THE ART OF RATIONAL RETOX
Let’s face it, life on earth is toxic. No sooner is detox done than “retox” resumes. The moment you start eating normally again, your digestive system starts producing toxic wastes, cellular metabolism repollutes the bloodstream with carbon dioxide and acid residues, exercise sours the muscles with lactic acid, and the whole process of progressive tissue toxicity begins once more.
The body’s internal self-cleansing mechanisms are designed to deal with these natural sources of tissue toxicity on a daily basis through normal excretory functions, but the body is not equipped to handle the heavy overload of inorganic toxins and putrefactive wastes produced by unnatural sources of internal pollution such as chemically processed foods and medicines, toxic air and water, and indigestible combinations of denatured foods. For most people today, tissue toxicity is further aggravated by relentless enervation of the nervous system from chronic stress, insufficient rest and relaxation, overstimulation of the senses, and excessive dependence on stimulants and intoxicants. These stress factors keep the autonomous nervous system constantly racing in the “fight or flight” sympathetic mode, exhausting the adrenal glands, weakening immune response, and flooding the bloodstream with the highly acid-forming residues produced by stress hormones and the metabolic reactions they trigger. Unable to process and eliminate this growing overload of toxins through “normal channels,” the body is forced to store them instead by tucking them away in joints, bones, liver, bowels, fat, lymph, and any other tissue where they cannot directly poison the bloodstream. If these toxic deposits are not periodically dislodged from the tissues in which they’re stored and flushed out of the body, it will only be a matter of time before they do serious damage to those tissues and cause cellular malfunctions that can lead to cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer syndrome, and other fatal conditions.
The only viable solution to the vexing problem of toxicity in modern daily life is to cultivate the “Art of Rational Retox.” In a nutshell, this means designing your daily lifestyle in ways that minimize internal pollution and maximize internal cleansing functions. It means reforming your daily diet, reordering your daily priorities, and refining your daily lifestyle. To do this, you must take the time to learn how your body works, and pay close attention to how it reacts to various things you feed it and do with it. You need to consider the “cost/benefit” factors involved in what you eat, drink, and do each day, and learn to avoid those things whose costs to health and longevity far outweigh their benefits. “Rational retox” in daily life can make the crucial difference between long-term health and longevity and their opposites, chronic disease and degeneration, especially when practiced in conjunction with periodic detox diets or therapeutic fasts.
The great advantage of doing a detox program first, prior to trying to eliminate harmful food addictions and reform bad eating habits, is that a preliminary detox makes it much easier to break unhealthy old food addictions and cultivate healthy new eating habits. People who suddenly stop eating sugar, meat, or dairy products without first purging their bowels, blood, and tissues of the toxic residues left by these foods in the body, usually find it difficult to resist the craving for these things. They find it almost impossible to stick strictly to their new diets because food addictions are very similar physiologically to drug addictions. The body grows accustomed to their metabolic effects and learns to tolerate the damage they do. In some cases, such as sugar addiction, the nervous system becomes dependent on the toxic by-products of sugar metabolism, which act as a nervous stimulant. When these substances are abruptly withdrawn from the body, their toxic residues remain in the blood and tissues, leaving a metabolic memory that causes the mind to crave those items. While the symptoms of withdrawal from food addictions are not as intense and dramatic as those produced by drugs, the basic symptoms are very similar, including hypertension, insomnia, headaches, indigestion, depression, and irritability. By doing a detox program to purify the blood and tissues and completely rid the body of all toxic “leftovers” from former food habits, all withdrawal symptoms are condensed into a single week of detox, during which time you have nothing else to do anyway but pamper yourself with hot saltwater baths, herbal steams, deeptissue massages, and other soothing detox protocols. By the time you have completed these healing protocols, all cravings for former dietary trespasses will have totally disappeared, and healthy new eating habits may be cultivated to replace them.
If you find it difficult to give up all unhealthy eating habits and harmful food choices after your first round of detox, then just try eliminating one or two, and work on the others later, after your next detox program. As the novelist Nelson Algren observed, “Life is hard by the yard, but a cinch by the inch.” This is especially true when it comes to making necessary changes in life, and replacing old ways with new. But if you take it step by step, replacing wrong choices with right ones, one by one, you will soon discover that good habits are as easy to develop as bad habits, and just as hard to break, and that healthy diets and wholesome lifestyles can be even more habit-forming than indiscriminate self-indulgence.
“DETOX/RETOX”
The first step in the art of rational retox is to redesign your diet and other daily lifestyle factors in ways that allow your body to unload most of its toxic wastes on a daily basis, rather than letting them accumulate inside and cause blood acidosis and tissue toxicity. The more efficiently the body detoxifies itself daily, the fewer toxins remain stored in the tissues, and the easier each periodic detox program becomes. To put it another way, the more you let your body cleanse and heal itself daily, the less severe is the “healing crisis” that manifests later, especially if you allow internal toxins to accumulate for too long. Efficient daily detox also makes daily life a lot more pleasant and productive by increasing available energy, boosting physical vitality, and enhancing mental clarity.
