Our bodies love us unconditionally. They do not judge or blame or hold onto resentment. Day in and day out, all of our body systems—ones like the lymphatic, endocrine, and central nervous systems—are working for us without complaint. The immune system is constantly ready for battle, patrolling every part of the body looking for invaders.
We take all this for granted. We eat things our systems don’t appreciate, indulge in foods to comfort our emotions rather than feed our bodies and souls. As we seek out snacks, meals, beverages, and desserts that keep emotions at bay, our bodies become the victims of our soul damage. We get confused and cross the line between what we like to eat and what our bodies need.
Eventually, the physical body begins to show wear and tear. It starts with small breakdowns, then the larger breakdowns come. Imagine a car running low on oil. For a while you can get by on fumes, but at some point the oil will get too low. You’ll turn on the car, the engine will heat up, cause friction, and bang—you’ll blow a valve.
The human body is forever forgiving. Your body wants to heal. It can heal. Even after years of being ignored, mistreated, or misunderstood, your body will fight for you like nothing else and no one else can. When you tend to it in the right way, your body has the ability to rejuvenate and restore from the most extreme conditions and diseases.
You have to think of your body like an old friend in need. Imagine yourself reaching out a helping hand to this friend as she climbs out of a ravine. This is your commitment to use your free will and the power of your intention to give your body the support it’s crying out for.
When we connect to our bodies, truly listen to them, and give them the nourishment they’re yearning for, everything changes. True miracles happen.
Many of us grow up in this world with our pick of almost anything to eat. This can be a hard mind-set to change. Our food routines can feel like part of who we are. Hidden addictions and unproductive choices often go into them, though.
We all have cravings. It’s important not to confuse these cravings with intuition. We may feel a strong desire to eat certain foods and mistake that desire for our bodies telling us we need that bacon cheeseburger, or that omelet.
Yet when people eat anything and everything under the sun, subjecting the liver, pancreas, gallbladder, heart, and more to greasy, dangerous, processed, fried-oil, gastronomic concoctions, it’s because the soul and body are out of alignment. That happens because the hardships we encounter on this earth can damage our souls. We search for ways to literally fill the void with food, or to push down unpleasant emotions—except it doesn’t work. Eating unproductive foods, we get sicker. Our souls suffer more.
If you are struggling with your health in any way, the game has to change. Eating restorative foods—and eliminating foods that cause problems—is the most critical aspect of healing any illness or health condition.
The healing food plan I present in this chapter can move health mountains. It’s like a reset button for your body. Following these guidelines for four weeks will help reduce inflammation from illness—not just the conditions I cover in these chapters but also many more I didn’t have room for in this book. It can make a huge difference in mental health. And the cleanse will help if you’re healthy and just looking to lose weight, or if you want to maintain and maximize your potential.
I get that it’s not just desire that confuses people about the right foods to eat. It’s articles, fads, advertisements, peer pressure, and health-care industry advice. There’s always a new superfood in the news, a new story about this or that diet, a new rumor about what seemingly healthy food secretly isn’t good for you.
Now you get to tune out all that noise. Focusing your food choices for 28 days on the options listed here will let you stop wasting your energy on the information overload coming from the rest of the world. It’s not about deprivation in any way; it’s about abundance. This delicious, healing cleanse has brought profound results to countless clients. It has changed people’s lives. It can change yours.
If you follow the advice here to the letter, you’ll find that your body will respond in untold ways. It has been waiting patiently for you to discover this information. It’s ready to work with you. It’s ready to hit the reset button. It’s ready to heal.
THE PLAN
Here’s the deal: For four weeks, eat only raw fruits and vegetables.
For best results, follow the plan below for the whole 28 days. While that’s the best length of time, even just a week is likely to bring you significant results. Another alternative is one cleanse day per week. And if this doesn’t feel like the right time for you to try the cleanse for any length of time, turn your attention to the other healing techniques throughout the book and come back to this chapter when you feel ready. On the other hand, if your health is in dire straits, or if you have a lot of weight to lose, you’re welcome to extend the cleanse beyond the first month.
