In this video, Dr. Ekberg discusses 10 important body signs and symptoms that should not be ignored. He explains the underlying mechanisms behind each symptom to provide a better understanding of their significance. Some of the symptoms discussed include thinning eyebrows (indicative of hypothyroidism), ravenous appetite (related to hyperthyroidism or type 1 diabetes), poor wound healing (a sign of type 2 diabetes), and coated tongue (associated with candida overgrowth). Other symptoms covered include apple-shaped body (linked to insulin and cortisol imbalance), loss of arm swing (indicating neural degeneration), loss of smell (a potential sign of Parkinson’s disease), snoring (related to brain function), lightheadedness upon standing (possibly due to adrenal fatigue), and loss of impulse control with age. Dr. Ekberg emphasizes the importance of understanding these symptoms to make informed decisions about one’s health.
Key Insights:
- Thinning eyebrows can be a sign of hypothyroidism.
- A ravenous appetite coupled with weight loss may indicate hyperthyroidism or type 1 diabetes.
- Poor wound healing, especially on the lower extremities, can be a sign of type 2 diabetes.
- A coated tongue may indicate a candida overgrowth and an imbalance in gut flora.
- An apple-shaped body with excess weight in the midsection may signal insulin and cortisol imbalance.
- A loss of arm swing while walking can be an early sign of neural degeneration or Alzheimer’s disease.
- A gradual loss of smell may indicate Parkinson’s disease.
- Snoring may be a sign of weakened cranial nerve 10 or vagus nerve function.
- Light-headedness upon standing up quickly can suggest adrenal fatigue.
- Turning palms inward instead of outward may reflect a lack of impulse control associated with aging or dementia.
Transcript
Hello Health Champions. Today we’re going to go over 10 important
body signs and symptoms that you don’t want to ignore coming right up. Hey I’m Dr. Ekberg. I’m a holistic doctor and a former
Olympic decathlete and if you want to truly Master Health by understanding how the body
really works make sure you subscribe and hit that notification Bell so you don’t miss anything. So I want to go over a list of 10 different
signs and symptoms but more than just listing them and knowing what they are we want to
understand why they develop we’re going to understand the underlying mechanism so that
we can put the bigger picture together so make sure that you pay attention to every
step along the way as well as the mechanism cuz otherwise you’re not going to get the
full value and if you stick to the end then I’m going to get you a really cool bonus you’re
going to enjoy
Sign #1: Thinning Eyebrows
Sign number one is thinning eyebrows especially if you start losing the outer third or outer quarter of the eyebrows and you haven’t been plucking excessively
that could be an indication of hypo thyroid and hypothyroid is pretty important because
the thyroid makes hormone that tells every cell in the body to do what they do it tells
them how much to do of what they do so if the thyroid slows down it’s like the thermostat
for the whole body if the thermostat slows down in the thyroid slows down then your heartbeat
slows down your digestion slows down your peristalsis your breakdown of food your absorption
of food the rate of healing the speed of nerve impulses your metabolism everything slows
down so if you’re just have some thinning eyebrows than that in itself may not mean
so much but if you see it together with weight gain and is feeling sluggish and a slow heart
rate and constipation now you want to start putting it together and think that there may
be some hypo-thyroid going on another popular solution to that there’s two popular Solutions one
is give the person iodine and the other is give them thyroid hormone and sometimes that’s
appropriate and sometimes it’s the completely wrong thing to do so the iodine is because
in some parts of the world people don’t have much iodine in the soil and if there’s no
iodine in the diet then the thyroid is going to try to compensate it’s going to start to
grow it’s going to upregulate it’s going to hypertrophy so if you have a big blob sitting
on the front of your neck that’s your thyroid that has grown into what’s called a goiter
and that is a sure sign that you have no iodine and you need some iodine that part of the
reason has mostly been eliminated since they started putting iodine in table salt but in
some parts of the world they may still I’ll do that so it’s still possible that you could
get a goiter but in the rest of the world where we have iodized table salt then the
number one reason for hypothyroid is called Hashimoto’s thyroiditis it’s an autoimmune
disease that starts eating away at the thyroid and what they do then is they just give you
a synthetic hormone they give you Synthroid to replace the hormone that your thyroid isn’t
making an that sounds like a good idea the problem is that the root cause is an autoimmune
disease you have a problem in your body where it’s attacking itself there’s a reason your
body is attacking itself and if you don’t do anything about it you just put some hormone
in then you might get some more thyroid function added from the outside but you’re not going
to address the immune issue so if you take the synthroid if you take the synthetic hormone
make sure that you also understand what else is going on with the thyroid and that you
fix the immune issue if that’s what’s going on.
