Healing digestive and autoimmune disease is tricky, but very doable when you have the right information and motivation. Unfortunately, few providing advice on overcoming these diseases have ever dealt with it personally or have fully healed it themselves.
Fortunately, I’ve done both.
Here’s my ten pieces of advice from personally healing and helping others heal digestive and autoimmune problems, over the past decade.
1. Food combining: A technique which few know or talk about, food combining is quite simply assembling foods in a meal that will allow for maximum digestibility. Failure to understand which foods assimilate well together, will create unnecessary digestive distress which will create symptoms like bloating, energy depletion, heart burn, and inflammation.
2. Heavy metal burden: Behind many disease conditions, especially autoimmune, is an unacceptable heavy metal burden. Mercury, aluminum, and lead are just some of the perpetrators, and they can denature and kill healthy cells wherever they come in contact with them. This can be the mouth, digestive system, joints, the brain, and more.
Finding out if you have them can be tricky, but they are often available at naturopaths or functional doctors offices, and you can get them as home test kits as well. Once you know your heavy metal burden, do NOT attack it aggressively with supplements. Focus on food first, and safer therapies like infrared sauna to slowly remove them out of your body.
3. Food is the foundation: All too often, nutrition is either ignored or pandered to when consulting a health practitioner. This leads to eliminating food triggers and adopting popular diets which rarely solve the condition because neither take a significant HEALING approach which is required to remove the issues causing the symptoms.
For most, food is 75% of the healing process. Failure to create a comprehensive plan that ensures you do an excellent job of eliminating problematic foods, and PROPERLY combining highly nutritious and cleansing foods, and doing it on a consistent basis, will leave you frustrated and tired.
4. Infection removal: One of the two major reasons people get chronically sick, is biological (unfriendly microbes), chemical (poisons), and ethereal infections (emotions, EMFs). These infections can take weeks, months, and even years to clear properly, using food, supplements, protocols, and therapies.
Diagnostics to determine if you have an infection is one thing, doing the proper things to eliminate them is an entirely different ball of wax.
5. Nutrient restoration and balancing: A major cause of chronic disease is nutrient deficiencies and imbalances. This is easily caused by poor diets, toxic burdens, and a focus on individual nutrients through supplementation, which can put your nutrient levels out of balance.
A nutrient rich diet and proper supplementation can help bring those levels up and back into balance.
6. Heat therapy: If you want to get rid of an infection, especially one that is chronic, you don’t want to ignore heat therapy. Quite simply, this is the act of heating up the body to the point of sweating, to eliminate biological and chemical toxicities via the skin.
An excellent way to do this is through sauna treatment. Although a steam and infrared sauna will both help, the infrared is much more effective at removing toxins. Unlike traditional sauna’s that use air and steam, infrared saunas emit a radiant heat that is absorbed directly into the body. This makes it much more efficient in removing toxins with an estimated 80% water and 20% waste and toxin removal, as opposed to 97% water and 3% waste and toxins in a traditional steam sauna.
7. Emotional trauma: An underestimated and often less talked about issue that can lead to many chronic diseases, is unresolved emotional traumas. These are often from childhood, but can also occur as an adult, and can cause serious damage to the digestive system and many other areas of the body.
We all know how stress can bring on sickness or make underlying conditions worse, and emotional traumas are a more serious form of it. Clearing and cultivating acceptance are essential.
8. Environmental factors: Sometimes the things you can’t see, are the worst offenders because you fail to identify them and take action. Examples of environmental issues that will make a chronic disease condition worse are air pollution (often inside ones home or place of work – mold being a common issue) and dirty electricity (EMFs) from appliances, machines, computers, cell phones, and more.
Cleaning up indoor air pollution through air purifiers and removal of the offending pathogen(s) is critical, as is grounding yourself and your EMF emitting devices and appliances.
9. CLEAN supplements: Although supplements are rarely ignored and often the first path to resolving nagging health issues, it is very easy to pick up sources that are contaminated and ill-advised. Without proper lab-testing you really have no idea what you’re getting, and unfortunately many supplements can contain mold, aflatoxins, and heavy metals, even if they are labelled organic.
In a study conducted over 20 years ago, less than 3% of supplements made the cut for doing what they are intended to do and being pure in nature.
10. Caffeine intake: One of the biggest habits across the world is the intake of caffeine, most notably through coffee. Given the addiction it can create due to its smell, ritual, and energy generating properties, few ever consider their caffeine to be a problem when trying to beat a chronic health problem.
Unfortunately, caffeine has negative effects on the adrenals, and coffee can cause digestive, bladder, kidney, and liver issues as well. This is especially true for non-organic sources (due to high pesticide load), but even organic versions will contain acrylamide from roasting, and often microscopic molds that make it a no-no for anyone suffering from a disease condition.
Now, no one said there wouldn’t be work and “sacrifices” to make in order to reverse disease and feel your best. I know this well from overcoming 13 chronic disease conditions over a period of 10 years, and you know what? It was 100% worth it.
No regrets. No apologies. No problems.
If you want to get at it and experience the same before things get worse (and they always do if you don’t have the solutions), then contact me or look at the THRIVE Academy and its 7 year track record of resolving digestive, autoimmune, and other chronic disease.
Derek Henry
Derek Henry, Founder of Healing the Body and the THRIVE Academy, used nutrition, supplementation, and a holistic lifestyle to naturally unravel 13 chronic disease conditions that conventional or alternative medical professionals couldn't help him resolve. As a result of this one-in-a-million health transformation and the knowledge acquired in the process, he now educates, coaches, and inspires others to transform their health through a natural and holistic approach. Since 2014, he has helped his THRIVE Academy participants heal over 20 different chronic disease conditions, primarily related to digestive and autoimmune concerns.
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