Fundamentals of Deep Tissue Detoxification...If that happens, the liver decides, “Ooh! I’ve got...

Fundamentals of Deep Tissue Detoxification

Week 1: How to Heal a Leaky GutAnswering the questions what exactly is a leaky gut and how a person helps to heal a leaky gut

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Tera: Good morning, everybody. This is Tera, and I have Dr. Ritamarie on the phone with me. This is our first educational teleseminar for the Six Week Detox Program. Today we are going to be discussing leaky gut; what it is, how it happens, and things you can do to restore health in your gut. This is an important part of what we’ll be doing during the six week detox. Thank you so much for being with us this morning, Dr. Ritamarie.

Dr. Ritamarie: You’re welcome. Let’s talk about leaky gut. We hear that term a lot, but I’m not sure that everybody really understands what it means. I want to talk about why leaky gut is one of the major things that can go wrong with digestion. I also want to cover not just how to diagnose it, but also how to repair it, because that’s what this program is about.

I do want to say that if your digestive pro-cess is severely malfunctioning and you’ve had this problem for a long time, it is going to take more than the two weeks we’re devoting specifically to this problem to repair it. That repair process will continue throughout the second half of the detox program as we start to work on the liver.

So, don’t expect that your leaky gut is going to be magically healed in just two weeks be-cause of a specific diet or supplements. However, it’s going to be well on the way. We’re also going to work on decreasing the toxicity level of the output from your digestive system, which first goes into your blood stream and then is detoxified by your liver.

I wanted to start by giving you a quick overview of digestion and all the different pieces that are involved. I’ll then give you an idea of where it can go wrong, so that you’re empowered to then take charge and heal yourself from any given point.

What most people don’t realize is that digestion doesn’t begin in the stomach; digestion actu-ally begins in the mind. As we mentioned in an email last week, it’s really important for you be in the proper state of mind to receive food.

How to Heal a Leaky GutA teleseminar with Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo & Tera Warner

“...don’t expect that your leaky gut is going to be magically healed in just

two weeks.”

Week 1 | 3

How to Heal a Leaky Gut

So, take some deep breaths before you eat and go into a mode of appreciation. This is kind of like saying the standard grace before a meal, but taking it a step further to really feel that state throughout your body. It’s important to feel the gratitude and the calmness. That is go-ing to help your digestion work.

If you’re in a typical fight or flight mode, the state that we are in most of the time when we’re running from appointment to appointment, your digestion is not going to begin well. Living in fight or flight mode is like having a tiger chasing you 24 hours of the day. You need to take a break from running from the tiger in order to eat.

When you’re running from here to there and eat-ing on the run in the car, your digestive system isn’t ready to receive. Your stomach and your pancreas don’t get the message to secrete the enzymes and the acid that is needed to break down the food. The sphincters, which are the little valves and passageways between the dif-ferent parts of the intestine, can get stuck shut.

All of this happens because, as far as your body can tell, you’re supposed to be running away from the tiger at this point, and if you stop to

digest the food you can’t run as fast. That’s just an analogy, but I think it clearly illustrates the importance of really starting with your mind.

If you want to heal a leaky gut, you have to stop putting things into it that are damaging. When you eat in a stressed out state, a lot of partially digested food particles travel down and irritate the lining of your gut, which then causes it to become permeable. It causes little tiny microscopic holes, and then the little spots that are supposed to just allow single molecules of great nutrition to pass through become enlarged and the small intestine becomes inflamed.

One main causes of leaky gut is poor digestive capability, and the main cause of that is eating in a stressed out state of mind. I can’t emphasize that enough.

The second part of the digestion (again, before we even get down into the stomach) happens in the mouth. That means you have to chew your food. When you were a child you were prob-ably told to chew your food until it was liquid. “Chew it a hundred times, chew it fifty times,” and other suggestions were made, which were good, because the only place you have teeth is in your mouth.

If you only partially chew your food and allow big chunks to go down into your stomach, it’s going to irritate the stomach. It’s also going to irritate your small intestine, and it’s going to wreak havoc in the whole digestive system. So, poor chewing can cause leaky gut as well.

The third part of your digestive tract is your esophagus, which is the tube that goes through your throat into your stomach. The esophagus is just a passageway, but that passageway can get irritated and cause heartburn. Heartburn is an irritation caused by acid from the stomach leaking back up into the esophagus. When it gets irritated, it becomes inflamed, you’re un-comfortable, and there are all sorts of problems.

Next, you finally have your stomach. The main reason the stomach is important in the di-gestion of food and the prevention of leaky gut is that the stomach produces acid that pre-digests your proteins. Protein will not get digested in an alkaline environment, so the stomach

“If you want to heal a leaky gut, you have to

stop putting things into it that are damaging.”



has to produce acid to digest it. If the stomach is not producing this acid appropriately, then your proteins don’t get fully digested. Then, you have undigested protein molecules in the small intestine. That can create holes and cause inflammation. Once that happens, the undi-gested protein can get into the bloodstream.

If you have protein in the bloodstream, the body recognizes it as a foreign invader. When a foreign invader gets into your bloodstream, the best thing for your immune system to do is to protect you from it, right? Your immune system doesn’t know the difference between broc-coli and Streptococcus, or broccoli and fungus. It just goes on the attack.

So, the foods that you don’t fully digest because of lack of stomach acid, lack of chewing, and being in a stressed out state end up in your bloodstream. Then, your immune system starts to attack them, and you can get hives, eczema, mental fog, or fatigue as a result. There’s a whole slew of symptoms that can result from this.

Next, we have the small intestine itself. It’s the star of the show; the place where all that ab-sorption happens and where the leaks can occur. The absorptive surfaces in the small intestine are in the lower part. The upper part is where all the breakdown of the nutrients happens. Leaky gut happens mostly in the lower part of the small intestine, but it can happen further up.

Another vital part of the digestive process is a gland called the pancreas, which produces digestive enzymes. These digestive enzymes are required to take large food particles and break them down into single-cell, single-molecule particles that can be easily absorbed.

If your pancreas is not producing enough enzymes, it affects your digestion. If you’re eating a lot of cooked foods that have been depleted of their own enzymes, the pancreas is going to have to work harder, and it’s not going to be able to keep up with the load. You’re not going

to have full digestion of your food. This is going to contribute to leaky gut.

Next, we have the liver and the gall bladder, which are responsible for producing bile to help you break down fats. Again, if you don’t produce enough bile, your fat molecules won’t get digested. That causes irritation and contributes to leaky gut.

The final part of the digestive tract is the large in-testine. All of the undigested parts of the food you eat go down into the large intestine for elimina-tion. If you have a lot of undigested foods in there (things that should have been digested), it causes a

bacterial fermentation in the large intestine. That produces of lots of toxins, which are then ab-sorbed directly through a blood vessel that leads straight from the large intestine into the liver.

If that happens, the liver decides, “Ooh! I’ve got to fix this! I’ve got to fix this! I’ve got to get rid of these toxins!” When this happens on a regular basis, the liver gets overloaded, and you have a back-up of toxins in the body. Then, you have a lack of appropriate nutrition because the body pulls nutrients that you need for other functions out of the bloodstream. Then, your digestive tract is not as strong as it could be.

