be bad for you. I want to throw a few facts at you Graeme. First is that there has never been – and you can go research this if you like – there’s never been a single study that actually proves that saturated fats cause heart disease. I’m going to say that again. There’s never been a single study that proves that saturated fat causes heart disease. As a matter of fact, when heart disease rates were skyrocketing in the mid 1900s, when tons of heart disease was occurring among the population, consumption of animal fats was actually going down. But consumption of vegetable oils was going up, suggesting that the problem might be not with natural based saturated fats from animals but possibly from highly processed vegetable oils that have high amounts of inflammatory compounds in them including free radicals. And those inflammatory compounds are what can actually cause the wrong type of cholesterol build-up in the arteries or the ability for plaques to form and become dislodged. You’re basically talking about arterial inflammation causing heart disease but that arterial inflammation not coming from saturated fats from animals, but rather highly processed vegetable oils. I’m not done yet. About 50% of people who have heart attacks have normal cholesterol or low cholesterol. And there’s actually been autopsies performed on heart attack victims and typically they’re finding plaque filled arteries in people whose cholesterol has been extremely low. In one case in an autopsy, they found someone with cholesterol as low as 115, which is super low for cholesterol and they still had a plaque filled artery. So it’s not necessarily high cholesterol that’s causing these plaque filled arteries or this cardiovascular disease. Now, if you look at say vegetarians who aren’t eating a lot of animal fats, well Asian-Indians are one of the populations who are highly vegetarians. One of the most vegetarian populations on the planet. Half of them are vegetarians and they have one of the highest rates of heart disease in the entire world. They’re vegetarians but they’re consuming, still, high amounts of vegetable based oils and starchy foods. Well you can then go on to look at some of the benefits of saturated fats and animal fats. There have been studies done on kids who’re suffering from ADDD and kids suffering from ADDD put on a low carb, higher saturated fats diet have actually been successfully treated and the reason for that is because your brain releases on fat. Your brain needs fat, it’s made of fat and you actually have to have adequate fat levels in order for your brain to progress. That’s why my kids everyday get flax oil. We actually used to rub it into their feet when they were little babies. They could get flax oil absorbed and they’re smart kids if I don’t say so myself. Same thing with epileptics, epileptics – similar to ADDD, people suffering with ADDD can find success by using a diet that’s lower on sugar and starch and higher in saturated animal fats. There have been studies that have been done on that as well. Just because you get a lot more stabilization neutrally in the brain from consuming these types of fats. Saturated fats and the cancer link – that is pretty statistically weak. There’s not much research that shows that high levels of saturated fats can cause cancer even though you get a lot of doctors telling you that. At the same time however, there is a very big link between sugar and cancer. Go back and listen to the interview that we did with Nancy Appleton called Suicide By Sugar. Go to www.bengreenfieldfitness.com and do a search for “suicide by sugar,” you’ll learn the link between sugar and cancer. Saturated fat and cholesterol are essential for testosterone. We get a lot of guys walking around trying to limit their saturated fat levels. We get a lot of guys walking around with low testosterone levels.  And so, you know, even if you’re vegan or vegetarian you need to be figuring out how to get good levels of saturated fat into your diet. Now I personally am up to 4 pharmaceutical grade Omega 3 fatty acid capsules a day. Two tablespoons of the Udo’s Oil which is like a flax and a hemp based oil and also a pretty good serving of animal fats on a weekly basis. And I have to tell you that I feel fantastic. My actual body fat percentage, I’m at about 5% body fat but I’m consuming at this point about 35% fat in my daily diet and I’ve noticed that my body and my recovery and my performance has actually improved. So I don’t just want to use myself as a case study, that’s why I threw some of those other anecdotes and facts at you. But ultimately what it comes down to is that cholesterol concerns and saturated fat concerns are not as big an issue as a lot of people make them to be.

