Body pH – What Should I Do Now?

Review the other articles in this series:

1. Body pH – a Guide to Health or Disease

2. How Does An Acid Body Lead to Disease?

3. What Causes pH Imbalance in My Body?

1. Measure your saliva pH as described in “What Causes pH Imbalance in My Body” every morning upon awakening for about a week. That should give you a good idea of your level of acidity or alkalinity.

2. If your first morning saliva runs acidic, save your life by developing good life-style habits:

Age – well you can’t change the number of years, but you can certainly put more life in your years with healthy life-style habits.

Breathe – shallow breathing causes carbon dioxide to accumulate in your blood and tissues making them more alkaline. Take big deep breaths expanding your entire lungs several times per day. If you breathe mainly by lifting your shoulders instead of using your abdominal muscles, your lungs do not fully expand. Shoulder breathing stresses the body. Learning to breathe with you abdomen takes conscious retraining. Lie flat on you back with a good sized book on your abdomen and practice lifting that book with your abdominal muscles to develop a healthy breathing habit.

Exercise – find something fun and do it. Exercise will help you breathe deeply also.

Drink adequate amounts of pure water. And forget the carbonated drinks. Did you know that you would have to drink 32 8-oz glasses of good water to overcome the acid in 8 oz of soda pop? And how many 32 ounce sodas have you been swilling per day. You would have to drink enough pure water to float a battle ship to overcome that amount of acidity. Obviously it’s impossible and dangerous to drink that much water. So stop drinking the soda pop.

Laugh a lot. You may need to purposely find something to watch or do that tickles your funny bone for at least an hour per day. Norman Cousins reversed a chronic disease by watching re-runs of Candid Camera and the Marx brothers. Those might not suit your fancy, so find whatever it takes to give you a good belly laugh for at least 1 hour per day.

Worry – may have become an automatic habit for you. You can change it. You may need help. Just recognizing that you are a chronic worrier may stimulate you to throw it out. If you have to worry, set aside 5 minutes per day to consciously worry. List all of your worries without getting bogged down in them. Then say, “There, now I’ve done my worrying for today”. Then get on with more health enhancing activities. (Advice from Russell Jaffe, MD, PhD in Mastering Food Allergies #55)

Dis-stress – consider stress management.

Negative thinking and speaking – be careful of what you say and think, your cells are listening to you. Once you are aware of this negativity, practice replacing it with the positive side. Is you cup half empty or half full. Count your blessings.

Food allergies – you may have food allergies at least partly because your tissues are acid. But your tissues may become more acid from the food allergies. You often cannot recognize the food allergens. Review Food Allergies for help.

Toxic chemicals and metals stored in your tissues may make you more acid. But you will not detoxify them as readily if you stay acidic. Everything you do to balance your pH will help speed up detoxification.

Eat food that balances pH. Ahhh – Food – That’s a huge subject when discussing body pH. Often the most emphasis in restoring pH is put on food. And probably rightfully so. For you see, the Standard American Diet (SAD) that we unconsciously eat out of habit is laden with acid forming food: refined carbohydrates (all the sweets and white flour and rice = processed junk food), high protein, soda pop (because of the carbonation). North Americans eat considerably more acid forming foods than alkalinizing foods.

Bet you can hardly wait to have that list containing the spectrum of alkalinizing to acidifying foods in your hands in the next article on body pH.

Blessings,

Dr. Jo