Many of us have issues that we’ve been dealing with for a long time, and we’ve gotten used to them, to the extent that we don’t even notice them or pay attention to them on a regular basis.  As a practicing physician I see many patients who tell me they are fine and healthy, but when questioned admit to having headaches and migraines, joint or back pain, heartburn, skin rashes, or diarrhea among other things.  These things are not healthy, we’ve just gotten used to having them, and often take them for granted as “normal”.

Therefore it’s important to back up and take an inventory of your health and disease before you begin the ECD, so you can truly get a sense of how much benefit you’ve received from doing it.

I recommend creating an inventory of your health and disease.  Below I have provided you with a template that lets you rate your general health and well-being.  Answer each of the following categories from 1-10, with 1 being lowest/worst and 10 being highest/best, and answer yes or no to the sub-questions.  If you have specific issues you can add descriptions or notes afterward.

1. Sleep 1 – 10
2. Are you waking up feeling rested?
3. Energy 1 – 10
4. Do you have any energy crashes throughout the day?
5. Digestion 1 – 10
6. How often are you having a bowel movement? (1 per day, 1 per week, etc.)
7. Are you constipated?
8. Do you have diarrhea?
9. Gas or bloating?
10. Flatulence?
11. Mood 1 – 10
12. Anxiety?
13. Depression?
14. Menses (your period; for women only) 1 – 10
15. PMS?
16. Painful period?
17. Musculo-Skeletal 1 – 10
18. Joint pain?
19. Muscle pain?
20. Back pain?
21. Skin 1 – 10
22. Rashes?
23. Overall sense of well-being 1 – 10

After having taken an inventory, set it aside in a safe place.  Once you finish the elimination portion of the diet, you’ll fill out a second copy of the above questions which you’ll compare to the first to help solidify the benefit you’ve seen from the ECD.

What are your thoughts?  Feel free to share them with us in the comments section below.

As a new parent, I found the book Under Pressure by Carl Honore to be a welcome slap in the face.  Luckily I haven’t had time to descend into the madness of hyper-parenting but I’ve already begun to hear the seductive siren song.  After all who doesn’t want their kids to be better, smarter, stronger, faster?  We all do, we all want the best for our children.   But we often lose sight of what our children actually want in favor of what we want for them.

Traveling around the world Honore shows time and again that kids don’t want hyper-parenting, and that despite our best efforts it does not help them succeed more or become better people.  It often backfires and has the opposite effect.  What kids want and need is: to feel safe and loved, they want our attention and time with no conditions attached, they need boundaries and limits, they need space to take risks and make mistakes, they need to spend time outdoors, they need to be ranked and measured less, they need healthy food, they need to aspire to something bigger than owning stuff and they need room to be themselves.

Honore argues for us to slow down, and adopt a saner view of childhood.   I could not agree more.  I highly, highly recommend this book for all parents.  We can do better by our children, but not through hyper-parenting.  I think the following quote from the last chapter of the book, sums things up nicely.

“Half a century ago, an influential English pediatrician called D.W. Winnicott argued that engineering the perfect childhood was impossible and that striving to do so was damaging both to the parent and to the child.  Instead, parents should aspire to meet their children’s needs most of the time and accept that they will mess up occasionally.  Do a ‘good enough’ job, said Winnicott, and most children will grow up fine.”

Do your children a favor, get this book, read this book.

What are your thoughts?  Share them with us in the comments section below.

The first step here is getting a handle on what you regularly eat.  Let me use myself as an example.  Before the ECD we ate fairly well; a low wheat diet without much added sugar.

A typical day looked something like this for me:

• Breakfast:  A smoothie made in my blender (3 raw eggs, ½ cup of whole milk unflavored yogurt, ½ cup of frozen blueberries, stevia to taste, added water to thin the consistency)
• Snack:  None
• Lunch:  Salad greens with roast chicken, peppers, avocado, and grated parmesan cheese.  Dressing typically either balsamic vinegar and olive oil or a prepared garlic-parmesan dressing.
• Snack:  An apple, or a piece of cheese.  Sometimes both.   Often a small handful of dark chocolate chips.
• Dinner:  A protein portion (chicken, protein, beef, fish) and a side of vegetables topped with butter, a sweet potato a couple of times per week.  A side salad with bleu cheese crumbles, balsamic and olive oil.
• Snack:  A coconut ice cream bar
• Fluids:  Mostly water, green tea, glass of kombucha with a few ounces of pomegranate juice added.

