Read Crazy Sexy Diet: Eat Your Veggies, Ignite Your Spark, and Live Like You Mean It! Online
Authors: Kris Carr,Rory Freedman (Preface),Dean Ornish M.D. (Foreword)
Tags: #Nutrition, #Motivational & Inspirational, #Health & Fitness, #Diets, #Medical, #General, #Women - Health and hygiene, #Health, #Diet Therapy, #Self-Help, #Vegetarianism, #Women
Crazy Sexy Diet: Eat Your Veggies, Ignite Your Spark, and Live Like You Mean It! (28 page)
Next, roll slowly onto your right side, allowing the water to hit other areas. Wild women may want to try the kneeling position. Wha? Place your head on the floor and kneel, as if creating a tripod. Just make sure your door is locked and your ass is facing the other direction!
Finish up by clamping off the tube and slowly removing the tip. Try to hold the water for fifteen to twenty minutes, and then let it all go into the toilet bowl. If you can’t hold it for that long, no worries—let it go when you’re ready. Feel free to do another round if you didn’t release much the first time. Sometimes gas is the main thing in the way; once that’s removed you’ll have a better round two. If you get bored, bring a book or a recorded inspirational lecture. Perhaps you’ll hold the water longer if you put your focus on Deepak Chopra. When you’re finished, empty the bag of any remaining water and send some hot water through to flush it. Wash with mild organic soap and water. To avoid passing germs around, here’s a party tip: Don’t share your enema bag with anyone—duh!
TIP
Bring an enema bag with you when you travel just in case you get stuffy.
Wheatgrass is just what it sounds like: the young shoots put up by sprouting wheat seeds. Wheatgrass is a powerful tonic for healing through both drinking (see
chapter 6
) and as a sidekick to your enema. One 4-ounce shot made at home or bought fresh from the juice bar is like hooking your immune system up to a set of jumper cables. An implant is a small amount of juice held in the lower bowel for about twenty minutes. In the case of illness, wheatgrass implants stimulate a rapid cleansing and healing of the lower bowel. Implants also help to draw out accumulated debris. This stimulates peristalsis and replenishes the electrolytes in your colon.
Colon hydrotherapy with a wheatgrass chaser is also a good deal for the big daddy of all organs—your liver. Once implanted, a portion of the juice is absorbed into the hepatic vein, which travels
directly to the liver. The juice stimulates your liver to purge and gives it a great boost of the mighty healer chlorophyll (think oxygen).
Your liver is really the chief organ of elimination. Think of it as the body’s recycling center, constantly filtering and cleaning the blood. The liver also plays a vital role in digestion, assimilation, your immune system, and literally hundreds of other processes. It’s one busy dude! Once it gets clogged, so do you.
Colonics are even better than enemas (I know, you’re thinking nothing could be better than an enema!) because they can access the entire colon: ascending, transverse, and descending. A colonic machine uses very gentle water pressure to introduce the water deep into the colon. While an enema uses only about 1 quart of water, a colonic can use up to 6 gallons over the course of the treatment. As you can imagine, colonics are not DIY projects—you need a trained professional.
An average session with a colon therapist lasts from forty-five minutes to an hour. If you’re really backed up or if you have health issues that would benefit from deeper detoxification, you may have to do a series of treatments in the beginning. The number of treatments you’ll need really depends on the condition of your health and your colon—a good therapist will tell you where you stand.
If you’ve never had a colonic, the first time can be very intimidating. There is absolutely nothing to worry about. You won’t poop on the table or squirt water across the room. In fact, it’s all very sanitary and matter-of-fact. There are two types of colonics, gravity and pressurized. An expert hydrotherapist can do wonders with either method, but I recommend gravity colonics, since pressurized units can actually cause more impaction if you’re already really blocked up. Gravity units use only the force of gravity (like an enema, but bigger) to control water flow, so they’re gentler, especially for people with sensitive GI tracts or IBS. The therapist gently inserts the lubricated speculum into your rectum while you’re covered with a towel or sheet from the waist down. The water is slowly introduced—”Well, hello there, water”—then you fill and soak much as you do with an enema.