So, the large intestine can contribute to overload of the liver, which can contribute to overload of the immune system, because the immune system works to correct bacterial overgrowth due to fermentation.

“If you’re eating a lot of cooked foods that

have been depleted of their own enzymes, the

pancreas is going to have to work harder...”

Week 1 | 5


Now, you can see how all of the different pieces of the digestive tract can contribute to hav-ing leaky gut. That’s a quick in a nutshell. Tera, are there any questions that came up for you during that explanation, or would you like me to proceed from there?

Tera: I think that’s good. Why don’t you keep going, because I’m sure that many questions will be answered as you explain further.

Dr. Ritamarie: Yes. A lot of them will be answered as we go forward. In the slide presentation I gave you, there is a page that shows how your intestine works. It has a really cool picture of what a healthy, pink intestine looks like, with the good bacteria (like Lactobacillus) in there. It also shows a really bad looking one. Chances are, if you’ve been eating a standard American diet or you’ve just switched to a healthier diet, yours looks closer to the bad looking one.

If you’re still eating any of the things listed at the top of that page, if you’re on prescription drugs, if you’re eating meat and processed grains and sugars or using any kind of recreational drugs like cigarettes and alcohol, that contributes to the demise of your small intestine. If you’re doing those things or have done them in your past, and you haven’t done a gut restoring program, chances are your intestine isn’t looking like the nice, pretty, pink one. I put that in there to give you a picto-rial view of what happens.

How do you know if you have a leaky gut? There’s a bunch of symptoms that you can have as a result. I have a questionnaire that you can do to determine whether you have a leaky gut and how severe it is. Now, it’s not a be-all and an end-all. The only way to really tell for sure is to do what’s called an intesti-nal permeability test However, the symptoms of leaky gut are very specific, so you can tell pretty well by checking through them.

I’ll read you a few of those questions now to give you an idea, and you then later, you can look at the questionnaire, print it out, put little numbers next to everything and score yourself. Some of the symptoms of a leaky gut would include constipation, diarrhea, or both alternat-ing; abdominal pain; bloating after you eat a meal; mucous or blood in your stool.

One symptom that may not seem connected to the gut is joint pain, swelling, or arthritis. That happens because of the body’s inflammatory response. There’s also chronic or frequent fatigue. Food allergies are a key sign. If you have multiple food sensitivities or intolerances, it’s pretty likely that you have some degree of leaky gut. If you get sinus or nasal congestion, especially shortly after you eat, that can be a sign.

There’s also chronic or frequent inflammation anywhere in your body; and things that don’t heal quickly. Eczema and skin rashes or hives are very clearly associated with this. Some people get asthma, hay fever, or airborne allergies as a result of stress on their immune sys-tem from the leaky gut. Some people have confusion, poor memory or mood swings, espe-cially when eating or within a few hours of after eating.

If you have a history of using non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (aspirin, Tylenol, Motrin), or antibiotics or steroids, that can contribute to leaky gut. Alcohol consumption on a regular basis (more than once or twice a month), would contribute to leaky gut. If you drink alco-hol and you get really super-sick from drinking, that can be a sign that you have a leaky gut.

“Food allergies are a key sign. If you have multiple food sensi-tivities or intoleranc-es, it’s pretty likely that you have some

degree of leaky gut.”



Of course, inflammatory bowel diseases like colitis, Crohn’s disease, and Celiac disease are related to leaky gut.

Celiac disease is not just a disease related to leaky gut; it’s actually damage to the small intes-tine as a result of gluten intolerance. Gluten intolerance can cause leaky gut and it can be a result of leaky gut. It’s a double-edged sword.

So, there’s a score key at the bottom for you to get a total. If your score’s above twenty, it’s almost certain that you have leaky gut. If you determine that you have leaky gut, you’ll want to address the underlying causes.

We’ve covered some of those already, like making sure that your mental status is in order before you eat. That’s really, really important to create as a habit. Make it a lifelong habit that, before you put anything in your digestive tract, you take some deep breaths, calm your-self down, and really appreciate what you’re about to take in. That really shifts your ner-vous system into a mode where your digestion will be efficient.

If you have food allergies, or a pre-existing gluten or casein tolerance, and you eat those foods, that will cause irritation to the gut. It’s kind of a vicious cycle: You don’t know whether the intolerance or the leaky gut came first, but continuing to eat the foods you don’t tolerate well will make things worse.

Some reports have shown that the measles vaccine can actually irritate the lining of the gut. So, if you have children that have had vaccines recently, or if you were vaccinated as a child, that could have contributed to leaky gut. Exposure to pathogens can be a factor. So, if you’ve gone to a foreign country, eaten the food and drank and the water, you may have been ex-posed to pathogens; bacteria, fungi, and viruses that don’t belong in your gut. That can cause you to have leaky gut.

If your pancreas doesn’t produce enough enzymes, or if you eat a lot of heavy and cooked food that requires a lot of enzymes to break down, that can contribute to a leaky gut. Lack of chewing or insufficient chewing, medications, and toxin levels are contributors.

Sometimes, food combining can contribute. Now I’m not one of these really rigorous people who thinks you have to combine your food right all the time, but if you have leaky gut, you to want to combine your food in a way that helps your digestion rather than puts a strain on it.

The food combination I find most irritating to people is mixing protein with sugars. Combining nuts and dried fruit is definitely a challenge for our systems to handle. So, the typical lovely raw desserts that we eat are really poorly combined and I’d recommend that you avoid them during this detox program.

In the slides, I have a picture of the damaged intestine, which gives you an idea of what the tissue looks like when you have these teeny, tiny, prickly holes. This is an actual photo of an intestine taken using an electron microscope. You can get a feel for what happens with the holes if you relate it to a skin lesion. Say you’ve cut yourself and you’ve got little openings where the skin bleeds. Once it stops bleeding, it starts to form little scabs as part of the heal-ing process. That’s what your intestinal tract does as well.

“...like making sure that your mental status is in order before you eat.

That’s really, really impor-tant to create as a habit.”

Week 1 | 7


If you’ve cut your arm, you want to protect the skin from dishwater and dirt in the environ-ment, so you put a bandage over the cut. You don’t put the arm with an open wound into a basin of dishwater and start to wash the dishes with it. You protect it to try to help it to heal more quickly.

Well, with the intestine, you want to do the same thing. If your intestinal tract is damaged and irritated, you want to give it a break so that it can heal up the holes. If you’re putting food through it every three or four hours, even if it’s well-digested food, it’s still going through the system. As part of this program, we aim to reduce that load by replacing some of your solid meals with liquid meals, like green smoothies and juices. Juices provide the least amount of irritation because there is no fiber left in them. Green smoothies are also less irritating be-cause you’ve blended the fiber it up so that it’s very soft and smooth.

