Love is the first and only law. Because of Love, everything can exist in harmony. Because of Love, each thing plays its role in time and in step with everything else — each thing respecting its role, and the role of everything else.
Why do collisions happen? They happen because of a lack of Love, because of selfishness. When one thing covets another’s space or another’s time, a collision occurs. Two stars can collide, and worlds are destroyed. Two portions of the earth can collide, and an earthquake occurs. Two nations can collide, and a war occurs. Two people can collide, and spend eternity in misery and suffering.
Even within your own bodies, when your cells lose the awareness of their place in the whole scheme of things, then cancer is the result. The way you treat each other is reflected not only in your bodies, but in the body of the earth, and the body of the solar system in which you live.
— Sheng Zhen Contemplation
Osaka, Japan
Awakening to a new day, a new year, and a new decade, unknowingly to a completely chaotic and crisis-filled year ahead. And yet, there was so much excitement and opportunity in the air.
I was embarking on a new project, a journey, if you will. A 28-day-cleanse, detox and metabolic reset through an integrative approach — a nutrient dense plant-based diet and lifestyle change to make over my gut biome, and so much more. I was about to start in a week!
How did I come to this decision? Why would I commit 28 days to an around-the-clock, full-court press approach to eliminating unhealthy and inflammatory foods? Foods that contain wheat and gluten, all meats, all dairy, all sugar, all processed foods, all the tasty stuff!
And those beverages I used to enjoy? I had to eliminate them completely. No alcohol, no fruit juices (most of them, the sugary ones), and no coffee (something that was unimaginable, since I’ve always been the type to drink three to four cups of joe a day!)
Sounds scary, impossible, ludicrous even.
Amazingly, I found out over the next few days that it wasn’t. In fact, I was rarely hungry, despite drastically reducing my calorie intake, coming from having a very abundant and highly over- nourished state.
Metabolic Reset
Deciding to start and marking the dates on my calendar was the first step. I knew I needed to set a time-off, a furlough, a reset break. Once it’s written down, and you’ve told your loved ones and friends about it, there is no backing out.
So, upon my return to Manila on January 6, I started my journey, hoping for the best, but not fully expecting a mind-blowing outcome. Boy, was I in for a surprise!
At first glance, I thought, perhaps, this was just another one of those new year’s resolutions to lose weight or start exercising. But no, this was different. This is a metabolic reset, and I urgently had to do it.
I thought I was healthy, but I wasn’t.
For years, I felt that no matter how little or how healthily I ate, I had a propensity to gain weight. I had hovered around 250 pounds for ten years. Need I mention the additional 15 pounds I packed over the recent Christmas and New Year celebrations?
It wasn’t like I had an eating problem, I was eating relatively healthy food. My diet consisted mostly of seafood, and I have always been careful around the starches and desserts.
high-fat ones.
Just a few months before I decided to take this metabolic break, I did a series of traveling. I was in Guangzhou, China, followed by Singapore, and a Malaysian cross-country road trip.
Penang was an absolute delight! There were so many delicious exotic street foods and restaurants that were hard to resist. For Christmas, we traveled to Kyoto, Kobe, and Osaka, Japan, which were filled with rich and incredible Asian cuisine– beer, sake, Kobe beef, ramen, and fresh sea foods daily. We were powerless against the extra calories!
My State of Health
Nonetheless my pre-holiday annual blood work only revealed two main irregularities: very low Vitamin D levels and an elevated Homocysteine (an indicator of inflammation).
Of course, there were a host of borderline values like fasting blood sugar, uric acid, blood pressure all consistent with carrying too much extra adipose (fat) tissue-related excess weight, especially around the abdominal area.
It had been so easy in the past to dismiss these high normal values, as long as I COULD COMPLETE THE TREADMILL STRESS TEST.
But this year, for the first time in 40 years, I could only take the inclination and increasing the pace on the treadmill up to 80% maximum.
My eleven-year-old son asked me if I would still be around for his university days. Of course, I answered yes. But then, I wanted to keep my word. I knew I needed to do something drastic, something that would push me to do a complete 360-degree turn. And this was it, this was my chance.
Gut Makeover
My wife gifted me with a book on The Gut Makeover. She also gave me permission to take the month off from most of my home-related duties (best wife ever!).
Parts of the routine were downright luxurious: steam inhalation of essential oils, lymphatic drainage massages with dry brushing twice daily, and, my most favorite of all, afternoon naps!
Other parts were a little more challenging. Sitz Baths in Chinese herbs, steam-tenting and VCO and charcoal scrubs, nightly liver compresses with castor oil. And then, there was the downright uncomfortable organic coffee and bitter-melon enemas, awful tasting juices, Chinese herbal teas and blue-green algae drinks for detox which were truly difficult at times.
And this was all day, every day. I took a lot of effort not to throw in the towel. Good thing, my family was very supportive
Parts of the routine were downright luxurious: steam inhalation of essential oils, lymphatic drainage massages with dry brushing twice daily, and, my most favorite of all, afternoon naps!
Other parts were a little more challenging. Sitz Baths in Chinese herbs, steam-tenting and VCO and charcoal scrubs, nightly liver compresses with castor oil. And then, there was the downright uncomfortable organic coffee and bitter-melon enemas, awful tasting juices, Chinese herbal teas and blue-green algae drinks for detox which were truly difficult at times.