Sign #2: Ravenous Appetite
Sign number two is if you have a ravenous appetite if you eat all the time but you’re still losing weight you can have the opposite
of hypothyroid which is hyperthyroid meaning too much the thyroid function is in overdrive
and that’s called Graves disease. So if you’re eating and you’re losing weight then that could be
it but you also if you want to think Graves if you think that’s what it is then you
also going to have a high heart rate you’re going to feel like your heart is pounding
you’re going to have a very fast digestion of food is just going to go straight you have
a very high metabolism you’re going to feel very hot you’re going to feel like you can’t
wear clothes inside you wanted to be colder all the time you’re also typically going to
have bulging eyes to all of those are signs of graves disease if you find that you have
several of those then you want to get that checked out there’s one other condition that
could result in ravenous appetite and losing weight and that’s type 1 diabetes the difference
is that you probably will have even more thirst than you do hunger because the type 1 diabetes
is just going to drive all the fluids out through your body the fluids are going to
need to lose fluids with all the sugar through the urine and then you have to replenish those
fluids because then no insulin to absorb the nutrients so you losing weight you’re eating
and drinking but everything’s just going straight through you
Sign #3: Poor Wound Healing
Sign number 3 you may pay attention to is poor wound healing if you got a cut and it won’t heal especially on the lower
extremities usually starts on the feet and that would be a sign of type 2 diabetes and
what’s the mechanism here well high blood sugar makes the tissues swell a little bit
the sugar kind of leaks into the tissues and it holds water so the microcirculation get
stagnant things don’t flow through the way they’re supposed to so now your overall circulation
suffers and with that circulation you don’t have the proper delivery of nutrients to the
tissues cuz in order to heal something you need nutrients you need to replenish those
tissues and even more than nutrients you need oxygen and that also of course is reduced
when you lose that circulation the second thing that’s affected is similar to the damaged
tissue that won’t heal is your nerve tissue you get neuropathy the nerves degenerate
because they’re not getting their affected by the same mechanisms so now you have the
nerves degenerating and you can’t send the proper signals to where they need to go and signals
is another thing that you need to heal so you need nutrients you need oxygen and you
need signals but because of that high blood sugar and the lack of circulation you’re getting
a reduction you losing all or part of all of that that’s why type 2 diabetes is the
number one cause of amputation and because it damages micro circulation it is also the
leading cause of blindness and kidney failure
Sign #4: Coated Tongue
Sign number four if you stick your tongue out
and look at it in the mirror it’s supposed to be pretty clean supposed to be relatively
pink like a neutral skin color what if it’s coded if it has a thick layer especially if
it’s like a white frothy leathery thing on top of it then you probably have candida you
have a yeast fungus overgrowth and what that means is that you probably have also dysbiosis
in your gut because if you have an overgrowth of something in your body such as candida
then you’re missing something that’s supposed to keep it in check and in your gut and your
micro-flora you have about 40 trillion bacteria total with thousands of different
kinds and there’s a certain amount of good ones they’re supposed to keep the bad ones
in check and if that happens you have balance and then the bad ones aren’t so bad but if
you get an imbalance if you’re feeding them improperly if you give them too much sugar
than the bad ones are going to start to overgrow they’re going to start getting out of control
so what that tongue indicates is more than just a coated tongue right it means that there’s
a deeper problem there’s an imbalance at a very deep level so if you go to a doctor and
he says oh I can give you some yeast inhibitor I can give you something to kill off that
candida then you might improve a symptom of a sign or symptom for a while but if you don’t
stop eating sugar and if you don’t restore the proper microbial flora in the gut then
you still have the root cause of the problem there and then maybe the problem will come
back or it will manifest as some other problem right so that’s why I always want to work