Chia seeds can be helpful, because they create a gel-like substance when you soak them that can actually help to soothe the intestinal tract as it goes through. If you have a severely irritated gut, you might try mak-ing some chia gel and having a little drink of that gel before you eat. You can put a little cinna-mon or something in it to make it taste better, and then take that down to coat the lining and soothe it before you put any-thing into your system.

Another way of soothing leaky gut and irritation is to use some of the herbs I talked about the other day. In particular, slippery elm is a great help. You can do the same thing you do with the chia seeds; make a little gel-like paste of it before you eat and swallow it down to coat and heal the lining.

I mentioned DGL licorice, or just plain licorice, in your supplement list as well, because licorice is very soothing and healing. It has been compared to things like over the counter and pre-scription ulcer medications in medical studies, and research shows that licorice actually heals. The over the counter medications don’t actually heal the ulcer; they just provide relief. The licorice did not provide relief quite as quickly as the medications, but over the course of two to three weeks, it actually provided more relief and also repaired the ulcer. So, it can repair both your stomach and your leaky gut, which is why I included it as part of the protocol.

We talked about how to determine if your digestion is in need of repair. I also have a work-sheet on optimizing your elimination that I put together for another program. I am going to make a note to myself to upload that and send you all a link to it. Even though we’re talking about leaky gut, it’s important to optimize elimination as well.

Is that clear, Tera, before I go on to discuss what we can do about it? Is it clear what leaky gut is, how it happens, how toxic it is, and how damaging it is to our systems?

Tera: Yes, definitely. I think if you just keep going it’s all going to sort of fall into place.

Dr. Ritamarie: OK. There’s a program called the “4R Program” which was developed by one of my mentors in nutrition whose name is Jeffrey Bland. Although he isn’t that into whole fresh foods, and I think his programs would be a lot better if he were, he’s really brilliant in terms of studying the biochemistry of how things work, and creating programs to heal the mechanics.

“Chia seeds can be helpful, because they create a gel-like substance when you soak them that can

actually help to soothe the intestinal tract as it goes through.”



He came up with this idea of the 4Rs: Remove the things that cause the gut to get leaky. Re-place the missing enzymes and nutrients. Repair the damage. Reinoculate, or put back the healthy gut bacteria that have been destroyed and damaged by lifestyle and diet.

The first step is to remove the toxins. We’ve talked about this, and you have the list of toxic foods and things to avoid, so I won’t go through it again now. If you just avoid those toxins, even if you don’t do the other steps, you are going to get some degree of repair. You will have some improvement just because you’ve stopped overloading the digestive tract.

That is why some people will can on a raw diet or a juice cleanse for a small length of time, not add any of these extra supplements, and have some good results. However, a lot of people do

those short term fixes don’t get a great a result or they plateau. If you’re in that second group, that’s a great reason for doing this detox program, because it’s going to get a little bit deeper.

I won’t go through the list of toxins that includes alcohol and caffeine and all those kinds of things in detail again, but I do want to mention gluten, be-cause that’s one of the hardest things for people to avoid when we do a program. If you’re one of those people, listen up, because I’m going to explain why you really want to get rid of the gluten. Even if you’re not sensitive to it, gluten can be damaging

to the gut mucosa and cause inflammation. If you’re not sensitive to it now, and you continue to eat it, there is a good chance you will become sensitive to it. So, you want it out of your system for the duration of this program.

Gluten actually works like a glue in your system; that is where the name came from. It is kind of gluey, and it can stick to and embed itself in the little crevices in your intestine and actu-ally block the absorption of nutrients. It can poison the mechanism that the nutrients go through to be absorbed. I want to explain this really quickly, without getting into too much of the physiology of the digestive tract, because if you understand this, the reason for avoiding gluten may make a little more sense.

A lot of people will say to me, “Well, if my gut is leaky, even though the toxins may be getting through, at least all the nutrients are getting through.” That’s a misunderstanding. Actually, although toxins can slip through an impaired digestive tract very easily, some of the key nu-trients, like the electrolytes, actually require a little pump as an active transport through the membrane into the bloodstream. Leaky gut damages that pump.

As part of the intestinal permeability test I was telling you about earlier, you drink two dif-ferent substances. One contains nutrients, and the other contains things that shouldn’t get digested. The test measures your urine to determine whether the toxins that shouldn’t have been absorbed are present. If the toxins are in your urine, it means that you have a leaky gut. In addition, if the nutrient molecules that should have been absorbed are not in your urine, it means that that the active transport mechanism through the gut membrane is damaged in addition to the gut being leaky.

Getting back to gluten intolerance, first of all, it gums up the pump mechanism and doesn’t al-low the nutrients to pass through the membrane into the bloodstream. Then, you get symp-toms of malabsorption. In children, sometimes those symptoms look like failure to thrive, but

“Even if you’re not sensitive to it, gluten can be damaging to the gut mucosa and cause inflammation.”

Week 1 | 9


there are also other symptoms of poor nutrition. For example, if your brain isn’t getting the nutrients it needs, maybe you have trouble focusing, or maybe you get depressed. Beyond all that, there are food allergies and sensitivities.

When the undigested molecules get into your bloodstream and your immune system starts at-tacking them, you can get autoimmune diseases. An autoimmune disease is when the immune sys-tem starts to attack your own tissue. For example, the immune system may start to attack your thy-roid, your pancreas, your joints, or your mucous membranes as if they were foreign tissue. There are all sorts of different autoimmune diseases, which are named and categorized by the areas they affect, and these autoimmune processes are really, really dangerous.

The connection between autoimmune diseases and leaky gut has to do with the fact that the body perceives undigested food particles as things that are attacking you. Sometimes, a few of the amino acids at the end of an undigested protein chain (from gluten or broccoli or whatever) in the blood are similar to the amino acids at the end of the chain marker for healthy tissue, like the thyroid gland. So, when your body produces the antibody to get rid of the gluten, that antibody sees your thyroid and says, “Oh! There’s some more of that stuff I’m attacking,” and attacks your thyroid. Then, you can start to have symptoms of the long-term thyroid problems that you really want to avoid.

This is why I want to stress that it’s really important to clean up your leaky gut. That’s step one, which you’ve already embarked upon by starting this program. Avoiding toxic stuff in your environment and your typical food intake is very much within your control.

The second step in the 4R program is to replace the missing enzymes and nutrients. First of all, when you eat foods that have been cooked, all the enzymes have been killed off. If you have been studying the raw food diet so far, you know that one of the reasons we recom-mend eating more raw foods is because they have more enzymes in them. So, in this pro-gram, when you’re eating more raw foods and fewer cooked foods, it’s going to help you by providing more enzymes for digestion.

In addition, I recommend that you take supplemental digestive enzymes with all the cooked foods that you eat, and with the complex raw foods that you eat. If you are eating things with nuts or seeds in them, you definitely want to take enzymes. If you have a long history of bloat-ing and gas, it’s probably a good idea to just take digestive enzymes with all your meals to give your body that extra oomph to speed the repair process along.

