Clean: The Revolutionary Program to Restore the Body's Natural Ability to Heal Itself (19 page)

I met Frank, a forty-year-old New Yorker, six months after he’d undergone emergency abdominal surgery to remove his gallbladder. Though he was a little heavy and his skin looked dull and puffy, his surgeon and his specialist had declared him fixed. But he didn’t feel it. He had been suffering from mysterious abdominal pains since the surgery and he lived in a constant state of anxiety that the pain was a message telling him a tumor was waiting to get him. Since nobody had advised him otherwise, he continued to eat his lifelong diet consisting of large amounts of meat, fatty treats, dairy foods, and alcohol. These things filled up his anxious stomach, comforted his mind, and relaxed his emotions temporarily.

After doing a full physical evaluation, I was confident that Frank had a strong constitution and had generally recovered well from his surgery, but the symptoms he reported were signs that his intestinal flora was severely altered. His starchy, sweet diet, in combination with the antibiotics, anesthetics, and painkillers from the surgery had devastated his good bacteria. All these toxins had created dysbiosis and now the yeast that had overgrown in the intestines were releasing toxins causing abdominal bloating and pain. Worse, they were making him crave more sugary, starchy foods.

Frank was amazed at how, after completing the Clean program, his energy returned, his mood was elevated, and the pains began to disappear. When he reintroduced the old foods back into his diet—caffeine, red meats, fatty foods, dairy products, and more than one or two alcoholic drinks a week—he discovered that they irritated his digestive system and caused abdominal pains. The less he consumed these things, the less pain he felt. He had misinterpreted the earlier “message” from his body: the pain was not an omen of a tumor; it was a distress signal from an intestinal tract that was irritated and inflamed. The great benefit of his cleanse was the end of these cravings—and a new confidence in the strength of his health. As he cleaned out this debris, Frank began to hear something new: his body was hungry for different kinds of things. Instead of comforting, heavy foods, he wanted fresh vegetables and other foods that made him feel clear and sharp. He made smoothies with protein powder and went to the gym instead of having a cup of coffee. He told me, “I finally feel like I am listening to my body and I get it: I am what I eat—and I eat what I am!”

Step 2. Preparing Your Life: Schedule and Home

In some ways doing the Clean program at home is more convenient than retreating to a fasting center or spa for a cleanse, but it has its challenges. Changes of habit are hard for everyone to accomplish, no matter what level of diet and lifestyle they’re starting from, and changes in eating and drinking are some of the hardest. When we attempt to break free of them, we get moody and irritable or start craving the things we are trying to quit. Even though the Clean program addresses these issues nutritionally and biochemically, you have to be your own main support team. If you set up a schedule and system in advance, you will maximize your chances of success.

Put Clean on Your Schedule

Like anything worth investing effort and energy in, you have to make time for Clean. Plenty of busy people, from parents to business executives, from students to entertainers, have finished the program. They’ll all agree that getting three weeks free of obligations or social events is a fantasy, so don’t wait for months to start. Waiting for the perfect window of quiet time probably means you’ll never do it. What you can do, however, is plan the program for a period with minimal travel and start on a weekend if the week tends to involve business and social events. This will give you time to get used to the new menu and go through the first few days of adjustment outside of the workplace. Also note that too many changes at the same time can be hard to sustain, so try to start your program at a time when you are not moving, changing jobs, divorcing, or going through other major changes. (But some people do best during times of total change—you may be one of them.)

When you have decided on a start date, put it in your calendar just as you would any other commitment, such as a trip or work project. Note the dates you will start the Elimination Diet preparation phase and mark out Week 1, Week 2, and Week 3. Weekly planner charts are provided for you in the next section of the book, but it helps to put some of the optional activities, from exercise to massage, right onto whatever calendar you look at daily. You will also need to make some time for shopping for all the ingredients you plan to use each week. Block out times for this each week; finding your fridge empty halfway through the week is an unnecessary obstacle.