toward the root cause and understand where is this imbalance coming from
Sign #5: Apple-Shaped Body
Sign number 5 is an apple-shaped body. It’s where when you look at the body and where
they’re supposed to be a waist then there is no waist but it kind of goes the other
way when the midsection of the body has expanded sideways and forward and you have a big belly
when you carry a lot of your weight in the midsection that’s called an apple-shaped body
and why is that a problem other than that the clothes don’t fit so well well it’s the
reason that the fat ended up in that particular place is called intra-abdominal belly fat
or central obesity and it’s caused by two hormones insulin and cortisol there’s a disease
called Cushing’s that puts the fat exactly in those places because those people have a pathologically
high level of cortisol cortisol promotes insulin and insulin resistance and together those
two hormones create that body shape so what’s so bad about that won’t cortisol is a stress
hormone and if cortisol is high that means and you don’t have Cushings then that means
that your stress level is too high that means that your nervous system which is supposed
to balance between sympathetic fight flight and parasympathetic feed breed it is dominated
by the sympathetic by the fight flight and when that happens that means that your parasympathetic
is underactive and what does your parasympathetic nervous system do well just little things
like digestion and immune system and healing so that apple-shaped body means that your
immune system and your healing and your digestion is not working as well as it should the nervous
system is not allocating the resources so the apple-shaped body is a sign that that
is going on and how do you reverse it you eat less sugar you eat fewer meals to reverse
insulin resistance and you learn how to de-stress how to rebalance the nervous system to activate
that relaxation response
Sign #6: Loss of Arm Swing
Sign number 6 is a loss of arm swing when we walk we’re supposed to have arm swing their arms were supposed to match the movement of the lower extremity
it’s one of the earliest motion movement reflexes It’s called a gait reflex it the first one that we
develop as a pattern in the nervous system and you’ve practiced it every day ever since
you were crawling to everything that happens in the brain everything that happens in the
body is controlled by the brain and how well it works depends on how well the brain can
control those signals so how clearly you speak how regular and controlled your handwriting is
your physical skills your coordination your balance your arm swing everything depends
on how well and balanced that nervous system is so if we start losing arm swing that’s
an indication that there’s a deficiency there’s a problem there’s something in your nervous
system in your brain that the signals are not coordinated perfectly anymore so that’s
one of the first signs of neural degeneration of a degenerating brain and this could happen
long before you had any memory problems or any cognitive problem so this is an indication
of Alzheimer’s and if you catch it early then you can actually do something about it it’s
not the only thing you want to do want to cut out the sugar in can get some exercise
and all that but it’s one thing and if you practice when you’re walking if you practice
a symmetrical pattern of arm swing then you’re reinstating you’re practicing and rebuilding
those pathways again
Sign #7: Loss of Smell
Sign number 7 is a loss of smell now you could get an upper respiratory infection you get a head cold and you could lose your smell but that should be temporary
if you lose it gradually and it doesn’t come back that’s one of the earliest signs of Parkinson’s
disease Parkinson’s is a devastating motor disease where people lose more and more control
over their movement they get jerky and stiff and they can’t initiate walking or movement in severe cases it starts affecting their speech and their thoughts even. And again it’s because of brain degeneration, but in the case of Parkinson’s it’s one specific area kind of in the middle of the brain called the Substantia Nigra that means the black stuff and it makes dopamine and when you can’t make enough dopamine then
you can’t control movement properly some other signs would be stiffness or jerky movements
or temors and it could also be an early sign would be if you’re writing and the handwriting
gets smaller and smaller you kinda write slow with really small letters called micrographia
that’s another early sign of Parkinson’s.
