Archive for July, 2008

Hello my friends,

I’m off to Europe with my family tomorrow for 18 days: Italy, Spain, and France, and hopefully a one-day adventure in Serbia/Croatia.  I’ll miss y’all, but you won’t miss me, because my assistant Steff will be posting blog entries I wrote, the whole time!  And maybe I’ll miss you so much that I’ll get online and comment a few times while I’m there.

And, please celebrate INTERNATIONAL GREEN SMOOTHIE DAY on August 15 with me–if I can do it in Paris, you can do it, too!  (I know, it’s a rough life, but someone’s got to live it!)  The Raw Divas contacted me and asked me to spread the word, so here’s the link to register and get their instruction manual and support:

http://www.1shoppingcart.com/app/?Clk=2507726

Much love,

Robyn

I wrote last month about Emma coming home from girls’ camp.  Yesterday Kincade, who is one of my two children who is not always supportive of the “nutrition regime” around here, came home from camp.  Tonight at the dinner table this conversation ensued:

Emma:  “Mom, Cade thinks it’s stupid that we eat healthy.”

Cade (embarrassed):  “Emma!  I said that like a year ago!”

Me:  “I know that.  And I won’t lie: it hurts my feelings.  But I believe that someday, Cade’s going to thank me for the way I fed him.”

Cade:  “At Scout camp, where everybody was eating crap all the time, I really tried to eat healthy.  And even though it was better than everyone else, it was worse than how we eat at home.  I felt like crap the whole time.  Now that I’ve been home for a day eating like we usually do, I feel a lot better.” 

I’m in this for the long haul and I really believe that sticking it out, with our nutrition program that makes us different than most people, is so worth the sacrifices.  My best friend of almost 30 years (who makes “rainbow smoothies” for her own three children) wrote me today and said this:

“I thought the shout-out to your mom on your blog on Mother’s Day was so cute.  Of course I remember when you were a teenager and you were so completely disparaging of those whole wheat cookies & carrot juice. . . but what teenager wouldn’t be?  And in the end it led you to where you are today.”

When they’re adults, our kids will have not only lots of nutritious plant food they’re used to and enjoy, and stronger bodies and minds—but they’ll also be smart enough to know why we did what we did, even if they don’t now.  I hope and believe they’ll be more likely to transfer that example to their own children.

Sir Arbuthnut Lane was a surgeon for the King of England and specialized in bowel issues.  He removed parts of the colon and sewed the rest back together, and in the course of his practice, he noticed that many times, patients after surgery would have goiters or arthritis disappear, etc.  Often, seemingly unrelated maladies improved after removing diseased sections of the colon.

He became so aware of how toxic digestive systems are linked to the other organs of the body that he spent the last 25 years of his life teaching people nutrition, rather than performing surgery.  He said this:

“All maladies are due to the lack of certain food principles, such as mineral salts or vitamins, to the absence of the normal defenses of the body, such as the natural protective flora.  When this occurs, toxic bacteria invade the lower alimentary canal, and the poisons thus generated pollute the bloodstream and gradually deteriorate and destroy every tissue, gland and organ of the body.”

If pictures speak a thousand words, look at the color photos in Bernard Jensen’s book.  (You can also find this kind of thing googling on the internet.)  They show rubbery material expelled from many colons during colemas (home colonics) and a cleansing program.  Often, pieces are several feet long, the precise shape of specific parts of the bowel.  It is hard as tire rubber, held up with tongs.  Perhaps any modern doctor who insists this doesn’t happen in the human digestive tract has spent too much time prescribing drugs and not enough time actually studying the inside of that organ.

When Dr. Jensen attended National College in Chicago, they performed surgeries on 300 people.  Patients’ histories said that 285 claimed they weren’t constipated, and 15 claimed they were.  Autopsies showed the exact opposite: 285 were constipated (despite reports that they had up to 5-6 bowel movements a day), and in some of them, “the bowel walls were encrusted with material (in one case peanuts) which had been lodged there for a very long time,” and the bowels were up to 12 inches in diameter.  Dr. Jensen concluded that the average patient does not know whether or not he is constipated.  At a class I taught this week, one woman said, “I don’t have constipation: I have chronic diarrhea.”  She seemed a little shocked when I told her that people with diarrhea are usually constipated, too.  It’s not an either/or proposition.

Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, who lived to 91, said that we should completely eliminate the residue of each meal 15 to 18 hours after eating it.  He said 90% of modern diseases are due to colon problems.  And what is the way to eliminate your risk of colon diseases?  A high-fiber GreenSmoothieGirl diet rich in the natural anti-cancer compounds found in raw plant foods, of course.  No chemotherapy, surgery, or even vitamin pill will ever be able to do what live compounds in real food can.  A number of you during this blog series have wondered how you can cleanse totally, without spending the $$ on Arise & Shine.  Just keep doing each step of your GreenSmoothieGirl program in a committed way, and you can experience miraculous results over a longer timespan!

And with those few more words from experts, my friends, is the end of this topic.  Finally.

Many ancient texts speak of body cleansing, the need to fast now and then, for both physical and spiritual purification.  You don’t have to be a yogi to give your organs of elimination a chance to rest and repair.

I don’t sell cleanse products.  Arise & Shine’s regimen is purely a recommendation.  I also think that over time, if you eat a 60-80 percent raw diet that includes a quart of green smoothie daily, and if you virtually eliminate processed foods and meat/dairy, you may experience slower but equally excellent results. 

Depending on what part you want to target in body cleansing, you can flush the kidneys and liver with the Master Cleanse (a very old regimen using fresh lemon juice, cayenne, and a bit of real maple syrup in water).  Dr. Jensen recommends several days of eating nothing but watermelon, when it’s in season.  Or grapes, up to several pounds a day.  The extra water and insoluble plant fiber are helpful in removing built-up waste.  I often will go a few days eating nothing but green smoothie (and/or some Ultimate Meal shakes, and lots of water), just for a quick and easy cleanse that fits into my busy life. 

If you have a lifetime of eating anything close to the S.A.D., I do recommend you undertake full body cleansing with Arise & Shine (all the necessary products will cost about $200, which you can get at a health food store or online).  You need Chomper with Cayenne, which loosens mucoid plaque, plus Herbal Nutrition to support you as you aren’t eating, bentonite clay, and psyllium husk powder.  I also highly recommend you either buy or borrow a colema board to do a home colonic each day of your cleanse.  (A colema board online was about $200 when I bought mine 6 years ago.)  The most intensive Arise & Shine cleanse is for 28 days, and that schedule of what you do every few hours, every day, is online at their web site.  I never went to 28 days, only because after 20 days, nothing was coming out.

I love Arise & Shine, which I think is the best colon cleanse on the market.  Don’t underestimate it—it’s a commitment!  I don’t think anyone should do it for just a week.  Often the rubbery, mucoid plaque (described and shown in hundreds of photos by Dr. Anderson, Dr. Jensen, and many others) doesn’t even START coming out until Day 7.  You wouldn’t want to stop just as you’re getting results, even if you have to slow down the cleanse by eating a bit more.  Keep what you DO eat to blended raw plant foods or a green salad (no commercial salad dressings or vinegar).

If you want to read about it, buy Dr. Richard Anderson’s Cleanse and Purify Thyself books, parts 1 and 2.  They detail how he came up with the formulas for cleansing that resulted in these products.  Most of the photos, someone is holding up what was eliminated with tongs, or a stick—this is NOT just the herbal material you use in the cleanse being eliminated!  (You like how I warmed you up to this topic for a week before hitting you with the big whammy?!)

You can actually tell by the shape and striations in the eliminated mucoid plaque what part of the digestive tract it came from!  You know you’re really deep cleansing when 2 quarts of water goes in during your home colonic (instead of 1/2 a quart or less—typical of people eating the S.A.D. the first several days of cleansing), and what is coming out has the striations and shape of the small intestine towards the end of your cleanse!