Of course we are going to be drinking lots of greens, eating lots of greens, and using a lot of fresh vegetables and fruits, which are loaded not only with enzymes and nutrients. The green juices, the sea vegetables, the micro algae like Spirulina and the chlorella that we are recom-mending all are very, very high in enzymes. They’re also high in chlorophyll, which is very, very healing and soothing to the digestive tract. Plus, they are loaded with nutrition. So, just the diet part of this program alone is going to help you tremendously.

The next step in the 4Rs is repair of the digestive tract. I’m a foodist, and I’m a naturist, so I like to do everything I can using food itself without adding extra supplements. However, I

“Avoiding toxic stuff in your environment and

your typical food intake is very much within

your control.”



do recognize that there are times when it’s a good idea to add selected, targeted, nutritional supplementation to speed up the repair process. If you’ve had a leaky gut problem going on for a long time, it’s going to take a really long time to repair it by just getting rid of toxins and eating lots of nutritious food. In that case, I recommend that you take some extra stuff to speed up the repair.

Glutamine is an important amino acid that comes from foods. If you’ve had impaired pro-tein digestion for a while because you’re not producing enough stomach acid and enzymes, chances are you’re not getting enough glutamine from your food. You’ll probably extract enough glutamine later down the road after your gut is healed, but you need the glutamine to heal the gut. Another thing you need is zinc, which is also very important for healing the gut.

So the recommended dose of glutamine is 2500 mg twice a day. That number comes from all the different studies where researchers have added glutamine to people’s diets, watched the repair, and taken pictures before and after. You can buy glutamine in a powdered form. There are several companies that I recommended. Most health food stores will also have it, and if you live on the outskirts of a city or in a different country, you can just type “glutamine” into Google

and find somewhere to order online. However you shop for it, get some glutamine, and put it in your smoothies, shakes, nut milk, or water.

Quercetin is a bioflavonoid found in onions and garlic. There are also other foods that contain it, and you can find those by Googling “quercetin containing foods.” If you have a very inflamed gut, you can take extra quer-cetin at 500 mg twice a day. Again, it’s a very widely available nutrient.

Other good supplements include UltraClear Sustain and UltraInflamx, which are medical foods developed by Jeffrey Bland; the one who created this 4R program. These supplements provide lots of amino acids in digestible form. They are rice protein based supplements that have glutamine in them. So, if you’re doing option one and you’re taking the UltraClear Sus-tain or the UltraInflamx, you don’t need to take extra glutamine unless you have a very se-verely inflamed gut.

Also, anti-inflammatory herbs and foods like ginger, turmeric, onions and garlic are great to incorporate in your diet. That’s why, when you see the new recipes, you’ll notice that we’ve included more of those ingredients. You can also just start to incorporate those foods more into your own recipes. Turmeric specifically is incredibly beneficial not only for the gut but also for the liver. I will go through a little more about those foods when I go through the protocols.

There are also foods that help repair the gut. We talked a little bit about flaxseed and chia seed already. Flaxseed can be as helpful as chia, but I do find that if you have something like diverticulosis, which is little outpocketings in your large intestine (or even diverticulitis, when those pockets become infected), sometimes the flaxseeds don’t work very well. Even though a flaxseed gel is really soothing to the gut, those little seeds can actually get into the pockets and be irritating, so you probably want to grind them.

I am not saying that you should use all of these foods and supplements. I’m just giving you choices, because you may not be able to get the specific supplements that I’ve recommend-ed in the protocols.

“...anti-inflammatory herbs and foods like ginger,

turmeric, onions and garlic are great to incorporate

in your diet.”

Week 1 | 11


There are also some helpful herbs, like slippery elm and marshmallow, which you can use if you’re familiar with them. Chamomile, which you can drink as a tea, helps to calm the diges-tive tract as both a muscle relaxant and an anti-inflammatory agent. I know around here, we have a lot of Mexican markets and they have these huge aloe leaves for sale. You can strip them open and put scoops and spoonfuls of the gel inside in a smoothie. Aloe is very, very healing for your intestinal tract.

Plantain is another herb that probably grows in your back yard. We did an herb walk last week, and we found plantain all over the place. Go online and look at a picture of plantain, then go out into your backyard and see if you can identify it. Plantain can be added to your smoothies.

Propolis is another herb that you can purchase as a supplement, as is calendula. Again, some people have calendula actually growing in their yard, but if not, it’s a very common herb that you can find at any health food store or herb shop. It’s very heal-ing and soothing to the digestive tract.

Have any questions come up for you, Tera? Is there more clarification you think is needed before I go on to the rest of this?

Tera: No. My own personal reaction as I encoun-ter some of this information is a bit of a feeling of overwhelm, and maybe a bit of denial. I think, “Well, I don’t have leaky gut, and I don’t get bloated, so do I really need to do these things?” Every person is in a different situation, deal-ing with different symptoms and physical manifestations of what is going on internally. I’m just giving you my own feedback because you asked.

I think it would be really nice if we could put our heads together and give people a road map to this detox process. We could say, “OK. Start here. If you feel like this, order this. If you feel like this, order this.” It’s important for all understand that this is the first time we’ve done something like this, and we’ve really tried to make the program accessible to as many people as possible, so we want to have everyone’s patience and understanding as we put it together for the first time.

Dr. Ritamarie: That’s great feedback. I started to do that last night because I was thinking, “OK. This is a lot of information. How can we figure out which category each person should go with?” Those are great points.

On the topic of not having any digestive symptoms, if you don’t have any of the symptoms that I read off (and that are listed in the handout and questionnaire), then you don’t need to do the full extent of this program. You need to do the food pieces of the program, but you may not need the extra supplements at this point.

Tera: Yes.

Dr. Ritamarie: Right. If somebody has done juice cleanses before and has really been focusing on being fully engaged in the first part of the ninety days that you’ve been doing, they may not need to go as headstrong and intense on this piece. That person can just eat the foods, soothe the digestive tract, and do the thoughts and the chewing. Those things are lifelong habits that we all want to establish. That may be your focus for the next two weeks.

“Plantain is another herb that probably grows in your back

yard. We did an herb walk last week, and we

found plantain all over the place.”



However, for those of you who have the bloating and the gas, get hives, or have eczema, and have particular reactions that seem to point to the gut, then whole protocol is important to follow.

Tera: Yes. I love the idea of just sticking with the food if you don’t have any symptoms.

While I have you totally cornered and on the spot, you didn’t answer my question about how many hours of sleep you got.

Dr. Ritamarie: Let’s just say more than I usually get.

Tera: Yes, thanks. I only ask that to illustrate that there are different things each of us needs to put in place. For some people, the supplements won’t be as important as focusing on not eating so late or getting more sleep.

Dr. Ritamarie: Exactly. I’ll do a “true confessions” here: Last night I was up later than I intended to be, and I started to get hungry because dinner was at seven. At midnight, it had been five hours since I had eaten and I was thinking, “Oh, I’ve got to go get something to eat.” I had to keep telling myself that wouldn’t be the best thing; the best choice would be for me to go to bed and get up early to finish the work.

