A Self-fulfilling Prophecy

A self-fulfilling prophecy is a prediction that directly or indirectly causes itself to become true. In Greek mythology an example is that of Oedipus. Wikipedia writes "warned that his child would one day kill him, Laius abandoned his newborn son Oedipus to die, but Oedipus was found and raised by others, and thus in ignorance of his true origins. When he grew up, Oedipus was warned that he would kill his father and marry his mother. Believing his foster parents were his real parents, he left his home and travelled to Greece, eventually reaching the city where his biological parents lived. There, he got into a fight with a stranger, his real father, killed him and married his widow, Oedipus's real mother.

In Nutritional Balancing we see these self-fulfilling prophesis all the time (not the murder part of the analogy). There is a reason for them though and they are referred to as positive feedback loops. Scientifically it's defined as a process in which the effects of a small disturbance on a system include an increase in the magnitude of the perturbation. That is, A produces more of B which in turn produces more of A.

For example being sleep deprived leads to fatigue which can lead to sleep difficulties from being overtired. Perhaps a simpler example in the diagram below. When someone experiences anxiety they will suffer from increased physical symptoms like muscular tension and headaches. These symptoms and lead to worrying thoughts which can then lead to triggering factors such as other thoughts about how the body is under attack which then leads to more anxiety.

You might know this by its better and more common name: a VICIOUS CYCLE.

Dr. Lawrence Wilson writes about diet and say, "eating sweets, even too much fruit, worsens blood sugar imbalances that increase the cravings for sweets. This, in tum, leads to greater consumption of sugar until hypoglycemia, diabetes and other serious illnesses occur." He also writes about mineral balance and states "low tissue calcium in a child increases the stress level, which, in tum, can further increase the oxidation rate. This tends to worsen the calcium deficiency. This, in turn, increases the stress further, which causes an even faster oxidation rate.

Clearly there are some bodily issues with positive feedback loops although some can be positive. One of the goals of nutritional balancing programs is to assist the body to break out of damaging positive feedback loops and to restore stabilizing negative feedback loops. When this happens our sugar cravings for example disappear and this makes all the hard work worthwhile!