My husband just says, “Cleansing is GROSS!” and runs away.  I think what’s “gross” is to leave this stuff inside us, never clean it out, and/or go back to how we were eating that we got plugged up with it in the first place.

I have done this best colon cleanse three times—never had the crazy results I did after the first one, though, which cleansed 30 years of buildup, part of which was eating the S.A.D.  That first cleanse provided motivation to keep my colon clean for LIFE.  I was astonished each time I cleansed that I had loads of energy despite being hungry and was well supported by the nutritional herbs despite eating less than 800 calories daily.  I exercised my usual 1 hour daily, worked, ran the kids around, cooked meals, did everything I normally did—and needed even less sleep than usual.  That said, I think we should do deep cleansing only very occasionally, as it can be a bit invasive and stressful.  Some people take it too far.

Some won’t be ready for some of what Dr. Richard Anderson and others who have experienced deep cleansing have to say.  For instance, about how negative thoughts, emotions, and experiences are trapped in our proteins, and as mucoid plaque builds up throughout our vast lengths of intestines and colon, we retain those negatives in rather physical ways.  It’s theory and I find nowhere that “proves” it.  I rolled my eyes a bit when I first read it.  But, only someone who has released all that stuff can speak to the very real spiritual and psychological power (joy, even) of letting go of decades’ worth of negatives—harbored resentments and toxic anger.  My first cleanse was honestly one of the singular experiences of my life: powerful, unforgettable, wholly positive.

You always hear about how when Elvis and John Wayne were autopsied, they had 10 or 20 lbs. of impacted fecal material in their digestive tract due to chronic constipation.  I have no idea if that’s urban legend. 

Your M.D. scoffs at the idea of cleansing, at the idea that there’s a buildup of hardened mucoid plaque in the digestive tract from eating meat and processed food and chemicals?  Or if you look around online, you can find an M.D. or two saying this doesn’t happen, buildup of mucoid plaque.  That’s astonishing to me.  Having experienced it for myself, this is not something I have to take on faith after purely academic study, and you can see for yourself.  Look at the inside of a bunch of people’s colons, both diseased and healthy, on Dr. Shinya’s video clip:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=han3AfjevOc

Dr. Bernard Jensen worked on tens of thousands of human colons.  He once measured three gallons of hard, toxic material eliminated from one person, in one cleansing treatment.  You eliminate every day, you say?  Your doctor and the medical textbooks (including pediatrics’) say that one bowel movement every five days is fine, and normal?  Jensen says he knew a woman who eliminated five times a day but when he autopsied her after her death, the opening through her colon was the diameter of a pencil, even though the diameter of the vessel itself was 9 inches.

It’s not what’s coming out that’s a problem.  It’s what’s staying IN.

At the end of my 21-day cleanse, doing daily home colonics, I went to a professional for the last two days of colonics.  Dolly Hansen (Orem, Utah) is the wife of Dr. DeLynn Hansen.  She has a $20K machine and training to oxygenate the water to kill parasites the first day, so they will be dead and ready to eliminate the second day of colonics.  Her huge machine allows the water being eliminated to pass through a large glass tube, and she can stop the flow water at any time.  So, I saw a 5-inch parasite come out of me, because she stopped the water to show me.  Dolly has a parasite a few feet long in a jar that she saved, from herself.  My friend C. is a thin, beautiful, Barbie lookalike and saw a 6-inch parasite leave her body in that tube.

Fortunately, through cleansing and clean eating, I have been parasite free for years.  When I am blood tested, my blood is not perfect, but it does not contain any parasites, and I’m told that is very rare.  (Avoiding meat is key in this.)  When all putrefaction is removed from the body, and we eat a plant-based, whole-foods diet, we are no longer breeding grounds for bacteria, fungus, molds, and viruses.

This is not a recommendation of any specific cleansing plan for YOU, but rather a general opinion that having a clean colon leads to improved health.  Consult your health care professional about any cleanse you may be considering.

