Clean: The Revolutionary Program to Restore the Body's Natural Ability to Heal Itself (28 page)

Support your local farmers’ market or local farmers; locally grown foods have more nutrition, because they’re picked closer to their end-use locale and thus can be picked when they are ripe.

“Eat what you are.” Maintain a calm state of mind, an active body, and a clean intestine and you won’t set up the conditions for cravings. Fuel yourself with what will best serve the person you want to be.

Treat the planet’s animals well. Eat with awareness of your food’s impact on the whole. As the current tidal wave of movies such as The Future of Food explain well and simply, the choices you make when buying food have effects more far-reaching than their effect on your body and well-being.

The next most common question post-Clean is “When do I cleanse again?” How often and how long you do cleanses and detoxification programs will depend on how clean your diet and lifestyle stay and what kind of results you’re looking for. By now it’s clear to you that modern lifestyles and big cities make it impossible to completely avoid toxicity. Clean has shown you how inner pollution needs to be cleared out, even if you can’t see it as clearly as the grime on your skin. As a general rule, most people who are not suffering from any diseases or symptoms, feel consistently well, and want to stay that way, will benefit from doing the full Clean program once a year. Should you want to improve your state more significantly because you have lingering symptoms, do it every six months. Doing your full three-week program on an annual or biannual schedule is enough for most people. Repeat it too often, and the possible side effect is boredom. Too seldom, and you may find the enthusiasm dampens.

As part of a maintenance program, I use Clean myself and prescribe it to patients in two main ways: to maintain and improve upon the condition created by the last full-length cleanse; and as a tool to get back on the path right away if old eating and drinking habits creep back or associated symptoms flare up again. Here are two common scenarios that occur in people’s lives post-Clean.

You’ve been doing pretty well maintaining a healthy diet, but during a party or holiday weekend, you let go a little. You feel bloated and sluggish. Make the next day a juice fast. Make sure you have abundant bowel movements, using herbal laxatives if necessary. If you don’t bounce back immediately, repeat this the next day, or shift to one solid meal and two liquid ones. Play with it; be creative, and discover what works for you.

You’ve had a tough few weeks or months, and slowly the comfort foods and drinks have crept back in. You’re getting puffy again and your spirits are lower than normal. Use Clean as a tool for re-centering yourself. Do one week, two weeks, or even just the Elimination Diet on its own, for as long as you need to clear out the gunk. The first time you do Clean, it is a jumpstart to a whole new way of life. After that, it becomes a signpost on your lifelong path, pointing you back to your goals. After a short derailment (a few weeks of eating toxic foods or being under great stress), do a short version of the program. If you wandered far off the road for several months of toxification, do a full Clean program.

Everyone can juice for one day a week. Your digestive system and bowels work hard six days a week; give them a rest on the seventh day. It’s a biblical-sounding idea, like respecting the sabbath with your body. A day of digestive rest is not only calming to the spirit, it supports you in staying “caught up” with cleaning duties all year long. Weekly fasts have a cumulative effect: Four days of fasting a month becomes fifty-two days of fasting a year, which becomes a full year of fasting every seven years! Consider what happens when agriculturists follow this pattern: After six years of cultivation, in the seventh year they typically rest their soil by leaving it fallow to recover for a full year. Nutrients are restored and life-giving energy is literally rebuilt into the ground. If you take care of your body with a similar level of attention, you will flourish too.

3. Reduce Exposure to Toxins: Creating a Cleaner Lifestyle

Consider all the ways you’re exposed to unnecessary stressors, and make the following changes over the next twelve months. These are the most important modifications you can do in a toxic world.

Replace household cleaning and any personal products filled with unnecessary chemicals with natural ones.

Invest in a water filtration system. William Wendling is a water expert I work with in Los Angeles. His systems are affordable and his service is timely and dependable. He ships his filters around the country and takes consultations for coaching you on acquiring a system that fits your needs and lifestyle. Visit www.oxygenozone.com for more information.

