KEEP YOUR BODY CLEAN INSIDE

All the wisdom you need to be in good health can fit on your fingernail: keep your body clean inside.

Peter Dimkov, a Bulgarian healer

There are thousands and thousands of medical books in today’s market. There are much fewer fundamental truths about human health. The more I have studied various health techniques and systems, the more I appreciated the great wisdom of Peter Dimkov's words.

In fact, any meaningful health methodology, whether Eastern or Western, modern or ancient, is based on the cleansing of one’s body and mind, one’s musculoskeletal structure, and, of course, the gastrointestinal tract. So, what can we do to keep our gut and stomach clean?

Therapeutic fasting

The benefits of fasting have been praised in mountains of books. Personally, I think that Paul Bragg’s “The Miracle of Fasting” stands out as a true Gospel of health science, the Good News brought to us by a man whose whole life is a brilliant illustration for his theory. Bragg’s biography reads like a story of a dramatic liberation struggle.

Bragg had a very ordinary childhood. No one taught him anything about a healthy lifestyle, fasting, or a vegetarian diet. He remembers: “I was reared in Virginia on a typical southern diet. Ninety percent of my food was prepared in the frying pan: fried chicken, fried ham, bacon, potatoes, pork chops, and other fried meats of all kinds. I ate heavy cream, flour gravies hot biscuits, and plenty of pies, cakes, and jellies. When I look back, I see I suffered in my youth from this self-poisoning and didn’t know it. I usually slept 10 hours a night instead of 8, and the excess I am sure was largely due to autointoxication. Even after a long night of sleep, I seldom woke up feeling refreshed, plus I had a bitter morning taste in my mouth.”

Paul Bragg

This unhappy childhood came to a sad end when the 16-year-old Bragg developed tuberculosis of the lungs which at that time was as fatal as cancer. The unfortunate teenager had to look death in the eye.

Anyone can have a longer life by following the rules of hygiene and nutrition. There is no wealth that can impart health, but you can earn it with your own efforts.

Bragg rose to the challenge, however. With help from August Rollier, a Swiss doctor who introduced him to therapeutic fasting, Bragg defeated his illness and started an in-depth study of the healthy lifestyle culture. He wanted people to reach the highest degree of perfection allowed by nature. “Since Adam and Eve lived in that historic Garden of Eden, the prolongation of human life has been and still is mankind’s biggest challenge!

By following my mentors – Mother Nature’s and God’s Natural Laws, I invented the Bragg Healthy Lifestyle. Follow it and you can live to a healthy, active, advanced age! There is no wealth that can impart health. I earned it by living The Bragg Healthy Lifestyle and by always staying as close to Mother Nature as possible in this polluted, poisoned world of today. I have Supreme Health 365 days of the year. I have a painless, tireless, and ageless body.” You can accomplish a similar result.

Paul Bragg’s nutrition concept

Indeed, Bragg worked for 12 hours a day without fatigue or disease, ran two to three miles daily, played tennis, and took long walks in the mountains. Here is how he describes his daily routine: “I get up early every morning. After several hours of vigorous exercise, we return home to enjoy our fruit meal and pep drinks.

Now we are ready to do our best creative work, writing articles for health magazines or writing our health books.

Around noon or so we will eat our main meal of the day. We start with a large delicious salad based on cabbage and carrots, adding raw vegetables such as tomatoes, celery, beans, and half an avocado. After the salad, we have one cooked yellow vegetable – such as a baked yam or carrot – one green vegetable, such as Swiss chard, kale, mustard greens, broccoli, zucchini, squash, or green beans – and some type of vegetable protein.

Bragg believed man has nine true doctors: Doctor Exercise, Doctor Fasting, Doctor Fresh Air, Doctor Good Food, Doctor Good Posture, Doctor Human Mind, Doctor Pure Water, Doctor Rest, and Doctor Sunshine.

We enjoy tofu, beans, lentils, and raw unsalted nuts of all kinds and seeds. This program of 12 meals a week, 2 meals daily, 6 days a week doesn’t burden and exhaust the body’s digestive system and body’s bowel eliminative powers (we fast for 24 to 36-hour periods weekly).

Most people are sick or half sick most of the time. It is our opinion that they enervate and overwork their body and exhaust themselves in trying to burn up all those extra calories from all the excess foods they consume!!! We don’t overeat and the only exception we ever make for snacking between meals is to have some luscious, juicy organic fruit. In the mid-afternoon, we have a juicy organic apple or fresh pineapple, mango, or papaya. When melons are in season, we find nothing more refreshing than sweet, ripe melons.”

By adopting a new, sensible lifestyle, an old man can be even healthier than he was at the beginning of his adulthood.

This guru was a body-cleansing fanatic, and he put his money where his mouth was by relentlessly pursuing his own fasting regimen. Each week, without exception, he fasted for 24 to 36 hours. Bragg kept saying that there was no reason old age should equate to bad health. By adopting a new, sensible lifestyle, an old man can be even healthier than he was at the beginning of his adulthood. “I have an ageless body,” Bragg loved to say. It seemed that he would never die – but in December 1976 his life ended. His age had nothing to do with his death -- he was killed by a giant wave while surfing off the coast of Florida. The coroner observed that this “old” man’s heart, blood vessels, and all internal organs were in an ideal condition as if his claim to immunity from old age was upheld by death itself.

