detox diets Archives | Natural Health with Merrilyn Hope

Help Stop Smoking With Baking Soda

Baking Soda is Alkaline. It can help to neutralize toxins in the body and reduce acidity. A less acid body is less stressful and may help you to recover from addictions.

However, if you are on medications, or low sodium diet, then you should ask your doctor or naturopath before using baking soda.

It is good to be a non-smoker. Give it up and become more healthy. Enjoy the fresh air and those lovely walks again, without getting puffed-out.

Addicts of tobacco and alcohol and other drugs notoriously favour acid-forming foods such as red meats, pork, coffee, and dairy foods, sugar and wheat-foods such as pasta and bread.

The Best Dietary Measure To help Yourself Stop Smoking Is:

To cut out acid-forming foods and adopt an alkaline diet which avoids the use of dairy foods, sugar, gluten and all wheat products including bread and pasta.

Eat Alkaline Greens: Eating plenty of raw greens will help to make your body more alkaline. Try to eat brown rice instead of wheat bread. Use more vegetables and fruits in the diet, with easily digested protein such as lentils, beans, free range eggs, soy products, and sprouted seeds such as mung beans and alfalfa.

Sprouted seeds are especially alkaline and provide many important enzymes which your digestive system needs to function well. Include plenty of sesame seeds and sunflower seeds in the diet. These are rich protein and calcium foods and they are more on the alkaline side than acidic flesh foods. Sesame seeds and sunflower seeds are dairy-free and calcium-rich foods which will help your frayed nerves to settle.

Diet To Help Your Digestive Function: Eating these foods will take a lot of stress out of your digestive function. This will have a beneficial trickle-down effect on your nerves, which will help you in your goal to stop smoking. You will digest your food better, and have more of a sense of well-being than before, when you were eating more acidic and heavy foods.

I have mentioned baking soda in an earlier post entitled ‘Giving Up Smoking’. In this post, I mention Richard Webster, who is an exponent of the baking soda remedy to help stop smoking.

See Merrilyn’s other postsfor more ideas:

Homeopathic Remedy To Reduce Craving For Tobacco

Giving Up Smoking

Richard Webster has devoted many years to helping people with behavioural problems, including people’s addiction to smoking. He published a booklet which accompanied some tapes called ‘Ezi-Stop’. This was published by Prestige Marketing 1995.

The alkaline nature of baking soda makes it effective in neutralizing acids in the body. An acid body can be made alkaline through taking a little baking soda each day.

Baking soda is suggested as a remedy to help stop smoking by Richard Webster and other experts in the field, because it can have an immediate effect to stop you taking that cigarette which you imagine you really need. However, baking soda should never be substituted for eating a healthy alkaline diet.

Two Week Treatment: Also, it is not advisable to keep taking baking soda indefinitely. Use it for a couple of weeks, then stop for a couple of weeks before you start using the baking soda again, even if you have not managed to quit smoking yet. Too much baking soda taken on a regular basis is not good for your kidneys.

The Technique For Using Baking Soda To Stop Smoking: Simply put a touch of baking soda onto the tongue whenever you feel the urge to smoke. This technique is not recommended for people who are on specific low sodium diets, or who have high blood pressure.

However, considering that smoking can actually GIVE you high blood pressure, I think that I would rather opt for a touch of baking soda, which might reduce my desire to smoke and do some good to my health in the long run, rather than take another cigarette.

Also look at the post entitled ‘What Happens When You Give Up Smoking’, and ‘Calcium Rich Foods’. ‘Detox Diets’ might also be helpful.

Homeopathic Remedies to consider might be those suggested by Dr John H. Clark in his book ‘The Prescriber’. Just one remedy should be selected, depending on the symptoms, constitution and habits of the person trying to quit smoking. Read his book for dosage recommendations: Nux vom., Camphor, Stroph., Phos., Plumb. acet., Spigelia, Calc. phos., China, Arsen alb. He says homeopathic medicine can be of great assistance in breaking the habit of tobacco. The appropriate remedy can help break the desire for tobacco.

Preventative Medicine

Preventative Medicine is really what it should all be about: far better to prevent a malady of the health rather than wait for it to happen, and then have to seek drug treatments which are expensive and which, most probably, will not cure the condition anyway.

Just how popular is ‘Preventative Medicine’? How much do people really care about ‘Preventative Medicine’?

Today is the 30th August 2010, and there are only 11 searches recorded for the day in Google’s search engine for ‘Preventative Medicine’, which is nothing really, considering that there are 177 searches for ‘warfarin’ and 177 for ‘side effects of warfarin’. Imagine that – 177 people in a day looking up the side effects of warfarin, and only a portion of that – only 11 people all over the world, looking up ‘Preventative Medicine’.

