21 Pounds in 21 Days (15 page)

W
hile I was still a full-time nurse, another nurse told me the story of a mentally challenged man who had come to the emergency room because he was feeling extremely sick. His abdomen was as distended as that of a woman who was five months pregnant. It turns out he was very constipated. Once the staff discovered that he was literally full of you know what, they didn't feeling like being bothered. So rather than give him an enema to help clean out his colon and talking to him about improving his diet to find out why he became so constipated in the first place, they just gave him some laxatives and sent him on his way. Well, I don't know if he took the laxatives or not, but he must have kept on eating the same foods that had put his digestive system in gridlock. He still couldn't poop. Tragically, before long, he died of toxemia—too many toxins in the blood.

While this is an extreme example of someone whose eliminatory system was not operating properly, I see many patients who experience problems of one kind or another with moving their bowels. I have talked to many people who have not eliminated their bowels in two weeks, not realizing that some of the symptoms they're experiencing—signs such as mood swings, depression, headaches, brain fog, joint pain, and fatigue—are simply due to the fact that they have too many toxins in their body that can't get out.

Because the Martha's Vineyard Diet Detox causes the cells to scrub themselves so rapidly, it is exceedingly important that we get the noxious substances out of our body before they build up in our bloodstream and make us feel “off” or actually become sick. I want you to take a proactive approach that will help you remove toxins pronto. After the detox, I strongly suggest that you incorporate these techniques into your self-care regimen to help you take better care of yourself and keep your system clean.

The Process of Elimination

The human digestive tract is essentially a thirty-foot tube that begins at our mouth and ends at our anus. While we think of digestion as occurring in our stomach, it actually begins before food hits our mouth. Our sense of smell tells the body to secrete extra saliva. Our saliva chemically breaks down our food, enhancing the chewing process. If you chew thoroughly, the food is reduced to mush that is ready to be digested by the stomach. If you don't—and most Americans don't—some of the work that was supposed to have been done in the mouth now must take place in the stomach, causing us to experience gas, bloating, and indigestion. So it's important to masticate very well—100 chews per bite of food.

After we swallow, our food travels down our esophagus to our stomach, which liquefies and begins to digest it. Our stomach then sends the partially digested food to our small intestine, where the pancreas, gallbladder, kidneys, and liver chip in and metabolize this substance into molecules—for instance, starch is transformed into simple sugars, protein into amino acids, fats are broken down so that they dissolve in water—that are small enough to pass through the wall of the small intestine. Once these nutrients, which are now punier than a pinpoint, pass through the intestinal wall, they enter the bloodstream, which carries them to every cell. While that's going on, the waste left over from the food you ate continues down the digestive tract, traveling out of the small intestine into the large intestine or colon, a squiggly tube about five feet long. After the cells eat, they eliminate waste, which travels through microscopic pathways that meet back up
with the colon, which essentially throws out the entire body's trash each time you move your bowels.

While it's pretty easy to understand how food moves from your stomach to your small intestine and into your colon as waste, the process by which cells empty the trash is much more mysterious. Our eliminatory system consists of an intricate labyrinth of pathways running all throughout the body. The large intestine (colon), the superhighway on which waste travels on its way out of the body, is the most obvious. But before waste reaches this freeway, trash travels along invisible byways and through our bloodstream by way of our veins and arteries that ultimately flow to our colon. If we think of the colon as the body's eliminatory “superhighway,” then the smaller pathways are similar to the smaller traffic arteries that crisscross any city. The “driveways” that serve each cell dump trash into the smaller arteries and veins—side streets, if you will. These, in turn, intersect with main streets, then major arteries, on-ramps, highways, and, ultimately, our superhighway—the colon.

In a well-functioning body, the cells empty their trash and trash-hauling
phagocytes
carry it away through this waste-elimination system, eating up as many noxious substances as possible along the way. Ultimately, these toxins reach the colon, where they ride the wavelike motions of peristalsis and exit the body. But in a body whose toxic burden is high, the phagocytes as well as other cleansing cells and organs can become saturated and overwhelmed. Just as a city's transportation system gets crowded and experiences choke points and accidents that slow its flow, its byways slow down and exit routes get congested. At this point symptoms become noticeable. Classic signs of a toxic body include being overweight, fatigue, foggy thinking, body odor, achy joints, swelling, and inflammation. When conditions get really bad, as the constipated man I mentioned experienced, the entire body can go into gridlock as bad as New York on Thanksgiving weekend. The brain behaves similarly to an “eye in the sky” traffic helicopter, figuring out where all of the “choke points” are and telling the body to automatically seek out alternate routes for the toxins to travel. But in some people's bodies, even the back streets
get jammed. Sometimes conditions get so bad that the cells have tremendous difficulty in throwing out their trash. Of course, by the time this happens the person is usually very sick.

Constipation is both a common symptom and cause of a toxic body. Ideally, after you eat, the waste from that meal should push the trash from earlier meals down the pipeline, causing you to have a bowel movement. In fact, that's my rule of thumb: when food enters the top of the large intestine, feces should come out the bottom. In countries where people eat healthy whole foods that still contain their vital nutrients and have few artificial ingredients, people have more than one bowel movement a day. This is ideal. But the standard American diet slows our digestive system, even clogs it, making us backed up. In this society I think that if you have three bowel movements a day (one following your three meals) you're doing exceptionally; two are good; one is the minimum that will support good health. Going less often means you're constipated. Now, we all may experience constipation on occasion—because we eat denatured food or are traveling, for instance. But chronic constipation means that your body is circulating toxins looking for a way to get them out or store them in some out-of-the-way place—and that sets you up to get sick.

