The Remedy: The Five-Week Power Plan to Detox Your System, Combat the Fat, and Rebuild Your Mind and Body

First Chapter

The Remedy

Wellness Central

PART I

The Remedy

one

The Remedy Chlorophyllian Cleanse

“The eyes are the window to the soul.”

True talk. When you look into someone’s eyes you catch a glimpse of the world of feelings and ideas percolating inside them. But those eyes are also a window on health. Have a look at the whites of your eyes in a mirror. Not very white, are they? A touch yellowed? Plenty of visible blood vessels? Have that too-shiny and glazed look, a dry yet slick feeling when you blink and a kind of dull ache when you pinch them shut?

Your eyes reveal what’s physically going on inside you. The yellowing, the foggy glaze, the tired, squeaky blinking, the general cotton-lidded sensation you get as you prop your eyes open and hold your body upright at work and at play are signs that your liver, kidneys, immune system, and other internal organs and processes are working beyond peak capacity to filter out impurities and make something useful out of the Toxitarian diet you eat.

It’s the same with your skin. Your body’s single largest organ offers a similar look inside. Gently pinch the skin on your cheek, near your eye. Does it feel smooth and soft between your fingers? Does it slip right back into place with a gentle elasticity? No? It can. But the skin can’t adequately renew itself, can’t breathe, maintain softness, age, and heal gradually, if it’s covering up a disaster area of overtaxed organs, dehydrated cells, and tired, oxygen-starved blood.

Lack of energy

Obesity

Glassy, foggy eyes

Prematurely wrinkled, oily or dry skin, and/or acne

Brittle hair

Yellow nails

Bad breath and body odor

Irritability and mood swings

Inability to concentrate

Food cravings

Mucous membrane irritation and extreme allergy symptoms

All of these issues stem from the same source—body toxicity. All of them can be treated, improved, and even alleviated by the same technique—cleansing and detoxifying the body and getting your cells the pure, natural nutrient fuel they need. The goal of The Remedy Four-Day Chlorophyllian Cleanse is to give you a simple, easy, surefire way to detoxify, clean, and recharge your body’s internal organs and start the journey to a more energized, sleeker, healthier you.

THE TRUTH

Human beings, like all animals, are consumers and transformers. I’m not talking about comparison shopping for flat-screen TVs or turning from a car into a robot and back again. We’re made of billions of individual cells that consume food and transform it into energy 24/7, from the moment we’re conceived until we die, and even after we die, in the case of the cells that make up our hair and fingernails.

Cells are specialists. Every one of the trillions of cells that we’re composed of has a specific function it is programmed to perform. And each tiny little cell in us, regardless of its specialty, is looking to get fed in order to ramp up, grow, and make more of itself and do the job it was created to do. Any human cell, skin cell, pancreas cell, hair cell, brain cell, or what ever cell is looking to eat well. What a cell needs is to live and grow and function in a balanced environment that’s naturally rich in the vitamins, minerals, amino acids, enzymes, and other nutrients and natural chemicals it craves. The cell’s ideal cipher is a place where the right amino acids, glucose for energy, oxygen, and other natural substances will float by so that the enzymes within the cell can snatch them inside through the permeable cell wall and put them to use as energy and to make other tools to perform that cell’s specialty function.

Convenience, mass production, rapid travel, and all the other benefits we take for granted in the modern age have come at a steep price. Burning fossil fuels trashes the air we all breathe. Manufacturing, especially plastics, and operating massive factory farms to produce livestock, dairy, and inorganically grown vegetable ingredients for processed foods and for our tables dumps literally tons of deadly toxins in the water we all need to survive and grow. Most of us take that constant assault even further by ingesting the additives, hormones, dyes, and preservatives (along with excess calories) in processed foods, fast food, and heavy meat and dairy Toxitarian diets. Add to that the toxic chemical compounds in the cosmetic soaps, moisturizers, and beauty products women and, increasingly, men slather onto their porous, breathing skins and you have a body under siege from toxicity at all times and from all directions.

