Clean: The Revolutionary Program to Restore the Body's Natural Ability to Heal Itself (23 page)

OTHER TYPES OF ELIMINATION

The bowels are by no means the only avenue of elimination that your body uses. All types of elimination need to be supported during Clean, and afterward.

Kidney Elimination. Make sure you urinate frequently during Clean. After the liver does its hard work of transforming fat-loving toxic molecules into water-soluble ones, they need to be filtered out of the body by the kidneys and eliminated via your urine. Drink enough water that you pee every hour. If urination happens less than that, you are not drinking enough water. Lemon, cucumbers, coconut, and other ingredients used in the Clean recipes are natural diuretics that will help this process too.

Lung Elimination. Breathing is a crucial method for releasing toxins. When you exhale carbon dioxide, you are getting rid of acidity in the blood. (Remember the carbonic acid made by the little factories of your cells? This becomes carbon dioxide gas.) Make a point of using your lungs fully and deeply; visualize how each inhale is supplying you with the number one most essential nutrient you need to live, oxygen, and each exhale is an essential way of offloading the waste material that must be removed. Automatically, your breaths will become fuller and calmer.

Many people do breathing exercises to eliminate toxins from both the nervous system and the thinking brain. A simple exercise involves putting attention on the breath in a mindful way for a few minutes. Start by breathing in and out through the nose, letting the belly inflate and then the back and chest expand on the inhale; then letting the chest and back contract but keeping the chest lifted, and then letting the belly flatten on the exhale. Keep the rhythm as regular and as slow as you can. Most important, keep your attention focused on your breath. Be aware at all times if you are inhaling or exhaling. Notice how the moment you take your attention away from breathing, the autopilot kicks in—you will continue to breathe, but your attention will be elsewhere, most likely in thoughts, and soon your breaths get short and shallow. Each time you notice this, gently bring your attention back to your breath. This exercise can be done anywhere, at any time, even in the middle of an important meeting. It will be cleaning out the lungs while quieting and clearing the mind.

Skin Elimination. Sweating is another mechanism for eliminating toxins. In a healthy person, the skin is usually spared the job of eliminating heavy-duty toxins and mucus, and mainly releases excess water, minerals, and salts. But if your bowels are not doing their job, the body will recruit the other organs of elimination to compensate. If this happens, your skin pays the price with breakouts and problems that cosmetics and creams applied to the surface don’t fix. During a detox program, the skin might have to do some extra work at the beginning. Skin rashes or breakouts during the first few days of Clean are not uncommon; they are a sign that accelerated detoxification is happening. (Of course, use your common sense. Nobody knows your body better than you, so if at any point any of the effects of the program seem alarmingly abnormal, consult your doctor or preferably a healthcare practitioner who is familiar with the detoxification process.)

Taking saunas maximizes elimination via the skin during Clean, especially infrared saunas, a powerful method for boosting sweating. Steam rooms can be helpful as well, although they are less effective than saunas. Skin brushing is another simple, cheap, and effective practice that will help elimination and can easily be done daily during Clean. Your skin is constantly scaling off dead cells, but you’ll want to speed the process during a detox to prevent the dead skin from blocking your pores. Finally, hot-cold plunges are a detoxification secret weapon.

The most effective sauna is an infrared sauna. This newer technology heats up the user’s body instead of heating the air with steam like a traditional Finnish sauna. It creates radiant heat from long light waves that are not visible by the eye (like sunlight diffused by clouds). These rays penetrate more deeply below the skin than the heat of a regular sauna, exciting the fat molecules into vibration so that they release toxins. It also boosts circulation, which is desirable at all times, but especially during Clean, as the blood needs to carry toxins efficiently to the liver for processing. Those used to regular saunas will probably find that they sweat more in the infrared version. However, regular saunas will do if you can’t find infrared. In both cases, remember to rehydrate during and after the sauna with lots of pure water.