So that being said, we are going to go ahead and take a complete 180 and go into a talk about emotions and injuries with Dr. Bradley Nelson. After the interview I’m going to give you an update, not only on how I felt after the emotion coding session with Dr. Bradley Nelson that you’re about to hear but I’m also going to tell you about my decision to follow up on the blood glucose testing recommended by Bioletics and let you know how the test – like the A1C test that we talked about with Bioletics for looking at your blood sugar actually corresponds to daily blood sugar measurements. So we will do all that after this week’s featured topic.

Hey folks, this is Ben Greenfield and as many of you know, I do some personal training, some fitness training with clientele in the area in which I live and I have worked with one gentleman for quite some time who has struggled with heart issues. Specifically he’s got some issues with the node on his heart that affects the electrical pulses that cause his heart as regularly as it should. And it’s something we take into account and track on a regular basis while I train him. And a couple of weeks ago, I was over at his house putting him under an exercise session and as I usually do, I was monitoring his pulse and his heart rate and noticed it was more regular than usual. That it was skipping beats far less regularly than it used to and also going into a very rapid heart rate far less regularly than I’d been used to seeing it. And I asked him what he’d been doing, if he’d been taking magnesium, what type of nutrition supplementation he’d been following – and he said he’d simply been speaking with a doctor on the phone and specifically speaking with a doctor who uses emotions and the key to emotions using something he calls the Emotion Code to help people out with their physical and  their mental response and he’ll do a much better job explaining it than I will. But I was able to get this guy on the phone, find out who he was and get him on the phone. His name is Dr. Bradley Nelson and he’s actually a national lecturer on topics such as natural healing of chronic illness. And he treats people from all over North America who suffer from chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia and it turns out that he actually has a book as well and I’ll put a link to his book in the Shownotes. I’ll put a link to his website in the Shownotes. I’ll give you a chance to really look him up and get in touch with him, but we’re also going to talk with him today, with Dr. Brad Nelson. So Dr. Nelson, thank you for coming on the call.

Dr. Bradley Nelson: Well thank you Ben, it’s great to be here.

Ben: So I guess the very first place to start before we talk about what type of work that you do is what exactly is your background in terms of health and how did you become so interested in this unique field that you’re now practicing in?

Dr. Bradley Nelson: Well, I’ve been a holistic chiropractic physician for 22 years. I practiced for 17 years down in Southern California in Laguna Miguel. Left practice in 2004 to write this book called The Emotion Code which is a method of finding and releasing emotional baggage and what I found when I was in practice was our emotional baggage is much more real than we had ever imagined and that it is responsible for causing all kinds of problems for us, all kinds of physical problems. A great example is this gentleman that you’re talking about who’s having all the problems with the heart palpitations and the heart racing tachycardia and everything else. We were able to make a big difference with him, at a distance by the way, by releasing these emotional energies.

Ben: And this was over the phone.

Dr. Bradley Nelson: Yeah, exactly. It was over the phone. I live down fairly close to Las Vegas and he’s up in Idaho somewhere.

Ben: He’s actually about 15 minutes from me up here in Liberty Lake, Washington.

Dr. Bradley Nelson: Right. Well one of the things that we teach in the Emotion Code is that energy knows no barriers of distance and so we’re able to – we teach methods in the book of how you can actually release these emotional energies. These trapped emotions, we call them, on a person that’s right there with you or on a person who is far away on the other side of the planet or in the next state or the next country or whatever. It doesn’t seem to make any difference at all. And that’s one of the exciting things that we’re learning about energy work, is that you don’t actually have to be there to have it done. Now, I teach seminars around the world. We were in Europe for 6 weeks this year teaching, and we’re going to be in Australia, New Zealand Singapore in October. We’ll be in New York for Sept. 10 and 11 and then Chicago the week after that, but basically what we teach is this very, very simple method of releasing these trapped emotions. And like I say, my experience is that these trapped emotions are implicated in 90% of our physical and mental emotional problems. If you’re depressed, there are trapped emotions that are creating that. If you’ve got some kind of physical illness, if you’re dealing with – well maybe you’re not quite able to perform as you think you should be able to, maybe for example you’re a tennis player and you’ve had some difficulties and maybe something traumatic happened. Maybe you tore a hamstring or something and now you’re just having a really hard time getting back into the game and getting back to where you were and it feels like there’s something mental almost blocking you. Well guess what? There is. And it’s easy to get rid of these things.