Sign #8: Snoring
Sign number 8 you want to pay attention to is snoring and now you’re going well everybody’s snores right well snoring is a brain thing
again if you think about it don’t a lot of people snore a little extra after they have had some alcohol to drink right and what does the alcohol do. It inhibits it interferes
with muscle tone and motor control so snoring is a lack of muscle tone and it’s in a specific
place it’s in the soft palate that the upper part of the mouth that can close and open
the airway so if we lose muscle tone then it’s more likely to close and then when we
breathe and force the air through then it flaps in the wind and we create that snoring sound
well that muscle tone is controlled by an area in the brain in the better that area
in the brain works the better the muscle tone and the more control we have over the soft
palate so the area that controls that particular muscle in the soft palate sits in an area
called cranial nucleus number 10 cranial nerve number 10 is what controls that palate and
it’s the only cranial nerve that leaves the head and goes wandering in the body and that’s
why cranial nerve number 10 is called the vagus nerve which is the primary outflow for
the parasympathetic nervous system right so if your cranial nucleus number 10 is starting
to suffer it’s starting to de-generate a little bit that means that you’re also losing
some parasympathetic functions so by working on some things to improve your parasympathetic
function you can also actually improve your snoring they go together and what do you do
about that then you can do little exercises one thing that works great is singing and
if you are little embarrassed about doing that so anyone can hear then sing in the car
no one can hear you there play the radio really really loud so if somebody hears something
then they think it’s just the radio and other thing you can do is you can gargle with water
so you take a deep breath you fill your mouth with water and you gargle for as long as that
breath lasts and you do that three times and you do that a couple of times a day so this
is exercise for the muscles in the soft palate your stimulating your driving signals to cranial
nucleus number 10 you building up the strength of there so you can control you have better
muscle tone and control that snoring better and this is also what’s involved with sleep
apnea which is a buzzword these days it seems like everyone has sleep apnea and they’re
selling CPAP machines like they were toasters right so that can help some people improve
quality of sleep but what if you could solve the problem naturally by rebuilding the part
that isn’t quite working.
Sign #9: Light-Headedness upon Standing
Sign number 9 if you stand up especially if you stand up quickly and you get light-headed so for a few second it’s like you want to hold on to something
cuz you’re not sure if you’re going to fall and some people actually pass out altogether
and this is an adrenal problem this is called adrenal fatigue and some people claim that
adrenal fatigue doesn’t exist but let me explain here so when you sit down when you lay down
sit down or crouch down and you stand up quickly what happens is your stretching out your blood
you’re moving your blood pool up against Gravity so gravity is going to pull some of that blood
down toward your lower body towards your legs and your feet which means that there is less
blood available for the brain and you get light-headed so what has to happen the moment that you stand up you have to have vaso-constriction your blood vessels have to squeeze tight to squeeze the blood up toward the head
and this has to happen in a fraction of a second cuz if it takes a second or two it’s
too late you’re already dizzy and the hormone that causes this vasoconstriction the tightening
of the blood vessels is called adrenaline or norepinephrine and it’s produced by your
adrenal glands so if your adrenal glands starts getting a little sketchy if they get a little
tired they get little fatigued then they can’t kick in fast enough they can’t produce enough
adrenaline right in that moment and you get that woozy feeling so a lot of people in the
medical world they don’t recognize adrenal fatigue they have something called Addison’s
which is the extreme end-case of adrenal fatigue it’s adrenal failure it’s complete failure
where the adrenals are just barely hanging on by a thread the really not working at all
and any kind of stress just leaves you like a sitting duck you can’t respond but in between
normal and Addison’s there is a gradient there’s a lot of gray area in between called adrenal
fatigue and if you have experienced where you’re sitting down and you’re standing up
and you get light-headed then you have just proven the existence of adrenal fatigue and
what can you do about that you can stabilize your blood sugar you can make sure you get
regular and sufficient sleep and you can work to reduce stress because stress is the thing
that wore out the adrenals in the first place along with unstable blood sugar so stabilize blood sugar get sleep and practice relaxation exercises
Sign #10: Internal Rotation in Arm Hang
Sign number 10 is you stand in front
of a mirror you let your arms hang down your shake it loose and you look at your arms and
see where they end up what’s going to happen in a lot of
cases is you’re going to find that they’re turned in more or less some people are going
to have like a 45° some people are going to have a 90 degree and other people are going
to have one at 45 and one at 90 and all this means different things so if your hand
ends up parallel that means you have a balance between the internal and the external rotators
of the shoulder and these are linked to stress so when you have stress like when you trying
to defend yourself if you imagine a boxer or a wrestler if you’re standing relax and
then you get attacked you going to pull your shoulders up being a pull your shoulders forward