Skin brushing involves using a soft, natural-bristle brush with a long handle on your dry skin, before a bath or shower. These brushes can be found in health food stores and some drugstores. Use long strokes and circular strokes to gently “scrub” the dry skin, from feet to head, including the front and back of the body, the arms, and neck, always moving inward toward the heart. Do this for several minutes daily if possible. Go gently on thinner-skinned areas and use more pressure in thicker-skinned areas such as your back and the soles of the feet. A loofah works too. In addition to removing dead skin cells, you are stimulating the all-important lymph system, the hormonal system, and glands. For best results follow this with a hot-cold plunge or shower. If you need to moisturize the skin afterward, try using a small amount of natural oil like sesame or coconut oil instead of a chemical-filled drugstore product.

In a hot-cold plunge, you alternate between hot and cold water repeatedly to boost circulation and detoxification. Your skin is your largest organ: it contains miles of arterioles and venules that are filled with blood. These vessels relax and dilate with heat and contract with cold. When this relax/contract pattern happens, your skin pumps almost as much blood as your heart. You don’t need to go to a spa or bathhouse to do it. In your shower, turn the water as hot as you can tolerate for one minute and then as cold as you can go for one minute and repeat this 4 or 5 times. Doing this daily is an easy way to support the skin’s detoxification function.

EXERCISE

Exercise boosts the effectiveness of all the elimination channels at once. It increases circulation of both blood and lymph. It makes you sweat. It stimulates the bowels to eliminate. It makes you breathe more heavily and deeply. It relaxes your mind and puts you in the present. It burns calories, and, last but not least, it releases endorphins, the feelgood hormones that are nature’s antidote to stress and worry. Use your common sense. Don’t run a marathon during detoxification, especially during the first few days of your first Clean. Until you get familiar with what your body is doing and how it feels, take exercise slowly and increase the intensity gradually; start by walking more and taking the stairs. Longer periods of exercise will speed up your metabolism and help with weight loss. Scientific data show concretely how exercise helps reverse most chronic diseases. Make sure you include some form of exercise daily, during Clean and beyond.

Yoga. Some forms of exercise have extra detoxification power. Hatha yoga’s series of twists and bends massage the organs and promote their good functioning. Jumping exercises like jump rope and mini-trampoline (also called rebounding) are favorites on detox programs because they stimulate blood and lymphatic circulation.

In addition to being relaxing and nurturing, massage helps release toxins by boosting the circulation of lymph, the fluid that carries waste, debris, toxins, and sick cells through the lymph nodes. These “healing stations” act like filters, processing and removing sick cells and fighting viruses and bacteria. Deep-tissue massage works best for detoxification purposes, but any massage technique will help during Clean.

As long as you support the essentials of elimination—bowel, kidney, and basic exercise—you’ll get Clean no matter how much or little of these support practices you do. There are varying degrees of Clean—it’s sort of comparable to taking a shower without soap, with soap, or with a salt-scrub, soap, and loofah. Do what feels right to you on your first program, trying a few new measures whenever you can.

Rest and Sleep

One of our biggest health challenges is the lack of enough time for resting and repairing. Americans tend to be sleep-deprived; let Clean be an opportunity to change this. Energy levels always fluctuate during a detoxification program. Your body may crave sleep at the beginning, making you more tired earlier than usual. Allow yourself to get as much rest as you need and go to bed early because sleep is when much of the important repair work is done. A natural correction of fatigue tends to occur during the program, at which point it is normal to find yourself waking up earlier than usual, without the normal tiredness or desire to stay in bed. Make adequate rest as much of a priority as you can, even if it means cutting out some TV, reading, or socializing.

QUANTUM DETOXIFICATION: CLEANING THE MIND

East, West, Stress: Older traditions of health care are based on the idea that when conditions in the mind shift, so do conditions in the body. Harmony in the body is greatly dependent on balance in the mind. In India the single word amma denotes all toxins, whether physical or mental, that accumulate and throw off health. Most Eastern medicine practitioners know that by helping the patient establish a cleanliness or purity of awareness, orderliness of body is created as a mirror reflection of that order.

