beauty X, Ranko Tutulugdzija [jenna bush book club TXT] 📗

they need more support and help.
What I am talking about are those who don’t cause alarm. These girls and women are also in their own world of fight…that fight with the mirror, that fight with the size of their jeans, that fight with food, calories and exercise. That unrelenting, seemingly unbeatable, unnoticed to the outside world beauty fight. They are not diagnosed with any kind of eating disorder, and people around them might even say they are perfectly fine, but they are not fine. They cross the body’s ability to function in health. They develop internal deficiencies and that’s when their beauty and body changes. You don’t need to be diagnosed with an eating disorder to go through those changes. The bad news is the rest of the world notices the changes. The good news is they aren’t permanent. Girls and women who went through the beauty loss process can have it back. Some Hollywood stars have been through the beauty loss process and body changes, and there is an up and coming generation of young Hollywood stars that are on the way to doing the same.

What girls and women don’t understand is what’s going on inside the body is what’s seen on the outside of the body. Internal deficiencies of tissues, blood, organs, will show up on the face and change the body. Deficiency of food will always lead to beauty being lost and body ruined. It is only a matter of time. Some people are born with a stronger constitution then others or as science would call DNA or genes. Some people can endure longer and more severe conditions of starvation and malnutrition. They have higher cortisone levels, stress hormones, stronger bone marrow where red blood cells mature, and just an overall higher threshold than others because of genetics.
In the opening paragraph, I wrote how anyone can understand this book, but how I was giving special attention to teens and college aged girls. The reason is because the young are still in the process of development and cellular maturity. The worst and most aggressive changes are in them because their body systems are not fully developed. Think of a house that doesn’t have a roof and that isn’t fully built. What if a storm passes over the house? What happens? There is damage to the inside and outside of the house. Well, think of an unfinished house as a young girl or young woman, and a storm as eating less or not eating. If they start eating less or not eating when they are young the consequences are not just their physical beauty but their health. They lose valuable years of development and body system maturity. The body is much more able to fight against the changes from not eating or eating less when it’s stable and developed. Everybody reaches body and tissue maturity at a different age some earlier and some later. It doesn’t really matter though because no one can beat the changes in beauty, body and health that come by lack of food. Not eating or eating less will change you regardless of age.
It is very important to understand and remember the word deficiency and the equation Food=Beauty. Kristen was completely deficient. After my fight with health, my Chinese medicine and acupuncture education in China and in the U.S., and now as a physician, it wasn’t hard for me to recognize Kristen’s deficiencies. Kristen’s case was typical and is a silent epidemic in America and the world—girls and women eating less to be beautiful and to keep a thin body. In Hollywood it is everywhere. Almost every girl in junior high, high school and college think about it. But nobody really knows how many are living it...
They may not be completely starving. They might be just eating less. Eating less carbs, only salads, only fruit or trying a fad diet. Diets are one of the worst things for the human body. I hope you take the word diet out of your vocabulary and never try a yo-yo diet or fad diet. Those diets will leave you worse off than when you started, more insecure and empty than ever. Especially for young girls who are already are thin and in the developmental stages diets will leave your body deficient.

Remember deficiencies lead to beauty wasted and body swelling.
I had a dream to make it as a soccer player in Europe and went to the University of California Santa Barbara on a soccer scholarship when I was seventeen. At UCSB someone gave me a popular diet book for athletes. How awesome that book made everything seem. Just eat protein and vegetables and you will be like pro-athletes that compete in that “zone” - where you will perform at your body’s maximum potential. I trusted. So, I barely ate any complex carbohydrates my whole time in college, and I rarely ever took one day off from playing soccer or physical training. By my second year at UCSB, I was exhausted all the time and just wanted to sleep. My legs were starting to burn and hurt when I was practicing with the team and I didn’t know why. I transferred to the University of Illinois Chicago my junior year and I was still eating just protein from meat sources and vegetables. My junior year I was in severe pain everyday. That’s when our team doctor told me I had exercised-induced compartment syndrome, and that I needed surgery to release the pressure that was built up in the muscle compartments in my lower legs. No trainer, no doctor, nobody told me what to eat as an athlete. I had no clue that my muscles were lacking glucose, what gives muscles energy to stay healthy and function. Well, I didn’t get the fasciotomy operation to relieve the pressure because another orthopedic surgeon told me it was too risky.