Invest in an air filtration system. Room units or, better yet, entire household systems are well worth the investment. Please see William Wendling’s Web site for more information.

Cultivate an ongoing meditation practice—or whatever practice you think will provide the tools for avoiding quantum toxicity and encourage your own transformation. This could be a martial art, it could be working with a personal guide, or something very different.

Become conscious of the amount of unnecessary information (excess media, news, entertainment you aren’t even that interested in) and communication that may be in your life. Reduce whatever is superfluous, and recapture some of the attention that is lost this way each day.

Boost your exercise and commit to a regular routine. Science is showing us with exciting new research how challenging workouts correlate with giant health benefits, so make a point to put this on your Wellness Plan.

Get more sun, fill up on vitamin D, and everything else that is free if you only make time for it: friends, laughter, nature, and pleasure in its fullest sense.

4. Maintain a Clean Bill of Health with a Partner in Health

Maintaining yourself Clean can primarily be done by you, on your own. But you want to have a like-minded partner at certain times and for specific needs. That partner is an openminded doctor.

Working with a professional who understands and appreciates what you are building through diet, detoxing, and offloading stress is invaluable. Your current doctor may be an excellent ally—there is no need to fire her if, for example, you are concerned that she hasn’t brought up nutrition and detoxification. Maybe you can start the conversation. Be critical and ask questions if you have the right partner. We’re in the middle of a big shift in health care; there is a global movement redirecting medical professionals toward a more holistic approach. You want to be guided by a doctor who is at least open to exploring this territory. Even better, find a doctor who already practices medicine in an integrative way. For this, I recommend looking for practitioners who have studied Functional Medicine (find them at www.functionalmedicine.org). Whether meeting a new doctor or broaching the subject with your existing provider, interview her as if she were applying for the most important job in the world, taking care of you. Look into her eyes and see if she is present with you. Watch if she listens and is willing to rethink your treatment when the current approach is not working. Feel the atmosphere in the office. How does she relate to her nurses, technicians, and receptionist? Does it feel well in there? Or does it feel tired and drained? How did she respond when you told her about Clean? Now that you are more trained to listening in to your body and your instincts, you have the sensitivity to be the driver of your health. Take the wheel.

Of course, to get where you want to go you need a map. This is why you should have a simple checklist of goals you want to achieve in the year following your first detox program. Clean was your jumpstart; now ask the next set of questions: Do you need to lose weight? Do you want to transition off medications and regulate or improve conditions naturally? Do you want to get stronger to prevent osteoporosis, or maybe to look even better? Everyone has their own list, which can include simple concerns (clear up bad skin entirely; lose final fifteen pounds) or more involved ones (find a natural alternative to arthritis drugs that works for you; prepare for pregnancy). If you truly want to change, then all these things should be clear-cut goals that you have written down and can look at; they need to be things you tell your doctor about and work together to achieve. They should be written on your calendar along with dates indicating when you hope to have achieved them, just as you did with your Clean program.

Wellness Coordinators and Coaches

To keep businesses running smoothly, we have CEOs, COOs, CFOs, presidents, vice presidents, executives, secretaries, assistants, receptionists—a whole army of people to initiate and then keep track of everything that has to be done to keep a business running smoothly. It is not a crazy idea, if you can afford, it to have a wellness coordinator. Someone who will meet with you periodically, review your goals, analyze where you might have failed in meeting them, and explore why. This person will help you reinforce your plan for success, keep your appointments, research the doctors you are referred to and the treatments that are prescribed for you.

It’s amazing to see how my patients’ efficiency sky-rockets when they work with a wellness coordinator. When they come to my office they are now armed with all their previous tests organized in chronological order, saving time and avoiding repetition of expensive tests. They are more prepared mentally and stay on the program of building health with more ease. If you have some big goals for your own Wellness Plan, working with a wellness coordinator or coach may be a sound investment. This is not a very developed field. Maybe you can train your current assistant to include this as part of his or her job. Or simply find a person with the necessary qualities. I would look for a smart, curious, motivated, and organized person whom I feel a certain chemistry of inspiration. Be creative. Invent what works for you.

