Clean: The Revolutionary Program to Restore the Body's Natural Ability to Heal Itself (18 page)

GETTING STARTED

Clean is custom-built to incorporate the five essential functions of detoxification.

Reduce the workload of digestion. The small daily loss of energy funds to allergy responses, even if you don’t overtly feel them happening, is taking its energy toll and contributing to the “dullness” that most of us experience day in and day out. Consuming less solid food and leaving out irritants lead to a reallocation of energy to the processes of detoxification.

Restore the twelve-hour window. After the signal to enter detox mode starts, around eight hours after your last meal, the typical modern body needs about four hours to do a deep cleaning. Few of us get this today, because we snack and drink until late at night.

Rebuild the inner environment. Acidity is lowered, the intestinal flora is rebalanced in favor of the beneficial bacteria, and the intestinal wall gets a chance to heal. Creating this balanced and stable environment reduces cravings for the foods that cause toxicity, which supports long-term maintenance of a clean state.

Support the liver. Nutrients are delivered that ensure that the liver can perform phase 1 and 2 functions efficiently, keeping you safe.

Enhance elimination. Once toxins are released and neutralized, they must be discarded along with their mucus coating. Clean incorporates supplements and techniques to ensure that this happens effectively.

Clean preparation is done in three steps:

Step 1. Preparing Your Mind: Easing into the Program

Step 2. Preparing Your Life: Schedule and Home

Step 3. Preparing Your Body: Eliminating Irritants

You do not have to wait until toxicity is eliminated across the planet—it may be too late. You do not have to settle for symptom control and its dangers.

You do not have to give up on your search for a powerful way to repair the damage of living in our toxic world.

You are about to experience what happens when your body is given back the magic abilities it was born with.

The Clean program is your guide.

People of all walks of life have done it successfully.

So can you. Get Clean!

Clean works best when you complete the full three weeks, but the program will also yield results after one or two weeks. Some of my patients build up to the complete three-week program, while others jump in and complete the whole Clean program the first time out. Wherever you are in this spectrum, it is important to remember that every change you make is an important one.

Please read through the following section, which describes the whole program, before starting, as it contains information that will help you plan, accomplish, and benefit from Clean in the most successful way.

Before You Start Clean

People with certain conditions should not cleanse or detox. Please do not proceed if any of these apply to you at the moment:

You are pregnant or breastfeeding.

You have type 1 (insulin-dependent) diabetes.

You are currently living with advanced cancer and are losing weight rapidly.

You are taking a medication that needs a stable blood concentration, including medication for preventing blood clots (such as Coumadin), antiarrhythmics (such as Tikosyn), or anticonvulsants (such as Tegretol). Stable blood concentrations of drugs may get disrupted as absorption rates change, leaving you on too high or too low a dose. Consult with your doctor and do not proceed on any kind of detoxification program without supervision of an expert.

You are currently living with any other disease that needs close monitoring and in which slight changes in your body chemistry could pose a threat.

Are You Spent?

There is another group of people who should not start the Clean or any other detox program. These are people who present with a clinical picture that is not recognized by most traditional physicians, but has been identified and treated extensively by my colleague, Dr. Frank Lipman. He has named this the “Spent” syndrome, and it refers to patients who are exhausted and have low blood pressure and a host of other symptoms attributable to the depletion of their hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, the body’s stress-regulating system.

Depletion of the adrenal system, the “Spent” condition, is rarely diagnosed by conventional doctors, largely because most blood tests and other laboratory evaluations come back as normal, despite the patients’ experience of being constantly exhausted. This means they continue on without treatment as stress takes its toll on the body, when replenishing the adrenal function holistically is actually what is indicated. Dr. Lipman, my partner at the Eleven Eleven Wellness Center in New York, and I are seeing that this condition disproportionately affects women. This could be because their hormonal systems are more complex, because they tend to express the effects of fatigue more acutely, or because women, as natural caregivers, are more likely to let themselves reach a point of burnout before asking for help. But the condition does not discriminate between the sexes and it’s likely that all of us, women and men, go “Spent” at times in our lives.

Your answers to the following questions will help determine whether you have a problem with your adrenal function:

Does it take you longer than average to recover from illnesses or injuries?

Do you regularly have difficulty getting out of bed in the morning?

Do you feel a sense of ongoing fatigue that is not relieved by a good night’s sleep?

Do you feel light-headed when getting up from a lying-down position?

Do you have abnormally low blood pressure?

Do you have extreme sensitivity to cold or tend to feel cold in environments where others do not?

Do you have a chronic level of anxiety or have you ever had panic attacks?

Do you have periods of depression or frequent crying jags (also a hallmark of toxicity)?

Do you have a tendency to bruise easily?

Although some of these symptoms are similar to those of toxicity, as a group they are more specific to the adrenal weakness the Spent program is designed to help. If you answered yes to two or more of these questions, it is important to find a healthcare practitioner who understands how to check your level of adrenal function and work with you to improve it. Embarking on a detox program would be counterproductive and even harmful if you are Spent, as you will not have necessary energy to support the detox and intestinal rebuilding processes. Once you have rested and reactivated your adrenal glands, a detox program will be in order.

I highly recommend that you read Dr. Lipman’s book, Spent, which describes the syndrome and its treatment plan in detail. The ability to tune in to what you need and distinguish between the conditions of toxicity and of being Spent may be one of the most important tools you can use to create a future free of hospital visits and prescription drugs—and full of vibrant health.

If you have any ongoing health problems whatsoever, please consult your doctor before engaging in any detox program, including Clean. If your doctor does not support you or does not give you well-explained, sound reasons why you should not begin a program, I recommend you change doctors and consider working with a professional familiar with Functional Medicine, who is trained in the ways that sickness and disease can have roots in toxicity and a weakened ability to detoxify. You will learn more about working with a wellness partner in chapter 8, “After the Cleanse.”

