I began Week 3 of Phase 1 - Freedom from Wheat yesterday and I finally took a moment to snap a shot of my hand this morning. What an amazing difference from Week 1. I'd like to make a few observations on this. First off, I feel that the healing of my hand has a lot to do with the Green Smoothies this weekend. The cleansing effects of consuming mainly only Green Smoothies and fruit this weekend I believe are huge on how normalized my skin has become. It was a definite boost in cleansing to aid along the freedom of certain wheats from my diet. Secondly, what happens to the body as toxins are ingested can also happen as toxins come out. There is a chance that as the toxins that have accumulated in my body on account of wheat can cause flare ups as it comes out. It will be totally dependent on the state of affairs in my bowels because meaning that toxins already tried to get out through the bowels and did not find an easy passage out and therefore found a way out through the skin instead. Finally, wheat isn't the only food that causes toxins to build up in the body or to cause flare ups. Last week I noticed that I did have a huge flare up and it could have equally been because of cleansing and because I had consumed sugar products, or both!
I'd like to get into a little more detail on wheat from two different sources of information. The first is Tonya Zavasta's book Your Right to Be Beautiful.
"In striving for modernization,we have come a long way from the bread described in Psalm 104:15 as the bread that sustains the heart of man. In Biblical days,a recipe for the traditional bread of Israel, sprouted bread, was very simple. It was called Essene bread, the only ingredient added was water to allow the wheat berries to sprout. Then the sprouts of grain, rye, or wheat, were ground between stones and mashed by hand. After the grain was crushed, thin wafers were made and left on the hot rocks for the sun to bake them."
A big stretch from the breads that we are used to today.
My second source of info today is naturally, Victoria Boutenko. I don't suppose anyone could spend the weekend with such a fountain of information and not pick something up about breads. Breads and the milling process was actually a big part of the information that she passed on this weekend. This is a summary of the notes I took.
A hundred and eighty years ago people might have been starving but they weren't deficient. Not at least until the inventions of the mill, refined sugar and canning. Before sugar was invented there was no sugar except the sugars in fruits and honey and honey was only available in the summer and mainly only available to the rich. That is a big stretch from the amount of refined sugar and honey that can be available to us on any given day. Pasta became a survival food. It didn't have nutrients but it had calories and it could sit in our cupboards all winter and prevent hunger and starvation. Also, a far cry from how pasta is seen today. The mill, sugar and canning were all seen as signs of progress and it mattered to people at that time to be progressive. Unknowingly people chose to become deficient. Then deficient pregnant women gave birth to deficient babies and never taught them about eating from their backyard. Children instead learned how to use a can opener. Within a few years people began dying by the 10's of thousands of deficiencies that at the time were considered to be infectious diseases - scurvy, vitamin B deficiencies and rickets. Of course, we now know that those weren't in fact infectious. The USDA performed a study a few years back in which they selected 3000 random Americans and tested them all for deficiencies. The results were that everyone was deficient in something.
We are now the 7th Generation since then of deficient human beings giving birth to deficient human beings. It's going to take a lot more than just eliminating wheat from our diet to reverse the effects of even the deficiencies that we were born with, let alone the ones we have developed since then.
One thing that amazed me about the actual fountain of information that Victoria Boutenko is, is that if you named any condition or deficiency she could tell you the natural way to reverse it, the exact deficiency that caused any particular ailment and a green leafy vegetable that was abundant in the exact nutrient that was lacking.
Recently when I was at the Yaletown Baby and Toddler Fair I described to a woman how after a few months of drinking green smoothies my nails were no longer brittle as they had been since I had first been pregnant. She commented by saying, "it's amazing what nature can do". And it truly is. I encourage every here to think of one ailment that they have, to research what that deficiency that it is a symptom of and then to find 3 sources of it in nature, uncooked, as it is. You may find that the information just isn't there. I've personally been hugely mislead by science in this way. Who is to know that the only reason scientists know what nutrients are in foods are because someone sponsored them to look at one specific nutrient each time they discovered it. That means that what you know of on say an orange is only the questions they've been paid to ask thus far. There are thousands of just one type of nutrient or mineral or vitamin and they've only asked the questions that we know of so far. And even larger gap in all of this research is green leafy vegetables which has only begun to be researched in the past 5 years. That means that every book that we currently have on nutrition is already outdated because there is an entire section in nature that hasn't been even looked at or considered and yet people are healing themselves with it's use.
Green leaves of fruits and vegetables are the pregnant mothers that want to eat the best diet for their unborn baby. You might find a lot of Vitamin C in a fruit, but you will find 20 times that in a green leafy vegetable. And remember from yesterday, the seedless fruits that are actually miscarriages or abortions from reproducing further fruit? Well, that's exactly as it is. The most nutrient dense part of fruits and vegetables are the parts that we don't eat, the greens.
I hope you all take away at least one awesome new piece of info from today (I did my best to do justice to Victoria's lecture). Oh happy day. Suzanne
