How and When to Be Your Own Doctor by Moser and Solomon (best classic books to read .TXT) 📖

me once a week. Almost inevitably, successful at-home fasters had already done a lot of research on self healing, believed in it, and had the personal discipline to carry it out properly, including breaking the fast properly without overeating.

Foods To Heal Chronic Illness

Sprouts Baby Greens Salad Juices Fruit alfalfa sunflower lettuce beet grapefruit radish buckwheat celery celery lemon bean zucchini zucchini lime lime clover kale kale orange orange fenugreek endive radish parsley apple wheat tomato tomato raspberries cabbage cabbage cabbage blueberries carrot carrot grapes spinach apple peaches parsley grapefruit apricots sweet pepper lemon strawberry Fruits should be watery and lower in sugar. Some examples of poor fruit choices would be pineapple, ripe mango, bananas, dates, raisins, figs. Fruits should not be combined with vegetables.

Vegetables should not be starchy, packed-full of energy. Poor vegetable choices would be potato, parsnip, turnip, corn, sweet potato, yam, beet, winter squash. Sprouts and baby greens are vegetables and may be included in salads.

Juices should not be extremely sweet. Apple, orange, beet and carrot juice should be diluted with 50% water. Fruit juices should not be mixed with vegetable juices or with vegetables at the same meal.

Salads should include no fruit. Salad dressings should be lemon or lime juice, very small quantities of olive oil, and herbs. No salt, soy sauce nor black pepper. Cayenne can be okay for some.

I have also helped chronically ill people that were not mentally prepared to water fast, but were able to face the long-term self-control and deprivation of a raw food cleansing diet that included careful food combining. These people also regained their health, but it took them a year at minimum, and once well they had to remain on a diet tailor-made to their digestive capacity for the rest of their life, usually along with food supplements.

Jim was such a case. He was 55 years old, very obese, had dangerously high blood pressure poorly controlled with medication, and was going into congestive heart failure. He was on digitalis and several other heart medications plus diuretics, but in no way was his condition under control. He had severe edema in the feet and legs with pitting, and fluid retention in the abdominal region caused a huge paunch that was solid to the touch not soft and squishy like fatty tissue.

Jim had dreamed of having his own homestead with an Organic garden, now he had these things but was too sick to enjoy them or work in his garden without severe heart pain and shortness of breath. Jim had retired early in order to enjoy many years without the stresses of work, and he was alarmed to realize that he was unlikely to survive a year.

The day Jim came to see me the first time I would have classified his condition as critically ill because his life was in immediate danger; but he responded so quickly to his detox program that he was very soon out of danger and would be more accurately described as a chronically ill person. Jim was not prepared to water fast. He was attached to having his food and he was aware that at his extreme weight he was going to have stay on a dietary program for a long, long time. He also wanted to choose a gradient that he could manage by himself at home with little assistance from his wife. He had been on a typical American diet with meat, coffee, etc., so that in spite of his dangerous condition it did not seem wise to me to add the heavy eliminatory burden of a water fast to a body that was already overwhelmed with fluids and waste products.

Jim immediately went on a raw food cleansing diet, with no concentrated foods like nuts, seeds, or avocados, and with one day each week fasting on vegetable juice and broth. He did enemas daily even though it wasn’t his favorite thing. In one month he had lost 30 pounds, his eyes had started to sparkle, and his complexion was rosy. The swelling had disappeared from his feet and legs, and he had to buy new pants.

Starting the second month he gradually withdrew from prescription medications. From the beginning I had put Jim on a program of nutritional supplements including protomorphogens (see chapter on vitamins and food supplements) to help the body repair it’s heart and the kidneys. In only four months he had returned his body to glowing health, and looked great for his age, though he was still overweight. At the end of one year he had returned to a normal weight for his height, and only cheated on the diet a couple of times when attending a social event, and then it was only a baked potato with no dressing.

He was probably going to have many qualitative years working his garden and living out his dreams. The local intensive care ward lost a lot of money when they failed to get Jim.

Diet For The Acutely Ill

The acutely ill person experiences occasional attacks of distressing symptoms, usually after indiscretions in living or emotional upsets.

They have a cold, or a flu, or sinusitis, or a first bout of pneumonia, or a spring allergy attack. The intense symptoms knock them flat and force them to bed for a few days or a week. If they are sick more often than that, they are moving toward the chronically ill category.

People who are acutely ill should stop eating to whatever extent that they are able until the symptoms are gone. During an acute illness, the appetites is probably pretty dull anyway, so why not give a brief fast on water or fruit juice a try.