I had to talk myself through that, and it’s a training process. It’s really through this process that you identify where your problems lie. For you, is it, “I always eat on the run?” Then, re-ally work on that. Is it, “I don’t chew my food well enough, because I’m seeing recognizable pieces coming out the other end.” If yes, you need to be looking at that as a big piece. Then, incorporating the really good green foods and juices is going to help to heal the gut.

The reason I brought up supplementation is that I know that idea raises a red flag for people who have been on raw food for a long time who think you can do it all with food. What I see in my practice is that many people can heal it all by just doing the juices over a long period of time, but that takes a lot of effort and discipline. We’re not all there.

You really have to be honest with yourself. If you’re having trouble just making a green smoothie first thing in the morning, drinking a gallon of juice ev-ery day is going to be a challenge for you because it’s a lot more work. Like you said, you may feel like you would have to strap yourself to your juicer. Be honest with yourself about where you are, what the problems are, and how much you can do.

Just because you do this program for six weeks, it doesn’t mean you’re set for life. I think you really nailed that in the introductory letter for the pro-gram. Detox is a process that happens every moment. It happens while you sleep. It happens while you talk. Your body has the built-in mechanism to do it.

What you want to do is constantly lower the load. If you’ve already got a big detox load, and you’ve already got damage to your intestinal wall, just drinking juice for two weeks is not going to heal that damage. Doing that for two years will, but you may want to get results more quickly.

That is why we said this program is for people who don’t have the time in their lives to take six weeks and go to a detox center to heal. Beyond that, even if you could go to those places,

“... many people can heal it all by just doing the juices over a long

period of time, but that takes a lot of

effort and discipline.”

Week 1 | 13


I know lots of people who have done that, not made any changes in their day to day life, and the benefits don’t stay.

With this program, we want you to cultivate a commitment to habits that you can do day after day after day after day. Not that you’re going to be a saint and be perfect every moment of every day, but your habits will be healthier in gen-eral. Does that make sense?

Tera: Totally.

Dr. Ritamarie: Does that help with some of the red flags that are going up? I’m glad you said it.

Tera: Yes. They’re not major red flags; it’s just that you can feel like you’re floating in the ocean when all this information comes in at once. I think you have covered and addressed the concerns really well. People in this program are all starting in dif-ferent places. For those who have significant health issues or who are struggling, it’s impor-tant to put all the details there and let them know which course they need to chart.

For me, just getting back to green smoothies and maybe some green juices, going to bed on time, and not eating late would make a huge difference. Maybe supplementing a little bit with digestive enzymes, or giving myself a few of other things that click and resonate with me feels right. You know?

Dr. Ritamarie: Exactly. Yes. The protocol is also a great reminder to pay attention to all the stuff that you know is good to do but you don’t always do it. That doesn’t mean that there is anything wrong with you, or that you’re deficient in some way; it just means that you are a real person living a real life and you don’t always make the best choices.

What I tell people to do, especially with the probiotics and the enzymes, is to have them on hand for the times when you don’t make the best food choices. Aim to do the best you can when you eat, but be honest with yourself when you have to sit down and eat a meal really quickly, or the food isn’t as well-combined as you would like, or you are out with friends eating foods that normally you don’t. In those situations, take the digestive enzymes.

Give your body the little crutch that it needs when you’re making it limp. When you’re not making it limp, then you don’t need the crutch. Does that make sense?

Tera: Yes, totally.

Dr. Ritamarie: You can use probiotics the same way. You see that my list of probiotic foods is huge, so incorporate the foods as your main active step. Personally, I’d love to be incorpo-rating those foods everyday, but I don’t. Sometimes I don’t remember or I don’t have them handy. In that case, I go with the supplement somebody else cultured for me. I throw that in my smoothie, or take it in water in between meals. I want my body to get the benefit of the probiotic, even if something in my lifestyle prevented me from doing it with food. Does that make sense?

Tera: Yes.

Dr. Ritamarie: The same thing goes for my sleep. I know that if I eat impeccably and drink a lot of juices and smoothies, I can get away with a lot less sleep. That’s a choice that I make

“... it’s just that you can feel like you’re floating in the ocean when all

this information comes in at once.”



sometimes. If I know I’m not going to be able to sleep very much one night, I’ll just do green smoothies during the day. That way, I’m not putting a digestive load on my tract that causes my body to spend a lot of time working at night, so I can actually stay up a little longer.

This is not the ideal choice for the long term, but we are all real people, and we are not going make choices that are pristine and perfect all the time. This program is meant to help you to fix some of the things you broke because you weren’t paying attention and made some bad choices. That’s what the 4R program is.

I’ve listed all the helpful foods because I want you to have choices. I want you to say, “Oh! I saw some jicama in the grocery store and that looked really good. Oh, yes, it was on that list of inulin-containing foods, which helps to feed my good bacteria. Yay!” As the ideas about what foods are good become more and more enmeshed, you may even get an intuitive hit when you’re shopping about what you need to get. You may get an intuitive hit but not know why. Then, you look it up and find out that food is good for something that is troubling you right now.

There’s a whole list of helpful foods to choose from, and you only have to include some of those them. You can add shredded Jerusalem artichokes on a salad, and it’s lovely. Most people don’t think of them. You can even juice Jerusalem artichokes. Throw them through your juicer. They are a root, so they’ll produce juice like a carrot or a sweet potato would, although not as much. You can take that juice and add it to your smoothie.

I wouldn’t recommend actually putting Jerusalem artichokes into smoothies because they have too much starch. Combining the starch in the artichokes with the fruit in the smooth-ies is probably not a great idea. Drinking it as a juice would be better. Putting it in your salad separate from your smoothie would be a great idea.

You can do that with other green things, like chicory and dandelion. Those are easy. You just throw a handful into a smoothie, or into your salad. You can incorporate these on a daily basis and start to heal your gut.

Optimizing your digestion is really, really, important. Again, I want to mention that it’s impor-tant to eat in a calm, relaxed state. Don’t sit at your desk reading your emails and getting mad at people who sent messages about controversial topics while you’re eating. That’s not going to allow your food to be digested well. I will admit this is a hard one for me, which is why I often choose to blend up my meals and drink them as smoothies. Find your Achilles heel, so to speak, and give yourself tools to support yourself to work through it.

Where would you say is the best place to take this call now? I think the next thing I would like to go through is the foods that I want you to include on a daily basis in this program. We have the three different options. We can go through those, or we can hold off on going through those until you and I have put together a flow chart that’s a little bit more step by step.

Tera: I think going through the foods is a good idea. We actually have some people who are doing a work exchange on this program, and maybe there’s someone that would be well-suited to help us lay out the step by step guide. I think it would be good for you to go over the foods like you suggested.

Dr. Ritamarie: You have some menu plans already. You can modify those a little bit according to what I am mentioning here. Of course, most of the foods we recommend are going to be

“I want to mention that it’s important to eat in a calm, relaxed state.”

Week 1 | 15


fresh, raw, green vegetables and fruits. However, a lot of people have said, “Oh, I don’t know if I can go all raw for six weeks. That’s a long time. I have never done this.” If you don’t do all raw for six weeks, it’s not the be-all and the end-all. It would be good if you could, but there are lots of conditions under which you shouldn’t.

