Maybe we should all detox instead of diet...
Unless you're totally new to alternative health, you've probably heard of detoxification or "detoxing" — the effort to get poisonous substances out of our bodies.
I heard about it for years, but I never paid much attention until I started learning about alternative cancer treatments. Almost all doctors who successfully treat cancer take detoxing very seriously. Our bodies are loaded with lead, mercury, pesticides, food chemicals and additives, chemicals from prescription drugs, a long list of industrial pollutants and who knows what else. Continued below...
These toxins also leech into our bodies through our clothes, our furniture, and our carpets. I know, because I'm highly sensitive to chemicals. The gases given out by certain treated fabrics and by newly-purchased plastic items such as computers, televisions and new cars can put me in bed for a couple of days if I'm not careful.
I have a long love-hate relationship with the Pentium chip standard in most computers. At one point I actually had to put my computer in another room and run the connections through the wall to my office. As for most laundry detergents, I don't even want to talk about them. Consider me the canary in the coal mine: you're breathing and touching the same junk that makes me sick, you just don't notice it. Yet.
My pesticide bath. . .
I grew up in farm country in 1950s and 1960s and I was practically bathed in pesticides and herbicides. So was everyone else. Farmers, including my Dad, had no idea the stuff was dangerous and handled it very carelessly.
Maybe farmers nowadays are more careful not to get it on themselves or inhale it, but I'm not sure it makes much difference, because they still put it on the plants and the earth. I'm certain the ground water where I grew up is unsafe to drink. And the cancer rate there is frightening. My fatalistic brother thinks all of us who grew up there will eventually get cancer. But then he's not a believer in alternative medicine. I believe you can do something about your toxic load.
When is the right time to detox?
If you don't have cancer, it's tempting to put the whole problem aside -- put it off till you have time, deal with it later.
That's a mistake. NOW is the time to get rid of toxins. Don't wait till you're sick. To help you get started, I've got extra benefits for you: you'll feel a lot better, and you might lose weight while you detox. It worked for me. According to some experts, when you have a lot of toxins in your body, your body sends out messages that something is out of balance. Those messages can take the form of food cravings as well as fatigue, gas, headaches, trouble sleeping, acne, bad breath, and so on. All these things are typical symptoms of toxic overload. Maybe you've heard of the documentary film Super Size Me. It records how filmmaker Morgan Spurlock lived on nothing but McDonald's food for 30 days and gained 25 pounds. He also began to suffer from liver problems. When the experiment was done and he was ready to lose the weight, what do you think he did? He went on the "Detox Diet" developed by his wife, Alexandra Jamieson, a certified health and nutritional counselor. The Detox Diet worked. Spurlock was able to get all the weight off.
Oxford Ph.D. says toxins make us fat
Dr. Paula Baillie-Hamilton, author of the book Toxic Overload, says, "Virtually all chemicals we are exposed to in our food and environment possess some sort of weight-altering effect, even at very low levels." Dr. Baillie-Hamiliton is an M.D. who also earned a doctorate in human metabolism from the UK's Oxford University.
She contends that our bodies have natural self-adjusting mechanisms to help keep us thin. Toxins damage this intricate system, causing muscles to shrink while body fat accumulates. In fact, she believes no diet will really ever work without detoxification. She thinks chemical toxins are largely responsible for the global obesity epidemic. Her research suggests that pesticide residues in food are some of the worst offenders. Pesticides actually contain certain chemicals called carbamates that are ALSO used to promote animal growth and to treat certain human illnesses such as thyroid disorders. These chemicals are known to promote weight gain. Another chemical found in some pesticides — organophosphates — was also used to fatten up livestock until it got banned for that purpose (it's still used to kill insects, and low levels of it are found in our food). Organochlorines are a third group of pesticide chemicals known to have a weight-gain effect. Animals fed one type of organochlorine still gained weight after their food intake was cut 50 percent! Maybe that's why we can't lose weight. So besides helping you prevent cancer, detoxification may help you shed pounds. There are many ways to detox, and I suggest trying several, not just one. In this issue, I’m going to talk about one of the most important: colonic cleansing.
Colonic hydrotherapy and the power of water
If you want to clear a lot of toxins from your body, a good place to start is your colon. Also called the large intestine, the colon is something like four or five feet long. It's the end of the line for the digestive process.
Your body absorbs very few nutrients from food residue once it passes into the colon. Almost all nutrient absorption has already taken place beforehand, in the small intestine. The colon is basically a collection point for waste — the stuff you ate that your body couldn't use. The colon DOES do one thing with ferocious efficiency: it removes water from that waste. This can lead to constipation — extremely hard stools. The longer the fecal matter sits in your colon, the more water the colon removes, and the harder the stool gets. The more constipated you are, the more constipated you get. Since all your waste ends up in the colon, it only makes sense that that's where your body sends a lot of toxins. Trouble is, toxins can get stuck in the folds and tissues throughout your colon. So the point of colonic hydrotherapy is to flush them all out. The technique is to flood the colon with water and literally rinse out whatever is there. Colonic therapists believe most people's colons are lined with impacted fecal matter that can be years old. You can picture it as plaster spackled on the walls of your large intestine. Colonic therapists also believe that this old fecal matter can leak through the walls of the intestine into the bloodstream and make you seriously ill. This old fecal matter may actuallypromote leakage by creating sores in the intestinal wall. I don't know about you, but that's a scary, disgusting thought — fecal matter leaking through a sore, diseased intestine into my bloodstream.