As you can see my standard diet was low in wheat and high in dairy.  Before you think I’m anywhere near perfect, we tended to eat out 1-2 times per week depending on the week.  This could range from relatively healthy food to pretty “junky” food like pizza, burritos, hamburgers, and ice cream cones.  I admit to a special fondness for donuts (about once per month; I highly recommend Top Pot donuts here in Seattle, if you’re going to eat a donut make it a good one) but I did draw the line at sodas, Twinkies, Slurpies, and potato chips.

So looking over my average day, it’s important to see what’s going to have to come out.  The biggest thing coming out for me are eggs for breakfast, and dairy in general.  It’s important to see what needs to come out and then even more importantly what is going to replace it.  Some people who aren’t prepared for an ECD do a kind of hunger strike for 2-3 days where they simply abstain from eating reactive foods but don’t put anything in its place.  This is a recipe for disaster.  One suggestion is to find two new foods to take the place of every food that is going to come out.  This may seem like a lot of work, but the effort you put in on the front end is going to make a huge amount of difference in the 3-4 weeks you are on the ECD.

I recommend you come up with 2 options for breakfast, 2-3 options for lunch, and 5-7 options for dinner, then plan to repeat these options for the 3-4 weeks of the ECD.  I used the Garden of Eating, a wonderful, highly recommended cookbook to plan out most of the recipes we’ll be using.

If at all possible, I highly recommend staying away from ‘faux’ foods.  That is, don’t replace milk with almond milk, cheese with a processed “no cheese” cheese, bread with rice bread, etc.  Simply removing the reactive foods will give you a huge boost in your health and well-being, but I recommend taking it a step farther, and at least for 3-4 weeks, purge fake food from your diet entirely.  I recommend you focus on: Meat, Fish, Fowl, Natural fats, Vegetables, Fruits & Nuts.

What are your thoughts?  Feel free to share them with us in the comments section below.

Enter Business as Unusual by Anita Roddick, one of the founders of the Body Shop.

In this book she talks candidly about her experience from founding the Body Shop to making it a worldwide company.  How she never compromised her principles despite intense pressure within and without the company to stop “her silliness and get with the program”, that is, running a business with the bottom line as the only goal.  She talks about being a leader in cruelty-free cosmetics (no animal testing), recycling, encouraging others both within and outside the company to be politically active about causes they care about, and going straight to poor and underserved populations to improve their quality of life.

If you’ve resigned yourself to business as usual as exemplified by the Great Recession we’re going through, caused primarily by the myopic focus on the short-term bottom line and greed, this book is a refreshing breath of fresh air.  You can be successful, found and run a multi-million dollar international company with both principles and profits.  You do NOT have to compromise your principles in order to be successful.

If this topic is of interest to you, I highly recommend picking up Business as Unusual and giving it a read.

Have you read the book?  Have you struggled between principles and profits in your life?  Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

If my little blurb sounds interesting, I highly recommend you watch the movie.  I came away from it inspired and joyful, and will be adding it to my movie collection.

What are your thoughts?  Have you seen the movie?  Share them in the comments section below.

If you don’t feel like you have strong willpower be sure you have eaten before going anywhere there is going to be food, and try to cancel out of all the obligations you can for the 3-4 weeks you are on the ECD.  When you’re on the ECD is not a good time to have business lunches, dinners, parties or other celebrations.  DON’T plan on doing the ECD around birthdays or the holidays.

More on the ECD coming soon.

What are your thoughts?  We’d love to hear them.  Please post them in the comments section below.

Let me give you an example.  A woman had severe seasonal allergies, she dreaded pollen season with a passion.  She was on the maximum doses of all the allergy medications and was still barely keeping her allergies under control.  Blood allergy testing showed that she was very reactive to wheat, dairy, and eggs (the big 3).  She cried a little bit at hearing this because it meant that virtually everything she ate on a regular basis was out.  But she took to the challenge with relish, and decided that this was going to be her chance to get back into the kitchen and experiment, finding tasty foods that she could eat and enjoy.  Within a few weeks her allergies were gone completely.  She stopped all of her allergy medication and has had no sign of her allergies, unless she eats some dairy, wheat, or eggs.  She is thrilled with her results and couldn’t be happier she took the plunge and did an elimination diet.  And for those who worry about giving up groups of foods forever, I expect over time as her gut heals and her immune system normalizes she will be able to reintroduce most of those foods back into her diet.