Ben: Now I think most people wouldn’t deny that bottled up stress, so to speak, bottled up emotions can definitely affect your biology. For example, probably a simple example I can give is your blood pressure but do you have some examples of how emotions can specifically affect things like your physical response or even the example of the gentleman I mentioned earlier. How does that actually work?

Dr. Bradley Nelson: Well, to really understand that, you need to understand what these trapped emotions really are and to understand what they are, you need to understand what our bodies really are and if you look at your hand, your hand looks pretty solid. You’ve seen that hand before and you recognize it. If you needed to, you could pick it out of a lineup. If you magnify that hand 100 times, it wouldn’t look the same anymore at all. And if you magnify it about 850,000 times you’d be looking at the individual strands of DNA perhaps that make up the cells and if you zoomed in on a single molecule like that, up to about a million power magnification, you’d be looking face to face at a single individual atom and if you open that atom and looked inside, you’d see that there’s really nothing in there. It’s all just empty space and there are some really infinitesimally small subatomic particles that would be zipping around at the speed of light. So that’s really what we are. We’re just energy and our bodies are energy and the chair you’re sitting in is nothing but pure energy. The earth, the sun, the moon, the stars, everything. So what happens to us… we know we can measure thoughts electronically…

Ben: If I could interject by the way for folks listening in, if you were to go talk to any chemist or biochemist or biologist or anatomist or any scientist, they would agree with what Dr. Nelson is saying. Every atom on the face of the planet is just bottled up energy.

Dr. Bradley Nelson: Really, that’s all it is. But what we realize now, see, is that emotions are also energy. And every emotion has a particular vibration so an emotion of anger – that’s a different frequency, a different vibration than an emotion of sadness which is different from sorrow. They’re all different. So what happens to us apparently is when you’re feeling an intense emotion of resentment or anger or frustration or whatever it is, your whole being can take on this new vibrational frequency and sometimes, in some ways that we don’t really understand yet, sometimes some of that emotional energy can get trapped or lodged in the body. And we call that trapped emotion. Now, these trapped emotions affect us in two ways. By the way, everybody listening right now has these. We’ve all got these and they’re affecting us in huge ways. Huge ways. But what happens is a trapped emotion is typically a ball of energy from about the size of a baseball to about the size of a cantaloupe. It took me 17 years to figure this out. Because these things are completely invisible. But they have two very profound effects upon us. One effect that they have is that they will distort the normal energy field of the body. Now these things can lodge anywhere and wherever they lodge in the body, they will tend to cause pain because they will distort that normal energy field and because that’s really all we are – is energy. When you’re distorting the energy field of the body, you’re distorting the body itself. You’re distorting the body tissues and if you distort those tissues long enough you end up having some kind of symptom and I’ve seen these things – I’ve seen them create cancer for people. I’ve seen them cause all kinds of injuries. In other words, they will imbalance the body such that when you go out and play sports for example, you have this underlying weakness going on and then suddenly you get injured when normally you wouldn’t have been. Nine times out of 10, when people get sports injuries, there’s an underlying imbalance you see and the most common cause of that are these trapped emotions. But they also have another effect on us and that other effect is they will tend to make us resonate with them more readily. So let’s say for example you have a trapped emotion of anger and let’s say that that’s affecting your low back, well in fact I can tell you a story that I remember that comes to mind right now about a guy who came in to me and he had low back pain. It was a trapped emotion. We released the trapped emotion. His back felt much better. But a day or so later, he came back into me and said “Doc, my back’s feeling great. You released that trapped emotion of anger.” But he said, there’s something else that happened to me. I used to have a hair trigger temper and I don’t feel that anymore. I just always used to be on the edge of anger and that’s gone away. That’s the kind of thing that we see when we release these emotions, you see? Because they have this effect on us. In other words if you think of trapped emotion as a ball of energy that’s vibrating at a certain frequency. Let’s say that it’s anger. If a situation arises where you could become angry, well you will become angry probably much more readily than you otherwise would. Why? Because part of your body is already vibrating at that frequency so it’s easy for you to fall into resonance with that frequency. So when we release these things, and it’s a very simple process that anybody can learn, suddenly you don’t have that emotional baggage. It’s literally a way to get rid of your emotional baggage and it’s the most powerful method in energy psychology that’s ever been devised and it’s far faster and easier than anything else out there.