Blood Tests: Finding Your Blood Levels of Important Elements

Western medicine offers certain tools that will help you maintain and improve upon the benefits you get from Clean. Take advantage of them, and they may be priceless in helping you avoid unnecessary suffering. As a cardiologist I value blood tests for giving early insight into obstacles and lacks that might exist in the patient’s body, conditions that if not corrected could tip them off balance and sow the seeds of coronary artery disease. When imbalances are caught early, changes in diet, exercise, supplements, and a Clean detoxification program can very often shift the balance back, as you’ve read throughout this book.

If this is so, why then is it still the case that a patient with a “normal” annual blood test can drop dead from a heart attack days after having the test? Why are so many people on statin drugs and heart medication as precautionary measures? Sometimes it’s because they and their doctors aren’t gathering all the information early enough that they could gather. Almost every doctor today, cardiologist or not, has tests done for cholesterol levels. But there are a few other basic blood tests that, when done yearly as part of your maintenance plan, can give you a hint of a heart attack in the making. Get your doctor to administer the following tests. A good doctor schooled in integrative health care will use the information from them to guide you to your goal of staying Clean, healthy, and youthful in a toxic world.

Inflammatory Markers. C-reactive protein (CRP) is a protein produced in the liver that is a marker of inflammation. When CRP levels are elevated it means your inflammatory system is turned “on,” making you a candidate not only for heart disease but also for all the other conditions now linked to inflammation. Work with your doctor to figure out why inflammation is turned on: Is it from nutritional deficiencies, a hidden infection (such as parasites), or another insult somewhere in the body? The investigation you will do together will be priceless. Other markers of inflammation are ESR (erythrocyte sedimentation rate), blood insulin levels (insulin is a proinflammatory hormone), and fibrinogen (where inflammation and blood clotting systems meet, which means both clotting and inflammation use the same molecules).

AA/EPA Ratio. This is a more sophisticated marker of systemic inflammation than the CRP test, detecting inflammation at an even subtler level. It is the true marker of silent inflammation. The higher the ratio, the greater the amount of silent inflammation you have. If it is greater than 10, you have inflammation. A good ratio would be 3, and the ideal ratio is about 1.5. The average American score today is 11, and for those who already have developed inflammatory diseases it can be over 20. A higher ratio indicates that you are at risk of aging faster and losing health quicker.

Remember that inflammation is one of the body’s necessary and potentially life-saving functions. The problem is when it occurs for no apparent reason because the balance between proinflammation and antiinflammation is lost. Too much antiinflammation can be as bad as too little. If the AA-to-EPA ratio is too low—for example, 0.7—you will be more prone to infections and you might not be able to mount an appropriate inflammatory response when you need to. (You can get this test through Nutrasource Diagnostics Inc.; 877-557-7722 or 519-827-8129.)

Lipoprotein (a). This type of fat is actually thought to be worse than LDL, the so-called “bad” cholesterol, and is associated with a sevenfold incidence of coronary disease. Statin drugs don’t touch it, nor does exercise. Niacin works, but not always. When I find it elevated on my patients I order a CT angiogram for them.

Uric Acid. A waste product produced mainly as a by-product of the processing of animal proteins, uric acid is toxic and causes gout (inflammation in the joints) as well as corrosion of arteries, increasing chances of arterial plaque deposit.

Vitamin D. More and more evidence links a deficiency of vitamin D with heart disease and also depression, osteoporosis, and cancer. Humans today protect themselves from the sun so much that they have become a species depleted of vitamin D. The consequences have been devastating. Early detection of low levels will help you modify your diet, take supplements if necessary, and get more sun.