Once you are in the swing of the program, it’s fairly easy to follow your normal lifestyle. Make the choice to do things differently and stay away from the cocktail hour and meals with friends and family for a few days. You might even take your dinnertime liquid-meal jar to a friend’s house.

Setting Up Your Kitchen

Getting a system set up for Clean that is both functional and supportive is very important. The anchor of this system is the kitchen. Millions of people today rarely cook—they eat out for most of their meals. Their challenge will be to use the kitchen and to find the time to organize and prepare foods daily. For others, the kitchen is the hub of a busy home. Their challenge may come from the tempting foods it is stocked with for other members of the family. If you are the household chef, determine how far you can go in disrupting the status quo. A personal commitment to your own goals might be the only thing that helps you get through preparing other peoples’ meals as you sip your vegetable juice. Know that after the first week this will get easier. But also remember that anything you do for yourself will help the whole family. It’s not too much to ask others to adapt slightly to accommodate you from time to time.

Take a few minutes to look in all your kitchen drawers and cabinets. See how many packaged products you have. What food do you have in boxes, jars, bags, tubes, and cans? Read the ingredients, familiarize yourself with what you were eating before, and then throw away or give away whatever is counter to the way you want to eat now. This should include anything that is going to tempt you to stray from your Clean meals and snacks.

You will need three basic essentials to complete the program that will all be important for maintaining the benefits over the long term. Although the best versions of them can be expensive, you can find affordable ones that will work fine. Since they’ll help you long after Clean is finished, they should be seen as an investment in your well-being.

A blender. Smoothies and soups are a very important part of the Clean program. I recommend a high-speed blender such as Vitamix, but any good blender with a powerful motor will do. Some recipes also call for a food processor for solid ingredients.

A juicer. There are lots of good juicers on the market today. My favorite brand is Breville, which makes powerful and easy-to-clean products.

A source of pure water. Anyone on the path to being Clean needs to use pure water. Tap water today carries too many chemicals to support you as you actively detoxify. Though it’s possible to buy bottled water during the program or use a bottled-water delivery system, these options are expensive over time and damaging to the environment. Jug filters will take chlorine out of the water, but leave many of the harmful substances. Your Clean program is a good time to invest in a water filtration system for your kitchen sink. A reverse osmosis filtration system lets you wash foods in clean water, drink clean water, and use it for your Clean program soups and smoothies. These are available starting for around $300 and increase in price as they get more effective. My preferred source is listed in the “Staying Clean” section of chapter 8. Whatever you decide on, try to use the purest water possible during the program.

Prepare a few clean jars and food-grade plastic containers so you are equipped to take your liquid meals and your daily lunches with you to work and elsewhere.

After familiarizing yourself with the ingredients needed for the meals and smoothies, juices, and soups, investigate where you can buy the healthiest ingredients possible, like a local farmers’ market, health-food store, or a supermarket with a good organic selection. In addition to buying what you need for Clean, remember to buy the foods that will help you when you feel cravings, such as raw nuts and herbal teas.

Step 3. Preparing Your Body: Eliminating Irritants

When it comes to cleaning, detoxifying, and restoring the body, it’s not ideal to go from zero to sixty overnight. There is some groundwork to be done. A few days of doing the Elimination Diet before you begin Clean will ease your body into the program, by clearing out of your body foods and chemicals you may be allergic or sensitive to and freeing up energy for detoxification.

Reduce Your Exposure to Toxins

Reduce your exposure to toxins in your environment and in your diet.

TOXINS IN YOUR ENVIRONMENT

The following are common everyday sources of toxicity: car exhaust, gardening and lawn chemicals, dry-cleaning products, heating systems, air-conditioning systems (use HEPA filters), chlorine in swimming pools, mattresses containing fire retardants, lead paint, cleaning products and waxes, aluminum-containing deodorant, fluoride-containing toothpaste, cosmetics, pots and pans whose cooking surfaces are coated with aluminum or Teflon, electromagnetic radiation from electronics, and cell phones.

