Clean: The Revolutionary Program to Restore the Body's Natural Ability to Heal Itself (10 page)

THE FACE: THE FIRST CLUE

Your face is the part of you that you probably look at most. It’s also where signs of toxicity are most evident if you know how to spot them. Taut skin that pops back into place immediately when you pull it is healthy; the less elastic it is, the more “puffy” or mucusy you are. The sagging of skin that we consider a “normal, natural” sign of aging isn’t necessarily so. Many elders in communities that eat clean, traditional diets have taut skin, uplifted around the bone structure, until the end of their lives. Pimples and dark circles under the eyes are also a clue to toxic buildup. Look at your skin with a magnifying mirror. Can you see pores all over? If you see little depressions in the surface, like the skin of an orange, there is mucus and water accumulation in the skin, which has caused the areas around the pores to swell or puff up, making the pores more pronounced.

Constipation

Annabelle, a tall, slender twenty-six-year-old, had an enviably healthy lifestyle. She rarely ate any kind of processed foods; she prepared mostly organic, fresh meals at home. She exercised and didn’t drink or smoke. To her friends she was the poster child for health. But, unknown to them, she had an ongoing battle with her bowels. For years, regular bowel movements were elusive. She used caffeine, herbal laxatives, and sometimes over-the-counter laxatives to try to stimulate elimination. The condition upset her. She felt bloated much of the time and psychologically it was taking far too much of her energy and attention.

During her first Clean program, she removed the primary irritating foods, got on a schedule of not eating after dinner, and built up her intestinal flora. The first two weeks were hard; she still got constipated until she started taking a strong herbal laxative. She also got a few colonic treatments. The third week, her body began to kick into action. Relieved of certain foods and caffeine and given some time to restore itself, her bowel function was finding its way back to normal. With astonishment Annabelle reported that her daily bowel movements were in excess of anything she’d had before, especially toward the end of the program. I told her that she was shedding some of the toxicity held throughout her body, in her cells and tissues. Her energy levels increased, and she experienced great clarity.

After Clean, she reported a different relationship to food; she had a new hunger and enjoyed eating, because meals were no longer something guaranteed to slow her down. Yet her newly improved condition required some maintenance. On adding back ingredients from her old diet, like cheese or pasta, her elimination slowed down again. Annabelle had to learn her triggers and keep a Clean diet for her bowels to work their best.

Constipation is one of the most frequent health complaints in the Western world. Laxatives are big business in the United States, and many people spend a lot of effort, time, and money trying to manage this symptom. Some try natural methods and small dietary changes, like adding more fruit, which may or may not improve the situation. But until they repair and restore intestinal integrity and remove certain foods for good, the solutions are often ineffective. (For example, excessive fruit can actually add to the sugar that feeds dysbiosis, the presence of yeast or of harmful intestinal bacteria.) The situation is much worse than we acknowledge, because what most people consider a “normal” state of bowel elimination is actually constipation in the picture of total wellness. An elimination after each meal is closer to what is natural for the body—but it’s not the common experience today.

Not all mucus is bad. There is a thin film of beneficial mucus on the intestinal wall. It is where the intestinal flora lives, it has antimicrobial properties for bad bacteria. But eating too many carbohydrates and dairy products, which are all hard to digest, promotes the formation of a stickier mucus that buffers irritation. This denser mucus partially blocks food absorption while slowing the bowels. When partially digested food sits in the intestines, yeast and bad bacteria have more time to devour more food. They flourish and emit more of their toxic waste, which numbs nerves and weakens muscle, causing further stagnancy in the colon and therefore delay in the release of feces. When stools sit inside the colon too long, their toxins may get reabsorbed back into the body, which may be experienced as the headaches and body pain that can accompany constipation. If this is a regular state, the constipation becomes chronic, partly because the good bacteria die off as the bad ones flourish—and good bacteria go together with regular bowel movements.