The life of Paul Bragg and his followers is compelling evidence that keeping the body clean inside brings great health and joy for many years.

HOW DO YOU FIGHT EXCESS WEIGHT

Robin O'Bobin

The big-bellied Hen,

Ate more victuals

Then three score men;

A cow and a calf,

An ox and a half,

A church and a steeple,

And all the good people.

And yet he complained

That his belly wasn't full.

English nursery rhyme

To fight or to dawdle?

The nursery rhyme sounds familiar, doesn’t it? How can you rid yourself of those extra pounds, stay slim, and spare your body the devastating effects of all that extra weight? How can you forget about high blood pressure, osteochondrosis, arthritis, diabetes, and so on? Really, why are we so prone to obesity? Why fighting it is so difficult and the results are so elusive? Well, the answer is simple: we just don’t know what we are doing. Instead of real fighting, we are taking one step forward and two steps back. When we lose weight by restricting the intake of calories, carbohydrates, meat, or fat, we are making a step forward. Once we get sick and tired of this sensible diet, we return to the habitual fare. We gain whatever weight was lost over half a year of painstaking efforts in a single month – and then gain some more. These are the two steps back.

Where is the truth?

Extra weight is not the real problem, it’s just a matter of insulin dependence.

 “What is truth?” Pontius Pilates famously asked Jesus. In our case the answer is straightforward. Extra weight is not the real problem, it’s just a consequence of insulin dependence. Yes, most of us are insulin addicts! When this hormone sends excess sugar from our blood to storage, we feel satisfied and happy with better food security.

Fat people live less but eat more. Stanisław Jerzy Lec

Well, saving some nutrients for a rainy day is a legitimate mechanism that has been good for human evolution. The problem is that the pleasure we get from it becomes a narcotic. We crave the insulin surge more than the food itself. We love to feel happy like a child from all those candies, cookies, sodas, pies, and donuts. If we attempt to fight this addiction, we go through all the withdrawal symptoms of an honest junkie. We feel fear, depression, anxiety, aggressiveness, vertigo, headache, or joint and muscle pain, though on a more modest scale. On the other hand, true drug addicts know that they are sick. They expect these symptoms as a price for recovery from a dangerous condition. A common overeater blissfully continues to believe in his superb health. It doesn’t matter that our pants size keeps growing and it’s getting harder to fit in a car seat, otherwise, we feel fine and can happily eat a pound of steak plus some cheesecake for dessert.

Don’t look for heroic feats before you are healed, and you will never be healed before you realize you are sick. Vladimir Solovyov

 Fighting insulin addiction

The main law of weight loss (or rather of health improvement) is to come to love this internal emptiness, the feeling of slight hunger, and learn to enjoy it.

Honest to God, our “normal” daily food intake is a sick joke. We were brought up to believe that three full-course meals a day were “good for us”. Just saying “no” to this culture will be the right first step. Then try activating the two rescue hormones, glucagon and hydrocortisone. The former is a gentle antagonist to insulin. If insulin is absent for more than two or three hours, it starts looking for internal glucose supplies. First, it retrieves glucose from storage and then starts extracting it from fat. Once you have a cookie or a sip of soda, however, glucagon promptly retreats.

Your pancreas reacts to higher glucose in your blood by unleashing the crazy insulin, which transfers all the sugar that came with your meal (and then some more) to storage. Your blood sugar drops dramatically; the brain starts crying foul and you rush to the kitchen pantry or the fridge. The main law of weight loss (or rather health improvement) is to come to love this internal emptiness, the feeling of slight hunger. Learn to enjoy this condition and rest assured that glucagon will never let you starve to death. To facilitate the move to endogenic nutrition, drink a lot of water and exercise. Water calms down hunger by filling the stomach and extending its walls a bit.

As for exercise, it launches the second hormone, hydrocortisone, a powerful natural agent produced by the adrenal gland to combat stress. Like a magician, hydrocortisone starts manufacturing glucose from whatever comes in handy, provides a surge of energy, and suppresses inflammation and allergies. Its release, however, is triggered only by extreme situations such as hunger, fatigue, extreme temperatures, lack of oxygen, or pain. Under regular conditions, our body produces hardly any cortisone, making us suffer from apathy, depression, inflammation, and allergy. So how do we launch the hydrocortisone factory?

That’s simple. The moment you feel like having a snack, promptly head for the gym or just go outside. Do some running, fast walking, physical work (here comes fatigue, heat, and lack of oxygen!), do some stretching (here comes pain), or expose your body (you may start with just your feet) to cold water. Does this sound difficult or impossible? No, it doesn’t. These methods are time-tested and highly effective. Sure, not being Baron Munchausen, you won’t be able to pull yourself out of a swamp by your hair, especially if you don’t realize how deeply stuck you are. We’ll discuss it in more detail in the following chapters, in the meantime let’s draw some preliminary conclusions.

You won’t lose any weight by seeking a magic diet. Taking “metabolism-accelerating” pills is even worse. Some of these drugs may cause psychological disorders, others have a bad effect on your heart and blood pressure. The outcome is hypertension, arrhythmia, depression, and neurosis on top of excess weight. It’s better to keep your natural weight, rather than lose your extra pounds at this cost! Serious weight control requires courage and reason, not blind faith in some miraculous pills or herbs.

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