Another weight-loss secret
Many people who try hydrotherapy experience weight loss just by getting rid of the old fecal matter. The evidence for this is anecdotal, but people report a weight loss of anywhere from five to fifteen pounds — literally old crap that was stuck in their colons.
Everything I'm telling you here is highly controversial. Conventional doctors deny that our colons retain old crap for weeks, months or years. So what? You shouldn't even retain it fordays. You need to get that stuff out! One thing I believe for sure is that most Americans don't move their bowels often enough and completely enough. I don't doubt for a minute that most people have a lot of junk "in there" that needs to get out. It wouldn't surprise me a bit if the stuff leaks through the intestinal wall. And it wouldn't surprise me a bit if this is one of the causes of cancer. Anyway, I go by results: here at Cancer Defeated we know and have interviewed cancer patients (and others) who have cured or controlled their disease thanks — in part -- to colonic cleansing. It's one part of an overall strategy for defeating cancer. Most of the top alternative cancer clinics employ colon cleansing. And they DO get results. People go home and live for years.
How it's done
While you lie on a table wearing a hospital gown, a colonic therapist begins by introducing a speculum into the colon through the rectum. The speculum is attached to a water tube. Once this water conduit is inserted, a flow of water passes into the colon. The temperature and rate of water flow can vary, depending on the type of treatment you're getting. One treatment might use as much as 25 gallons of water. Most people find the treatments pretty comfortable.
I've encountered two methods. There may be more, for all I know. One of them uses gravity to move the water. The water tank is positioned above the patient and water flows down through the tube into the colon. The therapist or even the patient controls the rate of flow. The other method uses a pump, and only the therapist controls the rate of flow. Practitioners are usually trained in one method or the other. They may criticize the one they don't use and tell you their approach is safer. I don't know of any good evidence either way, and I think injuries are rare. You can bet if people were being injured by colonic hyrdrotherapy, conventional medicine would make sure we all hear about it. Cancer Defeated has been reporting on colonic cleansing for many years and we haven't come across even one actual, real-life case of someone who was injured by colonic hydrotherapy. All we hear are scare stores from someone who heard something from someone who heard it from someone else. I 'm confident you'll be fine if you receive treatment ONLY from a skilled, experienced practitioner. (If you're reading this and you DO have credible evidence of injuries, please write me at the email address at the end of this page.) I've had two therapy sessions myself, one using each technique, and both therapists were careful and professional as far as I could see. More to the point, they'll stop anytime you say stop.
Improve circulation, boost immunity
Along with flushing toxins out of your colon, advocates say hydrotherapy has some other benefits. It actually helps increase circulation in your body, which in turn increases circulation of white blood cells, boosting your immune function. Better circulation also helps heal injured tissues and re-energizes your body.
To stimulate circulation, a hydrotherapist may take advantage of both hot and cold water. If your therapist uses this technique, you'll see alternate applications of hot and cold. Makes sense — blood vessels dilate with heat and constrict with cold. Doing this process repeatedly ends up driving blood to your organs, which helps tone them. Your colonic therapist may recommend several treatments, which may be as often as one or two times a week for a month or two. If you decide to try it, my advice is "go slow" and see how your body reacts. If it's painful, stop. IT SHOULDN'T HURT — at worst, there may be some discomfort in penetrating the anus with the speculum — but no serious pain. Don't let a therapist pressure you into additional treatments unless you feel completely comfortable with the process and the outcome. We've published Special Reports on alternative cancer clinics in Mexico, Germany and The United States. Most (not all) of these clinics feature colonic cleansing as an important part of their protocols for treating cancer, and if you receive cancer treatment at such a place you can be pretty confident the therapists know what they're doing. Unfortunately, besides the cancer clinics my team has visited and written up, it can be hard to find a colonic therapist and harder still to check them out. Colon cleansing is considered something of a fringe therapy even among alternative health professionals such as acupuncturists, chiropractors and body therapists. My trusted massage therapist doesn't believe in it. I think he's wrong. I believe it deserves mainstream recognition and could benefit nearly everyone. But I suspect this view will not receive wide acceptance anytime soon. If you don't want to try the water method or if you can't find a colonic therapist near you, take a look at Cancer: Step Outside the Box, a soft cover book by my good friend Ty Bollinger. Chapter 8 reveals a colon cleanse you can do at home with natural remedies. In fact, Ty's book also tells you how to cleanse your liver, gall bladder, kidneys and blood. It's a valuable resource. With his advice you can really go to town and get rid of the toxins in your body! Cancer -- Step Outside the Box One more thing: some advocates of colon cleansing say that the shape and texture of your bowel movements is a clue to your overall health. There are all kinds of theories on what a healthy bowel movement "should" look like. An extremely hard bowel movement — typical of constipation — is obviously a bad sign. And a watery, almost totally liquid bowel movement — diarrhea -- is another bad sign. But other than that, I'm not persuaded the shape of the feces tells you anything. |
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