For a detox program to be complete, it must help to correct constipation by eliminating the irritating toxins that cause mucus buildup. Different people are affected differently, but the most common mucusforming foods are wheat, dairy products, refined sugars, and excessive red meat. A complete detox also replenishes the good bacteria while killing the bad. And it begins the process of restoring some of the nutrients essential for a healthy bowel, for example, iodine, necessary for proper thyroid function and therefore beneficial for the bowels, and magnesium, needed for the muscular contraction of the bowels. The Clean program is complete, since it replenishes nutrients, eliminates toxin exposure, and enhances the neutralization and elimination of damaging molecules and the mucus that was formed to buffer their irritation. Its benefits go deep.

Calming the mind through a daily meditation practice can also have significant benefits on this state. If anger, greed, and other negative emotions are the initial cause of constipation, as older traditions of healing and well-being say, then we need to look beyond the physical realm for clues to this ongoing condition. Offloading the toxins of stress that congest the body is as important as taking in correct foods. We rarely make the time to disempower the toxic thoughts in our minds as our ancestors did with practices of meditation and contemplation—perhaps if we did, laxatives would not be such top-selling items at the drugstore. Sometimes the root of the problem is not something that can be solved by supplements and diet alone.

There are so many connections between nutrition and intestinal health that it is almost impossible to say in an exact, mathematical way what each person will need. Covering all the possible needs without overloading is the hallmark of a sound detox program like Clean.

Allergies

Tony, a businessman, was in good control of his health. He practiced yoga and exercised regularly, ate at good restaurants when he went out, and cooked with high-quality organic ingredients. But in the three years since turning forty, he’d noticed a dip in his energy. He was getting more headaches than in his younger days. His body wasn’t as lean as he’d expected from all his yoga; he had love handles that wouldn’t leave. The most pronounced change was seasonal allergies that got worse each year. They were now so bad he had to take prescription medication. He had heard that allergies were getting worse in today’s “dirtier” environment. He hoped a detox might help his problem and get him off the medication.

On questioning Tony more closely about his lifestyle, I found out that he ate bread and pasta frequently and loved ice cream. I explained that his diet, more than the dirty environment he lived in, was probably the primary cause of his problem. Wheat is a classic trigger of allergic responses. So are dairy products and refined sugars. They irritate and erode the intestinal walls, resulting in a “leaky gut,” the origin of inadequate allergic responses. Intestinal dysbiosis also contributes to exaggerated allergic responses. I suggested he follow an elimination diet for a couple of weeks, cutting out those sweet, milky foods along with the wheat, which would allow any leaks in the intestinal wall to heal. Then I recommended a three-week cleanse to restore a healthy intestinal environment by repopulating it with good bacteria.

Tony followed the instructions with the dedication of a true yogi, though his first week without ice cream he said was horrible. After three weeks he reported with some shock that he’d lost twenty-two pounds. He simply did not understand where those pounds had come from, as he had never considered himself overweight. He was leaner, though not overly thin, with the same good muscle tone and shape from his yoga. His love handles had almost entirely disappeared, and his skin was taut and firm. He also reported having the energy he’d had at age twenty. But the most important change revealed itself over the year that followed. He did not have seasonal allergies at all. Removing the root cause of the allergy, the damaged intestinal wall that keeps the gut-associated lymphatic tissue (GALT) overstimulated, had allowed for true healing to happen. Not only had the accumulated mucus been removed; his intestinal wall had started to heal.

Allergies are one of the most common symptoms of toxicity. But detecting the cause isn’t as easy as staying away from the things that make you sneeze. Allergic responses to food don’t necessarily play out in an obvious cause-and-effect way, like drinking milk and immediately getting hives or a stomach cramp. They can be delayed by hours, expressing themselves as diarrhea or headaches later in the day. Or sometimes the thing that seems to trigger the attack is only the “straw that broke the camel’s back,” as it was for Tony. The true cause of his problem was the irritating foods and toxic chemicals that caused a leaky gut and kept his immune system on heightened alert mode throughout the year, not simply the pollen he breathed in at the change of seasons, which tipped his system into crisis. A cursory look at the problem of allergies often leads to an incorrectly identified source. Trying to avoid trees and plants would not have cured Tony—likely some other trigger would have become the instigator of itchy eyes and nose.

