14

SETTING YOUR DETOX/RETOX CLOCKS

A key strategy for protecting health, preventing disease, and prolonging life is to align your personal lifestyle with the natural patterns of your body’s basic biorhythms, and to regulate your daily habits in ways that set your body’s internal detox/retox clocks to activate periodic cycles of internal cleansing and healing responses. Detox/retox is a cyclical process: blood and tissue toxicity gradually increases until it reaches the critical stage, at which point the body’s built-in detox mechanisms are activated and quickly remove the offending toxins, thereby restoring the original state of purity and functional balance, after which another retox cycle begins, and so forth. This cycle is a physiological manifestation of the primordial interplay of Yin and Yang within the body, the same polar principle that runs throughout all dimensions of nature and operates within the body in overlapping cycles of time—daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly (figure 12).

When allowed to function naturally, without human artifice or external interference, the body’s self-toxifying (retox) and self-detoxifying (detox) cycles operate smoothly and efficiently, maintaining a homeostatic state of balance that supports health and prolongs life. For every artificial factor that we add to nature’s carefully balanced equations of life, however, such as denatured diets, chemical drugs, electromagnetic and microwave pollution, contaminated air and water, we must take specific counteractive measures to compensate for the imbalances and to correct the deviations that these factors produce in our internal detox/retox cycles. The most effective way to restore your body’s natural detox/retox rhythms is to adapt your personal lifestyle to allow the body’s internal self-cleansing mechanisms to catch up with the toxic overload on a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly basis.

Fig. 12. Natural “detox/retox” cycles and the “wheels of time.”

Let’s briefly recall the analogy of maintaining a car, with which we launched this discussion in the preface. Just as a car needs to have its motor tuned, its internal parts cleaned, and its oil and other fluids replenished on a regular basis to perform properly, avoid break-downs, and prolong its mileage life, so the human body requires regular maintenance and internal cleansing work to stay healthy, prevent disease, and prolong its metabolic life. And like a car, in addition to major annual maintenance and repair programs, the human body must also be fed the right fuels and properly cared for on a day-to-day basis to prevent excessive wear and tear and to reduce production of toxic wastes. And in addition to annual and daily maintenance, some things may also be done on a weekly and monthly basis to improve the body’s performance and reduce its rate of deterioration.

Yearly Maintenance

The seven-day detox and internal cleansing fast with colonic irrigation, as discussed in chapter 6, is the best way to periodically detoxify the blood and tissues, rebalance the body, and regenerate vital functions on a yearly basis. This length detox is also one of the most effective ways to prolong life. This program removes the hard, deeply impacted mucus and putrefactive waste that accumulate in the wall of the bowels, thereby eliminating the main source of blood and tissue toxicity in the body. Since these toxic wastes are a major cause of tissue degeneration, organ failure, fatigue, and other symptoms of aging, totally eliminating them from the body once a year with a seven-day fast and colonic irrigations is the best way to slow down the aging process and extend the human lifespan. Exactly seven days of fasting are required for this detox cycle to completely purify the bloodstream and detoxify the tissues and cellular fluids, and if you do this fast regularly once a year, all sorts of diseases and degenerative conditions are nipped in the bud and never have a chance to develop.

A yearly one-week cleansing fast may also serve as an annual withdrawal program to gradually give up old food addictions and break bad eating habits. Each time you do this program, it becomes progressively easier to adopt wholesome new food choices and cultivate better eating habits after the fast is done. This annual “house cleaning” program allows you to indulge in a bit of overeating, drinking, and other binging during the course of the year, then clears your body of all the residual toxic debris in one clean sweep, before it can do any serious damage.

Another yearly maintenance program that promotes health and longevity is to take all or part of your annual vacation time in the form of a health holiday at your favorite resort, beach, or mountain retreat. This new style of vacation is becoming quite popular. Many spas and health resorts now provide packaged health-holiday programs that include various detox and healing therapies. Rather than exhaust your energy and pollute your body with all the hectic activity and overindulgence that characterizes conventional holiday plans, try giving your body and mind a real vacation from the stress and strain of daily life by resting quietly at a cozy spa, a deluxe beach resort, or a simple mountain cabin, eating only fresh, lightly cooked vegetarian food, drinking only pure alkaline water, and pampering your tired, toxic body with heliotherapy, herbal steam, hot mineral baths, massage, or just snoozes in a hammock. The money you save by not eating at expensive restaurants, not dancing in fancy nightclubs, not shopping, and not spending money on the other extravagances of conventional vacations may be used instead to pay for pure, simple foods and basic therapeutic services that cleanse and repair the body rather than pollute and damage it. Instead of returning to work tired and hungover from nonstop partying, you’ll resume your daily routines with renewed vitality and fully replenished energy resources. If you like to party, do it on weekends, one party at a time, and give yourself a full day to recover afterward. Long vacations, however, are more wisely used for real rest and relaxation.