As you set up your kitchen, notice where in your home and work environments you are exposed to unnecessary toxins. The most obvious category will be your household cleaning supplies. Read their labels just as you did with food. When you go grocery shopping for Clean, pick up one or two toxin-free home cleaners to try, so that you start the process of lowering your toxic load in addition to cleaning out your diet. Over the coming weeks, begin to notice where and when you are exposed to some of the most common daily toxins. Your kitchen, your bathroom, and your garage as well as your work environment will likely contain a considerable number of toxic products. Avoid what you can, replace the products you can, and consider how to lower your daily exposure. There is a plethora of information online about making your home and life toxin-free and it can happen in small steps (see “Clean Resources” in the appendix for further information).

TOXINS IN YOUR DIET

The duration of this preparation phase will vary, depending on the characteristics of your existing diet and lifestyle. The cleaner you are to begin with, the shorter amount of time you can spend on preparation.

Three to four days of the Elimination Diet is enough if you have done some cleansing programs recently or follow a whole-food-based diet with minimal meat, milk products, and wheat and almost no packaged, canned, or fast foods.

One week is enough if you consider yourself an average eater, with a diet that typically contains some or all of the following: packaged foods, red meat, baked goods, dairy products, sugar products, caffeine, alcohol. One week is the average amount of time people spend on the Elimination Diet before starting the Clean program.

Follow the Elimination Diet for two weeks before starting Clean if your diet includes a lot of fast food, boxed or packaged foods, sodas, junk food, and alcohol. If you have the time, you will get maximum benefit from Clean when you start it.

This preparation step will minimize withdrawals from caffeine and other chemicals in foods that can be a cause of headaches, nausea, and all kinds of other annoying symptoms during a detox program. It will also help blunt a possible “healing crisis”: sometimes a body that has been dulled with processed foods and deprived of nutrients responds in a dramatic way to eliminating toxins and obtaining adequate nutrients. The immune and repair systems can suddenly bounce back into full working mode and unsettle things on the surface, causing skin breakouts, fevers, and an array of symptoms that make you feel as if you are falling ill, when in fact they are signs of the body’s waking up and getting back in the game. Though a healing crisis is ultimately a good thing, it will disrupt your life and can be uncomfortable or even alarming. If you prepare by following the basic Elimination Diet for a few days you will avoid any of these problems.

The foods you eat in this phase are also the main ingredients in your Clean food and liquid meals. After this preparation, you will feel lighter in the body, sharper in the mind, and confident that you have the adaptability and motivation to accomplish the Clean program in full.

FAQs: Smoking and Prescription Medication

Q: I smoke. Do I have to cut this out too?

A: Smokers have different experiences than nonsmokers do during Clean. Some use it as a chance to quit cold turkey. Others find that smoking starts to lose its appeal as their palate and sensitivity to toxins opens up. At the very least, many naturally become more mindful of each cigarette, just as they are becoming more mindful of food. Even if you make no changes in your cigarette consumption, go ahead and do the whole program, knowing you are boosting your detoxification ability and creating a “clean canvas” in your body where you may just start to feel the effects of cigarettes in a different way. Smoking affects detoxification by accelerating phase 1 in the liver and it will detract from your achieving the best results.

Q: I am taking prescription medication prescribed by my doctor. Should I stop taking it?

A: If you are taking any kind of prescription drug, do not stop taking it during this program. Many prescription drugs can be safely stopped, but some cannot. Certain serious conditions require a consistent level of medication in the blood. Any change in diet can cause a change in the medication’s absorption rate, which can result in a higher or lower concentration in the blood. In the case of blood thinners, antiarrhythmic drugs, antiepileptic drugs, and chemotherapy agents, this can be life-threatening.

Eating from the Elimination Diet

Eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner at your regular times, choosing only foods and drinks from the “Yes” side and excluding all foods from the “No” side of the “Include/Exclude List” below. Since the “Yes” side of the list almost certainly does not contain some foods that you consume daily, you will need to make substitutions. Start using some of the recipes for the Clean program now chapter 11, “The Clean Recipes”). They are all Elimination Diet recipes, so they do the thinking for you.