The human body has an amazing capacity for storing, combining, and utilizing nutrients, flushing out excess and cleansing itself of impurities and potentially toxic substances it may absorb along with the good stuff. We flush out the bad when we:

The natural process of excretion, via deep breathing, breaking a sweat, and going to the bathroom can always use help. Nearly every culture on earth has adopted some kind of cleansing and detoxing technique. Our forebears made rituals out of emptying the lungs, sweating out toxins, and rinsing out the colon and lower intestine.

All these things have a very welcome detoxifying effect on the body and help to maintain a high level of energy and a healthy body weight.

Today we’re more inclined to make a ritual out of taking in toxicity! Every trip to the drive-thru, every cigarette, every gulp of a soda or a beer smuggles harmful ingredients into our bodies and cultivates illness, obesity, and exhaustion. Our bodies need help ridding us of the things we ritually and voluntarily put inside it.

There are three basic issues at work here:

1. Your body needs to be detoxed.

The voluntary intake of toxins through food has to stop.

2. Your body needs to be cleansed.

The body’s natural flushing processes need a major boost.

3. Your body needs a Supa Dose of nutrition.

You must feed your consuming and transforming cells what they must have in order to live.

Before we go into a five-week power plan designed to control and curtail the voluntary consumption of the things that make us sick, tired, and over-weight, and boost the body’s own filtering and flushing ways, let’s kick-start the detox.

THE WORD

Hype Williams is one of hip-hop’s true innovators. First as a tagger and graffiti artist, then as a graphic designer and finally an award-winning, groundbreaking, and prolific video, commercial, and film director, Brother Hype has defined a look and the motion of hip-hop and R&B that has influenced a generation.

“It’s just a struggle across the board,” Hype says about his desire to stay healthy. “Especially when you realize the kind of advertising that’s out there. People are bombarded with food twenty-four hours a day—TV, billboards, there’s like twenty restaurants on every block. You struggle with it. Half the time my mentality is clear, but just like anybody else, I get bombarded with all of this food and bad lifestyle and bad living in the company you keep and the media.

“Some people smoke cigarettes,” Hype says, “some people smoke weed, or drink or eat pork and beef and refined sugar and all that stuff. I try to fight that by completely abstaining from food three times a year. Once you attempt to get it out of your system, you see that there’s a difference in how your body operates without that stuff in it. If you don’t do some kind of seasonal fast for religious purposes, there are alternatives. You just gotta give it a shot to see the difference in how you feel. It’s like anything else. When you get some really good sleep, like that good sleep when you wake up, like that feeling versus an average night’s sleep, it’s a different thing.”

THE TRUTH

All human cells want food containing the amino acids, water, vitamins, and minerals they’re craving, but that our bodies can’t produce on our own—enzymes that will assist the cells’ own consuming and transforming, and provide oxygen to help keep things popping. But our cells and the organ systems they make up also need to have all that good stuff on hand in a body environment with a pH balance that’s sympathetic to the whole transformation process.

Strictly defined, pH is the ratio of acid (the positively charged, atomically grabby half of the two-part molecular dance that makes up chemical compounds) to alkali (the “base,” or negatively charged, more stable, and atomically generous half of the same team) inside us. When acid and alkali are in balance in the human body, everything is on a harmonious smooth cruise to a long healthy life—what since the 1920s has become known as homeostasis. But when we start to rip off our cells’ expectations by feeding them Toxitarian garbage like meat, dairy, sugar, simple starches, excess sodium, alcohol, and the rogues’ gallery of artificial and unnatural preservatives and chemicals in processed foods, we invariably tip things over to the acid side.

Acid pH foods include:

The first ingredient necessary to restore the body’s proper pH balance and homeostasis is water—a lot of it. You cannot thrive or even survive without the water your body needs. Every schoolkid knows that the human body itself is upwards of 70 percent water. That percentage needs to be maintained at all times, which requires A LOT of water. The water in your body is constantly working—in motion, moving from cell to cell, organ to organ, flushing, oxygenating, and keeping you clean. The life-giving oxygen in water is an essential part of every single one of your body’s metabolic and cellular processes. Of course, we breathe in oxygen all day and night. It arrives in our lungs in a cocktail composed mostly of nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and, for the last couple centuries anyway, increasing amounts of nasty Industrial Age pollution that we put into our air when we burn and make things. But O₂-hungry cells also get oxygen from the food we eat and water we drink. Water is the wonder drug, the magic bullet. When you constantly hydrate your body with pure, clean water, your system gets a flush boost, giving it the best possible advantage against toxins and a bad diet.

