Spring has sprung. My daffodils have come and gone already. Green stuff is popping up everywhere.
If you were a hunter-gatherer, you would be eating those green things. Throughout most of human history, this time of year meant near starvation. The only things to eat were the new young shoots and any game you might be lucky enough to catch. As a hunter-gatherer you don’t have food to set aside for the long winter. You eat whatever you can catch or find. The fat you put on in the late summer and autumn (from all the fall fruit and starchy winter vegetables you ate) has now been burned up. Your body is ready for a spring-cleaning.
Mother Nature wisely provided us with a time every year where we were forced to clean out the waste products and toxins accumulated over the last year. This is done through the combined actions of bitter greens and near starvation. The bitter greens stimulate our livers and gallbladders to flush out waste and poisons. These combine with the high fiber levels of the greens to scrub out the small intestine and colon and carry it all out of the body.
Our liver is our main organ of detoxification. It sucks all the poisons and wastes from our blood stream and breaks it down and packages it up for removal from the body. Science calls this phase 1 and phase 2 liver detoxification. In phase 1 the liver uses special enzymes to break the poisons into smaller (usually more toxic) pieces, and in phase 2 the liver combines these pieces with various special molecules to neutralize the toxicity and make them water-soluble. Once they are water soluble, they are dumped into the bile and shunted down into the intestine – and hopefully out. I say “hopefully” because gut bacteria will break the phase 2 products apart and release the toxins where they can be reabsorbed in to the body given a little time. That is why it is vital that the liver dump moves quickly out of the body.
The extremely high fiber content in the greens and the high bile flow helps stimulate the bowels to move right along, thereby dumping the toxic waste out of the body.
The near starvation state is also a critical portion of the cleansing process. As your body generates toxins or when you ingest toxins, your body tries to put those toxins where they won’t harm you much. It puts them into fat cells primarily. These are called sequestered toxins. When you have plenty of high calorie food, your liver is too busy doing lots of other things processing this food to spend its energy and resources on detoxifying. So the body parks the poisons in fat cells knowing that they will stay trapped there until a time when you do not have plenty of food and you have to burn your fat for energy. That is the same time your liver has the time and energy to spend on detoxifying the poisons that get released along with the stored fat.
How do you know if you are in the fasting/cleansing state? Buy a package of Ketone urine test strips from the pharmacy. When you pee on it, if it turns purple then you are in the fasting state. The purple means your body’s fat cells are dumping fat and toxins out into your blood stream to be metabolized. If you don’t get a purple color then you are probably eating too many carbohydrates. This same thing happens with low carb diets, but the high calorie consumption stops the liver from doing its job eliminating the toxins. Carbohydrates (sugars) stop the healing and cleansing process.
This is why fasting has been used for healing for so many thousands of years. When you fast (meaning no or very little calories), your liver kicks into high gear on detoxifying the body. It will not do this if you are eating plenty of food while trying to heal. When sick, animals naturally fast to turn on their healing mechanisms. Fasting dumps the toxins out of storage in the fat cells and carries it to the liver to be processed and flushed out into the intestines to be eliminated from the body. (Interestingly, even the gut bacteria support this process. Within 24 hours of drastically reducing our food consumption the dominant family of bacteria that are very good at breaking down any undigested food (and dumped bile toxins) switches to a family of bacteria that are not as good at breaking down leftovers in the gut.)
It is always amazing to observe how well designed our body is to function within a natural environment and in natural seasonal cycles. We have messed up that innate wisdom of the body through our manipulation of our environment. We were not designed to always have plenty to eat. We were designed to have times of no food so that we could detoxify and heal every year. Degenerative diseases didn’t happen in mankind until we learned how to grow food and store it, creating plenty through what were intended to be lean times each year.
My answer is to recreate the natural healing cycle of this season through the use of a Green Fast for 2 to 3 weeks every year. The eating details of the Green Fast can be found here. I will usually spend a week preparing for the fast by cutting out starchy carbohydrate foods and eating just steamed aboveground vegetables, protein, and my special carb-free flax flat bread. (A note to the gym rats out there; this is a tear down and clean out process, not a build up process, so stick with light workouts only to support good circulation while on this program.)
I used to start the green fast with a few days of Master Cleanse (lemon juice in water with a little maple syrup) and nothing else to get my body into the full fasting state. I have since learned that this is really only necessary when the goal is to calm down an overactive immune system. Now I just spend a week eating less than 20 grams of carbs per day to induce the fasting state. Then I move into the Green Fast protocol combined with special nutrients that support the phase 1 & 2 liver detoxification process ( Bilemin and Metacrine) for 2-3 weeks. I also boost up the detoxifier glutathione levels in my blood with Oxycell cream. For protein I switch to a rice protein/detox herb blend called Clearvite protein. Protein digestion places a heavy burden on the liver so we only want to use very easy to digest and process proteins like rice protein or whey protein.
Hunger is not really an issue with the Green Fast. The hunger signals from the brain not getting enough sugar disappear after three days as the brain switches over to the burning of fats instead. I make this transition during the preparation week so that I can eat more protein and vegetables while the brain is transitioning into fat burning. Protein calms down sugar cravings. The hunger that comes from having an empty stomach is also never a problem, because you keep filling it up with green high fiber foods and high fiber flaxseed meal.
Coming off the healing and cleansing process takes another week and involves gradually adding back in the heavier proteins and nuts and legumes. Finally, after a week of readjustment, I can reintroduce starches like rice and tubers.
For those of you who would like to detoxify and clean your system with this green fast liver flush, I will provide an incentive by offering a $20 discount on the combination of the four detox products I mentioned above. Normally they cost $139.80 so you can order them for only $119.80. Generally these products take 5 days to reach us and we usually place orders on Friday mornings.
During the fast you eat basically lots of greens, just like our ancestors did. We boost up the detoxification process with added supplements because we have so many more poisons in our food and environment than ever existed in early times. We need to maximize our healing and cleansing time as we will create and encounter more toxic waste in our bodies in one year than early man would encounter in a lifetime.
My personal belief is that most of the degenerative disease that is so rampant in our lives today is the direct result of too much internal toxicity. Regular liver/colon detoxification and cleansing is the most natural and easiest answer. The real challenge is getting past the false belief that we should always have plenty. Sorry, but our plenty is slowly killing us. Our bodies were not designed for year round plenty. Sometimes we need less so we can heal. Our addiction to more has congested our systems and our lives. We need to clean out. It is time for a spring cleaning.