Hi Janis,

I also read the article with great interest (Thanks, Tom!).

Your story is a lot like mine, from the CF to the supplements - my lifestyle for the past two years has involved a lot of air travel, often on a weekly basis, and living out of hotels, and so forth. Recently it has been a liberation to give up the supplements, realizing I no longer need them! I still feel it is important to follow my diet program at least 90% of the time, especially so if I'm not filling in the gaps with the supps, yet be able to make exceptions for social occasions or other circumstances.

Like you, I am so much healthier, yet I still think I need to be careful - a few weeks ago I was stuck in the airport and ate some deep-fried potato skins at TGI Friday's (I did request no cheese which, melted, always has a bad effect on me) - I spent the next day with a major headache as I was clearing out the toxins. It was actually a useful experience seeing how toxic food affected me. But, is it healthy to be constantly focusing on the effects of each meal? Yet if you don't pay attention, you can't figure out what to try or where to go to get healthier. It seems to depend on how bad the food is - on a 4th of July Cruise they had some mushy, rich buffet foods for dinner and I handled it OK. I also had a great time, whooping to the fireworks and dancing up a storm! It would have been a shame to miss out because I felt I couldn't eat the food.

Funny though, as I looked around at many of the folks on that cruise, overweight with their pot bellies, and sitting on their chairs while only some of us danced, I have to admit to feeling a strange mixture of superiority in a certain way (if they lived like me, they could lose all that weight like nothing, and feel 20 years younger!). Yet also there was a sadness that, to me, it would be so easy for most of them to be much more healthy and vibrant, and be able to avoid the misery of degenerative disease, and medicine's chemical cures, well into old age. Even with my problems, I seemed a lot healthier than many of them.

I've been lucky I've never had the degree of allergies where I ended up in one of those strict rotation diets where I had to keep extensive charts and so forth. I suspect the psychology of feeling trapped in a certain mode, over the long run, may have detrimental effects can that outweigh the benefits. My sister-in-law's sister is a perfect example: she sees only alternative MD's and deals with the Candida / Food Allergy thing, but by all accounts is miserable and unhappy. Anytime she is out with anyone, it is a constant 'I can't eat this' or 'I can't eat that'. Her MD's prescription seems to be to eliminate another food at each office visit. On the other extreme, George Burns did pretty well (although one could argue with those genes and attitude, if he actually practiced healthy habits he may still be going today).

Part of the problem may be 'a happy medium' sounds good, but a happy medium - to me a diet that avoids for the most part food consisting of added sugars, toxic fats and additives, but not necessarily strict on following exact proportions or avoidance of a few select kinds of foods that are assumed healthy (processed dairy, cooked gluten grains come to mind) - may not give much of a healing response.

It may require a major overhaul nutritionally to really get decent healing results - yet as the author noted, the introduction of fixed restrictions starts to limit social flexibility. Another problem is, it appears to me, that even a significant level of improvement, mostly from major diet change, is often not enough for that person to fully reverse from the ranks of the chronically ill to be, for the most part, symptom-free and no longer preoccupied with their health. This is especially true for anyone under finacial pressures who must maintain major family and work responsibilities (most of us!!!). It may be easier for someone who has had a very strong healing response to stick with their program - when people sense the level of vitality the person has, they may really be interested as he gets into an enthusiastic conversation on the benefits of a certain nutritional program.

But part of what Dr. Bratman was cautioning against was the sort of evangelism this can lead to obsession, as the vibrant individual pursues 'the truth' in manner of the way to eat and live. It appeared he was the healthy obsessive until becoming too obsessed, as opposed to the sick obsessive, who desparately pursues every and any type of food elimination, cleansing and fasting program until there is nothing left to try, while remaining ill.

If in conversation I get into this stuff about how healthy I eat and they should do this or that, then they ask me how my health is, and I say 'OK, way better than a few years ago, but still a bit tired most of the time' it doesn't make a great statement about what I'm doing. But that's where I'm at, and it says a lot about the limits of good nutrition.

Like you said though, this is where 'holism' is so important - working with the emotional and spirtual aspects of healing. If the nutrition part may not be enough anyway, why try to be perfect with it when you've perhaps reached a point of diminishing returns anyway, no matter what further adjustments you make in the healing diet.

Paul ([log in to unmask])