One reason this plan is so effective is that it maximizes the nutrition you get in every meal. Fruits and vegetables in their raw state contain the highest level of nutrients of any foods, in the form most readily available to your body. When you consume these nutrients in such a high quantity, you’ll flood your body with the building blocks it craves. The vitamins, minerals, microorganisms, and other nourishing components will help cleanse and strengthen every system in your body.
The digestive system is one of those beneficiaries. Digestive health has a major impact on immunity and overall health. Normally, digestion takes up an enormous amount of your body’s energy.
It’s almost like your body has a daily to-do list. There are the things it has to attend to every day, like keeping your heart pumping and your lungs inflating and food moving through your intestinal tract. Then there are all the things it wishes it could get to—taking out the toxin trash, repairing critical tissue, and so much more—if only it had the time and support.
Imagine a wobbly doorknob in your house. One of these days, it’s going to fall off, and you’re going to have a real problem. Every day, you mean to fix it, but paying the bills and making food for your family and shoveling fresh snow outside take precedence—plus your screwdriver’s gone missing. Same with the body. When it’s overloaded with tough-to-digest foods and it’s missing critical nutrients, those wish list items just keep getting put off.
The body processes uncooked fruits and vegetables quickly and easily. These foods also have live enzymes, which makes digestion even smoother. When your body’s not busy processing heavy fats and proteins, or additives and allergens, it frees up hours every day for your body to rebuild itself on a cellular level. It’s as though someone appeared on the front step ready to snow-blow your driveway and sidewalks for free, and handed you a full toolkit at the same time. Suddenly, nothing would be holding you back from fixing the doorknob—or the nails poking out of the floor, or the dripping faucet.
Note that while meat, fish, grains, and starchy vegetables can have helpful nutrients, they can also be tough for the body to break down. When our bodies are overloaded by illness or toxicity or even just sluggishness, we lose the ability to process these foods in an optimal way. The plan below gives us the reboot we need to come back to these foods with digestive vigor.
It also helps cleanse and rebuild the soul. As your body remineralizes, alkalizes, detoxifies, and mends, your soul learns that powerhouse foods like fruit are the true sustenance that will bring it comfort. When you come out on the other side of the 28 days, foods that you know are detrimental to your health won’t hold the same sway they once did.
Your soul, spirit, and body will also be operating on a new frequency. Each piece of fruit you eat, each raw spinach leaf, holds a living vibration. When you consume it, you assimilate that. The living food brings you back to life.
Are you ready to kick-start your healing process? Then for the next four weeks, eat the most healing foods on the planet—and nothing else.
In other words, consume raw (preferably organic) fruits and vegetables, with an emphasis on keeping fat intake low. Limit salt intake, too—only add a sprinkle of Himalayan salt to a dish as needed. Stay hydrated with plenty of water, coconut water, herbal tea, and/or fresh juice. (The hot water for tea doesn’t destroy the nutrients in the herbs; it releases their medicinal properties.) If you’re suffering from a condition for which this book lists a specific protocol of supplements and healing foods, then add those to the mix.
And that’s it. Get ready for the healing to begin.
Early Morning
Start the day with a cleansing beverage. Celery juice, cucumber juice, lemon water, coconut water with Hawaiian spirulina, herbal tea, or barley grass juice extract powder reconstituted with water will do wonders to maximize the detox work your body performed overnight and hydrate you for the day ahead.
If your mornings are too rushed, it’s fine to skip this step and start the morning with plain water instead.
Breakfast
Make a fruit smoothie for breakfast. A good baseline recipe is three bananas, two dates, and one cup of berries. If this doesn’t fill you up, don’t hesitate to add more bananas or berries. Don’t deprive yourself—this isn’t about going hungry. Papayas, pears, and mangoes also make delicious additions.
Other healthy smoothie add-ins include greens like a handful of kale, spinach, or cilantro; two stalks of celery; or a spoonful of barley grass juice extract powder. Just make sure that fruit remains the main ingredient.
Mid-morning
Make another fruit smoothie as described above (or make two servings first thing, and have your second serving now).