I went to Europe that year very sick without knowing it and missed my dream. I played out my final season in college in deep pain. I started to have trouble sleeping, concentrating and studying. I had no strength or energy. I was changing from a confident, radiant kid to a withdrawn, quiet, person I didn’t know. A few months later a doctor told me I had high creatinine phosphokinase (CPK) levels in my blood and diagnosed me with rhabdomyolysis. The pressure in my legs was cutting off blood supply to my muscles releasing a toxic chemical into my blood stream. I had no medical insurance and no way to treat it. That’s why I went to China.
Why do I share all this with you? So that you understand how the body works. So that you can see that an all protein diet almost killed me. Eating only protein is simply one of the worst diets you can put yourself through and it is the quickest way to lose your beauty, change your mental function and over time create health problems. Having no complex carbohydrates in the body means no energy and no life. I was completely exhausted because I was pushing my body so hard and not getting any energy from the food I was eating. Protein is not a source of energy in the body. It is vital for life, but it does not break down into cellular energy. Protein breaks down into amino acids that are the building blocks of life. I’m sure you learned this in your freshman biology class but it is so important to understand. Kristen and I were having problems with sleeping and changes in our mental function because of our diets and lack of food.
I developed an overwhelming sense of fear. Kristen struggled with severe anxiety, life altering fear combined with panic attacks. My understanding is because we both operated in a kind of survival mode where our bodies were living off their own tissue to make up for the lack of food, the autonomic nervous system started to operate more sensitively to the fight or flight pathway. Because we were starving nutritionally for so long, it was natural to operate in the fight and flight mode to stay alive. Much of our body’s response during this period of malnourishment was in the fight and flight pathway and that allowed for a heightened sense of anxiety. Of course, this isn’t proven. Nobody really knows why a person develops anxiety, and although I think Kristen’s anxiety and my fear may have been caused by our constant state of malnourishment, it doesn’t mean that all anxiety is caused by physical deficiencies.
Anxiety is very complicated. It could be rooted in emotional hurt, long suffering, post-traumatic stress disorder, spiritual reasons and more. Each case is individual. But there is no doubt that in my practice, as a treating physician, I see a pattern of anxiety and mental changes in girls and women who eat less or don’t eat much at all.

Kristen was deficient and living off her own body tissue to survive. That may have sent her into a state where her brain synapses and autonomic nervous system was sensitive to the fight and flight response. No science can prove that but there is scientific evidence of mental changes in a person that does not get enough food or nutrition. Girls or women who don’t eat much or eat less will experience problems with over-thinking, constant thoughts in their heads, a restless mind, withdrawal from social activity, timidity and insecurity. Sleep is also a big problem when the body develops deficiencies. Problems like falling into sleep and needing hours to finally get to sleep. Waking up tired and looking tired. There is no escape. If you are fighting for beauty and body by eating less these things will happen.
If there are mental changes and if it is a young girl who has enough trust in her family then she is taken to the family doctor. The doctor usually asks no questions about food intake or anything related. She might be asked to fill out a questionnaire about how she has been feeling mentally and emotionally. Depending on how she answers, the doctor prescribes medication for depression or anxiety. The medication is given but it is not based on any objective medical testing. It is based only on subjective questioning. This medication in young people is known to cause suicidal thoughts and behavior. Now, depression is real and medication is sometimes the only and the best way of treatment. If you are on medication do not stop taking it. Your doctor is the only one who has the right to take you off any medication. After reading this, I hope that the girls and women that are living out the trend of eating less to meet society’s standards and expectations of beauty and body can start looking at their mental function in a new light.
So what have we learned so far? Deficiency steals beauty, changes the body, warps mental function and that diets can be the worst thing you can ever do to your body. I gave you an example of what an all protein diet did to me, what a fruit diet did to Kristen and what not eating or eating less will do to the up and coming youth of Hollywood.
If you re-read Kristen’s letter you will get a good sense of what deficiencies do to the internal body systems and how those deficiencies take away from your external beauty. When a person gets little nourishment the body goes into a kind of survival mode and feeds off its own and reserves. As the body starts to live off itself what the outcome to the outside world is fading beauty and a changed swollen