Clean: The Revolutionary Program to Restore the Body's Natural Ability to Heal Itself Read Online Free PDF

whose whites were whiter than any I’d ever seen. He was also exuding a sense of calm and joy that were highly out of character. Sensing my astonishment, he told me he’d just completed a detox program at a holistic center located minutes from my home, out in the desert. He’d abandoned his usual routine of restaurant meals, alcohol, and all-night movie shoots for a retreat based on green juices, colonics, massage, sunshine, yoga, and meditation. This shiny new being was the result.
    It was an “Aha!” moment for me. This was exactly the kind of result I wanted to offer to my patients. I got the address of the center, named the We Care spa, and signed up for my own program.
    With my overloaded schedule, I had to improvise. Instead of booking myself in as a guest, I drove to the center on my lunch breaks, where I would fill my jars with fresh juices and take natural supplements. Every day I’d get a colonic hydrotherapy treatment to help flush out the toxins that were getting released from my tissues via my intestines. And then I’d go back to work until late at the multiple busy offices under my care. I committed to two weeks of this intensive juice fasting program and made sure to keep my mind wide open, because although I’d trained hard in fitness in the past and had months of eating very simply and wholesomely in India, this was different from anything I’d ever done.
    By the third day of the detox program, my fatigue, hunger, and headaches had disappeared. By the seventh day, my IBS had completely vanished and has so far only threatened to return at times when I disregarded my lessons. After two weeks of following the center’s cleansing program, my depression—or whatever was left of it—had completely lifted and I had lost fifteen pounds, just like my friend. I had not felt better since my teens.
    I was floored. My own body had reset itself. The irritation I’d been experiencing in different areas—mood, energy levels, allergies, and digestive function—had all been connected. They were different ways that my body was showing it was toxic, damaged, and out of balance. By detoxing, I had restored that balance and repaired the damage. As a result, my cells were remembering how to do their chemistry. My guts were restored their normal functioning without medication, and my serotonin levels had gone up. Nobody I’d consulted in modern medicine had suggested these separate symptoms were linked—or had told me that I could heal them myself. It was knowledge that no medical school or specialist seemed to possess. Several times a day, colleagues stopped me at the hospital and said, “Alex, you look ten years younger!” I wondered, had I just reversed the aging process? Was that even possible? If so, it was a subject that—just like nutrition—was missing from my medical school curriculum.
    This was a turning point. I finally saw my path clearly. I quit my job at the hospitals and moved to Los Angeles, one of the most polluted cities in the world but also, luckily, home to some of the most progressive thinkers and health practitioners in the world—and lots of openminded patients. I started studying everything I could about detoxification, from the ancient traditions to the new scientific studies that had come out explaining the biochemistry of detoxification in detail. I immersed myself in the study of the emerging field of Functional Medicine, which translates the Eastern paradigm of health to fit the Western terminology and tools with incredibly effective results. Every week I drove back to the desert for two days and worked as the medical consultant for the We Care spa. Susana Belen, the center’s visionary founder and owner, and I guided many different kinds of people through their juice fasting experiences, developing our understanding of the process and sharing our findings with each other and the guests.
    I began to treat patients as an M.D. and cardiologist who worked with an expanded toolkit. It