If you have a really irritable bowel, then you may have to lightly steam your vegetables and blend them to allow that gut to repair. If 80% of your food is raw, and then you do some steamed vegetables, it’s not a problem. The goal of this program is to eat food that’s really easy to digest.

If you’re doing any nuts or seeds, I’d recommend you keep that to a minimum because those are hard to digest. We’re going to be having fat free days throughout the program for maybe a day or two in a row. That will happen more during the liver cleansing part, where we give the liver a break so that it can get its juices back together.

Look at it like this: If you’ve run really hard for three days in a row, everything’s achy. If you try to run that fourth day, you’re not going to be very efficient and fast. So, you give yourself a few days to rest and then you go out and do it again. Then, you are going to be really good at it. That’s what we want to do with your liver.

In this gut repair program, I built the menu plans so that there were at least a couple of days of just liquids each week. The more liquid only days that you can incorporate, the quicker you are going to heal your gut.

Let me clarify what I mean by liquid only days: The ideal intake on a liquid only day would be just lots of green juices. That’s going to give you the most repair. However, a lot of people don’t have juicers, and juicing is very time consuming. We’re trying to make this program very accessible, so if you can get to your juice bar and get a couple of juices each day, that would be great.

You can also blend your foods and do some green smoothies. If you’re going to be doing nuts or seeds on the liquid day, you want to make a milk out of them. You want to make a hemp seed milk. You can even make chia milk, which I have tried. It’s not so good tasting, but it’s really great for cleaning out your gut and helping with your elimination. You can play with that, but liquid only days will be incorporated.

Some of the recipes in your menu planner might have some vanilla extract in it, but you want to avoid extracts like almond or vanilla, because they have glycerin in them, which is made from corn. If you have corn sensitivity and you use a corn product, you are going to decrease the effectiveness of the program. We are trying to stick to hypo-allergenic, low allergy foods.

You want to minimize oil except for hemp, flax, or coconut. If you do have flax oil, you want to make sure it is really fresh. Read the date on the label. If it doesn’t have a date, then don’t buy the flax oil. If it does have a date, look at it and make sure that it expires a month or two out from now. Rancid flax oil is inflammatory, and we’re trying to heal the inflammation in your gut.

“The ideal intake on a liquid only day would be just lots of green juices. That’s going to give you

the most repair.”



I tend to prefer to eat whole foods, so you will see some of the recipes call for some young co-conut meat or flaked coconut to be mixed in. Recipes may even call for a little bit of coconut cream, or coconut concentrate that you can get in a jar, kind of like peanut butter. If so, make sure you get the raw, organic one. Don’t get the one at the Asian market, which is processed and has preservatives and some sugar in it.

You want to keep the oil to a minimum. You don’t want to be slathering your stuff in oil, because that will put a load on your digestive tract. Oil itself is not that great. You are really better off with the whole foods, but you do want to make sure that you get some coconut every day (unless you’re sensitive to it, or really have an aversion to it). Coconut has re-ally good healing properties for your leaky gut.

Mixing hemp, chia and flax seeds in equal parts with your coconut is a great way to help your body make the anti-inflammatory chemicals that it needs to re-pair leaky gut.

Let me say a little bit about dried fruit, and then I want to say a bit about fruit in general. You really ought to be avoiding dried fruit, especially during the gut repair phase, because it’s such a concentrated source of sugar. That will both feed your Candida and cause your blood sugar to spike.

Candida is actually an organism that lives normally in your body. It lives in balance with your good gut organisms. However, if you take antibiotics, birth control pills, steroids, or you just eat a lot of foods that tax your digestive tract, the good bacteria and flora that live in your intestinal tract get killed off.

Those bacteria are responsible for helping you digest your food, and for making some of the B vitamins. When you kill the good bacteria off, the Candida has a field day. Fungi and bac-teria that normally just inhabit in very small amounts have a field day and start to grow out of control. They produce toxins that can cause bloating and gas that can contribute to leaky gut. So if you have a problem with this, it’s a really good idea to get it under control. There’s a lot of controversy about how to do that.

Did you have a question, Tera?

Tera: Yes. Should people who don’t necessarily feel that they are suffering with any Candida issues still be avoiding fruit?

Dr. Ritamarie: No. Not at all. Fruits are great. Here’s the deal: I have a questionnaire that I am going to upload. Take that questionnaire and see if you are a candidate. If you have Candida overgrowth, there is still a controversy about whether you should include fruit in your diet or not. Some camps will say to include lots of fruit, but keep the fat out and the Candida won’t be able to grow. That may be true, but I’ve seen people who have gone on that particular regimen, used a lot of fruit and greens, and still had problems.

People on the other end of the spectrum will say not to do any fruit, and instead get your calories from good fats and vegetables. I’ve seen people try that diet and not be able to fol-low it because it was just too restrictive or they just didn’t have energy on it. In those cases, it didn’t help their leaky gut or their Candida.

“Candida is actually an organism that lives normally in your body. It lives in balance with

your good gut organisms.”

Week 1 | 17


I’ve also seen people on both of those plans have success. So, what’s the answer? The answer is you’ve got to figure it out for your body. Try this plan with the smoothies and the fruit. If you find that that causes you to have bloating or gas, or you get irritable an hour later because your blood sugar is rising, then modify it. Choose only the low sugar fruits.

It’s very easy to find a list of low sugar fruits. Just go online and type in “low glycemic fruits”. You’ll see that berries, grapefruit, lemons and limes have very low sugar. You may have to stick to just small fractions of those fruits, in particular blueberries, which help with the blood sugar regulation. Cranberries, strawberries, blackberries, raspberries, and things like that are also low in sugar.

If you don’t have a problem with the sugar in fruit, then you don’t have to modify. Then you’re going to do well with lots of fruit on this diet. If you do have a problem with it, then you want to go with the low fruit version. We’re not recommending you just choose one method and stick with it. You have to use your body as the experiment ground and get feedback from it.

It could be that you have so much overgrowth that you can’t do any fruit for a while. However, once you get the inflammation under control, and you reinoculate with the good bacteria, you can handle fruits.

I’ve had diabetics on green smoothie cleanses for a week, putting plenty of fruit into their green smooth-ies, and their blood sugars just get normal within three to four days. I’ve had others whose blood sugar rises if they put strawberries into their green smooth-ies, but not if they put blueberries in.

You have to experiment with yourself. Try some of the recipes that are in the booklet. If you find that it doesn’t feel right for you, then modify things. Any-body that needs more specifics for their particu-lar condition can consult with me on a personal ba-sis and we can help you to put things together. This is just trial and error. That’s why there are so many detox programs out there; different things work for different people.

I have tried both ends of the spectrum. I have tried sticking with the very high fruit, 80/20/20 type of a diet; and I could go two or three days before I felt just totally out of balance and hungry all the time. I’ve tried the other end where I’ve had no fruit at all, and while I don’t get as crazy and have as much of the swings with that, I find myself craving fruits. I’ve also done water fasts and juice fasts. I have no problem with the either of those fasts, but if I try to do a no fruit diet for any length of time, I have difficulty.

