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Welcome to A Healing Moment with Dr. A'Shellarien Addison Addison, airing Sunday mornings at 9:45. This is your respite from life to steal away to take care of you. Trauma continuously collides with our faith. Let this 15 minutes be my gift to you as I walk with you on your healing journey. Over the next 15 minutes, we'll talk about mastery over money, empowerment, nutrition, trauma. So let's jump right in. Today's topic is my gut, my gut, my gut. Let me tell you something, I think about all the times that I walk past some Oreo cookies, and I'm telling you, I think they was talking to me. I think they were saying, you know you want these cookies, so come on over here. And I'll be in Wawa, and then Wawa Donuts, I think sometimes they are talking to me. So listen to this text. I'm gonna tell you about your gut in a second, right? Because you ever hear people say, oh, my gut told me, I'm just gonna listen to my gut, that intuition, you know, sometimes. But our gut is our second brain, and all disease begins in the gut. And so listen to what Psalm 34:19 in the Amplified Version says. It says, many hardships and perplexing circumstances confront the righteous, but the Lord rescues him from them all. So I want to talk these perplexing circumstances. I was doing some research on the gut because I was like, I know that these cookies aren't really talking, and I know that the Bible says greater is the Spirit of God on the inside of me than the spirit of evil that's in the world. So I know that I have the power, right, to overcome my craving for sugar. And I was like, man, I really need to figure this out because all this processed food gonna kill me. So I started doing some research on the gut, and I found out that the gut is our second brain, and all disease begins in the gut. And so the gut creates like these peptides and you have good bacteria and you have bad bacteria. And so the goal is to feed the good bacteria and get rid of the bad bacteria. What I didn't know is that there are so many foods that have sugar or turns into sugar in your body. I knew the Oreos, obviously that's processed food. I knew the Oreos. I knew the donuts from Wawa, I knew that's processed food. What I didn't know is that grapes have a lot of sugar. What I didn't know, like potatoes are starch, right? Uh-huh. And pasta, and I, oh, I love rice, and so I eat a lot of rice. And I didn't know that all these things like become negative sugar in my body. And I thought about, you know, my grandma had diabetes on my father's side, my father has diabetes. My grandfather on my mother's side had diabetes. Like, it's just— as I went to the doctor, the doctor was like, listen, this diabetes is hereditary in your family. So for the rest of your life, you're gonna have to really monitor what you eat, exercise. Now, the good news is diabetes can be managed, right, by diet and exercise. That takes strict discipline, and here's why. If you live in a place that we call a food desert, that means there's no grocery store right there. There's no grocery store, but there's a poppy store. So in Philly, we call them a poppy store. Those are little corner stores. I went into this poppy store. I was in Philly. I was like in West, Southwest Philly. I went to poppy store and I looked around. When I tell you everything in there was processed chips. Donuts, canned stuff. Like, I love those, um, raviolis, the Chef Boyardee Jones, and I love like the Oodles of Noodles. Process. You try and do something, you be like, all right, I'm gonna eat some applesauce. Process. All right, I'mma, uh, I'mma do one of those, um, Stouffer's Salisbury steak. Process. Like, okay, I'm gonna get some fruit. Okay, it's stuff on the fruit. It's all kinds of stuff that's happening with our food that makes this process. And so now I was like, okay, so I'm trying to figure out about these peptides. That's okay. So this goes back to, um, Psalm 34, where we talk about these hardships and perplexing circumstances. What do you do when you don't have access to fresh fruit? What do you do when you don't have access to, you know, non-processed food, right? Everybody can't drive to Wegmans and get like the good food that just came off the line, right? We understand that some of us live in environments where we get the leftovers. We're not getting the fresh fruit, we're getting the fruit that's like a couple days away, right? And so I thought about what does that mean for people of faith who want to honor their body as a temple, right? Because the Bible says the body is the temple of God, right? So that's where the Holy Spirit dwells, and you feeding it a bunch of processed food, you haven't, you know And then for some women, it's a struggle because of stroke, heart attack, all kinds of stuff is happening. And part of that is our gut. Part of that is what are we feeding our second brain? And so I thought about that and I said, okay, well, if I take all the processed food out of my diet, that's going to be a lot of stuff. So I said, okay, let me start small. And I just took the chips out. I said, let me stop eating chips, right? We talking about perplexing things. I'm telling you, Lay's, they have a slogan, you can't eat just one. I tried it. You eat that one chip and you like, I'm gonna eat one more. Then you be like, wait, I want more. Wait, wait, wait, one more. By the time you look up, you're gonna eat the whole bag. These are these perplexing things. Right? But then it says the Lord rescues him from them all. So that means if the Lord will rescue me from me, right? Because