April 2007

I‘m fascinated by how many people I am meeting who are on cleanses of one kind or another. They are cleaning their systems, cutting back on gluten and dairy, and drinking lots of lemon and water to flush their lymph and nourish their organs.

I was speaking to an allergist recently who remarked that physicians are seeing a vast improvement in inflammatory diseases, such as Crohn’s, arthritis, and fibromyalgia through diet. Cutting out dairy and gluten for a period of time appears to be an essential first step. 

Cleansing our body of toxins should be a natural part of our lifestyle, not something we do because we’re ill. As a friend reminded me, Moslems and Christians historically have had fasts every year. Lent, one of the few remaining moon-based celebrations on the Christian calendar, was an opportunity to purge the system of parasites using early bitter greens such as nettle and yarrow, that grow in the spring. The Lent and Easter celebrations begin the first Tuesday after the new moon, following Imbolc on Feb 2nd. This is called fat Tuesday when participants feed their parasites all the fat in the larder, and then proceed to starve them for Lent, which begins the next day. This 40 day fast lasts until Easter celebrations, the first Friday after the spring full moon.

Interestingly, on February 2nd I went to a vegetarian cooking workshop hosted by Tanya Wodicka in Wakefield. Normally, I eat wild fish and organic chicken, but wanted to learn some delicious, show-stoppin’ veggie recipes from this well-known French Canadian cook (tanyawodicka.com). It was fantastic. 

There were many things I learned that I found invaluable and I’d like to share a number of them with you here, for example: 1) regardless of your blood-type your plate should be 80% vegetables, and 20% starch and protein; 2) always eat something raw at every meal to provide the digestive enzymes for the rest of the food on your plate.

Our hostess is a professional caterer as well as a Naturopath and Kinesiologist, so there were wonderfully unexpected elements to our cooking weekend. We woke with sunrise to begin active morning Osho meditations, which got our circulation going (osho.com). I have since kept them up with great results. My personal version is standing like Isis, arms in the air and gently going up on my toes and then dropping heels onto the ground while saying (with gusto) “Ho”, every two seconds, for ten straight minutes. Afterwards I stand, arms still in the air, for another 10 minutes. It is so simple, you feel connected to heaven and earth, your heart is smiling and your whole body is vibrating. I follow this with a glass of warm water and lemon. A fantastic way to flush out your system each morning.

Under Tanya’s guidance, we used kinesiology (muscle testing) to see which foods were easy for each of us to digest, which were neutral, and which should be avoided. I have known for a while that dairy and wheat can stuff me up. With the kinesiology I was able to establish further details like oatmeal being aggravating, but that goat feta was all right. Kinesiology is a great little tool for getting direct and quick answers to questions. The idea is that the best way to get answers around food is to hold the food item in one hand, while testing to see if it weakens your muscles/system in some way.

What I also found interesting was discovering that some foods are not good for me when I am tired or fighting a cold, but when I’m in good health they are fine to eat. There are lots of great books and workshops if you’d like to learn more about muscle testing.

When I returned home from the weekend I was also booked in for an ion footbath. You may have seen pictures of people with their feet in a tub of water while a magnet sends positive and negative ion pulses through the water. This draws everything from heavy metals to parasites out through the bottom of the feet, colouring the water with the cleared material. (For those of you interested there are also foot pads made with tree vinegars, which you wear to bed at night, that function under a similar principle.)

What my footbath water revealed was that my body has too much yeast. That information, in combination with the allergy testing at the vegetarian cooking weekend, helped me understand that gluten and dairy were only part of the problem, and that I needed a good old Candida cleanse. There are good cookbooks and herbal assists for these cleanses (healingnutrition.ca). Since beginning my candida diet, my allergies and sinus problems are abating already, so I will continue the cleanse and then move on to a more consciously anti-inflammatory diet, which I hear  is the key to eternal youth anyway! Happy Spring, Ho!

(For more on the anti-inflammatory diet, read The Perricone Promise by Nicholas Perricone, MD, or The Glucose Revolution by Thomas Wolever, MD, PhD and Jennie Brand-Miller, PhD.)