It’s dramatic what happens when you actually meet the body’s water requirement. Even if you choose only to supplement a poor diet with double the intake of water you drink now, you’d see a difference in your eyes, skin, and hair after just a few days. When your body is getting all the water it needs (probably about twice what you’re giving it now), even if the rest of what you put into you is fast-food garbage, your skin and eyes will improve in clarity, your digestion will run more smoothly, and you’ll feel stronger and better in every department.

THE WORD

“You must drink and maintain a certain intake of water,” says Tyson Beckford. “It naturally flushes the body and keeps you right.” My Brother knows of what he speaks. His body and face are his livelihood. Since he broke out in the modeling scene of the early nineties, Tyson’s athletic frame and exotic looks have helped him to refocus and redefine the masculine media image. Whether as the face of Ralph Lauren, one of People’s exalted 50 Most Beautiful People, the key visual ingredient in dozens of music videos, print ads, and films, or as cohost of Make Me a Supermodel, Tyson Beckford commands attention and respect because he pays attention and respect to his body.

“A good glass of water puts you in a better mood,” Tyson says. “People don’t realize that a lot of stuff they put into themselves every day is not right, you know? The sugar and the artificial flavoring and color, that stuff takes a toll on your body. Look at your insides as if they were a white linen shirt. You put anything other than water on white linen, pour any coloring on it and it’s going to stain, right? Your intestines and your stomach lining, your whole digestive tract is colored by those different artificial flavors and man-made coloring that the body’s not used to and not designed to take.” Brother Tyson’s challenge? “Put yourself on a water diet for thirty days,” he says. “Go thirty days drinking just water with breakfast instead of having juice or coffee. Drink water every time you’re thirsty, eight glasses a day, and don’t drink any soda. You’ll notice how your body will change and how much better you’ll feel in those thirty days.”

WHAT’S GOOD?

“Water,” according to Brother Tyson Beckford, “is the simplest and easiest thing to buy. It doesn’t have to cost you a whole lot of money to buy yourself a gallon of water, walk around with that, and knock that out.” Unfortunately, the quickest and easiest way to get water is also one of the most suspect. Tap water contains the additive fluoride. Fluoride is a toxic metal and to be avoided (as much as this country’s crazy fluoridation policy will let you). Also, most American water treatment plants are not equipped to filter out the pesticide run-off from toxic factory farm agriculture, which makes tap water even more dubious. Does that mean your water needs to be from Fiji? No, it just needs to be clean. Boutique bottled waters can cost a lot of money. Tap water is out. What does that leave?

THE TRUTH

Breathing and oxygen-rich water consumed on its own and used in our food play a huge part in helping us rid our body of toxins. But in order to flush, detox, and revive with the Remedy Four-Day Cleanse, you’ll need the biggest nutritional oxygen boost of all—chlorophyll.

Plants thrive on nutrients from the soil they live in, oxygen from the air and water they take in, and light from the sun. The miraculous process by which those things harmoniously foster healthy cell growth in plants is called, as we all learned in grade school, photosynthesis. Chlorophyll, a combination of molecules making up the green parts of the plant, is what makes photosynthesis possible. Human beings ingest plant chlorophyll, and the accompanying enzymes and nutrients that make plants grow, when we eat any leafy green vegetables.

In the human body, chlorophyll-rich foods restore pH and promote the vital disbursement of oxygen in the bloodstream. Chlorophyll, the “blood” of the plant, acts like a transfusion of nutrients, amino acids, and enzymes that we need to keep our blood healthy and pumped full of oxygen. Studies increasingly indicate that chlorophyll-rich plant foods help cells to restore damage to their DNA codes and replicate healthily. A pH-balanced stomach full of chlorophyll digests better, passes waste more efficiently, and cuts your liver and other hardworking vital organs miles of slack. Many of the physical symptoms and ravages of a lifestyle that embraces bad food can be treated and improved by a diet rich in chlorophyll.