As you soak, a lovely belly rub is gently administered. A good therapist knows how to access pressure points on your calves, feet, and back that will help you expel poo materials. When you’re ready to release, the flow is reversed and the water and waste depart from the same tube. It’s a completely closed system, so that means there’s no muss, no fuss, and no odor. You can even see what’s headed to pasture through a little viewing window in the machine. Now, that’s cool! Some therapists are like mystical tea-leaf-reading psychics! One look at your poop and they’ve got you figured out. You’ll learn a lot about what is and what isn’t working with your digestion. More than likely you’ll witness lots of mucus, gas bubbles, bile, undigested food (“When did I eat corn?”), and maybe some parasites cruisin’ by. Sometimes it’s better than a trip to the zoo!
Folks who oppose colon therapy claim you can become dependent on it. This isn’t really a worry. Think of colon therapy like a workout: The gentle pressure from the water actually tones and rebuilds your muscles by making peristalsis—the contraction of smooth muscles that propels stuff through the digestive tract—stronger. Once the initial cleansing process is complete, colonics need only be used for maintenance and upkeep once per season or a couple of times a year.
Another criticism is that colon therapy washes away good bacteria. In fact, good bacteria can only breed in a clean environment. A probiotic (see
chapter 9
) can be taken after cleansing to help repopulate the colon with good bacteria. The colon
will rebalance itself with a better ratio of friendly to unfriendly bacteria, especially when all the debris is cleared away.
The one real concern you should have about colon therapy is the cleanliness of the provider. Colon therapists don’t have to be licensed or certified—pretty much anyone can buy a machine and go into practice. To avoid unskilled or inexperienced practitioners or those who might be careless about sanitation, get a personal recommendation if possible. Ask around among the people in your community who are most likely to know: chiropractors, massage therapists, naturopaths, nutritionists. Ask for and check references! My resource section on
crazysexylife.com
also lists several national databases.
Be prepared for some crazy (not so) sexy purging. If your diet is mildly bad, then your detox will be mildly uncomfortable. If your diet resembles a train wreck, then hang on tight, ’cause it’s gonna be a bumpy ride, baby! Just remember, this too shall pass (that’s the point). It’s better to get the crap out with an enema or colonic than to let it pile up and wage a secret war on your insides. For now, know that most symptoms you feel during the process are totally normal and harmless. Desperate times call for deeper cleaning.
If you are pregnant; suffering from a flare-up of Crohn’s disease, irritable bowel syndrome, or acute diverticulitis; if you’re having diarrhea; or if you’ve ever had any portion of your colon removed, then colonics are not advised.
DETOXING
YOUR BODY
with
Alejandro Junger, MD
Detoxification is as necessary
for life as the beating of the heart. Our cells are constantly forming toxins as normal waste products of metabolism. The cells release the toxins into the blood; within a few heartbeats, the toxins are swept into the liver for detoxification.
The detoxification process is amazingly intricate. While the toxins are still in your bloodstream, circulating antioxidants latch onto them, neutralize their oxidizing capacity, and escort them to the liver. Once there, a liver cell grabs onto the toxin and releases the antioxidant molecule to go back into circulation. The liver cell then gets to work on the toxin.
Detoxification processing has two steps. In phase 1 chemical reactions within the liver neutralize and then eliminate the toxin by one of three routes:
• Sending it into the bile to eventually pass out of the body in feces.
• Sending it into the urine and sweat to be eliminated that way.
• Converting it into an intermediate compound that may actually be more toxic than the original toxin.
When a toxin is converted, phase 2 detoxification kicks in to deal with the intermediate compounds. During this process, additional
chemical reactions in the liver neutralize the compound and make it water-soluble. Once that process is complete, the neutralized toxin can be eliminated through the urine or sweat.