I'll tell you up front that my perspective conflicts with that of the American Gastrological Association (AGA), the professional organization representing doctors who specialize in gastrointestinal tract diseases. The AGA states that the “normal frequency” of bowel movements “varies widely, from three bowel movements a day to three a week.” A person is constipated, they say, “if more than three days pass between bowel movements or if there is difficulty or pain when passing a hardened stool.”

However, I'm less concerned with what is so-called “normal” and more concerned with what's healthy. More than that, I like my advice to make sense. Does theirs? You decide. Consider what would happen if on several consecutive 98.6-degree days—the temperature of the human body—you decided not to take out the trash. Now I'm not talking about paper trash, I'm talking about food scraps. It wouldn't take long for the fruits, vegetables,
starches, and grains to ferment and decompose, creating a gas that would “light up” your house. The fatty products like mayonnaise or bacon grease would turn rancid. It may take a couple of days, but you'd smell them, too. And the meat would begin to rot, emitting that all-too-familiar, way-past-its-sale-date odor and spawning maggots, which would be crawling all over it. This is exactly what happens when waste sits in your body—it breaks down, ferments, turns rancid, smells, rots, and hatches parasites. If you're not having at least one bowel movement daily, I can guarantee you're having some of these problems:

• Abdominal bloating and gas—happens when decaying foods ferment.
  
• Acid reflux—in some cases heartburn happens because there's not enough room for the food to go down, so it tries to come back up.
  
• Stomach upset and nausea—just the idea of fermenting, rancid, and rotting ingredients mixing it up in your belly probably turns your stomach now.
  
• Stomachaches—doesn't it make sense that your digestive organs would hurt if they had to expand to accommodate gas and waste?
  
• Body odor—the reason that some people have a wicked body odor is because their digestive system is so backed up that the odor is literally excreted through their pores.
  
• Excess abdominal weight—many people's abdomens are literally stuffed full of feces.
  

Many of these problems originate in the colon, the five to six feet of the digestive pipeline that precede the final six inches, or
rectum.
A healthy colon consists of pink, flexible, and supple tissue about the texture and consistency of your skin. It's lined with many nooks and crannies. Like skin, it has microscopic pores in it that allow water and electrolytes, such as sodium, along with any nutrients the small intestine might have missed, to flow through the colon's walls and into the bloodstream. The colon is very sensitive because it is made up of many types of tissues, including
muscle. When it feels waste enter at the top, the muscles begin to pulsate and contract, propelling the waste matter through the colon and into the rectum, a process known as peristalsis. But many factors interfere with this process, including:

• Toxins
  
• Synthetic and artificial ingredients in the waste the body was unable to digest
  
• Insufficient fiber
  
• Missing essential fatty acids (EFAs)
  
• Low levels of digestive flora, also known as “good bacteria,” or enzymes
  
• Too many bad bacteria
  
• Not enough enzymes to assist with digestion
  

When the body experiences these types of conditions, waste and synthetic substances build up along the inside of the colon, creating a thick, black, and slimy sludge. Over time, this fecal matter hardens and develops the consistency of a rubber tire. Because the colon's inner walls are now covered with this rubbery stuff, they can't feel the arriving waste matter and don't engage in peristalsis as effectively. When the colon behaves sluggishly, feces linger longer. Not surprisingly, this creates even more slime. As the sludge thickens, the passageway through the colon narrows, just as happens with your household pipes when they clog with grease and debris. As this happens, the shape of our stool changes. Healthy feces are medium brown, roughly two feet long, the diameter of a half dollar, smell but do not have a noxious odor, and float on the top of the water. Unhealthy stools are slender or small—think: pencil-thin, rock or pebble sized—sink to the bottom of the toilet, and “light up” the bathroom and maybe several surrounding rooms. If your bowel movements display any of these characteristics, something is obstructing or interfering with its normal behavior and you need to take action. Most of the time the culprit is impacted waste.
Many people have between ten and twenty-five pounds of toxic fecoid matter just sitting in their colon!
I didn't believe my colon therapist back when I was sick and she
quoted me that statistic. But once I started getting colonics, I lost weight like crazy! Sometimes issues more significant than sludge slow the elimination system. Health issues whose causes range from the easy-to-solve—not consuming enough fiber or water, for example—to more onerous, like having a tumor, can interfere with bowel movements. These types of problems can cause bleeding and turn stools black, create mucus in the stools, or cause a sense of fullness that exists even on an empty stomach. Very light-colored stools—usually gray or almond-colored—also signal health problems. If you experience any of the above, there is reason for concern, so contact your doctor immediately.

Whether you have two pounds or twenty pounds of sludge coating your colon, if it is stuck there decaying and putrefying, it is creating gas and causing bloating and other digestive problems. Because the colon's walls are semipermeable, trapped toxins pass back into the bloodstream, where they circulate around the body, making us look and feel sick and tired. The body attempts to take toxins out of circulation by storing them as fat. Sometimes, sludge coating the colon wall blocks an on-ramp connecting that organ to one of the highways carrying in waste from another part of the body. Not surprisingly, traffic on that byway then backs up, and toxins from the body part it serves can't download into the colon quickly enough. If the backup is bad enough, the trash will overflow into a waterway known as the lymphatic system, congesting cellular tissues along its route. Disease results in the far-off region that's unable to cleanse itself. That's why many experts in complementary and alternative medicine believe that disease begins in the colon.

Since our environment and food supply expose us to an incredible number of synthetic chemicals that the body does not know how to process, I strongly believe that we need assistance in keeping our colons clean. This is especially true if you are among the many Americans who do not move your bowels at least once daily. Because man-made chemicals cannot be processed by the organs, the other body systems that help us eliminate toxins—the liver, kidneys, lymphatic system, gallbladder, and skin—need assistance with cleansing as well.

The Liver