And this was all day, every day. I took a lot of effort not to throw in the towel. Good thing, my family was very supportive
January 6, 2020
The Cleansing
First week was the parasite cleanse. Pretty much tolerable as I assumed I was mostly parasite- free. I was always super careful about water in Asia ever since I had experienced a severe gut infection requiring hospitalization in Shanghai in February 2003 right in the middle of the first SARS outbreak in China.
No fun waking up in a Chinese hospital where no one spoke English. When my doctor arrived the following day, and I asked about the IV antibiotics I had been receiving, he said “it’s like penicillin, only better.”
I never found out what drug it actually was, but was reassured that the needles were all sterile and non-reusable.
Upon my return to Honolulu, I discovered I had an antibiotic-resistant campylobacter (curved bacteria) infection that was still in my system weeks later. My travel medicine doctor ascertained that the H2 blocker I was taking to help with heartburn and reflux had reduced my stomach’s acid capacity sufficiently to make me more susceptible to gut infections. Further, he added that in the future, I should stop taking it prior to going abroad.
Another case of unintended consequence of Western medications for symptomatic treatments, rather than addressing the root cause of the problem.
This time, it was smooth-sailing. Cramping wasn’t too bad (relieved somewhat by hot abdominal compresses and VERY FREQUENT trips to the lavatory.) And by the way, you do not want to be in a car in the middle of Manila traffic during this phase of the cleanse. Don’t do it! Just stay very close to a toilet, at all times! You’ve been warned.
A Rumbling Eruption
Eight days into my program, just as the world was starting to grow concerned over the virus outbreak in Wuhan, China, it was business as usual at home. I was undergoing a colonic coffee enema treatment. As was usual, I was feeling the rumblings of my gastrointestinal tract, when I heard a much louder growling outside.
I looked outside our window in our home in Tagaytay, only to realize that the Taal Volcano we lived adjacent to was becoming increasingly active.
The social media warnings started pouring in, asking if we were okay. When I stepped outside to see what the fuss was all about, I saw a huge mushroom cloud arising from the Taal volcano from the distance.
The thunder was a phreatomagmatic eruption, and it began raining ash upon our house. No questions, we had to evacuate immediately.
The next six hours was the mother of all traffic jams (four hours to go for 15km to Metro Manila), as night skies were filled with heavy ashfall, rendering windshield wipers inoperable, headlights caked in ash.
If it weren’t for some good Samaritans working for tips by hosing down passing cars covered with several inches of ash that were stuck in traffic, we might have been stranded on the descending roadsides of the volcano we lived on.
Amazingly, I required no emergency bathroom breaks while driving that time—a true miracle, and a testament to the “fight or flight” sympathetic nervous systems in action.
The Last of the Cleanses
Next came the gallbladder and liver cleanses. Gallbladder cleanses are mostly painless and often rewarding, once you see the small gallstones (tiny pebbles, actually) you excrete the day after fasting and drinking only fresh juices, followed by an uncomfortable tall glass of olive oil mixed with citrus juice.
Really tough to swallow all of this in the short time allotted. But alas, I had to stick to the plan.
The liver cleansing was a bit more challenging, with its assortment of Chinese medicinal herb tea and tonics. Earthy, rooty and truly unusual tastes and smells! I did not dare ask exactly what was in it, or I might start refusing to ingest it.
Luckily, at the time, I scheduled a week-long break to act as a tour guide and host to a functional medicine doctor, Miles Nichols, who was visiting from Colorado.
It was a great opportunity to pick his brain about the gut biome and the intricacies of metabolism and supplements, as we were captive occupants of the long and winding roads to Baguio and Sagada in Mountain Province, Northern Luzon.
It was a bittersweet break, as I had to cancel my attendance to the Sheng Zhen International Teacher Training retreat, something I look forward to attending every couple of years to maintain certification status in teaching Sheng Zhen. For now, the focus is on my family, and I’ve got my eyes on the prize. Health was my number one priority.
February 2, 2020
The Last Phase (and Reaping Results!)
The last phase of the program was the kidney cleanse. I was in the home stretch, so to speak. At this point, I was ready to do a happy dance!
The teas and the tonics were again bitter and acrid, not something to look forward to. But then I had drunk many a Chinese herbal concoctions (detoctions) in my training, so drinking unusual teas was not entirely unfamiliar to me. Let’s just say, it’s an “acquired taste.”
At this point, three weeks in, I was feeling much better overall.
Lighter, more refreshed in the mornings, easier to sleep early at night, and much more mindful throughout the day. It’s as if time had slowed considerably. Life became simple. My daily routine became steady and predictable. A balance of nourishment, release, cleansing, and refreshment. Mahalo!
However, I had lost 20 plus pounds in that first month, partly because of portion control and calorie restriction. All my favorite “not so healthy” foods were gone. Bye-bye cheese, bread, pasta, eggs, meat and coffee!
I have to be honest, my energy levels seemed low. I wasn’t exercising, not for a lack of wanting to. But rather, to avoid never being more than a few seconds away from a bathroom, or as we say in the Philippines “C.R.” or comfort room — no truer words were ever spoken when the strong urge to evacuate your bodily fluids rapidly rushes over you.
It is said that it takes cataclysmic events to awaken the deeply sleeping. I guess escaping a massive volcanic eruption was one such event.
To step back and be thankful for your life, your loved ones, and the opportunity to question everything from where you live, what you eat, and how your lifestyle affects your longevity and vitality. Little did I know a much larger catastrophe lurked right around the corner…..the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic!
— Roger Ty-Simone
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