At midday, make a salad with spinach, lettuce, and cucumbers as the base, then toss in the fruits of your choice. Examples include berries, sliced mangoes, papaya chunks, grapes, and orange or grapefruit segments. For dressing, blend half an avocado and a handful of cilantro with the juice from two oranges (plus garlic and/or fresh ginger to taste, if you’d like). This is meant to be a large salad, so make sure you eat enough to feel full.
Optional additions include chopped cabbage, celery, or cauliflower; arugula or baby kale; sprouts; and scallions.
Mid-afternoon
As you become hungry throughout the afternoon, snack on any fruits of your choice. Good examples include apple or pear slices, dates, oranges, and grapes. Munch on celery sticks alongside each serving of fruit. A spoonful of raw honey also makes a great pick-me-up.
Dinner
For a creamy suppertime spinach soup, combine two bunches of spinach, three medium-to-large tomatoes (or an equal quantity of cherry or grape tomatoes), the juice of one orange, one stalk of celery, a small handful of cilantro, and a clove of garlic (if desired) in a high-speed blender. You can adjust the recipe by using other herbs, such as basil, that appeal to you. For best results, blend the tomatoes and orange juice first, then add the other ingredients. If desired, garnish with sprouts, chopped scallions, chopped tomatoes, Atlantic dulse, and/or herbs.
It can also be a lot of fun to eat this dish served over cucumber noodles, which you can make with a kitchen gadget such as a julienne slicer or spiral slicer. These tools make it easy to turn vegetables into long, slim, crunchy strips. Keep in mind that while zucchini noodles have become popular (and are much healthier than wheat pasta), raw zucchini can be a bit uncomfortable to digest. If maximum healing and detoxification are your priorities, save the zucchini (and carrot and butternut squash) noodles for when you’ve completed this cleanse.
If you’re still hungry after dinner, snack on an apple and a date.
MODIFICATIONS
You don’t have to eat this exact menu every day. If you’d like, swap the lunch and dinner dishes. Or eat two salads. Or a smoothie for lunch or dinner. Cycle through different salad and soup greens if you’d like, too.
Pay no mind to the trend that says too much of a particular raw, leafy green such as spinach will cause you harm. That’s misinformation. If you eat raw spinach soup every day for a month, it will be the best thing you’ve ever done for yourself. Don’t be afraid to eat as many greens as you’d like.
It’s also okay to eat an entire meal of just one fruit. For example, you can spend the morning eating only mangoes if they’re calling your name. You can balance them with a few celery sticks, if that feels best. If you find yourself eating a lot of one food in particular, many grocery stores, co-ops, and farmers will sell you cases of produce at a discount.
Speaking of mangoes, one delicious alternative meal is mango salsa, which you can make by chopping mangoes, tomatoes, cucumbers, celery, cilantro, and garlic (if desired) in the food processor. Serve in cucumber boats, lettuce wraps, or over greens.
And in place of the avocado-orange juice salad dressing, try mashing up some guacamole, topping your salad with it, then sprinkling the whole thing with lime juice.
Another great detox dish is a food-processor grind-up of apples and cauliflower or apples and cabbage.
Point is, you have options. Just remember your mantra: raw fruits and vegetables.
Here are some more possibilities:
If your gut needs healing, start the day with a glass of fresh, plain celery juice on an empty stomach. (For more information, see Chapter 17, “Gut Health.”)
If blood sugar or energy levels are of particular concern, employ the grazing technique I describe in Chapter 8, “Adrenal Fatigue.”
For a really powerful cleanse, try a week or more with no avocados or other overt fats. Also try cutting out added salt entirely. You’ll be getting plenty of natural sodium from the fruits and veggies.
And if, on the other hand, you’re okay with a less rapid rate of healing, add a half-avocado at dinner. Further, you can use raw coconut butter, nuts, and seeds as add-ins to your salads, or as a creamy base for a dressing or dip.
You can also pull back the reins on this diet by swapping out the spinach soup dinner for a meal of simply cooked vegetables. Steam, roast (with a bit of coconut oil), or make a soup with veggies such as squash, potatoes, yams, broccoli, cauliflower, and/or asparagus. For maximum digestibility, eat them with some raw sprouts, greens, or celery. This can be part of a less intense cleanse, and it can also be an excellent way to transition into or out of an all-raw cleanse.