Ben: Now when you talk about the energy ball so to speak the size of cantaloupes, is there a way to visualize those? How did you become aware that people’s emotions actually can take up energy or take up I guess what might be called physical space?

Dr. Bradley Nelson: I’ve never actually seen one myself, however there are people – we’ve had a number of people who actually have been able to see these. Some people have that kind of unique gift, not many. But I would say probably one person in every other seminar that I have taught has the ability to see these but for me it was just a matter of 17 years of trying to help sick people get well and gradually these little pieces, these little clues falling into place over time. One of the first things that happened to me was I had a woman who came in and thought she was having a heart attack many years ago and the left side of her face was numb, left arm was totally numb and she had this crushing chest pain, difficulty breathing. I told my staff we might need an ambulance. So I checked her vital signs and so on. And then I started asking the body some questions and what we got was she had a trapped emotion that was behind this and the emotion was grief as I recall and the subconscious mind, you see, knows everything about these. So in the book we teach a number of different methods of finding these things. It’s a simple process. But in her case, I traced it back to when it had been created and it was three years before. At that point, she broke down crying and said I can’t believe it’s affecting me. I thought I dealt with all that. I said what happened? She said her husband had an affair that year and it destroyed her marriage and destroyed her life for a while, but she put her life back together. She went to therapy for a year and dealt with it mentally but the physical body was still holding on to this energy and this ball of grief and when we released that from her which just takes a few seconds, the feeling came back into her arm and her face within, I would say, about four seconds at the most. And the chest pain was gone, difficulty breathing was gone. She never had another problem. But multiply that by about 2000 or 3000 and that’s the kind of experience that I’ve had with these things. All kinds of things – tennis elbow, knee pain, back pain, migraine, headaches, neck pain, depression, phobias, panic attacks, on and on and on.

Ben: Interesting. Now I am of course a fairly open minded guy and I’ll admit there are many things that science has yet to find. There are fields, whether it be magnetic fields or these energy fields that you were discussing that we may not have yet found a way to actually visualize in human science or our modern medicine but that we may someday actually find to be a very key component of our health. So let’s assume that these emotions exist and obviously I’m sure that you’re used to people questioning what you do because it is somewhat fringe. But for folks who are believing what you’re saying and they’re interested in this, as I am, what I’m wondering is can you walk me through a typical… I don’t know if you’d call it a session or what… a typical treatment of locked up emotions or negative emotions or these negative energy fields. What is it that you’re doing or saying when you meet with a patient or a client? How does the visit actually go?

Dr. Bradley Nelson: Ok, well what we could do if you would like to is actually do a quick demo on you.

Ben: At my own risk, I’ll say yes.

