Category Archives: Mind and Body

3 Pillars for Beating Cancer

 I call my three pillars to beat cancer the “survival triangle.”  They are simple, proven fighters that will make you a winner against this devastating disease. Taking a single one and making it part of your life will make a huge difference in your overall health.

If you utilize all three, it will change your life.

Now, before anything, let me say that traditional cancer treatment (surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation) does its part to help patients survive cancer.

Unfortunately, they don’t address the root cause of cancer. They treat the tumors that result. They kill the cancer cells and a lot of healthy cells along the way. Conventional cancer modalities treat the disease…not the patient.

Even oncologists who understand that toxins and inflammation are the underlying cause of millions of deaths globally from cancer every year aren’t addressing prevention techniques that will keep these patients from coming back with another cancer in a year or five years.

Even if you fully expect traditional treatment to “cure you,” alternative methods can help you with the side effects you’re going to experience, keep your body stronger, and guard you against another episode of cancer in your future.

Alternative choices can improve your quality of life and help you endure treatments such as radiation that leave the body (and immune system) ravaged and weak. The “war” against cancer leaves as much destruction as a real war.

Pillar #1 – DIET

Cancer represents the biggest fight of your entire life.  You need to be as fit and healthy as you can be to meet the challenge. In order to handle the demands of exercise, to terminate infection and bacteria, to fight the effects of age, your body is going to need the right fuel.

That is why diet is the first pillar of beating the root causes of cancer.

Anyone (medical professional or otherwise) who tells you that diet does not affect your health or ability to fight disease is a liar. Period.

Diet is everything. Even the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that around 40% of cancers are caused by diet (I think the numbers are actually much higher). What you choose to put in your mouth may mean the difference between life and death.

That isn’t dramatic, that is fact.

Eating a diet filled with junk food, dyes, preservatives, excess sugar, caffeine, or other “empty” calories cannot and will not feed your body. If your body doesn’t get the right vitamins and minerals – it stops running. Just like a car without gas.

Dietary requirements must be assessed based on each individual’s specific needs. Remove any foods (no matter how much you love them) that cause stress to your immune system.

My personal suggestion is to fill your diet with fresh, organic foods (where possible), salads, smoothies, and brightly colored produce. Remember that dairy, soy, grains, and even certain produce can be unknown stressors. Avoid white sugar, white flour, white rice, processed foods, dairy, and soy.

Pillar #2 – Emotional Cleansing

Negative emotion as a root cause of cancer is reality. There is far too much science to back this stance up, so keep an open mind.

Stanford psychiatrist, Dr. David Spiegel, was a skeptic when he began his study on the influence of negativity on breast cancer patients. He was shocked to discover that at the ten-year survival checkup, those women who included therapy in their lives survived twice as long as those who did not.

You read that right…there was a 50% better survival rate by purging negative emotion.

Another Yale research study found that cancer spread faster in women who had “repressed personalities.” They defined the word “repressed” as having intense feelings of hopelessness and not having the ability to express anger, fear, or other negative emotions.

In other words, they bottled it all up inside and it made them sicker, faster.

Stress is known in the traditional and alternative communities as a major cause of inflammation. It is one thing everyone agrees on (though traditional medicine’s answer is another prescription). Inflammation has been discovered at the base of all known diseases.

In other words, stress will kill you through cancer or heart attack or autoimmune disease…if you allow it to control your life. Balanced emotions equal a balanced physiological system.

Pillar #3 – DETOXIFICATION

There are countless stressors in our modern world and many of them are foods, people or situations, and products we allow into our lives. We’ve talked about the first two. Let’s discuss the contamination most people never consider.

Personal pollution is as dire as environmental pollution and we are surrounded by both at every turn. Pollutants are in our soil, water, and air and that means they are in our food supply. Those are harder to control (even organic foods are grown on the same planet we’ve corrupted with countless toxins).

You can control what you put on your body, what you put in your body, and how you maintain the environments you live in most (your home and work space).

If you haven’t heard about the chemical soup found in cosmetics, household goods, and everyday cleansers, I urge you to do some research on it right now. From heavy metals and arsenic to formaldehyde and parabens…products you buy every day at your local market are filled with endocrine disruptors, estrogen mimics, and outright poison to the cells in your body.

Big Business (food manufacturers, chemical producers, and even personal care manufacturers), and Big Pharma (drugs, drugs, drugs) don’t care about your health. They don’t care about “curing” anything at all because then…how would they make money?

Every time you use cosmetics, shampoos, conditioners, antiperspirants, paints, household cleaning agents, laundry detergent, or any host of other products…you are playing Russian Roulette with your health.

These deadly toxins don’t just pass through your system. No, that would be bad but your (healthy) immune system would be able to control most of the fallout. What makes many of these chemicals so dangerous is that they accumulate in your body, gradually building up (bit by bit) to levels that are toxic according to any agency.

The True Causes of Cancer

There are many things stressing your body each and every day. Junk nutrition, high levels of stress, and chemical contamination push these stressors past the brink of what your body can handle.

Eliminate them from your life.