Before undertaking an ECD it’s important to determine your motivation.  What is going to give you the drive to persist through the early cravings?  What is going to allow you to say no when you get in situations where it would be so much easier to simply say yes?  Unless you plan to be a hermit for the 3-4 week duration of the elimination part of the diet, you need to have motivation.  One strong source of motivation is others.  Most of us don’t tell anyone about any diet or lifestyle changes we’re trying to make, that way if we fail, no one knows.  Turn that around, and tell all your friends, tell your co-workers.  Enlist their help and let them hold you accountable.  That way when you are tempted to reach for that food you know you others are going to know.

For me, I have three sources of motivation.  The first is simply curiosity.  As mentioned in my previous post when we saw the changes a change in diet caused in our pets, I became curious.  What changes would I see in myself if I did the same?  So this is an experiment to see what happens.  The second source of motivation is my desire to have experienced the therapies I ask my patients to go through.  It is a belief of mine to, whenever possible, try the therapies out on myself that I recommend to my patients.  That way I know what the therapies feel like, and it helps me understand what my patients are going through.  The ECD is one that I have held out on, because without any major health problems I simply did not want to give up the foods that I enjoy.  The third source of motivation is others, when my wife and I first came up with the idea, the first thing I did was quickly post the idea to my blog and to my mailing list.  That way, many people know about this, and are going to hold me accountable for completing it.

If possible, get your friends or family to join you on the ECD (often easier said than done).  It’s especially important to have the help of people you are living with.  If you can all go on the diet together it creates a shared camaraderie and helps to keep the foods that have been removed out of the house.

Stay tuned as this series on the ECD will continue.

Do you have any thoughts on the ECD?  Have you tried one?  We’d love to hear your comments, please post them in the comments section below.

We had been told by our vet that one of our dogs would need bilateral hip replacement (due to hip dysplasia) at around age 6 and who was very unlikely to survive past 9.  She is now 11 years old with both natural hips intact.  One of our cats who was on the road to having teeth removed due to periodontal (gum) disease has all his teeth and his gums are in great shape (and truth be told we have never brushed his teeth).  The vet was absolutely shocked at the change.  Our other cat lost his behavior problems and has become a much more mellow, friendly cat since stopping the junk food.  And here’s perhaps the least and most important change: their poop does not smell.  The difference in the odor of their feces from kibble to raw meat is night and day.  Most noticeably our 2 litter boxes used by our 2 indoor cats only begin to stink after a week or so (versus 2 or 3 days when they are on kibble).

That’s the good news, a dramatic improvement in physical and mental well-being for our four pets.  The bad news, like any therapeutic eating plan, a raw meat diet is a pain in the butt.  We order 50 lbs boxes of turkey and chicken necks special order from our butcher, usually ordering 2-3 months worth at a time.  Then we defrost the boxes and re-bag the necks into gallon freezer bags and refreeze them in a garage freezer we keep for the purpose, transferring them to the fridge for daily feeding.  It’s a lot of work, and every once in a while my wife and I look at each other and really question whether it’s worth it.

Recently we ran out of raw meat and our butcher was backordered so we transitioned back to kibble.  Within a few days the litter boxes stunk, the dogs themselves began to smell noticeably ‘doggy’, both the dogs and cats fur began to lose its shine, and one of our cats began manifesting behavior problems again.  Even for a Naturopathic doctor, someone who knows the tremendous difference food can make, the change was shocking.

Over dinner a week ago my wife and I were talking about the huge changes we saw in our pets.  If a change from a junk food to a high-quality diet could make such a tremendous change in our pets, what changes would we see in ourselves if we did the same thing?  We both are in a good health, and eat a pretty good diet.  But we were curious,  and so we decided to do just that.

In the month of March I will be transitioning to a diet free of sugar, gluten, dairy, eggs, soy, and citrus foods (the five most common reactive foods I see in my practice are: gluten, dairy, eggs, soy and citrus).  In future posts I will be talking about making the transition, and detailing my experiences on this therapeutic eating plan.  I invite you to follow along to any extent you wish.  If you would like to join me through cyberspace, I invite you to post your experiences in the comments section through the month of March.