Warfarin in my opinion, is one of the worst modern drugs. It is dished out to people willy nilly, and once you begin taking it, it seems you are on it for life. I don’t know of ANYONE who has taken warfarin just for a while until they get better. Warfarin is a blood thinner.

Now – Calcium Ascorbate is a natural blood thinner. So is Garlic a natural blood thinner. So is Ginger. So is Cayenne Pepper. So is grapefruit a natural blood thinner. There are many foods which thin the blood naturally, without having to take Warfarin for life.

One of the bad things about taking Warfarin is that you have to avoid all the naturally occuring blood thinners like grapefruit and other high vitamin C foods. This is not good for the liver or the gall bladder – or anything else, I should imagine.

I know somebody who began taking Warfarin in his early 30’s and has been taking it for almost 40 years. He has recently had his gall bladder removed because of cancer, and is now waiting for a liver operation to remove some of the liver, because there is now cancer in his liver. There was still time before the last operation for an alternative treatment, if only he had realized, however now that he has entered the cycle of operations which remove vital organs, or parts of them, his vitality is decreasing rapidly, and so alternative cures would have a hard job revitalizing this man’s body. Also, he has taken Warfarin for so long now that he cannot imagine being able to live at all without it. He believes his life depends on it.

Why is this? Why are people not so tuned in to thinking about preventative medicine?

I quote from the 2005 ‘Touch For Health: The Complete Manual’, written by John Thie, the founder of ‘Touch For Health’, and his son Matthew Thie. It is published by DeVorss and Co, P.O. Box 1389, Camarillo CA 93011-1389:

page v of the Introduction reads “…..The Touch for Health book and educational program was my way of providing some simple tools and processes that each of us can use to regain a role and authority in our own care.
Today, more than 30 years later, things have by and large gotten worse. While awareness of these problems has increased, and there is a resurgence of traditional and alternative approaches to healthcare, drug companies have become more aggressive in their advertising, manipulative of research, whether public or private, and there is ever greater emphasis on “conditions” requiring long-term and even life-long medication. Our profit driven, high-tech medicine, arguably the most advanced crisis care ever developed, has become costly and dangerous, while simpler preventative measures seem to have fallen by the wayside.
In fact, the American medical system is the leading cause of death and injury in the United States.”

These authors give some alarming statistics on the practices of modern American orthodox medcicine. They claim that:

“Tens of millions of people unnecessarily take antibiotics, 9 million people are unnecessarily hospitalized, 7.5 million unnecessary medical and surgical procedures are performed, 2.2 million people have adverse drug reactions to prescribed medicines, and 783,936 deaths are caused by conventional medicine each year.

The fact is, that most disease can be prevented. There are a wide range of alternative health practitioners who can advise on methods to prevent disease becomoing established, and whose methods are effective in treating even more serious disease. However, preventative medicine is really the key.

The idea is to increase body vitality so that the immune system is strong and your powers of resistance to disease are working optimally.

Yoga exercise which teaches good breathing, meditation exercises such as yoga nidra, good diet, positive thinking including Reiki healing, the Power of Prayer and Spiritual healing, and Music therapy, are so important in helping to prevent disease. Acupressure techniques, including DoIn, Tsubo, Shiatsu, Qi Gong, and the more modern Touch For Health, are all ways in which your Prana, or vital energy can be maximized, and so they are all helpful in restoring health and preventing disease.

Visiting an Ayurvedic health practitioner, or a Chinese or Tibetan herbalist, or a homeopath are some of the alternatives which can improve the vitality and immunity and prevent a serious disease from setting in.

Our health practitioners, ideally, should recognize the symptoms of a disease early in the piece so that remedial action can be taken, the vitality improved, and a natural recovery is assisted.

Modern medicine, on the other hand, tends to define a disease which people get stuck with, along with the expensive drug which people believe is necessary.

Most people have a reverence and respect for the doctor’s word. The doctor, backed up by the drug company who is making the profit, tells them that they must take a certain drug for a certain condition, and that they will need to keep taking that drug for goodness knows how long. People usually don’t know any better, so they accept treatment without question, and the drug companies like it this way.

Some people like it this way too, as it means they do not have to DO anything about their condition if they believe that a medicine-drug is all that they have to take to manage their disease. Disease, unless you are unlucky from birth or some unusual freak event, often comes at us through our own poor lifestyle choices – bad living, poor nutrition and negative thinking.

However, the biggest causes of disease in our modern society are:

Environmental toxins, medical drugs, poisons and preservatives in our food, and electromagnetic radiation from modern technology such as cell phones and living close to excessively high power sources: these all lead to disease. This is really why alternative therapies such as detox diets which help you to detoxify chemicals from your body, and foods and methods which improve your vitality and immune function, are so important in preventing disease.