All green vegetables contain chlorophyll. The greener they are, the more chlorophyll-rich they are. But since meat and dairy, food additives, polluted air, and other environmental body hazards put us in the toxic crosshairs at all times, we need to flush and combat those poisons with an extra-potent dose of the green stuff. That’s where blue-green algae comes into the fight. Marketed and consumed as spirulina, chlorella “green food,” “green juice,” or “pure liquid chlorophyll” supplements, this commercially available chlorophyll-rich superfood acts like body armor, slowing down and stopping those toxin bullets that would otherwise rip through your immune system, digestion, heart, liver, lungs, brain, and muscles.

Taken as a supplement (powder, liquid, or tablet), spirulina and chlorella supercharge your blood and immune system to a degree unrivaled by just about any other food source. Regular consumption of any combination of these algae food supplements also helps the body’s ongoing efforts to purge itself of toxic environmental contaminants and balance pH to sustain homeostasis. Blue-green algae also stimulates the growth of the T cells and white blood cells that the immune system uses to fight illness. It also evens out blood pressure and blood sugar. When it’s grown and harvested in a pure, clean, and consistently nutrient-balanced state beneficial to human consumption, blue-green algae contains vegetarian amino acid protein to feed your hungry cells; essential fatty acids for the heart; enzymes, beneficial bacteria, and fiber to give your stomach, bowels, and liver a hand up; and antioxidant vitamins (like naturally occurring B12) galore.

The other all-powerful chlorophyll-powered supplements are prairie grasses, such as wheatgrass, alfalfa, and barley grass. In the first half of the twentieth century, nutritionists began extolling the virtues of wheatgrass and the incredibly dense cocktail of chlorophyll, enzymes, and minerals within it. By pressing the juice out of the immature grassy shoots of the wheat berry plant, and other grasses that grow naturally on the American prairie, wheatgrass advocates created a very strong, very green, very powerful nutritional supplement. Whether via a fresh shot at a juice bar, or taken in concentrated powdered form, wheatgrass and the other prairie grasses like alfalfa and green barley grass are an incredibly intense and healthy solar energy booster. Wheat berry, alfalfa, and green barley grass juices are loaded with calcium, amino acid protein, and an abundance of vitamins, minerals, and enzymes that strengthen the skeleton, build muscle, boost the immune system, and help the body cleanse itself. All told, wheatgrass juice contains every vitamin, mineral, and enzyme needed to sustain human life.

When I was putting myself back together in North Carolina, I was also putting The Remedy together. Mom had turned me on to consuming chlorophyll from spirulina, chlorella, and prairie grass juices in concentrated supplement form as a kid. As I grew older, I found the energy boost so invigorating and powerful that I would take a gallon jug of distilled water, pop the cap, spoon in a mixture of powered greens that I had made, shake it up, and then drink down the gallon over the course of a day. Studying, working out—everywhere I went, the jug went with me. When I returned to Brooklyn, the jug and my day long green juice ritual came along, too. Between the jug and a diet composed almost completely of deep-colored, chlorophyll-rich vegetables and fruits, I had moved beyond vegetarian or vegan—I had become a Chlorophyllian!

WHAT’S GOOD?

Eventually I decided that I should tailor my own mixture of chlorophyll supplements. I experimented with various combinations of powdered greens, and eventually came up with the Supa Mega Greens formula. My particular Chlorophyllian supplement body, soul, and cell feast incorporates seven different green foods and herb ingredients:

Plus:

Ginger root adds flavor, has antibacterial properties, revs up bile production in the gallbladder, soothes the stomach, and helps to cleanse the blood. In concentrated powder form, dandelion greens help to drain toxins that weigh down immune function while also restoring and preserving pH.

THE TRUTH

My whole life I’ve done juice fasts, the Master Cleanse, water fasts—almost every kind of fast and cleanse that there is—and I can personally attest to the fact The Remedy cleanse program is the greatest, quickest, and easiest mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual natural reboot I’ve found to date.

Detoxifies      Yes      Yes      Yes      Yes      Yes     

Cleanses      Yes      Yes      Yes      Yes      Yes     

Nutrient dense      No      Yes      Yes      No      Yes     

Quick and easy      No      No      No      No      Yes     

Simple      No      Yes      No      Yes      Yes     

Potential side effects      Many      Many      Few      Many      Few     

Over the course of The Remedy Four-Day Chlorophyllian Cleanse, you will:

The Remedy’s gentle but thorough program:

I know that last point is a big one for a lot of you. Depending on your weight and your level of toxicity at the start, strictly following The Remedy Four-Day Chlorophyllian Cleanse will help you to lose weight.