THE HEALING CLEANSE
| SAMPLE MENU 1 | SAMPLE MENU 2 | SAMPLE MENU 3 | |
| Early Morning | Celery juice | Lemon-ginger water | Barley grass juice extract powder mixed with water |
| Breakfast | Smoothie bananas dates frozen wild blueberries | Smoothie bananas dates frozen cherries barley grass juice extract powder | Honeydew melon |
| Mid-morning | Smoothie same recipe as above | Smoothie bananas papaya strawberries fresh aloe leaf gel cilantro | Bananas with celery sticks |
| Lunch | Salad baby spinach butter lettuce cucumbers sprouts orange segments | Chopped salad spinach baby kale cucumbers tomatoes red onion | Salad baby spinach romaine hearts cucumbers tomatoes papaya cilantro |
| Blended dressing fresh orange juice avocado garlic | Blended dressing lime juice avocado cilantro garlic | Blended dressing tomatoes papaya scallions Atlantic dulse | |
| Mid-afternoon | Pear slices (plenty of them!) with celery sticks | Sliced peaches with strawberries and raspberries | Coconut water with spirulina; Grapes with celery sticks |
| Dinner | Spinach soup spinach tomatoes celery cilantro fresh orange juice scallions - Serve over cucumber noodles - | Mango salsa mangoes tomatoes celery cucumbers cilantro garlic - Serve over red leaf lettuce - | Cut-up mangoes (plenty of them!) - Serve with romaine leaves on the side - |
| Evening | Apple slices with date | Herbal tea | Apple slices with date |
When you’re adjusting to this way of eating, you may miss certain comfort foods. In their absence, one source of comfort is that this isn’t forever. The cleanse is for a month. If you’re 40, you’ve lived through 480 of those things. You’ve blinked before, and a month has gone by.
You may also experience unpleasant emotional and physical sensations as part of the detoxification. After the initial cleanse phase, in which your bloodstream will purify itself, your liver will then start to do its work, releasing toxins it’s been storing for a long time—in some cases years, or even decades. It’s natural to need extra rest during this period, and extra sensitivity and caring from loved ones. (For spiritual support, turn to Chapter 22, “Soul-Healing Meditations and Techniques,” and Chapter 23, “Essential Angels.”)
As your cells release toxins from unproductive foods you’ve eaten in the past, cravings and memories may burst to the surface of your consciousness. Consider each of these mental twinges a gift. It means a pocket of toxins is leaving you. If you give in to the craving, it may make you feel momentarily satisfied, but you’ll cut off the detox process and seal remaining toxins in the liver.
This cleanse could also bliss you out. We don’t just suppress negative emotions—we also suppress joy. Sometimes we feel overburdened by the world’s worries, so we feel we don’t deserve to be happy. This detox plan will help reset that thinking. As your body pushes out the toxic clutter, your brain will clear. You could find yourself experiencing realizations about who you truly are, and about the direction you want your life to go. Embrace that. Listen to it. Your happiness matters to the good of humanity.
As for transitioning on the other end: don’t go out for a meat-lover’s pizza to celebrate the day you finish the cleanse. Don’t order a chocolate ice-cream cake. Your liver and digestive system will become overloaded if you reintroduce large amounts of fat right away. Be patient with the process. Bit by bit, here and there, start by adding in some cooked vegetables, legumes, lean protein, a little more fat, or some healthy grains such as quinoa or brown rice. If you want to enjoy your best health, then keep the foods listed in Chapter 19, “What Not to Eat,” out of your diet for good.
And if you feel so great on the cleanse that you want to keep going, or keep going with minor modifications such as a bit more avocado, nuts, seeds, coconut, or cold-pressed olive oil, or a cooked meal here and there, then I’m not saying you should stop yourself from doing that. If you want to make low-fat, plant-based eating your way of life, go for it.
Everyone’s different. Everyone has different nutritional requirements, different living and financial circumstances, different health histories, different bodies. Some people need animal protein in their non-cleanse lives to feel all is right with the world. Some feel that a bowl of brown rice with salmon at lunch is what keeps them going. Others don’t.
Feel it out for yourself. Take it day by day. Do what’s right for you.