I’m not sure what that’s all about, but I’ve learned that about myself. So, if I really feel like I want to get a cleanse going on because I’ve had too many dates and Candida’s starting to overgrow, I know that my best way is to go a few days with just green juices to clear it out.

This is a lot of information, and there’s a lot of choice, so we’ll narrow it down. The point is there’s no exact right or wrong way to detox. You have to find what’s right for you. We’re going to give you guidelines, we’re going to give you menus, and we’re going to have you keep food diaries. It’s really important to keep a food diary because that way you’ll know what affects you.

“I’ve had diabetics on green smoothie

cleanses for a week, putting plenty of

fruit into their green smoothies, and their blood sugars just get normal within three

to four days.”



Tera, you said you thought buckwheat was affecting you. You might decide, “No, I can’t put buckwheat into my diet on a regular basis.” Somebody said they were allergic to chlorella. Maybe some of the other green powders are going to work for them instead. Maybe it’s just the algae that is not good for them. There are some doctors out there who will say that if you have really severe Candida, you shouldn’t be doing the algae. You have to find out for you.

Tera: That flexibility is one of the things that I appreciate about our program. Inflammation is a great thing to notice, because it’s a clear indication that the body is reacting to certain foods. I notice that some foods will make me retain water and other foods won’t. So, I have been watching are my ankles to evaluate, “What am I responding to negatively?” and “What is my body sort of resisting?” I know buckwheat is one of the problem foods for me because I tend to go into a water retention mode when I eat it.

It’s been interesting, because I hadn’t really thought of monitoring that before, and that’s part of what this whole process is doing. Yes, we’re talking about different supplements and foods, but we’re also educating ourselves about the processes that are going on in the body.

The more we understand, the more we can get control of the situation and become em-powered about our health. When we don’t know what’s going on, how the gut works, why toxins are circulating, or how this whole thing gets itself going, we are missing a layer of personal empowerment.

Dr. Ritamarie: Absolutely. We’re developing consciousness about eating. We’re practicing mindful eating. We’re becoming aware of how food affects us. Now, we don’t want to be-come aware to the point where we get paranoid about everything. It’s better to just observe and think, “Huh. Well, that was interesting.”

In the food diary, I recommend creating a list with three columns. The titles of the columns would be: Foods that are Definitely Causing Me a Problem, Foods that I’m Suspicious About, and Foods that Definitely Make Me Feel Good. You may already know which category some foods fall into.

For example, you have experimented enough with the corn and the buck-wheat to know to put those into the “I am having a problem with this” column. It doesn’t mean that you permanently have a problem with it. That’s what the repair phase is all about. Once you repair the gut, decrease the inflam-mation, and increase your body’s ability to handle stuff, you won’t react to foods that are actually healthy anymore.

You will continue to react to unhealthy foods, because that’s your body’s way of saying, “Uh, uh! No way! Don’t do that!” The first time you ever had a sip of alcoholic beverage, what did you do? Probably spit it out. That was your body’s protective mechanism. But when you over-ride your innate protective mechanisms by mindlessly eating and drinking, you don’t get clear signals anymore. We want to reacquaint you with your intuitive sense about what’s good and what’s not good, so that you don’t reach for something mindlessly and say, “Oh, I am just go-ing to eat this.” Instead, you say, “Eew. That’s not food.”

Once that shift happens, when you see a chocolate cupcake that used to look really good to you, you think, “Wow! That’s not food,” and you don’t want to pick it up. I’ll tell you it does get

“You will continue to react to unhealthy foods, because that’s your body’s way of saying, “Uh,

uh! No way! Don’t do that!” ”

Week 1 | 19


there. You really will get there if you follow this kind of a process. Really endeavor to become mindful. Keep those food charts.

Keep in mind that even something as healthy as broccoli may end up on your suspicious list. If you’re going along eating and doing really well on this program, then you decide to have some broccoli and you suddenly get gassy and bloated, you may think, “I haven’t been gassy and bloated in three or four days. I wonder if it was the broccoli.” If that happens, put it on your suspect list and don’t eat broccoli again for four or five days. Once the bloating and gas is gone, you can try it again. That’s a process called elimination and provocation, which is the best way to determine what you’re sensitive to.

On the other hand, you may notice, “Wow, every time I drink a kale banana smoothie I feel incredible. I feel like I’m flying high. I feel like I’m on top of the world.” Put those foods on the

positive list. Create your own little roadmap to your health. We can give you a guideline, but you’re going to actually fill in the details. Hope-fully, at the end of this process, you will know what makes you feel good, what doesn’t make you feel good, and be able to make choices that optimize the way you feel.

Getting back to supplements, I put up the lists so that everybody can read through them and see what the choices are. Once you have de-cided which process you want to go with and you’re ready to order supplements, Raw Food World has almost everything. They have chia

seeds, all the greens, the enzymes, the probiotics, the Sun Warrior, and the Health Force Nu-tritionals all in one place. That’s the Raw Food World link that I gave you earlier. You can get just about everything there.

Are we full for today?

Tera: I think we’re definitely well fed. I’m going to check in with the questions before we go. I know some of the questions that came in have been answered during the course of the call.

Someone said that yes, a roadmap would be very helpful. She’s confused about what the three stages of the program are and what she should by for the other two stages. She has ordered supplements, which is good, but now she is worried that she may not need them.

Dr. Ritamarie: The thing is, if you’ve ordered any of the stuff that I have laid out, it’s going to help you. Even if you don’t think you need them, they will probably be helpful. It would be the rare person on this program who’s not going to need the supplements and isn’t able to benefit from them. You may be able to get by and do the program without them, but you’re going to speed up your process if you use them. Does that make sense?

Tera: Yes.

Dr. Ritamarie: The licorice and glutamine in particular are going to be helpful to everyone.

Tera: I want to clarify that, if you don’t order the supplements, it’s not like you’re backtracking. If I don’t do any supplements, it’s like I’m choosing to run a race in my old sneakers because I know that I just don’t have the commitment or the discipline to invest in nice, super high sup-

“Wow, every time I drink a kale banana smoothie I feel incredible. I feel like I’m flying high. I feel like I’m on top of the world.”



port brand name shoes. I’m just not in a place where I am going to order supplements. So, when I hear this, I ask, “What can I still do for myself?”

The main message is really not, “You should do this and you shouldn’t do this.” The message is that each person has to find out where they are and take it according to what they need to address first. I understand the desire to have a list of everything we’re going to cover right now, but keep in mind that we’re trying to create a program that is useful for people with dif-ferent budgets, geographic locations, and degrees of health. We could just put something there that tells everyone to take the medical foods, but some people are not comfortable with that. That’s why there are three different protocols. It’s taken a lot to put these three different options together.

Over the next six weeks, my main focus is going to be tightening up the discipline with my food, doing more green juices, and getting sleep. Those are things that I had fallen short on prioritizing for myself up until now. I know that I’m not in a place to order supplements just yet, even though I conduct detoxes to make a living.