Dr. Bradley Nelson: The end of the world is going to come up. So here’s… first of all then, here’s what we do. The human body has this unique ability built into it to set aside its own needs temporarily and act on behalf of another person. Now this is just part of what the Emotion Code is about. Most of the time, people who are practicing the Emotion Code are doing it on themselves or they’re working on another person who’s right there with them. But we also teach how this can be done at a distance. So the first thing that we do is simply make a connection here with you and I just ask if it’s ok if I can work on you by proxy and if we have a good connection. I’m muscle testing myself. Now muscle testing – a lot of people are familiar with this. You hold your arm out and you say your name is your name and you’re strong and you say your name is somebody else’s name and you’re weak. It’s just simply a way to tap into the subconscious mind. So at this point you and I have a connection going. So let’s say here, ok. So what we can do is we can simply ask… do you have any kind of issue, any part of your body you’re having any kind of difficulty with or anything that seems to bother you off and on more than anything else?

Ben: You know, right now I’m fairly healthy but if I had to outline one spot that’s been nagging at the back of my mind, for example, after a run it would be the back of my right knee on the outside.

Dr. Bradley Nelson: Ok, back of your right knee on the outside. Alright, no problem. Let’s take a look at it then and let’s ask, let’s ask if there is any kind of an imbalance that you have going on that might be affecting that right knee and the answer is yes and actually what that is here – and this understanding is part of what I call the body code. And the body code is a whole self study course that I’ve created where people can learn how to really be a master at energy work and really understand all these things. And anybody can do this. But one of the understandings there in the body code is that every organ and every gland are connected up to certain muscles. So for example what I’m finding on you right now is you have a little imbalance in the gall bladder. Now the gall bladder just happens to connect up to the muscles between the right knee. So we have a gall bladder imbalance. If you overload the gall bladder. In a sense you can blow the fuse that goes with that organ. Kind of like in your house, you plug in too many blowdryers…

Ben: Now are you identifying the gall bladder because you know that to be connected to the right knee or because you’re actually sensing that emotionally from me?

Dr. Bradley Nelson: Yeah, I actually just picked that up on you. I have a chart here of all the different kinds of imbalances. That was the first thing that showed up. You’ve got a gall bladder imbalance. This is very, very common. That doesn’t mean that you have any kind of disease in the gall bladder. It means that there’s an imbalance there. Energetic imbalance, things energetically are not quite perfect there. So let’s ask why. Why is this organ imbalanced? And let’s see here, I’ve got a chart here of all the different kinds of imbalances that can occur as part of the body code and this particular thing is something in the energy area and it actually is something emotional. The biggest cause of imbalances like these are actually trapped emotions. So let’s see what this emotion is. By the way how old are you right now Ben?

Ben: 28.

Dr. Bradley Nelson: 28. Okay. If I could only be in my 20s again that would be great. But anyway we have a chart here of emotions. 60 emotions we have divided into two columns and 6 rows. So you can watch how easy it is and how quick it is to identify what this emotion is. Now, see, what you have to understand is that your subconscious mind is connected up to mind in this way and your subconscious mind actually knows exactly what this emotion is, who was involved, when it occurred, the whole thing. That emotional energy became apparently lodged in the gall bladder area imbalancing the gall bladder. And because that gall bladder is connected up on the same circuit as this muscle… the Popliteus muscle in fact in the back of the right knee, this is an underlying reason for your right knee trouble. So let’s ask what emotion this is. Is it listed here in column A on our chart or column B. It’s in column A. So we just get rid of half the list. Now remember I’m muscle testing and we teach all these methods in the book and seminars. But anyway, so now we have column A left, that’s 30 emotions out of 60 and so what we’re going to do now is we’re going to ask what row this is in or if it’s an even row or an odd row and even row, the answer is no. Odd row, the answer is yes so is it in row 1 or row 3, the answer is it’s in column A , row 3. There are five emotions there and let’s see what it is? Is the emotion crying or is it discouragement. Yes. The emotion is discouragement. Now we can also figure out when this occurred. So if you’re 28, we can divide your life in half. For example we can ask does it occur earlier than age 14? No. Did it occur earlier than age 20? No. Earlier than 25. Yes. So between 20 and 25. Did it occur around age 25 or 24 or 23 or 22? 22. Around age 22 there was… and these are actually generally within a year, plus or minus. So you might have been 21 or maybe even 23 but you were probably 22 and there was something, some kind of experience that you went through where this emotion of discouragement was strong enough that it got stuck in your body. Now whether or not that rings any kind of a bell for you, a lot of the time it will for people, but sometimes it doesn’t come back to people for a day or so and that’s ok. It doesn’t matter. But does anything come to mind about that time at your life?