Weight Loss Goals:

NOTE: These numbers are GOALS. Your actual results will depend on:

There are no hard, fast rules about weight loss with The Remedy, just as there are no hard, fast rules about weight loss with any cleanse.

NOTE: As with any cleanse, regardless of your health goals or physical condition, you should consult with your doctor before undertaking The Remedy Four-Day Chlorophyllian Cleanse.

WHAT’S GOOD?

The Remedy Four-Day Cleanse has just three basic ingredients:

1. Two 12-ounce glasses of fruit juice a day for four days + one recovery day

2. One gallon jug of distilled water per day for four days + one recovery day

3. Five heaping tablespoons of Supa Mega Greens per day for four days + one recovery day

Looking at it as a grocery list, you’ll simply need to buy:

Supa Mega Greens

1 tsp. spirulina

1 tsp. sun chlorella

1 tsp. powdered wheatgrass (or 3 oz. of fresh wheatgrass juice)

1 tsp. powdered alfalfa grass (or 3 oz. fresh alfalfa grass juice)

1 tsp. powdered green barley grass (or 3 oz. fresh green barley grass juice)

½ tsp. fresh ginger, juiced (two or three decent-sized fingers of fresh ginger should do it)

1 cup dandelion greens, juiced or powdered

Mix ingredients in a separate container, then add to gallon jug of water.

My Supa Mega Greens powder combines low-temperature dehydrated, highly concentrated forms of these fresh juices and greens and is available from www.supanovaslom.com.

Juice

Ideally, you should use fresh-squeezed juice from organic sources. Cold pressing—the slow crushing of juice from fruit—is the best process, because it gets the maximum yield and doesn’t mix excess air into the juice the way that other mechanical juicers do. The reality of course is that almost no one has a cold-press juicer in their home, and even those with cheaper electric juicers on hand can find it difficult to work juicing into their schedule. Your real-world juice source options are as follows:

Not acceptable:

For a first-time Remedy Cleanse experience, I find that it helps to pick a variety of juices according to these categories:

DAY 1. ENTICE JUICES—FLAVORS YOU PARTICULARLY LIKE

DAY 2. SUBACID JUICES—JUICES FROM FRUIT WITH A HIGH-ALKALI PH

DAY 3. MELON JUICE—SWEET AND SOOTHING

If you can’t find fresh melon juices in the supermarket, try a farmers’ market or organic grocery, or juice your own with a juicer.

DAY 4. TROPICAL FRUIT

Water

Like I said, I prefer distilled water to boutique bottled water. I find the gallon jug with the handle (the ones that look just like a gallon milk container) really convenient. The jug also has a nice heft and size that helps to remind you of your goals and the task at hand. When hard-core bodybuilders do intense training in the gym, they’re never without a gallon plastic jug. On The Remedy, you’re doing intense cell building, so let the world know you’re hard-core by carrying the jug.

The downside of the gallon plastic jug of water is that the specific plastic used to manufacture those bottles is potentially hazardous and toxic on its own. Nalgene plastic bottles contain a chemical called bisphenol A (or BPA) which remains in the body and is thought to contribute to a variety of potentially fatal disorders. Health advocates say that the amount of BPA that leaches out of plastic water bottles is a cause for concern.

The Park Slope Food Coop in my native Brooklyn considers the risk serious enough that they no longer carry water bottled in plastic. The chemical industry—and for the most part, the government—say of course there’s little or no risk to humans from the amount of BPA we absorb from a plastic jug. I’m on the fence. Part of The Remedy philosophy is that you can always do better; that your health and your well-being can always be improved. My feeling is that the additional cleansing and detoxing benefits of The Remedy cancel out the BPA risk, but you may feel differently. If so, you’ll need to find an alternative gallon jug or you’ll have to mix up the Supa Mega Green mix and gallon of water separately and put them in individual non-plastic bottles. Your move.

THE PLAN

Each day of The Remedy is divided into:

You may need to adapt the times to fit your waking hours, but the general breakdown of your uptime remains the same:

DAY 1

Supa Liquid Breakfast Meal: 6–9 A.M.

