Читать книгу Stay Healthy During Chemo - Джо Диспенза - Страница 18
ОглавлениеPART TWO
The 5-Step Chemotherapy Diet Program
We must turn to nature itself, to the observations of the body in health and in disease to learn the truth.
Hippocrates
The Chemotherapy Diet
Here is a quick summary of the 5-step program I developed for cancer patients and their caregivers. I will go through each step and say why it is important. Then, the rest of this section will be devoted to the actual nuts-and-bolts of the diet—what to do, how to do it, when, and why.
Step 1: Change your thinking and develop an attitude focused on healing
Step 2: Detoxify to promote healing from the inside out
Step 3: Eat the best foods to create a healing chemistry in your body
Step 4: Supplement your diet correctly to support the healing momentum
Step 5: Exercise and rest to speed the healing process.
Let me explain that I am laying these steps out this way, each building on the one before it, as a way of fully engaging in the process of staying healthy during chemotherapy. Reading through these steps, you may be tempted to go directly to the list of foods to enjoy or avoid and begin there, skipping the detox step. Or you may want to start by taking supplements, leaving behind the all-important dietary guidelines. But if you look closely at each step, you will see that there is logic to the progression. If the program is followed as it is set out, you should have excellent results—staying healthy during treatment and beyond.
Step 1: Change Your Thinking and Develop an Attitude Focused on Healing
Healing is a matter
of time, but it is
sometimes also a
matter of opportunity.
Hippocrates
This step comes first, because an attitude that focuses on vibrant well-being creates the mental and emotional framework for the entire healing process. Expecting a successful outcome of the chemotherapy experience, and what you are adding to it with this program, will help to bring about that result.
It goes without saying that the reverse is also true. Cancer patients who begin a healing journey weighted down with fear, anxiety, self-pity, and an expectation of failure will find the road to wellness rocky, slippery, and barely navigable. Focus on failure, in other words, and you are bound to fail; focus on success, and you must surely succeed.
A re-identification is required here from cancer “victim” to cancer “victor”—and the body from diseased organism to healing machine.
Welcome to a new way of thinking about your relationship to cancer and chemotherapy! Whereas before you may have been dwelling on the “why me, why now?” part of being a cancer patient, the time has come to get positive and begin to develop an attitude focused on healing—your healing.
This really is the first step on the path of healing, no matter how you look at it. Diet, supplements, exercise—anything else you do for yourself to stay healthy during chemo—will be tougher and seem more scattered without this positive framework for the healing process.
I strongly urge you to engage these practices at the outset of the program, and to keep them going throughout. If you don't feel up to handling all of the suggestions below, try at least some of them. Tremendous benefits can be derived from “getting your head on straight” about who you are (not a victim, but a person on a healing journey) and where you are (exactly in the right place) in the process of getting and staying well.
Use Daily Affirmations
Affirmations are highly effective ways to turn around your thinking, and from there to turn around behavior. They have been used for centuries in one way or another to support goals and aspirations.
Affirmations are statements that you make to yourself, about yourself. You say them aloud and keep printed copies of them around (on your computer monitor, for instance) where you can see them and repeat them often during the day.
It's best to come up with an affirmation or two that you adopt as your own. Avoid using negative words, such as “no” or “not”—it is better to say “I am healthy” than to say “I do not have cancer.”
Here are some suggestions:
I am healthier with each new day.
My body heals quickly and easily.
I am healthy in every cell of my body.
My body is a healing machine.
And before a nap or bedtime:
Even when I am asleep, my body is healing itself.
Journal Your Feelings
Emotions are apt to run rampant during cancer treatment. You may find that you are happy one minute, depressed the next, on an ever-changing see-saw.
To bring some balance into the life of the emotions, and to release negative ones that might be weighing you down, consider keeping a journal of your feelings. It is as simple and getting a notebook, titling it “My Journal of Feelings,” and writing in it once a day or several times a day, or whenever something comes up that you want to express.
There is no special way of doing this, except that the entries should always start with, “I am feeling....”
You may want to make your journal public. To do that, there is no better way than to blog on the Internet. Starting and maintaining a blog is not difficult; for some, it is a good way to both release emotions and share the experience of treatment.
Here are some emotions that may surface when you are doing this practice:
Anger
Confusion
Fear
Forgiveness
Gratitude
Joy
Resentment
Self-pity
Spruce Up Your Environment
Just because you are in treatment it doesn't mean you need to live in an environment that says “professional sick person.” As part of the healing process, I encourage you to spruce up your surroundings, making them bright, airy, clean, and uncluttered.