As Tony learned, if the intestinal wall is intact and the good flora alive, the gut-associated lymphatic tissue is awake, but calm. If the intestinal wall is damaged, it is hyperactive and ready to cause havoc, even when the allergen makes contact with the interior of the body at a far-off point, like pollen inhaled in through the airway. The body picks up the message that invaders have arrived and initiates a defense response, forming mucus and calling your attention through itchiness. Removing the most common irritating foods from the diet during the Clean program is the first step to restoring order in the body and preventing allergies. But because ice cream, wheat, or whatever food item is the true cause of the problem seems unconnected to the sneezing, eliminating foods from the diet is not always the obvious step to take. Years go by and we are still eating irritating foods while suffering symptoms that we are convinced are triggered by anything but food.

Each of us has our own constitutional weakness that is affected by a problem in the intestines. Tony didn’t have any symptoms of constipation or bloating, yet his damaged intestinal environment manifested in the area of his weakness—nasal and bronchial irritation. Others might be doubled over with belly cramps from excess gas, while still others experience the downward dip of exhaustion or foggy brain.

Depression

Thirty-year-old Kate had been feeling increasingly depressed. She had consulted a psychiatrist who told her (in an echo of my own case) that she had a “chemical imbalance.” She was prescribed an antidepressant and when small doses didn’t help her mood, her prescription was increased to the maximum dose. This high dose bothered Kate, who mentioned she felt uncomfortable taking medication for her sadness at all—but at least the pain in her heart and the anxiety that made breathing difficult at times had subsided. It was a secondary, but equally upsetting problem that had brought her to me. She had gained twenty-five pounds while on the medication, and the shame about that was starting to be as painful as the sadness that the antidepressant had improved.

I told Kate that her antidepressant is part of a group of drugs called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). They are designed to help with low serotonin levels—not by increasing the amount produced, but by letting the amounts available in the body stick around longer before being inactivated. Although they can be very beneficial in cases of moderate depression to kick-start someone to a more stable place, they can sometimes mask the real problem: something in the factory of the intestines, where the majority of the serotonin is produced, has gone awry.

Instead of relying forever on an outside source for something Kate was designed by nature to make in her own body, we wanted to correct whatever was causing her to underproduce the neurotransmitter. In addition, I told her that one of the most common issues I see among women her age is a sluggish thyroid gland, due to mental stress, allergies, and inadequate nutrition. This influences both weight gain and depression. By giving her body a recharge and a “reset” through a cleanse, the inner serotonin production gets a chance to improve and the thyroid can bounce back into full action, helping to regulate weight again. Kate ended up doing six weeks of Clean, because she was feeling so great that she didn’t want to change anything. In total she lost thirty pounds and looked better than ever. I worked in conjunction with her psychiatrist to slowly taper her off the antidepressant.

When your intestinal environment is damaged and inflamed, there is a slow reduction of natural serotonin levels, because so much of your serotonin is made in the intestines under the right conditions. When this happens, it physically changes the way you are getting signals about what to feel and how to respond to the world. Your experiences of moods and feelings will change for the worse, shifting to apathy, a dulled anesthetized state, or serious lows. This explanation could be seen as a modern scientific understanding of amma’s torpor of the spirit. Both are caused by toxicity.

As anyone with a more complex understanding of the psyche and physiology knows, the picture of depression is far more intricate than this. For one thing, many other neurotransmitters are involved that may also be out of balance, whether from a lack of nutrients or subtler imbalances in other parts of the body. Then add to this the toxins from the problems of the heart and soul that evade a physical examination, and it is impossible to say that there is ever a single cause of depression. I would never have presumed to tell Kate whether the root of her suffering started in the body (that low neurotransmitter production was causing her low spirits) or in the spirit (that her spirit was generating a physical symptom to get her attention).