Most acute conditions are short in duration, usually not lasting more than a week. Allergy attacks, some types of flu, and a first bout of pneumonia may well last for three weeks or a month. The general rule is to eat as little as possible until the symptoms have passed, self-administer colon cleansing, even if you have a horror of such things, and take vitamin supplements, including megadoses of Vitamin C, bioflavinoids, and zinc. (See the chapter on vitamins.) Those having a little experience with natural medicine make teas of echinacea, fenugreek seeds and red clover and quit eating. Eating as little as possible can mean only water and herb teas, only vegetable broth, only vegetable juice or non-sweet fruit juice, even only cleansing raw foods. If you eat more than this you have not relieved your system of enough digestive effort.

After your symptoms are gone it is very important to change your lifestyle and improve your diet so that you aren’t so toxic and don’t have to experience an acute illness several times a year when your body is forced to try an energetic detox.

Diet For A Healthy Person

I doubt that it is possible to be totally healthy in the twentieth century. Doctors Alsleben and Shute in their book How to Survive the New Health Catastrophes state that in-depth laboratory testing of the population at large demonstrated four universally present pathological conditions: heavy metal poisoning, arteriosclerosis, sub-clinical infections, and vitamin/mineral deficiencies. Those of us who consider ourselves healthy, including young people, are not really healthy, and at the very least would benefit from nutritional supplementation. In fact the odds against most people receiving adequate vitamin and mineral nutrition without supplements are very poor as demonstrated by the following chart.

Problem Nutrients in America

Nutrient Percent Receiving Less than the RDA B-6 80%

Magnesium 75

Calcium 68

Iron 57

Vitamin A 50

B-1 45

C 41

B-2 36

B-12 36

B-3 33

A genuinely healthy person almost never becomes acutely ill, and does not have any disturbing or distracting symptoms; nothing interferes with or handicaps their daily life or work. A healthy person has good energy most of the time, a positive state of mind, restful sleep, good digestion and elimination.

Healthy people do not have to live simon-pure lives to remain that way. Healthy people can afford 10% dietary indiscretions by calorie count—eating or drinking those things that they know are not good for them but that are fun to eat or are “recreational foods or beverages.” Such “sinning” could mean a restaurant bash twice a month, having a pizza, French bread, beer or wine in moderation, ice cream, cookies, cake, turkey for festive occasions, etc. The key concept of responsible sinning is keeping within that ten percent limit.

A diet for a healthy person that wants to remain healthy should not exceed the digestive capacity of the individual, either in terms of quantity or quality. All foods that can not be efficiently digested should be removed from the regular diet and relegated to the “sin”

category, including those you are allergic to and those for which you have inadequate digestive enzymes. I have encountered very few people that can efficiently digest cooked meat, chicken, or fish, but some can, and some can with the assistance of digestive enzyme supplements. In order to digest meats, the stomach must be sufficiently acid, there must be enough pepsin, pancreatin, and bile, etc., and the meat should be eaten on the extremely rare side (not pork), in small quantities (not more than five or six ounces), and not combined with anything except nonstarchy vegetables. If you must include meat in your dietary, it should represent a very small percentage of your total caloric intake, be eaten infrequently, with the bulk of the calories coming from complex carbohydrates such grains, legumes and nuts, as well as large quantities of vegetables and fruits.

The healthy person that wants to stay that way for many, years is advised to fast one day a week, to give the organs of elimination a chance to catch up on their internal housecleaning. If water fasting seems impossible, try a day of juicing it; if that is too rigorous, try a day on raw foods. A similar technique, though less beneficial than even a one day each week on raw foods, is delaying breaking your overnight fast for as long as possible each day. Try giving up breakfast altogether or postponing breaking your overnight fast, because from the time you stop eating at the end of one day to the time you start eating the next is actually a brief, detoxifying fast.

Eggs, milk, cheese and yogurt can be assimilated by some healthy people with or without digestive aids. It is possible to take lactase to break down the milk sugars for example; sometimes aids such as hydrochloric acid, pepsin, and pancreatin help. If you can buy it or are willing to make it raw milk yogurt containing lactobacillus bulgaris or acidophilus may be digested more readily, especially if it prepared from healthy cows or goats fed on unsprayed food, and served very fresh. Eggs should come from chickens that run around outside, eating weeds, and scratching bugs.

The yokes of those eggs will be intense orange, not yellow. Few people these days have ever eaten a real egg. Surprisingly, for those of you who fear cholesterol, the healthy way to eat eggs is use just the raw yolk from fertile eggs. It is enjoyed by many people in a smoothie—fresh fruit blended up with water or milk. Eggs contain lecithin, a nutrient that naturally prevents the body from forming harmful fatty deposits in the arteries.

Sea weeds are a wonderful source of minerals and should be eaten in soups and salads. Other invaluable fortifying foods are algae of all kinds (such as chlorella and spirulina), lecithin, brewers yeast, and fresh bakers yeast. Many people have had very unpleasant experiences trying to eat living bakers yeast and so use brewers yeast instead. But brewers yeast is cooked and the proteins it contains are not nearly as assimilable as those in raw yeast. Raw yeast is so powerful, it feels like pep pills!

It takes a special technique