All the complex chemical detoxification reactions in the liver are made possible by a group of enzymes known as the cytochrome p450 series. To function properly, these enzymes need plenty of nutrients such as vitamin C, the B vitamins, selenium, magnesium, sulfur, and amino acids like methionine and cysteine.
Evolution has designed your detox system to handle a natural diet that’s high in fresh, raw, and alkalizing plant foods. If we humans ate just our natural diet, we would have all the antioxidants we need to protect our bodies from the oxidative damage caused by circulating toxins. We’d also have in abundance all the nutrients the liver needs to perform phase 1 and 2 detoxification efficiently.
So intricate, intelligent, and predictive is nature’s design that it has built-in backup mechanisms in case of excess toxicity. Since the most likely situation if any toxin accumulates is acidity, the body can turn on one or more backup systems to restore the pH balance. Breathing faster releases more carbon dioxide, an acid; this is one way your body can compensate, at least for a short time, for a sudden rise in acidity. If the acidity is persistent, your body will release calcium and other minerals from your bones to neutralize it. This fizzling of the bones means they are literally dissolving themselves. Down the line comes osteoporosis.
Nature has included backup systems because acid overload has always been a possibility. Those backup systems are designed to work only now and then, because they shouldn’t be needed more than now and then. In the past few hundred years, however, the human diet has shifted into a red zone that constantly calls on our backup systems.
Here’s what happened:
Modern life has added thousands of toxins to the picture. Foods today are loaded with chemicals and heavily processed. Instead of eating actual nutrients, we digest food-like molecules that trick the body into absorbing them. Once inside the body, they can’t be used. Within the body, they cause irritation and inflammation; in the liver, phase 1 metabolization turns them into even worse poisons. In addition to the coloring agents, fragrance agents, texturizing agents, and artificial flavoring, we also ingest toxic chemicals such as hormones that can interfere with our body’s signaling.
Our overall environment also has seen an exponential increase in the amount and variety of chemicals that are not naturally occurring—they’re concocted in a laboratory. The air we breathe, the water we wash with and drink, the cosmetics we use, the laundry detergents, the paint on our walls, the fire retardant off-gassing from the mattress …
Because of our constant exposure to chemicals, our intestinal flora—the bacteria we depend on for good health—are in danger of extinction. They’re under massive direct and indirect attack. Direct attack happens when we take antibiotics. Indirect attacks happen because we’re constantly exposed to antibacterial agents. Preservatives, conservatives, pesticides, insecticides, antibacterials, antivirals—we’re exposed to them every time we wash or clean our bodies, our clothing, our homes, our workplaces. Even some toys for children have antibacterial products built in to them. Killing off our intestinal flora is knocking over the first domino that ends up manifesting as many of the chronic diseases that became epidemics.
Nutrients are becoming scarce even as the quantity of food explodes. Depleted soils, farming practices, transportation, irradiation, pasteurization, not chewing thoroughly, and the death of the intestinal flora—all make it almost impossible to end up with enough nutrients from the diet for a harmonious metabolism and vibrant health. At the same time, nutrient depletion turns on hunger sensations. Your body wants and needs those nutrients, and the only way it knows to get them is to make you feel hungry so you’ll eat more. Only when your body detects that the needed nutrients have been consumed will the hunger stop. But if your food never really gives you those nutrients in adequate amounts and in forms your body can use, you never stop feeling hungry.
In summary, in modern life you’re exposed to more toxins than your body is designed to handle. Your body has to work much harder to eliminate them, while also coping with a lack of good intestinal bacteria and a shortage of nutrients. This is an evolutionary glitch—your body can’t evolve fast enough to handle our modern diet. What to do instead? Return your diet—and your body—to the way of eating it is designed for. That means lots of raw and lightly cooked foods and regular elimination. Avoid adding toxins to your body by avoiding added poisons from cleaning supplies, antibiotics, and other chemically laden products. Clean versions that are better for you and the planet are readily available.