to protect your neck and jaw you were going to turn the hands in to protect yourself and
your going to have what’s called a defense posture which has flexor dominance the flexor
muscles are dominating over the extensor muscles and you’re going to have internal rotation
dominating over external rotation so if you relax them balance you’ll end up in the middle
if you’re stressed then you’ll end up more internally rotated and the reason this matters
is that there’s a portion of the brain called the frontal lobe that supposed to turn off
that stress response so it’s normal to have stress and then we activate the internal rotators
but then the brain is supposed to turn them back off and the side that is the most internally
rotated is the side that doesn’t get turned off as much so if you have someone looking
like this then this side which is my right side would be the weak side of the brain so
there you can tell kind of how balance your brain is it’s an indication of how well that
brain is balanced. It’s not the only thing to look for because some people
have just done too much exercise where all they did was bench press and arm curls and
then they’re going to have they’ve developed a flexor dominance just from repetitive use but for most people who haven’t done that there should be a pretty good balance So one thing you can do in general is you can practice posture exercises and then you basically do the opposite of internal rotation you practice external rotation
and extension and the other thing you can do which is a little too complicated for this
video is you can selectively stimulate the side of the brain that’s the weaker one and
over time you can restore that balance between left and right so congratulations for staying
through all 10 and for paying such close attention now we can talk about the bonus so this has
a lot in common with some of the things we talked about but this is really cool so it’s
not cool to the person that happens to but the mechanism once we understand it is kind
of interesting so a loss of impulse control with age so if we get older and all of a sudden
we stop being able to control some of the things that we’ve been able to control such
as kleptomania this sounds weird but it actually happens in a lot of older people as they start
getting demented even though they can fully well afford to pay for something they steal
it because they have lost the ability to inhibit inappropriate behavior they have an Impulse
but they don’t have the part of the brain that tells them that’s not appropriate that’s
not acceptable social behavior so they start going back to more primitive or uncontrolled
or even criminal behavior so this is very similar to the previous point with the palms
facing inward and as we age we lose the ability to inhibit certain things so just like the
frontal lobe inhibits the stress and our palms turn in that frontal lobe also inhibits impulses
and secondary stimuli so that the same mechanism that is responsible for ADD if we’re supposed
to pay attention to something but something flashes over here and we lose the attention
that’s attention deficit cuz the frontal lobe supposed to inhibit that secondary stimuli
something else that you might notice is people who have been calm and well behaved for
most of their lives all of a sudden they get angry they have temper tantrums in their old
age or they start using profanity they start They start using bad words. People who have been mellow and well-behaved and polite all of a sudden start cussing because the impulse is there but the frontal lobe isn’t there to dampen the response to dampen the impulse to this came in very
handy from me just a very short time ago when I recorded this video the first time and after
coming to the end of it I discovered I hadn’t turned on the sound so the frontal lobe then managed to keep me a well-behaved frontal lobe managed to keep me from breaking something really expensive so that frontal lobe came in handy to control that impulse so here’s
an interesting thing that this impulse control is not something that were born with. It’s something that develops with age babies have no impulse control children have very little teenagers
have some but it’s not fully developed and the Brain the frontal lobe keeps growing it
keeps stabilizing it’s called myelination okay the white fatty substance that fills
in the pathways and matures the brain the brain is not fully mature or myelinated until
age 25 and an interesting little tidbit here is that’s why you can’t rent a car in the
United States until you’re 25 years old and they probably don’t know that at the car rental
places but they do know that people are more accident-prone before age 25 and the reason
is that the brain is not fully developed enough to inhibit spontaneity and impulses. So then unfortunately it comes full circle so the babies have to develop it at age 25 we have it fully developed
and then we keep it throughout life but then as we age and the Brain starts to go south
and start to degenerate now we regress and we don’t have that inhibitory capacity and
we go back to having the lack of impulse control that we had as children. This channel is kind of unique in that we really try to not just list things, but we try to help you understand them , because if you fully understand the mechanisms and the concepts and you watch videos that build on each other then you will end up with empowerment
then you understand your body you can trust your body you can have confidence in it and
most importantly you don’t have to fall for every little thing every little fad or trend
that comes around you will know enough about yourself that you can make the right decisions for your health So if you want to learn more we have videos in our library on virtually every one of these videos and if you enjoyed this video then I think you should go look at that one next thank you so much for watching and I’ll see you in the next video