Ben: Let’s see. 22 years old. I’d finished school was working. You know when I was 22 years old I did a complete reversal in terms of what I wanted to do my life in terms of a career. I went from being 100% hardcore wanting to become a physician and go to medical school to wanting to go into exercise and nutrition. That was probably the most significant thing that occurred when I was 22. At the time, I was definitely – I don’t know if disappointed would be the word that I’d use – and now of course I’m not disappointed at all about my decision, but there may have been some emotion like disappointment at play with that decision.

Dr. Bradley Nelson: Okay. Well, let’s ask if this discouragement was about your career choices. You know what? No. I’m getting a no. It wasn’t about that. This particular thing. You might have another trapped emotion of something else about your career choices, but this is about something totally different. Was this about… do we need to know more about this emotion and your body… what I’m getting is yes your body is saying yes. We need to know more. Let’s dig deeper. Was this discouragement about some kind of a situation, yes? Some kind of a work situation? No. Maybe school. Bingo. Something about school. Something discouraging about school. You graduated around that time?

Ben: Yeah I graduated. I actually graduated in 2005. So, when I was 21. I guess I would have been 21. Earlier than that. Or later than that. I was 22.

Dr. Bradley Nelson: Ok. Well there was something about school. Let’s ask if we need to dig deeper into this emotion. And the answer there is no. So at this point we’ve uncovered everything we need to uncover about that. So we can go ahead and release this. Now the interesting thing about this, you don’t actually have to do anything. When we’re working on someone by proxy, we can actually release the emotion from here. Because basically I’m acting on your behalf at this time and this is an energetic phenomenon that is really amazing that we’ve used for many years now to get great results with people actually all over the world. Now I really don’t practice myself. I don’t have a distance practice anymore because I just don’t have time. I just have too much going on. We’re doing seminars all over the world and interviews and this and that, but I do have people that work with me who do this. But let’s take a look now and ask if we released that trapped emotion. By the way what I just did is I used a magnet and I just rolled a magnet from my forehead over the top of my head to the back of my neck three times. And what we’re doing is we’re putting magnetic energy into the governing meridian. That governing meridian runs from the upper lip over the top of the head all the way down the tail bone. And when we do that, it reverses this emotional energy or erases it. So let’s ask if we cleared that and we’ll ask if your gall bladder now is energetically intact and it is. And so let’s take another look at your knee and let’s ask is there some other imbalance that’s affecting your knee? And the answer that I’m getting is no. So what I would say is it may take a few days because this is not something that you’re noticing all the time, right? Or is it?

Ben: No.

Dr. Bradley Nelson: Okay, well what you’ll probably notice though is another week or two will go by, maybe a month will go by and you’ll find yourself thinking, you know my knee doesn’t bother me anymore like it used to.

Ben: That’s interesting.

Dr. Bradley Nelson: But this also works for people who are having acute problems.

Ben: Well for those of you listening in to the podcast right now, Dr. Nelson was definitely… he was in the ball park for sure. I did have one very, very disappointing thing occur to me with relation to school. When I had just graduated with my bachelor’s degree I applied to multiple medical schools and fantastic scores and fantastic grades and thought I was just the perfect applicant and ended up not getting into any of the schools that I wanted. That was very crushing to me. Very disappointing.

Dr. Bradley Nelson: Ouch.

