Clean: The Revolutionary Program to Restore the Body's Natural Ability to Heal Itself (27 page)

Rich came to my office with complaints of severe irritable bowel syndrome. He had it so badly that he was starting to see a decline in his effectiveness at work, where his attacks of diarrhea, often with cramping, hit him hardest. Most of all, his quality of life was greatly affected. He thought that since the attacks were worse at work than at home on the weekends, it was most likely linked to his sometimes stressful job. I asked Rich to do Clean. To his surprise, the symptoms completely resolved as if by magic, even during the most stressful of days. He continued to follow the Elimination Diet for several weeks, until he allowed himself to eat from the list of “no” foods again. During this detective work we found the answer to his problem, loud and clear. What Rich most missed from his forbidden foods was the egg salad sandwich that was his standard workday lunch. Two hours after once again eating his beloved egg salad, the diarrhea he got was so violent that we were left no doubt: eggs were his trigger. Rich had spent fifteen years getting tested by different doctors in an effort to clear his bowel syndrome. None of the blood tests performed for food allergies had ever detected the egg allergy. It took doing his own investigation to reveal the answer. Four years since that last sandwich, Rich remains symptom-free.

Staying Clean: The Months to Come

Preparation is important before you do the Clean program and maintenance is critical afterward. What you’ve just accomplished during your three weeks is monumental. You restored your body to a more natural state. You gave the body back its natural ability to defend itself, restore itself, heal and even rejuvenate. By clearing out some of the toxic overload and restoring nutrients, you have literally cleared out some of the obstacles and restored many of the lacks getting in the way of healthy functioning. You are experiencing the benefits already in the way you look, feel, think, and sleep, and in your reduced vulnerability to common sicknesses. Some old ideas have been turned on their heads. For example, one accepted belief is that bacteria and viruses attack you and make you toxic and ill. This is like saying the mice and roaches make the trash can full—a crude analogy, but an apt one. The real reason roaches and mice hang out in the trash can is because garbage is there attracting them. Likewise, bacteria and viruses will land and thrive in bodies that are already toxic. You have just emptied your trash and scrubbed the can itself clean. The scavengers will find you very boring—they’ll go straight to your neighbor’s in search of their meal.

Furthermore, you have started to create the kind of inner environment that fends off not only bad bacteria and viruses but also the many other diseases and sicknesses of modern civilization that bedevil so many Americans as they get older. Conserve and take care of this environment, and they need never find their way to your door.

Of course you want to stay this way. You want to get through seasonal changes without allergies, avoid long winter colds, maintain a leaner body, retain bright, glowing skin, keep your digestion functioning well, continue to sleep calmly, and stay energized through the day.

This is more than possible. This state of well-being is resilient. It is natural to you. And therefore it is quite self-sustaining when you support it with maintenance and periodic follow-ups. This is basic common sense. If you constructed a fantastic new building, it would be foolish to not maintain it. If you invested in a new car, you’d maintain it just as the user’s manual instructs, to keep it running well over the months and years to come. For some reason, we’re more resistant to this idea when it comes to our health. It’s easier and more convenient to let things go a little and then look for the next fix-it solution when systems and organs start to degenerate. The “magic bullet” approach is rampant in American culture today. Ignore things until they get intolerable, and then hunt out that diet, supplement, surgery, or natural therapy that promises to reverse it all tomorrow. Magazines, movies, and TV shows support this approach overwhelmingly. Magazine covers feature pictures of celebrities and headlines about what they did to look ten years younger—which becomes the next fad of the moment. But what if we saw that celebrity a few months or years later? Often they’ve backslid from that high state of health back to where they were before, or worse. Usually lack of maintenance is the cause. They did the kick-start without any follow-up.

Clean will give you great results, but don’t expect it to be your magic bullet; see it as a profound and well-deserved jumpstart to a more balanced way of living. Once you start, it’s up to you to maintain the balance if you want to maintain the benefits. Use some of the principles you’ve already been practicing to build a system of eating and living that you can sustain on a daily basis.