I'm the one saying these chips is calling me, these cookies is calling me, the soda is calling me. So you know what I did? I started to titrate myself, right? Because it's not really about willpower, it's about what am I saying to myself? What am I saying to myself? And so what I say to myself leads to my emotions, what leads to my behavior, right? So when the Bible says, let this mind be in you that's also in Christ Jesus, right? It also says we, we bring every thought captive to the knowledge of Christ, casting down imagination. So what does that mean? That means I'm pausing to say, what am I saying to myself? What am I saying to myself about all this sugar? What am I saying to myself about all this salt? What am I saying to myself about these oodles and noodles? Right? Because it's a quick— it's a quick win. Boil some water, put it in the thing, I'm eating and I feel full. I just put a bunch of sodium in my body, I put a bunch of processed foolishness in my body, so it's temporary. So go back to these perplexing things, right? These perplexing things. You, you know what's the right thing to do. You know you should get up and exercise. You know you should eat the right things. Sometimes it's just easier to grab that bag of chips, grab that soda. What I'm saying is your gut is your second brain, and how you treat your gut is going to be how you treat your life. And so this part where it says, but the Lord rescues him from all of them, part of that is knowledge is power. When you know better, you do better. When you learn what you should do and learn what you shouldn't do That's part of God rescuing us. We think God gonna what, put a hand down from the sky and be like, don't eat them cookies, right? Or you think you gonna wake up, this audible voice like Elijah be like, why are you here near the cookies? It's not necessarily gonna be that. Now you mess around standing next to some cookies and some cake, right? You eating all that macaroni cheese, and it might be a still small voice say, now put that fork down, put that food down. You know, God still speaks, and the Holy Spirit will tell you that's heart attack food right there. But then I'm telling you, comfort food— sometimes we eat out of comfort, right? When life is overwhelming, you might be in a challenging relationship, you might be like, I'm gonna eat, right? And what happens? Emotional eating. And we'll pick up that ice cream, we'll pick up them chips, we'll pick up that processed food, and it'll make us feel better. I'm telling you, let me tell you something, I had some Hershey's banana pudding ice cream, baby. I could have ate the whole thing, but I said, listen, even though I'm enjoying this ice cream, I can only have a little. So let me tell you what I do. I'm gonna give y'all a little tip of what I do, right? When I was, um, I was doing this keto lifestyle, and one of my soldiers taught me that if you give your body sugar at a certain, like, a 24-hour window of sugar, then the rest of the time you have sugar, your body use it as fuel instead of storing in this fat. So I tried it. And it worked. So I went back to my sugar window. So I only have 24 hours I could eat sugar, and the rest of the week I don't eat any sugar. So now I plan my sugar window, and part of my sugar window is that Hershey's banana pudding ice cream, baby, to make you hurt yourself. But I'm just saying, you can have some stuff, just not every day. So you do like me, learn to titrate yourself. Like what I say, I say your gut is your second brain. So your vagus nerve talks— has your brain talking to your gut. That's that longest nerve in your body, right? So you have to train it instead of it controlling you, right? So this says, many hardships and perplexing circumstances confront the righteous. When you go to the store and you see all that sugar, see all them cookies— let me tell you something, at the grocery store they put all the sugar stuff right by the cash register. All the candy, all the Soda, they put it right by this so you can say, you know what, I'm just gonna grab this. So you gotta titrate yourself and say, listen, my body is a temple of God. My body is a temple, and I don't want to put the Holy Spirit in a bunch of foolishness. So I— if I had soda 7 days a week, I'm going to 6. And after I master 6, I'm going to 5. After I master 5, I'm going to 4. After I master 4, I'm going to 3. After I master 3, I'm going to 2. After I master 2, I'm going to 1. After I master 1, I'm going to none. This is how you got to get stuff out of your mouth, out of your— yeah, get out your mouth, right? Stop eating them cookies, stop drinking that soda, all this processed food. We got to get rid of it. We got to go back to the Garden of Eden where we had plants and stuff. And sometimes you don't have access, I get it, but we got to get back to your gut. Your gut, your gut needs you. Your gut is your center of health. So listen, many hardships and perplexing circumstances confront the righteous. But the Lord rescues him from them all. And all thy getting, get understanding. Learn to eat better, learn to exercise, go for a walk, get off that phone, get out the— off that game, go outside, get some fresh air and exercise. All right, that's all we have for today. So until next week, I want you to change how you eat. So I would love to hear from you. Go to my website, desakajosflow.com. D-E-S-A-K-A-J-O-S-F-L-O.com. I'm on Instagram as Dr. A'Shellarien Addison. TikTok is Dr. A'Shellarien Addison. So until next week, you keep holding on to God's unchanging hand, and you tell that devil, get some wit and sit down.