12 ounces of freshly pressed organic fruit juice or unsweetened bottled juice with 1 heaping tablespoon of Supa Mega Greens

Supa All-Day Liquid Meal: 9 A.M.–5 P.M.

Tonic Mix: Add two heaping tablespoons of Supa Mega Greens to 1 gallon of distilled, filtered, or alkaline water.

Supa Liquid Dinner Meal: 5–7 P.M.

12 ounces of freshly pressed organic fruit juice or unsweetened bottled juice with 1–2 heaping tablespoons of Supa Mega Greens

DAY 2

Supa Liquid Breakfast Meal: 6–9 A.M.

Supa All-Day Liquid Meal: 9 A.M.–5 P.M.

Supa Liquid Dinner Meal: 5–7 P.M.

DAY 3

Supa Liquid Breakfast Meal: 6–9 A.M.

Supa All-Day Liquid Meal: 9 A.M.–5 P.M.

Supa Liquid Dinner Meal: 5–7 P.M.

DAY 4

Supa Liquid Breakfast Meal: 6–9 A.M.

Supa All-Day Liquid Meal: 9 A.M.–5 P.M.

Supa Liquid Dinner Meal: 5–7 P.M.

DAY 5—ENDING THE CLEANSE

First Remedy End Cleanse Meal

Supa Liquid Breakfast Meal: 6–9 A.M.

Along with breakfast: 6–8 ounces of fresh fruit—NOT canned or sweetened

Second Remedy End Cleanse Meal

Supa All-Day Liquid Meal: 9 A.M.–5 P.M.

Augment the gallon of water with a lunch of 6 ounces of warm (not hot) clear broth soup, such as miso.

Third and Final Remedy End Cleanse Meal

Supa Liquid Dinner Meal: 5–7 P.M.

Add a dinner of 1 cup of raw salad greens (Boston, iceberg, arugula, spinach, etc.) with the juice of ½ lemon used as dressing. NO tomatoes, onions, bottled dressing, or anything else.

The following day you may return to eating normally.

THE TRUTH

Like other cleanses, The Remedy greatly restricts your caloric intake along with your intake of potentially harmful food substances. Also, like other cleanses, it flushes out accumulated toxic elements your body has stored in its tissues. But unlike many other cleanses, The Remedy is putting back as it’s taking out. The Supa Mega Greens mixture is oxygenating and bathing your cells in Chlorophyllian nutrition. The green juice powder is truly a tonic for organs and systems thrown out of whack by prior Toxitarian diet extremes.

And, since The Remedy is only a four-day program, it’s much easier to stick to and has almost no side effects, such as the constipation, skin breakouts, irritability, and other problems associated with longer fasts.

THE BODY

The Remedy Cleanse flushes toxins from your body when you go to the bathroom, sweat, and breathe. To take full advantage of this likely overdue cleaning-out, pamper your skin and wash with extra care. Hot soaks and baths will help your skin rejuvenate.

Day 1: Dissove 1–4 tablespoons of Epsom salts or 1–2 tablespoons of sea salt into a hot bath and gently massage your entire body with a loofah or seaweed sponge and some oatmeal scrub from the health food store. Lightly scrubbing off the dead skin will increase your circulation and allow your skin to make the most of the cleanse.

Day 2: Moisten a sponge or loofah, apply oatmeal scrub, and wash your entire body in a warm shower.

Day 3: Soak your feet in a tub of water with 1 table-spoon Epsom salts in it. Remove one foot at a time and massage it with a pumice stone. After you’re done, rub down feet, toes, and ankles with olive or castor oil.

Day 4: Epsom salt bath once again.

Supa Breath Work-In

Each day during the cleanse take a few moments to practice conscious breathing.

Repeat ten times for Day One, twenty for Day Two, thirty for Day Three, and forty for Day Four.

“I just can’t do it!”

If you’ve successfully done a longer, more drastic cleanse, you’ll find The Remedy a lot easier to complete. On The Remedy, the extra energy that sometimes doesn’t kick in for days with other cleanses is there from the start. The Supa Mega Greens are so nutritionally pleasing to your body that it requires less active concentration to stick with the program for the full four days. Food cravings are minimal—the middle-of-the-day gallon-jug infusion will fill you up, no doubt.

