I recommend the Body Ecology Diet book also. Just to add to Raindance’s comment on cleansing and healing…
In my experience, radical diet changes almost inevitably create lots of bizarre little symptoms and side-effects. Rashes, headaches, cramps, cebaceous cysts, body odor, fatigue, moodiness, on and on. I’ve found the more narrowly one shifts one’s diet (say, the more kinds of modern foods and anti-nutrients one avoids), the more marked the symptoms during transition (and during relapse if one goes back). We can find differing useful ways of explaining and modeling these experiences, I favor the “detox” (per Raindance’s comment) model the best.
Meaning, all those symptoms signify all the different cleansings of your body’s clogged detoxification/filtration systems that it finally feels it can do; while we eat garbage, our body’s basically give up on the idea. We overwhelm them with pollution! But once we tell our body that we plan to eat a minimum of modern fouling foods, boy do the floodgates open! And boy does it complain if we change our minds!
Anymore, I see us almost like molluscs, environmental filters, who can handle almost any pollutant with enough opportunity to flush it out again. But overload it, and reduce regimens of bathing/hydration/sweats/fasts, and we just end up clogged with muck. I don’t know that I groove too well with the overenthusiastic regimens of bodycleansing that some fame yogis for, but as far as I can tell all north and central american indians had sweating (sweat lodges) and fasting traditions, even though they already had unlimited fresh air (and many had almost unlimited fresh water), along with nourishing and appropriate diets. Clearly it doesn’t suffice just to change diet…we need to resurrect sweating and fasting traditions too for a well rounded home-health-care tradition.