Although retox is a natural process of life that functions automatically, you can take rational measures to slow down the rate of retox and lessen the degree of internal pollution. The extent to which you practice such preventive measures can have a decisive influence on health and longevity. Detox is a natural, self-cleansing function of the body, but it is only designed to process toxic wastes from natural sources. To deal with the heavy overload of unnatural toxins that collect in the human body today from pollutants in food, water, air, medical drugs, and other environmental sources, you must take extra steps to help your body to eliminate these poisons on a daily basis, and thereby protect itself from the damage they produce if allowed to accumulate inside. These toxic chemical residues from industrial sources pollute the bloodstream and corrode the tissues far more swiftly and severely than natural metabolic wastes, and failure to flush them from the body paves a quick path to disease, degeneration, and premature death.
The key elements required to produce precisely the right climate within the body for detox and self-cleansing mechanisms to operate continuously day and night are alkali and oxygen. As long as the blood and tissues remain sufficiently alkalized and oxygenated, they will naturally cleanse and balance themselves, and the body will be able to neutralize and eliminate toxins as soon as they appear. Among the measures that may be taken to keep the blood and tissues alkalized and oxygenated on a daily basis, by far the most effective is proper utilization of life’s two most basic elements—air and water—which enter and exit the body constantly throughout the day and night. Correctly used, air and water continuously alkalize and oxygenate the body as they enter and continuously eliminate toxins and acid wastes on the way out.
To facilitate daily detox in modern lifestyles today, nothing works faster and more efficiently than drinking the alkalized, ionized, microclustered water introduced in chapter 2 as microwater. Drinking this type of activated water throughout the day and using it to prepare all your foods and beverages provides continuous internal detox and cleansing activity that permeates all the tissues and fluids of the body and allows the cells to eliminate their metabolic wastes as soon as they’re produced. The negative charge carried by ionized water neutralizes toxic residues in the blood and tissues owing to its potent antioxidant properties, and the microclustered minerals and water molecules easily penetrate cellular membranes to keep all of the tissues sufficiently hydrated and mineralized and to maintain proper pH balance in the cellular fluids.
Negative ions also constitute the essential element in air that helps keep the body alkaline and oxygenated and that facilitates continuous internal detox. When the oxygen molecules in the air we breathe are ionized, they become far more bio-active in the body, and their cleansing and healing properties become much stronger. The negative-ion count in air is an accurate measure of its capacity to support life, and without that energy, air is just a cocktail of inert gases. Breathing “dead air” with low or no negative-ion count is a major contributing factor in chronic fatigue, chronic toxemia, and chronic degeneration of the body, and it has become one of the biggest banes to human health throughout the world today. While living in a forest high in the mountains, or on an unspoiled beach by the open sea, is no doubt the best solution to this problem of bad air, it is simply not possible for most people to do that. The next best solution is to recharge dead air in homes and offices using negative-ion generators, or to spend twenty to thirty minutes each day breathing purified, supercharged air from the GEOMED Activated Air System.
In addition to breathing bio-active air, it is also very important to learn how to breathe correctly by using the diaphragm to draw the breath deep down into the abdomen, rather than breathing only in the narrow part of the upper chest. Correct diaphragmic breathing greatly increases oxygenation of the blood and tissues, as well as elimination of carbon dioxide, and it also has an immediate alkalizing effect on the bloodstream, thereby counteracting acidosis and assisting detox with each and every breath.
Besides air and water, other factors of daily life such as food and supplements may also be used to help keep the blood and tissues alkaline and assist the body’s self-cleansing functions. Freshly extracted raw vegetable juices are particularly fast and effective alkalizers. Including a glass or two each day in your diet is a very good way to prevent acidosis and facilitate rapid elimination of toxic wastes. Various dietary supplements may also be used as sources of elements that alkalize and detoxify blood and tissues, including all green foods such as chlorella, spirulina, and cereal grass juices, Celtic sea salt and marine mineral extracts, and antioxidant nutrients such as vitamins C and E, beta carotene, zinc, and selenium. Sunlight, too, plays a vital role in this process by stimulating the body to produce enough vitamin D to assure maximum assimilation of calcium from food, water, and mineral supplements. Since calcium is the body’s primary internal alkalizing agent and an essential element in all detox processes, sunlight can be an important supporting factor in maintaining the body’s daily defense mechanisms against acidosis and toxemia.
In the final analysis, the primary factor in the complex “detox/retox” equations that determine human health is usually diet. “You are what you eat” is more than just a slick slogan; it’s a basic fact of life. Rebalancing your daily diet according to the principles of “trophology”—the science of food combining—and reviewing your daily food choices in light of the effects they have on pH balance and other vital conditions in the body are the first and second steps on the path of rational retox. The reason that diet is the first priority is simple: wrong food combinations and wrong food choices have become the primary causes of blood acidosis and tissue toxemia, and these in turn are the primary conditions for the onset of disease and degeneration of the body. After giving up unhealthy food addictions and breaking acid-forming eating habits by doing a few detox diet or therapeutic fasting programs, it is both easy and enjoyable to cultivate healthy new eating habits and a taste for wholesome alkalizing foods that nourish and balance the body rather than derange and ruin it.
In the following chapter, we’ll review the most important rules for combining food in ways that minimize internal toxicity and maximize digestive efficiency, then we’ll examine the major categories of food in light of their effects and side effects within the body and decide what’s really healthy and safe to eat today and what’s not.