Lemon Juice for Stress

Testing Your Own Stress Level

You can test yourself to find out how you respond to stress. You can use pH paper (from a health food store) and measure your baseline saliva reading (it should be between 6.4 and 7.0 depending on the time of day). You baseline saliva reading shows you how your liver is metabolizing foods.

If your reading is below 6.4 you're not picking up nutrients well from foods, and food may be passing through you too quickly. If your saliva pH is over 7.0 your metabolism has slowed down, and this can create more toxins and a higher tendency toward joint and muscle stress. So just knowing your daily baseline pH reading is helpful since it can tell you if your diet and lifestyle are creating your pain.

Once you have your baseline pH reading you can drink 1 tsp of lemon juice in 1 tsp of water. If it is too sour, just swish it around in your mouth and spit it our. Then take your saliva pH reading again immediately. It should be yellow or 5.0 on the pH scale. This indicates that your mouth has responded to the acid in the lemon juice.

How Do You Respond to Stress?

If you are like many people, your response to stress robs your body of minerals on a daily basis. You see, your adrenal glands are in charge of your "fight or flight" response when stressful events happen. And your adrenals need a good quantity of minerals to function on a daily basis. As you know, your fibromyalgia symptoms get worse with acute or chronic stress in your life, often due to a lack of enough minerals, especially magnesium.

But if you have enough minerals in your diet, and your metabolism is working well your saliva pH readings will go up gradually over time. So wait one minute after drinking the lemon juice and take another saliva pH reading. What is it now? Here are some options of what can happen and what it means:

1. High Stress Reading: The pH reading 1 minute after drinking the lemon juice is dark blue (or between 7.6 and 8.0 on the scale): This means that your respond to stress very quickly. Your adrenals react to the acid in the lemon juice and create an alkaline reaction within one minute. Your body is using minerals quickly in response to even small stresses.

2. Medium Stress Reading: The pH reading 1 minute after drinking the lemon juice is blue (7.0 to 7.4), and is higher than your baseline pH reading: This means that you respond to stress quickly, but not too quickly. This is a pretty normal reaction for most women, especially mothers.

3. Low Stress Reading: The pH reading 1 minute after drinking the lemon juice is green (between 6.4 and 6.8), and this is where your baseline reading is also. This indicates an average response to stress, and if you test again in another minute it should continue to rise over time to about 7.2. If the reading does not continue to rise, you are rebounding back to your initial pH reading, so you are compensating for stress easily.

4. Low Digestive Energy Reading: The last option is if the pH reading does not respond by rising after drinking the lemon juice. If it stays below 6.0 even for minutes after drinking the lemon juice, I would recommend taking your pH reading every minute to see how long it takes to rise back to your baseline level. This reaction means that there are serious digestive problems, and you are having acidosis reactions, and need digestive support. This is where I would not recommend lemon juice in water until the digestive system is working again.

By doing this test you can find out if you have enough minerals (calcium, magnesium, potassium, and zinc) for the stress you have in your life. If you need to know more about this test and the other factors that are involved in making this test useful, you can read all about it with graphs and score sheets at Patterns of Stress Testing Kit.

This testing kit does not come with pH paper but does have all the directions for many tests to measure you metabolism related to diet, blood sugar, and acid/alkaline food reactions. Most health food stores carry pH paper for $10 to $13.

This test is also discussed in my "Natural Choices for Fibromyalgia" book, and shows you the way these urine and saliva tests measure how metabolism affects hypersensitivity to pain. This saliva test was done on every test client for the Fibromyalgia book, and once this test was done I could tell the client a lot about their reaction to stress and how their metabolism was using magnesium to lower their pain.

You might also want to read the 10 health benefits of lemon juice, I love comments feel free to say something please leave your message below.