Nevertheless, some people struggle with The Remedy. If you hit the wall the first day, try replacing the gallon of distilled water/Supa Mega Greens with an equal quantity of unsweetened coconut water with Supa Mega Greens dissolved in it. Find a store that sells unsweetened coconut water (no pulp) in the larger cartons rather than those little sippy-sized ones, so you don’t have extra trash to recycle. The Remedy can be done one, two, three, or all four days with coconut water instead of distilled water. The effects may not be quite as dramatic as with the plain H₂O but you’re still very likely to feel and look substantially better after following through to day five and after.

Another thing you can do the first day or two is flavor the all-day liquid meal jug with stevia. Though it’s used on nearly half the sweetened processed foods in Japan (a country that banned aspartame, the active ingredient in NutraSweet), Israel (one of the most health-conscious countries on Earth), and much of the rest of the world, stevia—a natural sweetening extract made from a South American bush in the Chrysanthemum family, is almost unknown in the United States. Stevia is commercially available as both a spoonable granular powder and as a liquid. You can find it in most health food stores (the FDA only approves its sale as a food supplement, not a food additive like aspartame, so look for it next to the vitamins) and it can be purchased online. A few drops of the liquid version will sweeten your jug considerably.

And if you suffer from extremely high blood pressure, hypoglycemia, Type I or Type II diabetes, or are under an MD’s or psychiatrist’s care for an ongoing illness or condition, you should NOT undertake the cleanse without getting your doctor’s permission. For the majority of people, The Remedy runs smoothly and safely, but if you experience:

or have been prone to those things in the past, stop the cleanse immediately and consult your doctor.

Okay, go back to the mirror and look at the whites of your eyes again. Notice an improvement? With less toxicity to contend with and a Supa Dose of chlorophyll nutrition to feed on, your liver, blood, immune system, brain, and other organs and processes have had a chance to regroup. Over the course of those four days, your body probably drew closer to its natural and correct pH than it’s been since you were breast-fed. The cool, clear white cast your eyes have taken over the four-day cleanse and one-day recovery are a sign that walking the Chlorophyllian walk agrees with you.

Take a gentle pinch of your skin again. Feels different, right? Smoother, softer, more resilient? The signs are on you everywhere. Waistband a little looser? Bowels a little more regular? Less mucous discharge if you suffer from allergies? Less tension and fog on the brain? The Remedy Four-Day Chlorophyllian Cleanse is like that.

THE LOVE

The way I look at it, everything is food. Every word we hear, every touch we experience, every relationship affects us the same way food does: What the conscious mind ingests during the day, the unconscious digests while we sleep at night. The memory stores experiences, both toxic and nourishing, in the brain and feeds off of, or tries to flush, their good and bad ingredients as we go through our lives. Ideas? Food for thought. Music? Food for the soul. When we make love, when we exercise, when we relax and listen to the world inside us and out, we are consuming experience and transforming it into sensation and memory the same way that our cells consume nutrients and use them to transform.

When you eat and live toxically, it’s because you’re eating and living unconsciously. Consciously preparing a salad or doing a cleanse, or unconsciously sleepwalking to a burger joint or polishing off a quart bottle of soda, you run your life through choices. Doing anything, whether it’s making the same mistake for the 1,000th time or a first step toward improvement, requires you to choose. All choices, good or bad, are governed by the same straightforward series of guiding principles and assumptions. In order to live consciously, make the right eating choices, and live your life well, healthy, and happy, you have to know what those guiding principles are, and use them to do the right thing.

There is no such thing as an absence of will and desire.

You are either exerting a will and desire to neglect yourself, to remain helpless and unconscious, or you are exerting a will and desire to get better, do well, and grow powerful and strong. The logical first step to free your mind is to commit to surviving and maximizing what years you have left on the planet.