The Western medical point of view acknowledges the connection between mind and body more than it realizes. Scientists can observe and measure how continued stress responses literally change the biochemistry of the body (the fight-or-flight stress response floods you with cortisol) and also change behavior (such as pushing you into unhealthy eating and sleeping habits). Any doctor who works shifts in the emergency room can tell you that Monday mornings are characterized by a wave of heart attack and stroke patients, marking exactly the time when weekend fun and rest shifts to work-related stress and worry. From an integrative or openminded medicine point of view, we can combine the two understandings and say that stress, anger, or disappointment experienced at the level of thought and feeling are so potentially corrosive that they sometimes have to make themselves visible as physical symptoms in order to get your attention. These stressful thoughts find a pathway to the weakest part of your body and begin to disrupt functioning.

For all these reasons, detoxification does not limit itself to the aspects of toxicity we can see, touch, or measure. It also means getting rid of bad thoughts and feelings and letting go of negative relationships, emotions, jobs, or even toxic governments. It means much more than just cleaning your body and maximizing the liver function. It includes meditation and clearing and calming your mind. What we find is that detoxification at the physical level facilitates detoxification in its quantum counterpart, and vice versa.

Clean presents an opportunity to change some patterns for a few weeks. This includes changing the patterns of the mind. If some of the biggest obstacles to radiant well-being are the quantum toxins of stress and endless thinking, then one of the most important acts any of us can do to achieve better health is to engage in quantum detoxification: clearing the debris and toxic waste that fills up the mind on a daily basis, and recapturing some of that lost attention that drains out of our brains in random, repetitive thinking. You can start this easily and simply with a few practices that I ask my patients to include in their three-week program.

Today’s new age ideas have got everyone striving for positive thinking. “Think positive” is a universal goal. But though positive thinking is much more pleasant than negative thinking, it also consumes our attention, our life energy, and can be the leak that causes disease or prevents healing. Becoming present, reclaiming our attention from the thinking mind, whether it is thinking positive or negative thoughts, is what will ultimately allow this energy to be redirected into something other than generating thoughts.

Attention, the Energy of Life

Understanding the true meaning of “attention” is the key to quantum detoxification. Right now, as you continue to read this page, put some of your attention on your right hand. Don’t stop reading. Do it at the same time. Feel your right hand. You don’t need to look at it; you can feel it while you read. Feel the temperature in your hand; feel any dampness there, feel the edges of the fingers touching each other. Now think of this: Your hand was there before I asked you to put your attention on it, yet you weren’t feeling it. You weren’t aware of it. Your hand became part of your awareness the instant you put your attention on it. Your hand becomes your felt reality at that time, it becomes your experience. So we can conclude that wherever your attention is at any given moment will determine your experience at that moment.

The total experience of your life is the sum total of every one of those moments.

Now consider this. In order to put that attention into your hand, you activated a cable made of neurons (nerve cells) that connects your brain to your hand. The charge you are sending down and up this cable, that just a moment before was idle and unused, is literally a charge of electricity. It is a current of electrons, which in turn, as quantum physics revealed, is just energy, or light. This energy was being used for something else right before you used it to send it down that cable. Everything is in constant flow. The instant you decide to use this energy to connect your brain with your hand, you are actually redistributing or reallocating energy (just like with the digestion-detox systems). You are claiming this attention from wherever it was going before and are now choosing to direct it down the neuron cable to your hand. More than likely, this attention was flowing upward into the thinking mind, splashing out like water from an overfilled pool. Instead of connecting your brain with your hand, it was connecting the brain with thoughts and it was doing so automatically, by default. When you are shifting your attention by choice, you are using your will.

When attention is flowing into thoughts, you become not present to the reality before you in each moment. Thoughts are in the past or the future; they are in imaginary places and situations. Stuck in their grip, you become “lost in thought.” Curiously, your body does not know. It continues to react as if your thoughts were real. Get wrapped up in thoughts about a fight you had with someone, and adrenaline will be released to prepare you for fight or flight. Your body is actually making your quantum thoughts a physical reality, and paying the price.