Ben: And that actually was a fairly significant moment in my life when I had to make some serious life decisions. So yeah, I’m definitely impressed that you were able to get to where you got and of course I’ll keep people posted on the knee and if I notice any changes because I’m sure that people are going to wonder. So, you do this type of treatment with not just physical ailments but also I would imagine things like – and it looked like on your bio, chronic fatigue syndrome and things of that nature as well which I guess could be argued as mental as well as physical.

Dr. Bradley Nelson: Well the reality is that trapped emotions cause a definite physical effect on us. Because what they do is they distort that tissue and so they will definitely cause physical problems for us. And during the last 10 years that I was in practice, I was seeing people from around the United States and Canada for these serious supposedly incurable chronic conditions. Fibromyalgic chronic fatigue, lupus, even cancer patients. And what we found is that the single biggest common denominator that all these people had was their trapped emotions. But we also were finding that trapped emotions were often times the only cause of some of these things and the only cause, very often of things like knee pain and ankle pain and low back pain and hip pain and migraines, elbow problems and wrist problems. All of these things. It’s really – well what happened with me was finally after doing this all this time and teaching these seminars on this… it’s been 12 years now I think, I finally realized that this really had to get out to the whole world. And I’ve said before and I’ll say again, I really honestly in all sincerity believe that this work – the Emotion Code and the Body Code as well is really… I’d like to take credit for it, but I can’t. I believe it just has come down from up above to me to spread out to everybody in the world. So I’m just a messenger, but it’s time for us to really recognize that there is so very much that we can do to help ourselves and it’s time for us to reclaim our birthrights. I believe the birthright that belongs to every single person on this planet is a birthright of being a healer. There’s so much that we can do and what’s exciting about this and the reason why we’re selling so many copies of this book all over the world is precisely that. That people are finding that they’re taking back their power and they’re finding that it’s very easy for them to help themselves, their family members and loved ones by just releasing their emotional baggage. It’s amazing. I was at a seminar, I think it was in Toronto, not too long ago and there was a woman who came there with her sister and at one point she stood up and she told how her sister had migraine headaches for 20 years. She found one trapped emotion in her sister and released that one trapped emotion and her sister hasn’t had a migraine now since. I think it was like four months later. Imagine, that girl had migraine headaches every single day. Now would that be worth the cost of buying a copy of the book? $20.

Ben: And you teach some of the healing methods as well as the philosophy behind the healing methods in the book Emotion Code, right?

Dr. Bradley Nelson: The book is absolutely complete. It’s got everything in it that  a person would need to be able to do this. And we also certify people in this work. We have a lot of people now who are excited about actually doing this to help other people. It’s a very simple method. It integrates beautifully in if you’re doing massage or any kind of body work or even if you’re not and believe it or not Ben, this actually works on animals as well because one of the things that we found kind of serendipitously was that animals experience a lot of the same emotions that we do and if you know how to do this on a human being, you can do it on an animal and the animal stories I could tell you… we’d need a couple more hours.

Ben: Wow. Well I notice that you do have a lot of information on your website as well. You’ve got a pretty comprehensive website with more explanations. I really get the feeling that we only scratched the surface in this interview today and so what I’m going to give listeners who are more interested or interested in finding out more is I’ll put a link to the Shownotes to this podcast that will allow you to check out Dr. Nelson and his programs and his website and I will also in a comment on the episode Shownotes let you know what I’ve noticed in terms of the knee. So, Dr. Nelson I’d like to thank you for joining us today and explaining a little bit about the Emotion Code. It’s definitely a different area of healing that we haven’t  talked a lot about on the show but I’m certainly fascinated by it.

Dr. Bradley Nelson: It’s great stuff and I appreciate the opportunity to be on the show. We’re trying to get the word out so I appreciate it a lot.

Ben: Alright, fantastic. Until next time, from www.bengreenfieldfitness.com. This is Ben Greenfield and Dr. Bradley Nelson signing out.