A healthy bowel produces minimal flatulence, none of it foul smelling or causing pressure, swelling, or pain.  Gas is, as Dr. Jensen describes it, “putrefactive fermentations” of undigested proteins.  In other words, proteins sit in the gut and become hosts for undesirable bacteria.

The problem is, when converting people to a high-fiber, GreenSmoothieGirl diet, that some people who didn’t have gas before, now do!  If they ate Coke and donuts before, they had no flatulence, and then when they start green smoothies as Step 1, they’re gassy and miserable.  They might even want to quit and go back to when they felt “better.”

Dr. Jensen likens this to when you sweep a dirty basement: as you sweep it up, a lot of dust is kicked into the air.  His research indicates, however, that people, even while experiencing gas problems, report softer stool and easier passing off the gas.  It gradually lessens, he said, until it becomes minimal after about three months.  Be patient and don’t quit good habits as you seek relief for intestinal gas and bloating.

As you get through that initial period, drink 1 ounce of water for every 2 lbs. of body weight, which will help.

It’s important that we keep the colon and lower intestine clean and powerfully peristaltic.  The answer isn’t to gag down some chemically reduced Metamucil stirred into water, while eating the Atkins Diet, like my friend Michelle does.  When I occasionally go out on a limb and express concern about her long-term Atkins lifestyle, I mention the importance of plant fiber, and she says, “Oh, I’m covered.  I drink Metamucil like crazy.”

Jensen says 95% of the millions of dollars spent annually on laxatives are only stimulating the bowel by irritating and harming it.  If you want to use a very effective natural laxative that will stimulate without causing diarrhea or irritate the colon, have the herb Cascara Sagrada on hand.

Laxatives do one or more of three things: (1) increase the amount of liquid retained in the feces, (2) act as a lubricant, or (3) irritate, poison, and/or chemically stimulate muscle walls to cause abnormal contractions.  If you have diarrhea, it’s for one or more of these four reasons: (1) excessive use of laxatives, (2) stress, (3) infection in the GI tract/colon, or (4) toxins in the bowel.  These chemicals are absorbed through lymph and blood vessels and end up in various parts of the body.  They damage the normal ability of the bowel to eliminate on its own, tiring out muscles by keeping them constantly stimulated.

Your blood recirculates through the colon, and toxicity in that part of your body is then spread to other parts of the body.  Doctors will tell you this isn’t so.  But Jensen (who originally believed that) noticed that when a person retained water in the colon from enemas, he eliminated a lot of urine afterward.  If the water in the colon is being taken back up to the kidneys, how, then, are none of the impurities in the colon being recirculated?  In his urinalyses, Dr. Jensen used to test for indican level (toxic material taken back to the kidneys from the colon), though modern M.D.s don’t.

Jensen showed through studying thousands of colons and eliminations that the bowel is key to our health.  One of the most valuable things I learned as a young mother is to give my children an enema with a syringe when they got a fever.  I never met a fever that didn’t reduce immediately after eliminating blockage in a little person’s body.

The way to heal the bowel is through diet that promotes excellent nerve and muscle tone, with clean, pink, highly peristaltic tissues.  And what’s that diet?  Lots of clean water, and lots of bulky greens, vegetables, and fruits, legumes and whole grains, nuts and seeds.  The GreenSmoothieGirl diet prevents ulcerations, diverticulitis, spastic bowel, IBS, strictures, adhesions, and colitis, and gas/flatulence that are affecting increasing numbers of people in the Western world. 

Additionally, you can do a very simple thing do get off laxatives and become more regular.  Wake up your digestive system every morning as you wake up, before you get out of bed.  Massage your ascending, transverse, and descending colon with your hands or a tennis ball.  Massage deeply starting in the lower right of your pelvis, work straight upwards, then massage right to left across your belly button, and straight down on the left [corrected from my original post].  Then get up and start your day with two glasses of water.  These are very effective natural laxatives.  And of course, most people know that prunes are good natural laxatives, too.