Normally on Saturday mornings I like to sit at my laptop in my bathrobe with a cup of hot green tea with lemon and write my blog. It’s a day unpressured by work concerns. But yesterday I was really sick. This began on Wednesday morning with a slightly sore throat, followed by some lung and nasal congestion on Thursday, which increased Friday. Saturday morning I had a pounding headache, sore throat, sneezing, nasal and lung congestion, back pain and I felt weak and exhausted. My temperature was ninety-eight degrees. The day was punctuated by short episodes of intense heat and sweating.
If I didn’t know better, I would think I caught a cold. But that wouldn’t make any sense. I start eating really healthy and then succumb to a bacteria? No, I don’t think so. You can see from the scale that I’ve dropped another couple of pounds. That’s a lot of fat and toxins being moved and metabolized.
If you kept up with my nutrition experiment, you know I finished it Sunday with some food from the Oregon Country Fair. The next day I indulged in a caesar salad for lunch and some ice cream. I say indulged because most calories in such a salad are from dairy and fat. Then Tuesday I went to a Mexican restaurant for a taco and enchilada with beans and rice. I also ate quite a few chips with salsa. For dessert I had an ice cream cone. I figured that since I screwed up staying off dairy by eating cheesecake, I might as well get some dairy in before giving it up again.
I’ll tell you, that Mexican meal sat heavily in my stomach. I hadn’t had that painful full-stomach feeling in over a week, and I didn’t like it. I went home and crashed in front of the TV. Wednesday I was back on track eating fruit and salads.
I haven’t been much of a fruit eater prior to my experiment, eating it only sporadically. Since I forced myself to eat all that fruit, I now find it much easier to reach for some plums or grapes when I want a snack. I also consumed a large watermelon this week, which was incredible. I am beginning to desire these clean, water-rich, nutrient-dense foods.
During the weeklong experiment I experienced detoxification symptoms including one day where I was weak and feeling rotten. I felt better as those toxins passed out of my body, but my body continued to detoxify beyond the diet. I was providing my body with many alkaline minerals to assist in detoxification, and my body was building up energy for a major cleanse, which it began on Wednesday. I feel much better today with minor congestion in my chest.
I knew a man who was a long-time alcoholic who quit drinking. Two months after he quit he came down with a very serious cold that lasted a month. He tried to figure out where he “caught” it. No one he knew had it, including his family, and I didn’t get it from him. You see, he didn’t have a cold. His liver had been relieved of the need to detoxify alcohol and in two months his body had built up enough energy to undergo a major housecleaning.
Colds are Best Treated by Fasting and Rest–Not Drugs
Many people, when faced with the unpleasant symptoms of a cold, reach for medicines to stop the coughing, stop the runny nose and sneezing, stop the pain, dry the sinuses. All these symptoms are instituted by the body as a remedy. Acids being excreted in the mucus membranes cause irritation and mucus is produced to remove them from the body.
When you take a drug, your body ceases elimination because it now has a new toxic threat it must deal with. The sinuses dry, the coughing is lessened. For a time. The body neutralizes and excretes the drug and returns to cleansing. Your symptoms return. You take more drugs. Symptoms cease as the drug is excreted. Symptoms begin again. You are thwarting your body’s attempt to heal itself.
Think of it this way. You’re mopping your kitchen floor. I come in after you’ve cleaned part of it and track in mud. You have to stop mopping the floor to clean up the mud. Then you go back to mopping and I track in more mud. Rinse and repeat. What you wind up with is a floor only partially cleaned and a very, very dirty mop. If I had stayed off the floor, it would be clean now. If you don’t take drugs, your body will continue cleansing until it reduces the toxic load to a manageable level.
The spring cold is often a cleaning event. You’re outside, getting fresh air and sunshine, you begin eating more fruits and vegetables, you’re exercising. It’s spring. You feel great. Wham! You’ve got a cold. Did you catch a bug? Or did your body take advantage of the extra energy to throw out some garbage?
You will take much longer getting over a “cold” by taking drugs than by resting and fasting. And you won’t be any better off afterwards, because your body will simply cease attempting to detoxify. You will have used up energy in excreting the drugs that could have been used in housecleaning. Do this many times over a lifetime and you end up with chronic disease as the body’s healing efforts are continually interfered with.
Every adaptation to habits, agents and influences which are inimical to life is accomplished by changes in the tissues which are always away from the ideal. The renovating and readjusting processes that must follow a reform in living is accomplished by the tearing down and casting out of these unideal tissues. New and more ideal tissues take their places. The body is renewed.
This process of readjustment is not always smooth. Aches and pains, loss of weight, skin eruptions, etc., may result. Helen Densmore truly says that, “If it were true that, after many years of abuse, we could stop the wrong course of living and all the blessings of health follow immediately, it would be proof that this disobedience is not so bad after all.”
As she says, “With the drunkard the curative action is recognized at once; all know that it is not the water that is making him ill, but the alcoholic poison which he had been before accustomed to. So mother, sister, sweetheart and friends with one accord appeal to him to keep up his courage, notwithstanding his apparently bad symptoms. How differently is the poor dyspeptic treated when he attempts to reform in diet. With one accord his friends try to prevail on him to abandon it; assure him that he is killing himself; read him tomes of medical authorities to show that he is impoverishing his blood by his ‘low diet’ and when he returns to the old injurious diet, just as with the dram of spirits in the case of the drunkard, the effect is to stop the curative action; he feels braced up, and this is taken as proof that he was all wrong, and the accumulation of disease commences again.”
These renovating crises are seldom severe and are always followed by better health. Persistence and determination are required when they come. Most people, particularly young and vigorous ones, will make the change with very little or no discomfort.
Such are our prejudices and prepossessions, and so strong is our tendency to cling to old forms and old schools, that when these manifestations appear, as they sometimes do, even though we have been forewarned and prepared to expect them, many more fail through fear born of ignorance or lack of comprehension of these curative crises than continue with the reform. –Herbert Shelton, The Hygienic System: Orthotrophy, Volume II
When in my twenties I sold Herbalife for weight loss. Many customers wanted refunds because when they took the supplements and protein shakes they got sick, and they reasoned that the product made them sick. What made them sick was what was stored in their own bodies. Any diet that reduces calories or incoming toxins will result in the body diverting newly available energy to housecleaning. When you sweep the floor the dust flies and fills the air, but sweeping the floor doesn’t make the room dirtier. It just stirs things up for a bit.
So next time you get a cold, try resting and working with your body instead of treating it like the enemy and poisoning it into silence. Energy is needed so rest is called for. Feeding to “keep up your strength” is a lie that will keep you in bed longer. Pain and discomfort are part of life. Suppress it now and it’ll be your constant companion as you get older.