The authors of ‘Touch For Health’ refer people to the article entitled “Death By Medicine” at www.lef.org/magazine/mag2004/mar2004_awsi_death_01.html

Detox Diets

Fasting and Cleansing: It is very important to regularly cleanse the body by a fast of some kind, especially in this modern age, when so many people die of cancer and other degenerative disease. These diseases can be helped, or even cured, by different diets which are really types of cleansing diets to help the body eliminate the toxins which are causing the disease.

In the case of treating cancer, arthritis, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, or even conditions like irritable bowel syndrome, cleansing diets are adapted to become maintenance diets. These diets give maximum nutrition to sustain the body and build the immune system so that it can stave off the disease. At the same time, the cleansing diet maximises the elimination process so that toxins are expelled quickly from the body. Enemas are an important part of the treatment if you have a serious disease like cancer. These are also very helpful if you undertake a simple cleansing diet such as one of these given below, especially if your body is in a toxic state and/or you have never folowed a cleansing diet before.

If don’t want to use an enema, you could visit a colonic clinic. They will rinse out the bowel for you. Colonic cleansing by a professional is not cheap, but it is well worth the money to have most of the poisons washed away. It really gives you a new lease on life. If you opt for this, then I recommend going to the clinic on the third day of your fast or cleansing diet.

If cleansing diets are new to you, then it is best that you do your chosen diet for just one day to begin with, especially if you are not going to use an enema. This is because you will be carrying poisons in the body which have been building up over a lifetime. The sudden release of these toxins from the liver and other organs, into the intestines and into the bloodstream, can make you feel sick, and this is why elimination is quickened by the use of an enema in treating disease or even when following a cleansing diet.

Three days is a fairly standard time for a cleansing diet, but you can build up to this by doing your cleanse in steps: Of course, if you have a serious disease, then you will need to follow a maintenance diet over a long period of time until you recover. Details of maintenance diets will follow this post on ‘Detox Diets’. Also look at my posts on ‘Ridding the Body of Cancer’ and ‘Preventing Cancer” for information regarding maintenance diets.

A DETOX DIET-TO START WITH: Follow the chosen method for one day to begin with. This will be, for instance, one day on the grape diet. Then eat fairly normally for two or three days, but omit dairy foods, sugar and wheat including bread. Then do two days in a row on the diet. Then two or three days again on the no-dairy, no-sugar, no-wheat diet. Then do three days at a stretch back on the cleansing diet.

There are numerous different ways in which you can cleanse the body of toxins. Here are a few easy-to-follow cleansing diets with which you can experiment. There are enough to choose from so that you may never get bored by following just one approach. See which one you might find easiest to tackle.

THE GRAPE DIET. This is a favourite of mine and many people I know. Bernard Petersen, an extremely talented psychic healer who lived on Waiheke Island in New Zealand used this diet frquently. Bernard lived to a great old age, into his 90’s, and was still active as a healer until the end. Incidentally, Bernard didn’t believe in using enemas. Grapes were enough for him. He loved grapes, and ate them daily when they were in season. This was easy, because they grew all over the underceiling of the roof in his porch, so that you could sit there in the sun, chatting to Bernard, and munching on grapes to your hearts content.

The grape diet is very simple: All you do is eat as many grapes as you fancy, whenever and as often as you like. A diet purely of grapes can be sustained for many days, but you need to build up to this. Grapes are very nutritious – high in IRON and Vitamin C, and they are high in ROUGHAGE which cleanses the whole digestive system very effectively. They ideally should be like Bernard’s grapes – unsprayed and totally organic.

THE APPLE DIET. You need to have a supply of, preferably, organic apples. Granny smiths are good, or you might prefer a sweet red apple. The method is the same as that for the grape diet – you eat as many as often as you like. You won’t get fat on either of these diets. In fact, they are very good for people who are losing weight. You will lose weight if you were to regularly use either the grape or the apple cleanse, especially if you follow the prescription of no-dairy, no-wheat, no-sugar when you come off the cleansing diet.

Apples , like grapes, are very cleansing and healing. They are rich in Vitamin C and potassium. If your teeth are not good, then you can grate the apples up, skin and all, just before you eat them. This is just about as good as chewing the whole apple: all the goodness of the apple is still there if you eat it immediately after grating, and the volume of roughage just the same.

POTASSIUM BROTH. For this one, you eat no solid food. Instead, you take the vitamins and minerals from cooked vegetables into the body via a broth. On the morning of your fast or cleansing diet, take a large saucepan and cut up several potatoes with their skins on. Add onions, leeks, greens such as cabbage, broccoli, or brussels sprouts, garlic, beetroot, carrots, in fact any vegetables you can find. Try to use some roots as well as greens. Don’t use aluminium. Cover the cut up vegetables with water, bring to the boil, and simmer slowly for an hour. Leave the vegetables in the broth for a few hours before draining off. You can start drinking it after an hour of simmering. Drink one or two cups every hour, on the hour, for the whole of the day – and nothing else.