Alright folks, well I’m a pretty skeptical guy. I don’t swallow hook, line and sinker every alternative or natural remedy or every healing method under the sun because I see a lot of it. A lot gets thrown at me, I go to a lot of health conferences. People send me things all the time, people are always wanting to try out and demo things on me and I got to tell you about 90% of what I experience simply does not work. So, I basically was not completely sold on what Dr. Nelson was telling me over the phone during the interview. I really wasn’t. About 48 hours after that interview, my knee continued to hurt and I just basically shrugged it off and thought about even just shoving this interview in the trashcan and not releasing it. About 3 days after the interview, I had no knee pain where that knee pain had been. I have not experienced it since after any training session in any way that I move my knee, no matter what I do, I cannot replicate that pain that I had been experiencing on a weekly basis nagging me at the back of my mind after every workout. Simply not there. Now I don’t claim to know exactly how these things work. However, I want to learn. I actually ordered Dr. Nelson’s book and I am now researching about how to attend one of his seminars because I feel that if this type of method actually works then it’s something I can implement with the clients I actually work with so I’m very keen to learn more about it so I’ve put a link to Dr. Nelson’s book in the Shownotes. I’ve put a link to his seminars in the Shownotes as well. But the fact that I have experienced twice now the results – the ones with my client and his heartbeat and now with myself and his knee – I am truly inspired to find out more about this and I would encourage you to do so as well. So go to www.bengreenfieldfitness.com and look at the Shownotes for podcast number 112. And I put the link to Dr. Nelson’s book The Emotion Code and also to the seminars that he teaches around the world.

Now the second thing that I promised to tell you was that I wanted to as I learned in the Bioletics interview from last week, podcast number 111 – I wanted to dig into this fact that I was told that I would probably be a diabetic if it were not for my levels of exercise. This was based off something called an A1C test. Now an A1C test is a snapshot of the past three months of your blood sugar levels and so what I decided to do was I would actually test my blood sugar levels after each of my primary meals during the day and I went ahead and did that. I got a blood sugar meter and I’ve been monitoring my blood glucose to see how this A1C test correlates with meals that I consume and what I found is that I indeed do have somewhat high resting blood sugar levels and here’s the most interesting thing. I found that after I consumed a high fat meal, my blood sugar levels have dropped after about 45 to 60 minutes. But after I consume a meal that has fruit or starch in it, my blood sugars have actually risen by 10 to 20 points after 45 to 60 minutes. And so, this once again affirms the fact that I do need to be continuing on this fat oxidizer protein type meal plan. So just interesting self-research that I’ve been doing and my fingers have gotten pretty scarred up from all this blood sugar testing, but I’m done with it for now. I’m pretty convinced that I’m on the right path from a nutrition standpoint and really that’s why I encourage people to go out and test with Bioletics or go to www.bioletics.com. Just to have that confidence. I have confidence now for the rest of my life that I’m eating foods that are actually helping my body to perform better and also elongating my health and my lifespan. I’m in my 20s. That’s a pretty cool feeling for me to know that for the rest of my life or the next however many years… 50 or 60, maybe even 70 or 80 years… I know exactly what to eat. So that’s one of the reasons beyond just the simple performance enhancement that I would encourage you to go to www.bioletics.com and look those guys up. So until next time, this is Ben Greenfield signing out from www.bengreenfieldfitness.com and one more thing, please be sure to leave a ranking in iTunes if you haven’t yet. Leave a ranking and a review. Just go to iTunes.com. Do a search for “Ben Greenfield Fitness.” It should be pretty apparent. So thanks for listening in and I’ll talk to you in just a few days from the Inner Circle podcast.

For personal nutrition, fitness  or triathlon consulting, supplements, books or DVD’s from Ben Greenfield, please visit Pacific Elite Fitness at http://www.pacificfit.net