Your outer world mirrors your inner world. If you are indeed on a journey of healing, it makes sense that the rooms where you are spending your time reflect the positive outlook you have adopted.
Here are a few ideas to make this a reality:
Ask your caregiver and friends to bring you some fresh flowers every few days
Make sure your bedroom is spotlessly clean and organized
Unclutter—even if it means giving away a few things that may have lost their meaning for you
Bring nature into your surroundings, whether through a small plant or photos of beautiful natural settings, or a bowl of water onto which you float some flower blossoms..
Dress Up
This goes hand-in-hand with the previous suggestion, but gets more personal. If you are spending a lot of time around the house—and close to the bed or couch, probably—there is something about freshening up and dressing up that is positively life-affirming.
Try to make time at least twice a week to dress up and go out, whether to an art gallery, a mall, a café, a park, or a movie—anywhere people congregate and pass by. This has a way of making us feel more “normal” than just sitting at home with a book or the TV.
Dressing up and going people-watching is good for the soul as well as for the body. When you get back to home-base, you may feel bushed, but will also feel fulfilled.
Stay Positive
Finally, wrap everything you do and say in a positive frame. Decide not to complain, but to be grateful for the good that is unfolding in your healing process. The more you concentrate on the positive aspects of your journey through chemo, the greater chance you have to heal faster and better.
Let “the glass is half-full” (not half-empty) be your mantra.
Step 2: Detoxify to Promote Healing from the Inside Out
The wound is the
place where the Light
enters you.
Rumi
Once the new mental and emotional framework has been set in place, the practical work of getting healthy begins. And it all starts with cleaning the body of both the chemo drugs and the dead cancer cells they destroyed.
Detoxification is a kind of purification rite that acts as a gateway for all the marvelous life-enhancing changes that will take place during the healing process. It is vitally important that the toxic residue from cancer cells left behind by chemotherapy exits the body as quickly as possible. This step is about pushing the wastes of chemo out so they don't keep circulating in the body, endangering the precious environment of the immune system.
Toxins leave the body in several ways. Here we will be concentrating on detoxification through the digestive system, the skin (the body's largest organ), and the liver and bladder.
Cancer cells that are killed off by chemotherapy, the chemo chemicals themselves, and other toxins left behind on the chemo battlefield circulate in the body until they are processed and expelled by the eliminative organs—the liver, kidneys, bladder, lungs, lymphatic system, colon, blood, and the largest of our organs, the skin.
The sooner the accumulated toxins leave the body, the better! In this step, I am setting out two scientifically grounded detoxification regimes that are easy to do and require little preparation or special materials. They will help you to feel better faster.
External: Therapeutic Bathing
These four therapeutic baths come from the work of Dr. Hazel Parcells (1889-1996), a pioneer in the field of nutrition and holistic healing; if you do the math on her dates, you will see that she lived into her 107th year. You can also find them in Live Better Longer, the book about Dr. Parcells and her methods of natural healing.
I recommend that you take all four baths—one at a time, of course—over a two-week period. Then begin the round again, separating baths by a few days.
Therapeutic bathing is another way of cleansing, and therefore of healing. Our skin is an organ of our bodies—the largest organ. Sixty-five percent of body cleansing is accomplished through our skin.
The Underlying Scientific Principle
The Parcells therapeutic baths are based on the chemical principle “the weak will draw from the strong.” The hot water bathing solution draws toxins out of the body to the surface of the skin. Then, as the water cools, the toxins are pulled from the surface of the skin by the change in temperature and go into the water. The purification is brought about by the simple principle of nature that the weak (cool water) energy draws from the strong (body heated by the hot water).
It is important to remain in the bath until the water cools in order to receive the full effect of these detoxifying therapeutic baths. Adding cold water to speed up the cooling of the bath water will change the chemistry of the bath, so that is not advised.
After leaving the tub, it is best to lie down covered with a blanket and allow your body to perspire freely, releasing more of the toxic build-up from the treatment process.
A general caution: depending where you are in chemo treatment, you may have to adjust the timing of these baths to make them tolerable to your system. You may find it uncomfortable and unpleasant to stay in the baths for more than ten or fifteen minutes. In that case, it is best to work up to a full therapeutic bath over several bathing sessions.
NOTE: it is not advisable to do a therapeutic bath on the day of chemo treatment or on the days before and after chemo.
The Four Parcells Therapeutic Bathing Formulas
Formula 1
When to Do It: This formula is especially good after any kind of scan. PET Scans and CAT Scans, for instance, will greatly increase levels of radiation in our bodies. Even simple dental X-rays will leave deposits in the body that will interfere with healthy functioning.