One of the greatest benefits of The Remedy Cleanse is that it gives you a chance to reconnect with your body’s healthy, balanced rhythms. As you prepare your juice and jug, drink The Remedy, flush toxins and fat, and clean yourself, listen to your body. Throughout The Remedy Cleanse and for the duration of the Supa Power Plan, keep a notebook and write down the thoughts and impressions you have. How do you feel physically and emotionally as you go about your day during the cleanse? What feels different? What’s the same? How do your eyes look? Does the texture of your hair improve week to week? Are your dreams at night particularly vivid? Have your bathroom habits altered? Listen to your body and make note of what it is saying. In order to do that, you have one more fasting goal:

For the four nights of The Remedy Cleanse, don’t watch TV. With that source of noise out of the picture, you’ll be able to pick up on what your body is saying that much more easily.

The holistic lifestyle community relies a lot on affirmations. Café Gratitude, a dope chain of Bay Area vegan restaurants, uses a positive phrase to name every item on their menu. Their live-food veggie burger is called “I Am Cheerful.” To order a lemonade with that, you say to your server, “I Am Refreshed,” just like it says on the menu. What the owner of Café Gratitude and other holistic health advocates know is the same thing that psychologists, religious leaders, coaches, and motivational speakers have all discovered over the centuries—finding the words to describe a goal and saying them out loud cranks up will and desire. Remember what your mom used to tell you when you were tongue-tied and making no sense? “Use your words.” Stating your intended goal as simply, clearly, and positively as you can manage really helps.

You already have plenty of voices in your head. Some may be telling you that you’re fat, or that you’ll never be good enough, or that you’re going to fail at any sort of self-improvement. These are self-perpetuating hangovers from childhood and have no bearing on your present conscious adult life and no place in your future. Drown out those doubting voices you inherited from others with positive affirmations in your own voice. Stand and deliver. It’s high time for true talk. Say out loud that Enough is enough, I am ready to be well. My health is my wealth. Today and every one of the rest of my days on this planet, I’m fighting to be healthy. The principle of Will and Desire is only ever just a sentence away.

THE WORD

My Sistah Erykah Badu and I have known each other for more than a dozen years, ever since Erykah walked into Frank’s Poetry Spot one night in 1996 when I was doing a spoken word performance. Turns out that even though we’d never before met when Erykah strolled in off the curb that night, she had just finished reading my mother’s book Heal Thyself. It was also the same year that Erykah recorded Baduizm and “On and On.” “A lot of amazing things were happening in that one year for me,” she says, “a lot of noncoincidental things, things that were destined to, and that I started putting together.

“For me it’s all about making sure that your willpower is good,” Erykah said. “It’s all in the choices that you make, the responsibility you take for the choices that you make, and the stamina you exert to get that energy out. The one important thing that we should always remember about the will is that it has to be exercised, like any other muscle. When you’re lying in bed, the will is the thing saying, ‘Get up now, go, go, go!’ I think one of the most powerful things that you have is that thing that says, ‘Okay, you’re not gonna drink anymore, you’re not gonna smoke anymore.’ ‘But I like it,’ you think. But your will, that voice, says, ‘You’re not gonna do it because you can’t. If you do, then the heart can’t do its job. You’re gonna mess up everyone’s program.’ The will is always talking to us. And it’s up to us to focus and listen and be there for the will.

“Life is all about intent. It’s either come in peace or leave in pieces. You should say anything that you feel is good, especially if the intent is good.” But the gift of willful speech has its responsibilities, too. “I have a very dry, deadpan type of humor and some people don’t get it,” Erykah says. “It doesn’t feel too good to them, you know what I mean? It can be threatening and also offensive, I believe. I’m from the South and we have a habit of talking about people in a joking way and it’s funny, it’s jokey but then it’s kinda hurtful if someone would ever hear us. It’s just a habit. You just have to experience the consequences of it, to know how to deal with it. After you’ve seen people react you must be able to forgive them and yourself.

“I’ve been all over this planet and I’ve seen so many people and so many things,” Erykah tells me. “We are all one thing. There’s nothing happening to you that’s not happening to anyone else.” There’s courage in that connection, she said. “I see so many people becoming conscious. People are rising up everywhere and resisting occupation more and more and more. I see it becoming a way of life. More and more people are eating right and more and more people are having discussions that are at a higher place. More and more people are doing yoga and all of the higher arts and the healing arts. There’s a quickening going on. I like that word, a quickening. I see it happening all over the planet.”

---

Excerpted from The Remedy by Slom, Supa Nova Copyright © 2010 by Slom, Supa Nova. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---