I take pains to assure patients that this approach is different from signing up for a whole lifestyle makeover. Nobody has to eat a set way from now on, exercise the exact same way as the rest of the herd, or have a totally green eco-home and office. In all these areas do what works best for you according to your natural interest and enthusiasm, enjoy your life, and keep evolving by taking steps forward. You should find making any kind of change a little easier now that you can hear more clearly which habits or foods make you function better, and which ones make you stuck, drained, or toxic. This is how long-term radiant well-being is built. It comes from you knowing your needs best. There’s an avalanche of wellness information out there to guide and inspire you.

Western medicine is slowly waking up to how the “one size fits all” approach to medicine is failing us. New data reveal that wonder drugs do not do wonderful things for all patients, because we all vary in our genetic predispositions. A variation in genes may leave one person without the enzyme needed to eliminate a certain drug and may cause a harmful high concentration of the drug in the blood. Researchers are now finding that most drugs, no matter what the disease, work for only half the patients for whom they are prescribed. As a result of the severe wastage of these drugs—literally billions of dollars’ worth—and to some extent because of concerns for the possible damage done by unwisely prescribed drugs, a new era of “personalized medicine” is definitely on the horizon in our allopathic (drug-based) healthcare system. In this coming era, diagnostic technologies that are still slightly on the fringes—such as doing tests to screen for genetic tendencies before prescribing expensive drugs, or testing for vitamin D levels—will become much more common.

Eastern traditions of health care have always known that one size can’t fit all. It’s all personalized. A doctor will first advise some basic, commonsense groundwork that is good for everyone to do, such as clearing out toxins and bringing the inner environment back to balance, just as you have done with Clean. This process gets the ball rolling and starts the healing. If it’s not enough to solve everything, then the practitioner evaluates individual constitution, personality, and preferences to determine the right kind of treatment. To give you an idea of the difference between the approaches, a Western doctor might diagnose ten patients with similar symptoms as having the same disease, and give them the exact same treatment. The Chinese medicine doctor may see the same patients and have as many as seven different diagnoses for the similar symptoms. She or he will consequently prescribe a different treatment for each patient, appropriate to each one’s unique needs.

The Eastern and Western approaches are combined in integrative, or openminded, medicine. When advising patients on how to maintain themselves Clean and healthy, I recommend a few general “foundational” tools—the Clean maintenance plan—that everyone living the modern lifestyle in busy cities can use to maintain the benefits and support the conditions for healing. The Clean maintenance plan is not a strict regime, but instead is a way to draw attention to four important areas that, if you keep an eye on them, will ensure that you feel and look as good as you can for your age and stage of life.

What patients do on top of this baseline will inevitably vary from person to person, as their goals, hopes, specific health challenges, age, and body types differ so widely. The common theme that unites everyone after doing their first Clean program is that they’ve experienced in their own bodies how much they can author their own state of well-being. They have realized the most “personalized medicine” of all because they’ve touched the power they have to truly heal themselves.

Keep this in mind as you move forward. There are thousands of theories about diet, lifestyle, and stress management out there, and everyone has her own opinion on how you should live. Take in as much or as little of that as you like; but first and foremost keep your foundation solid by maintaining what you’ve just achieved through the Clean Program.

Like a house with four pillars, the maintenance plan focuses on four areas:

Eat Clean: How to eat after Clean

Detox periodically: How often and when to Clean in the future

Reduce exposure to toxins: Realistic steps to Clean your immediate environment of toxins as best you can, including the quantum toxicity of stress

Maintain a Clean bill of health: Working in partnership with a doctor to continue to evolve your health and avoid prescription medications, medical interventions, and disease.