Step 1. Preparing Your Mind: Easing into the Program

Anytime you take on a project to improve an aspect of your life, you spend a little time planning and preparing for it. The Clean program is no different. Although it is a simple program to follow once you are started, it will require you to change some habits for a few weeks, and that can sometimes be challenging. If you take some time to prepare your mind, your schedule, and home—and, most important, your body—before you start, you will maximize your chances of success.

Gabriella came to my office after a number of different gastroenterologists had failed to help her improve her condition. She was diagnosed as having “ulcerative colitis,” an autoimmune problem. She had two young kids and no help. Her greatest problem was that she had an urgent need to stop wherever she found a restroom. Her breaking point had come the previous week, when she found herself at a Seven-Eleven, unable to leave the bathroom, with two toddlers inside the bathroom with her. I instructed her to start Clean.

A week later she came for a follow-up visit and told me she wanted to stop. Her problem was that even though she was feeling better, it was time-consuming to prepare blended foods for herself. Her “urgency” feelings had almost completely gone away, but she seemed to have forgotten how much time she had spent the previous week in public restrooms. I reminded her of our previous conversation in detail, when she had come to me and described her problem and frustration with her doctors. As she herself started vividly remembering, I saw in her face the unmistakable expression of an “Aha!” moment. We never talked again about the time needed for preparing healthy food. She completed three weeks without a complaint. She still follows the Elimination Diet and continues to fine-tune her lifestyle to support vibrant health.

Thinking of the big picture puts everything into perspective, giving you strength to sustain a change in behavior. This is also true on the flip side—if you fail to follow through with a plan you decided to complete. Judging or punishing yourself will not help. Guilt is as toxic as emotions come. If you find yourself failing, you can look at it as an opportunity to learn how to detoxify guilt itself. I have seen many people transformed by the initial shock of guilt, once they acquire the ability to put that force to work for them. It’s an emotional judo of sorts: the defender redirects the attacker’s charge to the defender’s own advantage. Transformation is happening all the time. Failing is just proof that you are trying. Practice makes perfect. One day at a time. The right mental attitude is integral to completing this program and transforming your health.

One of the first patients I guided through the Clean program was my friend Moshe. He listened very carefully to my instructions and then, with a serious face, said, “Alex, I have a big problem. I won’t be able to do this.”

“Why not?” I asked him.

“I really, really like bread,” he responded.

I told him what I have since told hundreds of patients. Do not think of Clean as something you will be doing for the rest of your life, as changing your diet and lifestyle for good. That’s an overwhelming and, frankly, undesirable prospect for most people. Rather, think of it as an experiment. If you’re like 90 percent of the population, you have probably eaten, drunk, and lived guided by your free will for most of your life, and knowing that you can return to free will after this experiment will reduce the stress of a long-term commitment. Yet I can almost guarantee there will be a natural shift as a result of doing Clean. You may just find that after you complete the program, you will look at food differently. You may simply not want to go back to what you were doing and eating before. You may want to make new choices. This is different from not being allowed to.

Like everything in life worth working for, this program will take commitment and discipline. The first three days may be hard, but most people soon adjust to the restriction in food choices and quantity. Within a week, they say they can’t understand how they ate so much before. Often they realize with surprise how much their life revolves around food. A detox program can offer a new perspective on what the body actually needs to function well—and how much our tendency to excess is more suffocating than supportive.

In my experience, people who complete the program are changed by the end of it. They have a new attitude toward food and a different experience of it. A resetting of their taste buds has occurred, which makes them desire healthier and more natural foods. This is very different from knowing that healthier foods are good for you, but having to force yourself to consume them. It is the “You eat what you are” phenomenon in action.

NATURE VERSUS NURTURE

Eating three meals a day every day is a fairly recent cultural invention in the span of human history. For millennia, our genes evolved in a world where feast or famine was the norm, so our bodies adapted over generations to be able to store excess food whenever it was found, to fuel us through periods when food was scarce. The industrialization of food in the last hundred and fifty years has made “excess” the new norm, yet our genes can’t adapt that quickly. They still eagerly store whenever they get the chance—which in modern life is all the time. This disconnect between genetic design inside and rapid change outside is the root of much of the conflicts we feel about eating.

For Moshe and many others, before they did Clean, certain foods that contributed to the toxic, tired state, such as bread and sugar, were almost magnetically appealing, keeping them stuck in a cycle. But after losing the chemicals and additives and getting a break from sugars, simple carbs, and stimulants, they had so changed their inner environment that they lost the cravings for their old favorites. Their senses, cleared of chemicals and sugars, found more to enjoy in fresh foods; they could “hear” the way their bodies responded to real food over junk food. Suddenly, bright green broccoli gave the delight that only used to come from Rocky Road ice cream. Improving the environment inside the body is much more effective for “cleaning up” poor eating habits than using sheer willpower or the power of positive thinking alone. It’s a universal truth: when you are fit and healthy, you crave the good-quality foods that maintain that state.

If your instinct is pushing you toward a detoxification program but you need motivation, just look around at people on the street, or in the mall, or in the airport. How healthy and happy does the average person look? Read some of the health Web sites that are talking honestly about the real state of health in America today. Too many people are sick. Too many people are taking medications, going to the doctor, or suffering with some kind of symptom. Half of Americans will have heart disease or cancer in their lives. The other half will likely develop other kinds of conditions and diseases that will continue to make the pharmaceutical industry one of the most profitable industries of all time. So as you consider whether you can successfully do the Clean program, it can be helpful to ask yourself, do you want to be a number in the American bad-health statistics? If you do what most Americans do and you eat what most Americans eat, how can you expect a different outcome?