February & March: Detoxing Begins

Scott's Program involves kicking the old anti-inflammatory diet up a few notches. There's a strong emphasis on eliminating dairy, processed sugars and fats, flour, and generally all processed foods. Also, no animal products were allowed. It also stresses fresh vegetables juices every day, as well as naturally-fermented foods such as sauerkraut or miso.

On this diet, I had to cook nearly everything myself. This is what I could eat at the average restaurant: herbal tea. Not kidding! The diet recommends ever the elimination of nighsthade vegetables, which have been thought to be tied to many inflammatory problems, so I was avoiding white potatoes, tomatoes, all peppers except black, and eggplant. At Sugarloaf, where my boyfriend and I spent most weekends in the winter, I found refuge in a salad that had a generous amount of homemade hummus on it. Not very seasonal, but I had to not worry about that. We left a restaurant once when the waitress refused to ask if the kitchen could sautee me some squash in olive oil. Luckily I am quite a cook and my boyfriend enjoyed the challenge of this healthier eating. (He's the one who gave me the Ohlgren book in the first place.) We became total soup aficionados and discovered interesting recipes and ingredients.

The food part became less of a worry as my body began to detox itself. In my case, it was mostly an angry red rash over the majority of my body. This, coupled with living in Maine in the winter, working full time plus taking two graduate courses, traveling to Sugarloaf every weekend (and learning to ski, which is hard at 28 years old) made me really a little crazy.

Thinking back over this past winter I have to shudder. People who didn't understand were sometimes really rude. They didn't understand why I didn't just use a cortisone cream. The reason is that after years of pushing my skin problems back into my body with horrible cortisones and allergy medicines, I was finally letting it all come out. This is hard for most people to understand because Western Medicine is based upon on idea of drugs, which may fix a symptom but not really solve the underlying problem. A symptom such as a rash is the body's indicator that something is wrong on the inside. If you just patch up the problem on the outside, you are really only hiding from the true issue. Detoxing allows you to see what your body has been holding in all this time. I won't lie, it is gross. There is a lot of "stuff" that comes out: physically and emotionally.

It is really wild, though. At the same time that I would break down crying in frustration about my painful rash or the frustration that I would never get better, I would get these epiphanies about how exciting it was to really take control of my problem. Not to mention the very basic fact that a detox of any kind is spiritually powerful stuff. The things that you learn about yourself are very meaningful while your body is detoxing. It's quite difficult to explain.