For those of you in the Seattle area who are interested and would like more intensive support, I will be offering a series of support classes over the month of March.  This is a prototype in design, and is currently 4-5 thirty to sixty minute group classes where we meet weekly to share information and support one another.  Because this is the first class and we will be working the bugs out, we are discounting the cost to $100 for the series.  A minimum of 5 participants are required for the series to go forward, so if you are interested or would like more information please email us right away at info@aspirenaturalhealth.com.

Stay tuned for future posts in the next 10 days as I lay out my planning for the month of March.

Do you have any thoughts or opinions?  We’d love to hear them.  Please post them in the comments section below?

The following text is from Labrix:

“Estrogen dominance, a state where there is a greater influence of estrogen than progesterone on the body is alarmingly common in women of all ages. In peri-menopausal women, their progesterone levels fall many years before the decline in estrogen levels creating a state of relative estrogen dominance. One of the many actions that progesterone has on the body is to calm electrical activity in the brain. The primary mechanism for this is through the metabolite allopregnenolone which activates the same GABA-A receptor as Valium, Xanax and alcohol. Without the relaxing effect of progesterone, many women find themselves with new-found anxiety or insomnia and may self medicate with one of the above mentioned substances. Furthermore, estradiol exacerbates the situation by enhancing the excitatory neurotransmitters dopamine, and histamine. The combination of increased excitation and diminished inhibition of electrical stimulation is often enough to push many women over the edge and into addiction. Although women in the peri-menopausal years is often where we see this phenomenon, please remember that there are many younger women and even adolescents with inadequate progesterone levels that may predispose them to reach for an exogenous source to relax them, or shut down some of their overactive neurotransmitter activity.

As in many situations, too much estradiol (relative to progesterone) causes significant problems, but too little estradiol can also wreak havoc on brain chemistry. Estradiol inhibits the enzyme monamine oxidase (MAO) which is responsible for breaking down serotonin, dopamine and histamine and estradiol enhances the serotonin receptor function in the female brain. As estradiol levels fall to below optimal levels (as with anovulation or menopause), many women can suffer from anxiety and depression due to diminished serotonin, histamine and/or dopamine levels. There are a number of substances that enhance dopamine and/or serotonin activity in the brain including food, nicotine, alcohol, opioid pain medications and marijuana.”

As suggested above hormones out of balance have a profound impact on the body that goes well beyond having babies and periods.  Balancing hormones is an important aspect of health care for both women and men, and always a piece of our long-term care to help people achieve a high-quality life.  In a future post I will take up, the hot button topic of hormone replacement.

In the meantime have you had experience with hormone imbalances?  Do you have insights you’d like to share?  We’d love to hear your thoughts, please post your comments.

In case you can’t view the video, or would like the words they are:

The principle of compassion lies at the heart of all religious, ethical and spiritual traditions, calling us always to treat all others as we wish to be treated ourselves. Compassion impels us to work tirelessly to alleviate the suffering of our fellow creatures, to dethrone ourselves from the centre of our world and put another there, and to honour the inviolable sanctity of every single human being, treating everybody, without exception, with absolute justice, equity and respect.

It is also necessary in both public and private life to refrain consistently and empathically from inflicting pain. To act or speak violently out of spite, chauvinism, or self-interest, to impoverish, exploit or deny basic rights to anybody, and to incite hatred by denigrating others—even our enemies—is a denial of our common humanity. We acknowledge that we have failed to live compassionately and that some have even increased the sum of human misery in the name of religion.

We therefore call upon all men and women ~ to restore compassion to the centre of morality and religion ~ to return to the ancient principle that any interpretation of scripture that breeds violence, hatred or disdain is illegitimate ~ to ensure that youth are given accurate and respectful information about other traditions, religions and cultures ~ to encourage a positive appreciation of cultural and religious diversity ~ to cultivate an informed empathy with the suffering of all human beings—even those regarded as enemies.

We urgently need to make compassion a clear, luminous and dynamic force in our polarized world. Rooted in a principled determination to transcend selfishness, compassion can break down political, dogmatic, ideological and religious boundaries. Born of our deep interdependence, compassion is essential to human relationships and to a fulfilled humanity. It is the path to enlightenment, and indispensible to the creation of a just economy and a peaceful global community.

What are your thoughts?  Have you extended compassion lately and what have the results been?  Please share with us below.