Clean: The Revolutionary Program to Restore the Body's Natural Ability to Heal Itself (26 page)

This dramatic level of offloading won’t happen with Clean’s slightly slower detox process. But patients who are starting from a cleaner state, do often report some version of this “shedding” toward the end of their program, and feel immensely better as a result. Should this happen during your program, keep hydrated and be thankful for what you are losing. (And remember that wise saying, “Better out than in.”)

For all these reasons, continuing past the second week is highly recommended. And if you do decide to finish the program after Week 2, it’s important to remember that at this point you have established a delicate balance in the intestines. You are partway through the process of restoring intestinal integrity, so don’t return immediately to sugar, alcohol, or the exact diet you had before you started Clean. Follow the tips in the next section for completing Clean. (And if you were considering stopping at the end of Week 2 but suspect that you can actually keep going, recommit and carry on!)

Week 3

As you start this final week, the end is in sight. You are two-thirds of the way through, so don’t give up. At this point you will be in a good routine; keeping up your resolve isn’t as hard because you have built a new set of habits. If you need motivation, ask your support system (your designated friend, family, or Clean partner) for help. Schedule a massage, take time for yoga, or do anything that is nurturing. Transformation can be hard, but know that the payoff for all your work is on the way: this week you start to reap the benefits. You feel the natural high that comes with detoxification; your skin glows, your eyes are whiter, your clothes are a little looser, and friends ask if you’ve just been on vacation (or had a face lift). Typically, the third week of Clean is when it hits you—this is how good you can feel at your age and stage in life. Just like the plant that has gotten nourished at the roots, you start to bloom, and healthy, shiny leaves and bright petals are the result. Let this be the inspiration to keep going through the full twenty-one days.

Kim, a twenty-eight-year-old architect, came to see me with one main complaint, a persistent, unrelenting cough. She coughed so much that it was affecting everything in her life, from her work to her sleep to her relationships. She had consulted with many doctors. She had even been seen by lung specialists and had undergone every imaging test that exists, from chest X-rays to CT scans, MRIs, and gallium scans. Nobody could find a clear problem. She was given special antibiotics that kill mystery bacteria known to cause a longstanding pneumonia that is marked by constant cough without fever or other symptoms. The coughing didn’t stop. Next she was given anti-allergic medications. These didn’t work. Then steroids were prescribed, which worked for a bit, until they stopped working. Her lung specialist wanted to increase the dosage and schedule a bronchoscopy—an invasive procedure that involves inserting a scope down a person’s throat and into the lungs. In a desperate attempt to avoid the bronchoscopy, Kim came to see me. After a three-week cleanse her cough had completely disappeared. But something else happened that blew my mind. She did not need her reading glasses anymore, a symptom that she had not even mentioned because she thought of it as just part of getting older—most of the adults in her family wear glasses, and they all had to start wearing them early in life. I still scratch my head over Kim’s recovery and its welcome side effect. Did the restored intestinal flora and the energy recaptured by the detox allow her body to finally heal? Did she lose mucus from the eye area, aiding her eyesight? In any case, obstacles were clearly removed, lacking ingredients were added, and Kim’s innate natural intelligence did the rest. When given a chance, even the most fatigued body wants to find its way back to balance.

Congratulations on completing Clean. By now you are probably having a very different experience of your body than before Clean. If you did not get all the results you were hoping for, it’s perfectly fine and safe to continue with the program for a few days or even a week or two longer. Some patients of mine have even stayed on it for several months. In fact, though you’d probably need a slight increase in quantity of food, you could safely keep on eating this way for the rest of your life, since the way you’ve been eating during the program is much closer to the way nature intended you to eat. True, nature doesn’t come with a blender, but the ingredients and the proportions of raw to cooked foods you have gotten used to have put you more in line with the way we, and all the other animals on the planet, were intended to eat. In an age of processed, devitalized food and tired, overburdened bodies, this can only be a good thing.

There are different ways to return to your previous style of life. You could finish Clean cold turkey on day 22, and pick up the same eating habits you had before you began. But if you were feeling slower and looking older before Clean—which is what most of my own patients report—do you really want to do that?

In my experience, almost nobody wants to go back to feeling the way they did before. Some people have such a profound transformation that even years later they have held on to enough of what they’ve learned to continue to enjoy the benefits. Others get a huge boost during the three weeks itself, but in the months afterward find that old habits, and the symptoms of toxicity, return because life gets busy and full of distractions again. Still others end the program only to return the very next day to the exact same eating and drinking habits they had before, inadvertently eroding some of the improvements to their inner environments. Which of these three scenarios ends up applying to you depends on how you transition out of the program and what you do to maintain its benefits, so read this chapter carefully.

Completing Clean

You may be impatient to return to regular meals. Or you might feel that at this point a few more days of Clean would be a cinch. In either case, please transition out of Clean gradually. Start by going to one liquid meal and two solid meals a day, continuing to choose meals from the Clean recipes or the Elimination Diet. Many of my patients never abandon this equation. The majority of them prefer to have the liquid meal for breakfast. It’s quick and easy to prepare and gives a lighter but still nourishing start to the day. You can use the Clean smoothie and juice recipes or be creative and invent some yourself. After a few days of doing this, return to three solid-food meals a day if you like—but continue to adhere to the Elimination Diet rules.

Do not yet return to your pre-Clean diet. You have a unique opportunity, one that most people today never get. For several weeks you’ve avoided all the foods known to cause food allergies, food sensitivities, and digestive strain. You’ve created a clean canvas on which to do some life-changing research. With a little patience and discipline, you can investigate what thousands of people pay huge amounts of money to do, and find out which foods disturb your body and might cause some of the symptoms you’ve gotten used to shouldering.