This is a radical cleanser which provides the necessary vitamins and minerals to heal the body. Build up with the Potassium broth fast by doing a day at a time. Ask your doctor or health practitioner about this one if you are on any type of medication or if you have a heart condition.

MUNG BEAN BROTH. This is used in ayurvedic medecine. Mung beans are easy to digest. They act as a gentle cleanser of the liver, gall bladder and intestines. Take two cups of mung beans and soak for three hours in a litre of water. Simmer until soft. Take the broth with its cooked beans whenever you feel hungry .Cook more beans if you are doing more than one day on this diet. Eat nothing else except for the mung bean broth.

THE LEMONADE DIET: We call this simply the lemon diet in New Zealand. Lemons are very cleansing. Lemons act as an antiseptic within the body and contain lots of Vitamin C which helps in detoxing the body and in healing.

Simply squeeze half a dozen lemons into a large jug. Put quarter of a teaspoon of cayenne, half a teaspoon of powdered ginger, and two teaspoons of powdered garlic into the lemon juice. If you are not diabetic, then you can add half a cup of honey or maple syrup. Dissolve with one cup of boiling water. Add two litres of water. Stir well. Drink one large glass every hour on the hour through the day. Don’t drink any tea or coffee, and don’t eat at all for the whole day.

The lemonade diet is very effective in treating colds and flu. It is antiseptic and breaks down mucous. It helps also in strengthening bone and dissolving bone deformities when done on a regular basis, say one or two days a week, with the maintenance diet to follow.

CASTOR OIL. Castor oil has the ability to attract harmful poisons such as petrochemicals, insecticides, etc. For this reason, it is used by many healers for the treatment of cancer, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s, arthritis and other disease. Two tablespoons of castor oil are taken in the morning with one cup of black coffee. This must be made from real coffee grounds.If you would rather, you could use Chamomile tea instead. This works just as well as coffee in stimulating the liver into expelling toxins. If you feel sick after the castor oil, then sip on peppermint tea until you feel better. An enema is recommended with the castor oil treatment. This should be taken within five hours of taking the castor oil. Castor oil is most effective if, after taking the castor oil, you eat only raw apples, whole or grated, or grapes, or drink fruit juice or carrot juice at hourly intervals.

CARROT JUICE. If you have a juicer, then you can fast for a day or so on carrot juice and other vegetable juices. Try to get organic carrots, especially if you are juicing, as agro-chemicals are concentrated in the juice.

Carrot juice is often used in the treatment of cancer and other disease. However, carrot juice is best avoided if you are treating candida. Stick to greens for cleansing if you have candida.

The APPLE AND POTATO CURE. This is a great one for people who don’t feel they can sustain a fast or a detox diet for even a day. With this diet, you can eat more or less what you like, within reason.You simply grate one medium apple with its skin on, plus one medium-sized potato. Mix the two together, and eat half an hour before breakfast.

Follow the same procedure for dinner – one apple grated with one medium-sized potato. Eat half and hour before each meal.

Follow this diet for anything from three days to several weeks. It is extremely healing for the bowel walls because of the pectin, vitamins and alkaline nature of raw apples and potato. It is effective as a cleanser because of the quantity of pure roughage in the mix.

Preferably, avoid dairy, wheat and sugar while you are cleansing on this diet. If you follow this treatment for a week or two, your bowels will not only be clean but be well regulated. It is good for the treatment of any bowel problems such as irritable bowel syndrome and colitis. Many people have reported success in treating bowel disorders with this detox diet.

The ONE-DAY BEETROOT AND APPLE DIET. This is all you eat for the whole day. All you do is grate apples and beetroot together, which makes a very palatable combination. Use the same amount of each.Some olive oil can be added if you wish. Make up enough so that you have plenty to munch on throughout the day. Whenever you are hungry, eat a helping of the grated beetroot and apple. Beetroot is helpful in treating cancer and other diseases. It is high in iron and other minerals and vitamins.

The ON-GOING BEETROOT AND APPLE DIET. For a slower-acting detox you can use the beetroot and apple combination as an ongoing addition to your everyday diet. Preferably, avoid dairy, wheat and sugar if you are doing a week or so on this diet. You can follow the same procedure as for the apple and potato diet. Eat a quantity of the beetroot and apple combination half an hour before breakfast and again half an hour before dinner. This is very nourishing, will help your digestion and tone up the bowel if it is done for a week or so. It is a great cure for constipation, as is the apple and potato diet.