Monthly Maintenance

A traditional Asian regimen for monthly maintenance of the body is to ingest only water and fresh fruit juice for three days each month, starting on the day of the new moon to time the internal cleansing and regeneration process with the beginning of a new lunar cycle. To further increase the detox benefits of this regimen, you may also take a dose or two of ground psyllium powder shaken in water on each of these three days. This clears the bowels of putrid digestive debris and makes you feel less hungry owing to the bulking properties of psyllium. This is also a good time to do daily sessions with the “Zapper” to eliminate parasites from the body along with all the other toxic wastes.

Some people, especially heavy meat-eaters, cannot go for three days each month on nothing but fruit and water, without triggering a major detox reaction that interferes with work and other daily activities. In that case, a less rigorous monthly maintenance program is to take one full week each month in which they eat only a purely vegetarian diet, without any meat, eggs, or dairy products. While this plan is not as detoxifying as a three-day fruit and water program, it does effectively counteract acidosis in the blood and tissues, which is the biggest health problem caused by eating animal products. For someone accustomed to eating meat, eggs, and dairy products every day, eating only fresh vegetables, fruit, and whole grains for seven days each month serves as a sort of semifast, but without the intensive detox reactions and “healing crisis” triggered by a real fast. This approach is also a very good way for meat-eaters to discover how much better they feel when they cut down on animal products in their diets, and to gradually work their way toward trying a genuine therapeutic cleansing fast—first for only one day, then for three days, and finally for seven days.

Weekly Maintenance

An alternative way to allow your body to detoxify and rebalance itself on a regular basis is to spend one day each week consuming nothing but water and fresh fruit. This one-day program gives the bowels a chance to catch up with the backlog of waste elimination, it rests and rebalances the digestive organs, and it restores proper pH in the blood and tissues. Since no cooked food is consumed on that day, the enzymes normally used for digestive purposes are diverted to assist tissue cleansing and immune functions instead.

The cleansing and healing benefits of this weekly day of digestive rest may be further enhanced by soaking in a hot bath with Epsom or Celtic sea salts and a dash of detoxifying essential oils, such as grapefruit, rosemary, or sage. Even more effective for detox is the “Magnum Bath,” with magnesium chloride crystals, magnesium oxide powder, and mica powder added to the water. Deep-tissue massage, herbal steam, and infrared sauna are other good ways to amplify the cleansing and rebalancing benefits of a weekly day of rest and relaxation. In fact, simply by remaining at rest for twenty-four hours and abstaining from cooked food, you permit your body to shift into the healing mode of the parasympathetic branch of the nervous system. This brief respite from the stress and strain of daily life suffices to recharge and rebalance the body and repair minor damage to tissues caused by weekly wear and tear. If you do this every week, that approach amounts to fifty-two days a year of rest rather than stress, waste elimination rather than waste accumulation, regeneration instead of degeneration. The cumulative benefits to health and longevity of such a weekly program are almost as great as a monthly three-day fast on fruit and water and make a good alternative for those who’d rather not spend three days in a row each month without eating solid food.

Daily Maintenance

The best way to support health and longevity on a day-to-day basis is to enlist the elements of air and water to assist daily detox and to help keep the bloodstream properly balanced. First thing each morning, before eating any food, drink two glasses of ionized, alkaline, microclustered water to flush mucus and acids from the stomach, give the bloodstream an alkaline boost, and rehydrate the cells and tissues. This infusion of energized alkaline water establishes proper pH balance in all the blood and other vital fluids of the body and boosts cellular metabolism with the ionized alkaline minerals required for optimum energy production. By starting each day this way, you flush out residual acids and toxins from the previous day and replenish your blood and tissues with pure, properly balanced water, establishing the conditions for optimum metabolic efficiency throughout the day.

The air element may be harnessed by practicing fifteen to twenty minutes of tu-na or other chi gung breathing exercises immediately after drinking those two glasses of water and before eating breakfast. Deepbreathing exercises practiced early in the morning expel residual carbon dioxide and other gaseous wastes from the bloodstream and replenish the blood and cellular fluids with abundant supplies of fresh oxygen and negative-ion energy. Deep diaphragmic breathing also alkalizes the bloodstream and helps establish proper pH balance throughout the body. Two glasses of pure alkaline water followed by twenty minutes of deep breathing is the true “breakfast of champions.” This simple morning regimen will not only add more years to your life but also add more life to your years.

In addition to starting each day with an alkaline and oxygen boost from air and water, proper daily health care requires that the diet be regulated according to the basic rules of food combining, and complemented with a few special supplements to facilitate internal cleansing and provide complete nutritional balance. Herbal detox teas, green foods, digestive enzymes, and various full-spectrum vitamin and mineral supplements may all be judiciously used to help keep the body balanced and properly nourished on a daily basis. By eating food in a way that delivers optimum nutrition with minimum production of toxic waste, the body’s daily elimination and self-cleansing cycles don’t get overloaded and tissue toxicity never builds up to damaging levels. The lower you keep the level of toxicity in your body, the longer you extend the duration of your life.