Live Healthy to Stay Healthy.

5 Sources of Toxins

 Here are the top 5 sources of toxins:

1. Food – The biggest culprit for toxic exposure is processed foods, which are full of chemical additives that can create symptoms ranging from cravings and weight gain to poor digestive health and food allergies. This includes packaged food, and also supposedly fresh, local produce which is often heavily sprayed with pesticides, or could be genetically modified, or both.

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To reduce your exposure to food toxins: Choose whole foods instead of processed foods. In addition, choose organic fruits and vegetables. Organic produce is grown without harmful pesticides and, even better, the soil is more mineral-rich. Eating organic, whole foods is a great step you can take toward health and wellness.

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2. Water – Tap water is teeming with toxins. The Environmental Working Group found over 316 chemicals in tap water, based on analysis of 20 million records from state water officials. In addition, over the past few years, studies have shown that pharmaceuticals, like prescription and over-the-counter drugs, are being found in tap water.

Many bottled waters have been shown to be just as bad as tap water in most cases—not to mention the toxins that leach from the plastic bottles themselves.

To reduce your exposure to water toxins: Avoid drinking tap water or showering without a filter.

3. Environment – Whether inside your home or outside your home, the environment is also a major source of toxins. Pollution from manufacturing, cars, and secondhand cigarette smoke can be challenging to avoid.

However, you can minimize many of the toxins inside and around your home. Too many people use harsh household cleaners containing bleach, ammonia, and other toxic chemicals that can cause health problems ranging from nausea to skin destruction, fluid in the lungs, and wheezing.

To reduce your exposure to environmental toxins: Switch your cleaning products to those with all-natural ingredients.

4. Beauty and Personal Care Products – Beauty products like toothpaste, lotion, anti-aging creams, soap, shampoo, conditioner, perfumes, and makeup are full of toxic chemicals.

To reduce your exposure to toxins in beauty and personal care products: Read ingredient labels on your personal care products. Anything you put on your skin is absorbed into your body.

5. Stress and Negative Thinking – Stress can kill the good bacteria and yeast living in your intestines that keep your immunity and digestive health strong.

To reduce your exposure to toxic stress: As the good bacteria and yeast die off, the bad bacteria and yeast are able to take over. Strengthening your inner ecosystem with fermented foods and probiotics can buffer stress and reduce the risk of illness and disease.

Eliminate toxins and Stay Healthy.

Keep your Heart Healthy – in 4 Simple Steps

doctor drawing a heart shape Heart disease is a top killer. But four out of five cases of heart disease don’t have to happen and you can take control of your heart health.Cardiologists at the Mayo Clinic have come up with a program they call the “Eat 5, Move 10, Sleep 8” program.

Eat at least five servings of fruits and vegetables daily. Preferably 9 to 13. These foods contain important phytonutrients that protect the heart. Plus, by eating these foods, you may eat fewer processed foods that can increase your heart disease risk.

Get some exercise every day. All you have to do to help your heart is move for an extra 10 minutes a day (although more exercise than that will help even more). The Mayo doctors point out that being sedentary is as bad for your health as smoking. They also urge everyone to do less sitting and more standing.

Get at least eight hours of sleep a night. Sufficient sleep is an absolute necessity for a healthy heart.

Make sure you take time to enjoy your life. Indulge in satisfying, joyful activities. A positive attitude helps your heart stay in top shape and is just as influential on your cardiovascular system as genetics and healthy habits.

Stay Healthy!

Adapted from Carl Lowe.

Mindful Eating

Discussion about healthy eating tends to focus on what we eat. Much less attention is paid to the question of how we eat it.

Yet a growing body of research suggests that changing our attitudes and practices around meals and mealtime rituals may be every bit as important as obsessing over what it is we actually put in our mouths. Mindful eating (also known as intuitive eating), a concept with its roots in Buddhist teachings, aims to reconnect us more deeply with the experience of eating — and enjoying — our food. Sometimes referred to as “the opposite of diets,” mindful eating is based on the idea that there is no right or wrong way to eat, but rather varying degrees of consciousness about what we are eating and why. The goal of mindful eating, then, is to base our meals on physical cues, such as our bodies’ hunger signals, not emotional ones — like eating for comfort.

Finding ways to slow down and eat intentionally are all a part of developing a truly healthy food culture. And some early research into mindful eating would seem to back this up. One study, for example, tracked more than 1,400 mindful eaters and showed them to have lower body weights, a greater sense of well-being, and fewer symptoms of eating disorders.

I found this illustration, which gives the principles in a very simple graphic.

How to avoid mindless eating

If we are searching through the kitchen for ‘something’ to eat, without a specific goal in mind, we’re probably not hungry, but looking for a distraction. Even after eating, there is no feeling of satiety. How do we know we’re hungry? Physical cues – stomach rumbling, beginning of hypoglycemic headache, etc. We look for a specific item, eat it, and the hunger disappears.

Eating in front of the TV is a classic example of mindless eating.

Try eating with the non-dominant hand, to bring your attention back to the activity.

Simple ways to Stay Healthy.