Be The Tortoise

Try one new thing at a time.

If you try two or more things at once (or very close together), you won't be able to tell what it is doing. You need to isolate things as much as possible so you understand the effect it has. This is the most conservative, informative approach. Please take this conservative approach. Doing anything else is dangerous.

Try new things about once every week or two.

Especially at first, you need a week or two weeks to see what it does to your body. After you have been doing this a while, you can speed things up a bit to every three days to a week. But at first, especially if you are in bad shape, give each new thing you try some time to work and give youself some time to observe how it works. It can take up to two weeks for things to shake out.

Start at a low dose and gradually increase it.

I know, this is extremely counterintuitive if you are used to conventional medicine. This is not medicine. Medicine uses a disease model and only does something when things get really bad -- and that's precisely why they get bad. This is about building good health and growing a better body. So think of how we grow our children. You don't feed a one week old baby a steak. You start with small amounts of easily consumed and easily digested food and gradually build up as they get more able to handle it. You must do the same with rebuilding a body ravaged by a lifetime of illness.

Adjust the dosage regularly and organically.

This is a big issue and seems to be a big mental block for most people. Conventional medicine is very stringent about giving you a set dose that must be taken at a set time and doctors wig out if you don't follow that routine religiously. Rebuilding the body is about giving the body what it needs, as it needs it. A baby or small child who has not yet been taught to eat only at meal time will eat when they are hungry and will eat until they are full. They haven't yet learned the American obsession of counting calories and worshiping a clock. Instead, they listen to their body. You must learn to do this too. You must unlearn this silliness about doing things when the clock says it's time and, instead, do things when your body tells you it's time.

So if you have started something new (especially if you started at a high dose) and had good results so far and suddenly start having bad results, the first thing you should do is lower the dose rather than quitting altogether. Your body probably has built up enough in the system that you no longer need as much and you are now taking more than you need, even if the dose you were on was right at that time. Well, it's not that time anymore. Now it's this time and you need to listen to your body to understand what is needed at this time. (And, please, lower the dose gradually and conservatively so you don't put yourself into serious withdrawal, which is a whole new crisis.)

Try new things on Friday night.

If you have a Monday through Friday work (or school) schedule, plan on trying things on Friday night. This gives you the weekend to recover. This is especially important if you take too much of something or if you have an unexpectedly bad reaction, such as an allergic reaction. But even if you don't run into a problem, if something works to help you heal, you will have a healing crisis and therefore you will need some time to rest and recuperate. Some common issues that come up: Diarrhea or constipation, being hungrier than usual, needing extra sleep, having lower levels of energy than usual while your body redirects energy towards the rebuilding process, and nausea as the body dumps toxins and overwhelms your ability to process them out. I still do a lot of stuff on Friday night so I can rest and recuperate over the weekend -- things like serious house cleaning, taking "extra" supplements so I can push the healing process, and so forth. If you don't have a Monday to Friday work week, try new things (or do "extra" stuff) the night before having a day or two off.

Start with supplementing rather than dietary changes.

I kind of hate to say this, but changing your diet is more complicated than taking supplements. The reason for this is that if you take a supplement, you are only dealing with one change: Adding a supplement. But if you change your diet, you are dealing with two changes: Introducing a new food and also removing an old food at the same time. It is much harder to figure out what is going on when you make dietary changes because you can't isolate the factors and, therefore, you can't know for certain what is causing the effect (the deletion of the old food or the addition of the new food or both). This is why we started out taking sea salt and coconut oil as supplements and only later used them for cooking.

Another form of supplementing I did for a long time was to order a big bowl of lettuce in addition to my regular lunch when eating out. Lettuce is supposed to be the best food for alkalinizing the body. To this day, I find I tolerate offensive foods better -- like the yeast in pizza or something very acidic -- if I have a salad first (by "salad", I mean a bunch of lettuce with maybe a few other raw veggies like cucumbers and carrots).