The first question people have upon returning to their regular routine is almost always “What do I eat now?” There are so many books about the perfect diet for humans that it makes everyone dizzy. People often decide that one or the other theory makes sense and launch themselves into that lifestyle, only to discover it ends up making them sick. I have personally tried many different plans over the years, for different reasons, from athletic training to losing that chubbiness I wrote of earlier. What I learned is that most of them do work for a specific purpose. Some plans quickly make you lean, others maximize your muscle mass, and still others make you lose weight in a dramatic, and not so appealing, fashion. My summation, however, is that when weight loss is the only focus of diet, any patient is bound to end up far from healthy and vibrant.

Instead of deciding which diet book is right, I look at the book of nature. This is basically the protocol you have been following in Clean, in a slightly modified way. When we return to what nature originally designed for us, and eat closer to what every other animal eats, this alone begins to heal us. This very simple concept is radical if you’re used to the idea that dominates the American psyche: that the sole objective of healthy eating should be weight loss.

The debate over which dietary plan is optimal for humans has become an obsession centering on calories and pounds, one that has taken society on a roller-coaster ride of overnight fads (described in an earlier chapter) with more than a few damaging consequences. Having witnessed how countless patients, including myself, lose their depression after good intestinal conditions are restored, there is no doubt in my mind of the connection. If you are a scientist or physician, then forgive the crude oversimplification of a complex subject. Yet it’s important to consider this question, both literally, through an understanding of metabolic function, and philosophically. What have we done by losing our ability to listen to our real needs and follow our instincts, by surrendering to market-driven eating instead? How are we causing our own toxicity by veering so far from natural patterns?

Looking at the experiences of my patients at both Lenox Hill Hospital and the Eleven Eleven Wellness Center, I have begun to believe that the current rise in chronic diseases such as heart disease, cancer, and depression is tightly linked to the high-protein madness that puts no limits on the consumption of meat. The diet that so many people follow to get skinnier just might be one of the biggest factors in their toxicity.

This raises the question of whether eating animal products is healthy or unhealthy. Personally, I think it almost requires a doctorate in nutrition to be a healthy vegetarian. To my mind, if transitioning to a vegetarian diet appeals to someone for health, moral, or ecological reasons, it should be a goal to work toward in stages, guided by an expert or at the very least, wise books like Dr. Cousens’s.

If all this raises more questions about how to eat than it answers, then that’s all to the good. I prefer not to present a single, definitive answer (which I don’t have to offer) but instead to set you on your own path to creating the diet that works best for your present understanding, interest, time commitment, financial resources, and geographical location, among other factors. What I do state without any reservations is that maintaining a Clean way of eating as the foundation of your diet to as great an extent as possible will prove highly beneficial—and possibly life saving—in the months and years to come.

THE EAT CLEAN MAINTENANCE CHECKLIST

Continue to include the habits you began during your three-week detox program for ongoing good health. In addition to lowering your intake of the foods you found to be irritating, do the following:

Eat more alkaline than acidic foods (eat lots of vegetables). Lower your intake of the mucusforming foods (dairy, sugar, wheat, white rice).

Eat more organic produce, more hormone-and antibiotic-free animal products and meats, and seek out products that have not been genetically modified.

Include plenty of the fresh, whole foods containing the key nutrients for health and detoxification in your diet every week.

Eat at least 51 percent or more of your food raw (vegetables, fruits, seeds, nuts, unprocessed oils.

Support thriving good bacteria in your intestinal tract with plenty of fiber, good-quality saturated fats, foods with naturally occurring probiotics (raw and unprocessed sauerkraut, organic kefir, kombucha, kimchee). Avoid feeding the bad bacteria. Avoid anything with preservatives; reduce sugar, wheat, and refined grains; avoid dairy products and alcohol. Lower your stress levels and avoid prescription drugs and over-the-counter medications when possible.

Follow an anti-inflammatory diet filled with nature’s antiinflammatories and take fish oil, or flaxseed and hemp oils if you are vegetarian.