Section I

Health

Rainer Maria Rilke

The human body is a wonderful machine that is capable of undergoing severe punishment, grievous damage, and debilitating illness, and then working hard toward recovery in an attempt to return itself to optimal health. We may try to attain some level of equilibrium consciously, but our bodies tirelessly work to restore balance within our system as a whole. Your body is doing the best that it can to try and maintain order, based on what we give it to work with. This order is known as homeostasis, and it's the balance that we all strive for, whether we are aware that it's happening or not. No matter what we do to ourselves, from sports injuries to poor eating habits, your body will try to recover from what you've managed to do to it. Life happens, though, and through our own experiences and the choices we make, we either steer ourselves toward better health or away from it. We usually seek out healthy choices, we try our best, but often something comes up that causes us to want to eat something we know we shouldn't.

Sometimes I slip into old habits and eat something that I know isn't the best choice for me. It happens, and when it does, I simply try to stop what I'm doing, put it away (after the initial rush of guilty pleasure has subsided), and go back to my diet of nutrient-dense properly prepared whole and natural foods. Even the most conscientious of us fall into moments of food relapse, backsliding into a brief lack of firm control.

But the human body is such a truly astounding creation, capable of healing and repairing itself when occasional slip-ups come into our lives. We are all highly developed organisms of astonishing innate intelligence that can regulate all of the body's functions so that we don't have to think too much about, for example, our hypothalamus as it signals our adrenal glands to release cortisol to regulate our blood sugar. It just happens, and by making a few changes in our eating habits, we can ensure that those signals keep happening at the right time and for the right reasons.

If you cut yourself, your blood will quickly coagulate and stop itself from bleeding more than you have to. A scab begins to form, which will ultimately fall off as the skin grows itself back together. Within a short time, there will be little evidence of your wound, and your body has restored itself back to a reasonable state of repaired function.

So it is with many of your organs. Your liver can completely regenerate new cells from damaged ones in as little as three to four days (in a process called compensatory hypertrophy). Blood vessels that have collapsed or constricted can re-route the flow of blood to nearby arteries. You shed skin cells and hairs and intestinal cells at the rate of millions per day, only to be replaced by healthy new cells in a never-ending parade. Your lungs are also self-cleaning and self-healing; smokers who quit have the same chance of contracting lung cancer as non-smokers within just a few years.

If you find yourself in a state of poor health, you can rebuild yourself through a rigorous protocol of swapping junk food for real food. It's as simple as that, and as complex as the seven-plus billion individuals that make up this planet. Learning what is right for your body and your condition is where it all starts.

How Health Happens

One holistic approach is to look at how health happens in six distinct stages: molecules, cells, tissues, organs, systems, and the organism as a whole. If we are taking in all the proper molecules – meaning the proper minerals, vitamins, amino acids, fatty acids, polysaccharides, and so on – each of them will do their part to support the cell structures of various tissues, which will support the organs that comprise our various systems and ultimately lead to a happy and healthy organism. Conversely, if the cells do not get all the right kinds of molecules that they need to grow and flourish, there will be defects in the tissue structures that can contribute to the failure of the organ, a breakdown of the system, or, as the rate of tissue degeneration exceeds the body's rate of repair, ultimately bring about the death of the organism.

It sounds scary, but it happens every day. Even the healthiest of us are at some stage of this process at any given moment, fluctuating up or down on the scale of optimal health. Though the human body is amazingly strong and resilient, as I've mentioned before, our bodies are ultimately self-destructing machines, and life is a condition from which no one escapes. I look upon optimal health as a process, not an event. It's not like you can work your way to optimal health, hands in the air as you victoriously cross the finish line, breaking the tape with your chest and high-fiving everyone in sight because you're now at optimal health. It's likely that you may never achieve what is considered "optimal" health at all, but it is my fervent hope that you will be able to approach it. From time to time you will waver in your efforts, guaranteed, but if you follow a good nutritional plan, coupled with a regular exercise regimen and a more active lifestyle, you will certainly move closer to it than you may have ever thought was possible.

It doesn't take much to instigate change in your life, but it takes energy to create energy. Once you've begun the process, you may actually start noticing a difference fairly soon, and that can give you motivation to keep putting your energy in that direction. With a little hard work and a lot of perseverance, you will start seeing real results from the changes you've made to your behavior. But before we get started on healing ourselves, let's first learn a little about how things should be working properly.

How Digestion Happens

I want to start by addressing digestion as a central issue to optimal health. It's not just because I am trained as a nutritional therapist, but because I believe that proper digestion is the cornerstone to the foundations of optimal health. When a client comes in to my clinic, they may present to me a variety of symptoms and conditions, but the first thing I want to look at is their digestive health. When we can resolve digestive issues, whether by using supplements to restore gut health or by modifying their diet to include more nutrient-dense properly-prepared foods, often their symptoms and conditions begin to magically subside on their own.

Some people consider the topic of digestion as a fairly messy process that they just don't want to know about. It's certainly not anything that is discussed in polite company, it's...