What if there really was a fountain of youth? What if there was a way to stay biologically and metabolically young, vibrant and full of health? What would it be worth to you to feel energetic, mentally and emotionally alive, strong, and pain free? What would you do to rejuvenate your body and your life?
Science is closing in on the answers on how to rejuvenate the body. The answers are not some new miracle drug or some magic potion. Research is finding that the oldest health practices used by all civilizations are what actually work to extend life, health, and vigor. Even though we all like the idea of magic potions and elixirs that give us what we want without having to participate at all, it turns out it is what we do that offers us rejuvenation. Life is built out of how we participate with life.
We are a diverse people. We are each genetically unique – skin type & color, hair & eye color, sex, height, facial features, etc. Internally we are also unique with different metabolisms, inherited strengths and weaknesses, hormone balances, brain processing patterns, and so on. But one thing we all share is we all age. We all face gradual degeneration and eventually death. Just how and where in our bodies this will manifest first depends on our individual design weaknesses. If we avoid accidental death, we will all face discomfort and disease slowly manifesting on a daily basis.
The common basis of all disease comes down to two things – inflammation and decreased functioning. Every disease has these imbalances present and causing the disease. So what does it take to decrease inflammation and increase functionality? To answer that we have to know why we are loosing functionality and why we are getting inflamed.
Inflammation is an over activity in some aspect of the body’s systems to fight something wrong. When something goes haywire, the body’s first response is to produce inflammation. Inflammation is the firefighters and police rushing to the scene of some disaster. Loss of function happens for many reasons. If the body does not have enough of the raw materials or too much of the wrong materials to build properly, then things don’t function well. If the body has too many poisons to deal with, things don’t function well. If circulation to the tissues is poor, things don’t function well. If inflammation is not able to rescue the day, then things don’t end up doing well. The list goes on and on for the many ways healthy function can be compromised.
Reestablishing balance is the key to regeneration of our body tissues. Currently we are facing a massive health crisis in this country out of our programmed lifestyle food choices. The information we have been taught to believe about what food choices are healthy and what are not has created a monster health problem for us. We have been eating a steady diet of foods designed to inflame us and degenerate us from the day we are born. These foods are extremely profitable for the companies that produce them and they dictate the health policies taught by our schools, government, and doctors, but terrible for us.
Many doctors around the country are waking up to the understanding I am presenting here and applying it to their patients with amazing results. We are seeing diabetes reversed, multiple sclerosis reversed, Alzheimer’s reversed, one chronic disease after another reversed simply by realigning the patients body with the natural rhythms and cycles it was designed to live with.
One of the most potent natural rhythms we have forgotten in our culture is the feast and fast cycle. There are times when food is plentiful and times when food is scarce in a natural world. Year round food abundance is foreign to the human species. Consequently our bodies developed natural biological processes to take advantage of these natural cycles of life. Just as when food is plentiful in late autumn, we are designed to gain weight. When food is scarce we are designed to fast and rejuvenate our body. When we stop eating the body switches gears and clears out the trash it doesn’t need and rebuilds healthy, clean, new tissues. This cycle and time is the natural rejuvenation power built into all our bodies.
We have turned off this inborn healing and renewal process in our lives by eating every day and turned on inflammation and degeneration by not only eating every day, but numerous times each day. This is totally unnatural for the human body. Through most all of human history we spent most of our day hunting and gathering or farming all day and then ate our evening feast when the sun went down and we could no longer work. Only the wealthy could eat several times a day, and interestingly they were the ones that grew obese and developed degenerative diseases. Everyone else died of infections or violence/injury.
Imagine yourself a hunter-gatherer in late winter and early spring. What dried provisions you had set aside from the fall harvest has all been eaten up – what do you do? Modern humans are here so obviously our ancestors did not all die of starvation. They did not even get weak from lack of food; otherwise they would not have had the strength to find new food in the fullness of spring. So what happens?
When your daily calorie consumption drops below 600 calories something magic happens, your whole metabolism changes. After a couple days your body shifts over into burning your stored fats for energy. As long as you have food to eat, it cannot do this. As long as you have more than 600 calories a day to consume, your body simply lowers its energy needs and breaks down your healthy muscle tissue to make sugar to feed the rest of the body. But below 600 calories your stores of fat energy become available. Even the fittest person has enough calories stored as fat to completely live off their fat for several months. Some people have enough to live without food for more than a year.
Your body increases growth hormone production to protect your muscles from being broken down and also starts recycling protein so you don’t need to eat. Fat becomes a fuel directly by being converted into ketones, and also releasing glycerol that the body turns into sugar for the few tissues that still need sugar to run on. Your body also starts scavenging and clearing out unnecessary tissues clogging up the arteries and brain to use and reuse in keeping the body healthy while food is unavailable. This is part of where the rejuvenation takes place; the body eats up imperfect and unwanted stuff to feed the healthy tissues. Old damaged immune cells are eaten up, arteries are cleaned out, brain tangles and plaques are removed, and so on.
So how can we access this innate healing power of the body to rejuvenate itself? The simple answer is to simply not eat for three to six weeks each year. As simple as this is, most people in this country are too scared to even miss food for one day. They have been programmed to believe that they will suffer some irreparable damage if they miss their morning snack. Interestingly no one seems to be afraid when the doctor tells you to skip all food for 24 to 48 hours before doing a colonoscopy to check for cancer.
So how can we empower folks to engage the power to rejuvenate their bodies without the terror of skipping eating. Let’s think back to those hunter-gatherers in late winter and early spring. Do you imagine they ate absolutely nothing until fruits and vegetable started appearing later in the spring? Of course not, they ate anything they could find, which at that time of the year was mostly green shoots coming up through the snow. Greens are the first available food for these people. Greens did not provide enough calories to sustain them, so their bodies still had to stay in fat burning mode. But it did provide some calories, plus a ton of nutrients that their bodies used to help detoxify and replenish their mineral, vitamin, and phytonutrient needs.
This is the part of the natural cycle that we can tap to build a powerful rejuvenation protocol. All the pluses of complete fasting are still happening in the body, plus the benefits of massive nutrient uptake. It is not a coincidence that kale and bok choy are two of the most nutrient dense foods on the planet. They are early spring foods. Greens provide us a nutrient dense, but low calorie food source, along with select other high nutrient vegetables. Thus we can eat abundantly without going over the magic 600-calorie per day number.
This is the rejuvenation protocol in its most basic form: Eat 3 cups of cooked, above ground vegetables or 6 cups of uncooked, leafy greens three times a day. To get serious benefit you need to do this for at least 5 days in a row. You get more benefit the longer you do this. I have just finished doing 2 weeks. I did water only for the first 4 days, then shifted to greens – salads, soups, and stir fries for the next 10 days. I hope to do more of this rejuvenation protocol in the immediate future.
Are you ready to rebuild your body?