Inefficiences:The Body Type Windows Of Vulnerability

Let's go back for a moment to that fast-food restaurant. You watched each one of the four people order a food that stimulated his or her dominant gland. This tendency -which we all share-to eat foods that stimulate our dominant gland is the basis of inefficiency in the system and produces what is called 'windows of vulnerability' for each body type. A window of vulnerability develops through over-stimulation of the dominant gland. What happens is that, through over use of stimulating foods, tendencies belonging to the dominant gland become too emphasized or 'fixed' in the system. Your body actually develops 'habits' of functioning that are hard to break. For example, one of the effects of adrenal hormones is to raise the blood pressure as part of the 'fight or flight' response. If you're an adrenal type, you rely on adrenal energy in times of stress or fatigue. When you stimulate your adrenals with meat or salty foods, your adrenals raise your blood pressure more than is appropriate in a balanced system. Your body tends then to fall into the habit of hypertension. In medicine, the development of this habit of the body has a name, 'labile hypertension' (labile means changeable) is the name used while hypertension is developing and the blood pressure is still bouncing up and down. Later when the pattern is fixed, it is called 'essential hypertension', meaning in part that it has become an essential feature, a regular habit of the body. Each of the body types has a tendency to develop such habits, which become the characteristic body-type window of vulnerability. If you're a thyroid type, to take another example, the overstimulation of the thyroid gland leads to a habit of too much effective thyroid hormone. Many thyroid types develop skin problems or irritation of the bowels in this way. Windows of vulnerability can also lead to fixed habits of thought. We get used to relying on a certain style of responding -T-types try to solve everything with a burst of flighty ideas, A-types react with too much stubbornness in situations where stubbornness doen't help at all, P-types try to think their way out when some honest emotion would be better, G-types try to mother everyone and end up smothering instead. A fixed mental habit, in other words, is as serious a window of vulnerability as a fixed physical reaction. Another window of vulnerability for each type develops through underactivity of the nondominant glands. Adrenal types, for instance,usually have fairly underactive thyroid glands, and thyroid hormone is needed to regulate blood cholesterol levels. Just as there is a window of vulnerability of hypertension from to much adrenal activity, there's a potential for elevated blood cholesterol related to low thyroid levels. To continue-