As you have discovered, mild to severe reactions against certain foods are commonplace. Remember, the activity may be happening far below the surface and not felt in obvious ways beyond fatigue or dullness. Or it may be experienced as full-blown allergic attacks. Two people standing next to each other will have vastly different responses to the same irritant and it’s impossible to predict who will have which response. But whether your response is mild or extreme, if you want to find the triggers, typically you have to choose between two diagnostic tools. The first is a laboratory blood test called an antibody profile. This scans a blood sample for antibodies to a wide variety of foods, both the kinds of antibodies that might cause full-blown allergic reactions and those that trigger subtler, more delayed food sensitivity responses. I offer these tests to patients who have the money or the desire to see results on paper, usually to confirm what they’ve found out through completing Clean and doing the detective work that you are about to do. However, the truth is that blood tests are not totally reliable. They sometimes fail to detect food allergies. Sometimes the tests cross-react with other antibodies and get the causes of the allergy confused. These tests don’t do a good job of detecting the lower-grade irritants that cause hidden food sensitivities.

Likewise, the skin tests performed by allergy specialists are time consuming and complicated, involving many repeat visits to the doctor. They are not completely accurate, either, and they come with a potentially huge downside: once you are told you are allergic to a certain food, you will never freely enjoy it again, even if the diagnosis was incorrect.

Clean gives you the opportunity to be your own detective. Freed from processing anything potentially irritating, your system has balanced itself and returned to its optimal conditions for healthy functioning. You can use a low-tech and cost-free method to determine your food sensitivities, one that is more accurate than any other available methods. It only takes a little commitment and some observation.

Identifying Your Toxic Triggers

Two to three days after finishing the Clean program, or whenever you have transitioned to three solid meals a day, introduce one type of food from the Elimination Diet’s “exclude” list into your daily meals. Perhaps it is wheat or one of the other gluten grains. Have a sandwich at lunch or have a bagel for breakfast. If you want to start with milk, have a latte, some yogurt, or cheese. You don’t need to have a whole loaf of bread or a quart of milk; a moderate serving of the food in question will do. Observe and feel what happens over the next twenty-four hours. It is helpful to record comments in your Clean log for each food you introduce. Notice the following:

How do you feel immediately after eating it? Are there any sensations in your belly?

Does anything happen shortly after you eat it, such as a runny nose or mucus in the throat (typical of milk), or fatigue, bloating, or headache (typical of wheat)?

How are your energy levels? A bowl of wheat pasta at night, for example, may make you feel very tired either immediately after eating it or on waking up the next morning.

How are your bowel movements the next day? As frequent and as easy to eliminate as they were during Clean, or are they now altered?

How did you sleep that night? Was it a heavier sleep, or were you disturbed?

How does your skin look, and how are your emotions the following day?

Any noticeable change in your physical or mental experience is an indication that you might be sensitive or fully allergic to that food. To make this process even more accurate, eat the same food the next day and see if it provokes a reaction. (The second day the reaction may be slightly milder as the contrast is less pronounced.) Again, notice what happens for a full day after eating the food. It is likely that some of the foods from the list will reveal themselves to you as toxic triggers: foods that are either mildly disturbing to your natural balance or actually allergenic.

Repeat the same process with every item of the “no” foods that you really like or miss. The most common foods my patients find to be toxic triggers include these, now familiar to you: Dairy (predominantly cow’s milk and products made from it); eggs; wheat and gluten-containing grains such as rye and barley; fatty red meat; soy products; corn (in this instance, corn tortillas and corn chips could be your testing food), and chocolate.

If you have a severe allergy to one of these foods it will be quite obvious to you. Gluten sensitivity is a prime example. Some people have such a bad reaction to gluten, the protein in wheat, barley, and rye, that it causes a cluster of extreme symptoms known as celiac disease, which severely limits nutrient absorption in the small intestine, with devastating consequences. But many others have a subtler reaction to the gluten that goes undiagnosed, because they assume that their chronic but non-urgent conditions must be related to other things, like being tired and run down from life or having a more sensitive constitution than normal. They may have gotten used to suffering these conditions for years, like being fatigued, frequently feeling they’re on the verge of catching a cold, having headaches, or regularly having constipation or diarrhea. Doing this investigation into irritants can be a revelation: they are able to identify their breakfast muffin or lunchtime penne pasta as a trigger of these symptoms, and they realize they are best off avoiding wheat and other gluten-containing grains entirely.

The effects of alcohol, caffeine (especially coffee), and sugar will also now be “louder.” With your clean Clean canvas, you’ll get a sense of their true impact on your particular constitution. If you still desire them, reintroduce them one at a time, consuming them in reasonable amounts, and notice the effects on your body, your energy levels throughout the day, and your mental outlook. Take some notes to serve as your evidence later about how these things affect you when you are in your cleanest state. There is no need to be a purist for the rest of your life if you enjoy wine, beer, cheesecake, or chocolate. Have them, and enjoy them—there’s nothing worse for digestion than guilt—and bring your awareness fully to the present moment with each bite or sip. Eating in this very conscious way, you might find that the larger amounts you used to consume have a stronger impact than you noticed before and that much smaller amounts please you. Buying smaller amounts of higher-quality products always helps.

If your reaction to any of the foods you test is mild but still noticeable (slight fatigue, constipation, blue mood) you might not want to eliminate it forever, but you will still benefit from reducing the frequency of exposure to it. Following a “rotation diet” is a simple way to avoid the negative consequences of mild to moderate food allergies and sensitivities. Rotate your choice of foods so that you don’t eat the irritating ones more than once every four days.

This process of investigating your toxic triggers may sound complicated at first. It is not. In fact, it’s a breeze compared to what you just accomplished with Clean, and the potential for discovering how to maintain the benefits you got during the program and avoid returning to old symptoms is priceless.