So, getting back to the question that came in, if you’ve ordered supplements, you haven’t wast-ed any time or money. It’s just like you’ve stuck yourself in high-powered running shoes so you can get there faster with a bit more support.

Dr. Ritamarie: I have laid out three programs. You’ve decided you’re going to do the option three, which is the more food based, juice based process. To you, that feels the most comfort-able. To other people, that feels the most difficult. To some, just buying some UltraClear Sus-tain and some gut powder, putting it in a container and stirring it around and drinking it, boy, that’s easy! To you, that’s not easy.

Tera: No.

Dr. Ritamarie: Everybody’s different in what they perceive as easy. The idea of being chained to your juicer and doing a lot of wheatgrass and that kind of stuff is challenging to many people. However, you might think “Oh, I’ve done that before. I’m going to do that again. I’m just going to tighten up and do that during this process.”

For a lot of people, especially people who travel a lot, the easiest option is just to have this jar of stuff that they can put it in a container, shake up, and drink in order to promote that gut repair. They don’t have to go find a juice bar and get the wheatgrass juice. They don’t have to go to their kitchen and juice ten pounds of veggies a day.

Those are the more extreme ends of the spectrum. There are also many people in the middle who want to make a commitment to taking in whole raw foods, not supplements that are synthetic. That’s why I developed the Sun Warrior based option with the Health Force Nutri-tionals products.

Health Force Nutritionals was created by Dr. Jameth Sheridan, who has been a raw foodist for twenty some years. Every single one of his products is whole foods based. There is not a synthetic ingredient in anything. He’s really careful. He’s well studied, and he’s committed to purity. The Sun Warrior protein is made from 100% raw foods. Dr. Sheridan didn’t like all

“The idea of being chained to your juicer

and doing a lot of wheat-grass and that kind of stuff is challenging to

many people.”

Week 1 | 21


the protein powders out there that are synthesized and hydrolyzed and have added synthetic vitamin C. The Sun Warrior protein powder is a whole food.

Its amino acid profile has been tested, and it’s 98% similar to mother’s milk. It’s a very highly absorbable protein. It’s going to give you the amino acids that you are not necessarily get-ting from your food because you don’t have enough digestive enzymes. If you don’t have the right amino acids then you’re not going to be able to heal your gut.

I’m starting this program after being on raw foods for 24 years. My biggest weaknesses are bad food combining at times, eating on the run, and eating late at night. Those are the things I’m tightening up right now. I’m using the Sun Warrior Protein powder as a help so that I can eat less often and not have to go to my blender all the time to make a new green smoothie. That’s a convenience factor because I’m realistic. I would love to do wheatgrass juicing all day long, but I’m being realistic and I don’t have the time for it. So, I’m going to be following the program that way.

I’ve done the UltraClear program with the Sustain (and another food later on for the liver) myself, and I’ve coached hundreds, if not thousands, of people through that program and had tremendous results. It works.

The point is to be realistic with yourself in terms of where you are starting. If you just heard about raw foods three weeks ago, got on Tera’s website, saw this thing and thought, “Wow, I want to do this!” maybe option three is a little beyond your reach. That first option might be great. It’s still 1000% better than what you were doing before.

Does that make sense?

Tera: Yes, totally.

Dr. Ritamarie: Be realistic with yourself. That’s why I developed the three options. Some peo-ple have said that they can’t afford all the supplements, and have asked which would be the most necessary or the ones that would give the biggest benefit. That’s where we could use a flow chart. I can’t answer that question for each person individually because there aren’t enough hours in the day and I’m not sleeping enough at night already.

The point is that we’re here to help you make this experience really, really good. The best thing to do right now is to take a deep breath and know and trust that your body can do this.

Tera: Yes. Also, it’s helpful that some people are giving a little of their time to help with the organization of the program. There are some people who are concerned about having gotten started a little late. So, if we add an extra week on the end of the program, it’s not going to hurt anybody’s feelings. We’re here to get through this together, and it’s not helping anybody’s digestive toxicity levels to be stressed out about the exact start date.

Whatever you do today to move yourself on a gradient toward the level of health you are try-ing to achieve is perfect. We are not going to put this off because it’s not perfectly complete

“My biggest weaknesses are bad food combining at times, eating on the run, and eating late at night. Those are the things I’m tightening up right now”



yet. When we learn to walk, it takes some time. We stumble about, and nobody’s expecting us to be perfect the first time we try.

We have put a lot into this program already, and it’s just getting started. There is still a lot more to get through. Let’s just grow together with the understanding that that pieces will fall in place with more clarity as we progress. The bonuses we have included in this program set up a lot of long term support. This is a journey. Let’s not get stressed out about a week or a couple of days. Let’s just make this a positive experience.

Dr. Ritamarie: In terms of an exact start date, I would say let’s count this week, because the program has started. It’s now a seven week program instead of six, and that’s fine. This is the week to really focus on food. It’s the week to make sure you’re doing your green smoothies at least once a day. If you’ve been doing them once a day, get yourself up to twice a day this week.

Focus on really being conscious of what you put in and how you feel afterwards. Start elimi-nating anything that makes you feel bad. Have lots of greens. 50-60% of what you take in should be green in this program.

With the UltraClear option, adding green powder to that isn’t part of the process, but it is part of my process! You can either use juice or green smoothie as a base, or put green in your drink, but it has to be green. Green, green, green is going to heal you. Green is the color of healing.

If you are going to do the supplements within option one or two, this week is the time to de-cide where you’re going to order from, what the best source is, and how to get them where you live. If you get them in time and you want to start with the supplements this week, go for it. If you don’t get them in time, you can start that next week.

Tera: Perfect. That’s really cool. Now, I’ll do some quick-fire questions. Can we eat nuts and seeds during the next two weeks?

Dr. Ritamarie: Chia, flax and the hemp seeds are part of the program. As far as the nuts are con-cerned, if you are going to do them, I would like you to have them in small amounts and do them in blended form. Rather than just chewing on them, make them into a little nut cheese or nut milk. They are hard to digest, and what we are trying to do is give your leaky gut a chance to heal. If you chew nuts, no matter how well you chew them with your teeth, it’s really rare that you get them down to the consistency of a puree like a blender would, and those little sharp edges are going to just keep scratching your intestine along the way.

So yes, if you are going to eat nuts, do it in small amounts, and make sure you’re not allergic to those nuts. Stay away from cashews, because they can tend to carry mold. Sometimes the Brazil nuts also carry mold. Brazil nuts are great, but you have to be really careful about your source. I’ve gotten them and they’ve had that taste of mold to them. So be careful.

Tera: Can people put wheatgrass right into their blenders?

“Focus on really being conscious of what you put in and how you feel afterwards. Start elimi-

nating anything that makes you feel bad.”

Week 1 | 23


Dr. Ritamarie: You can, but that would strain it. Even the Vitamix doesn’t blend the blades well. You can put a liquid in with it and blend it up, but it’s still not going to be very palatable. You can also just take the wheatgrass and chew it until you get all the juice out, then spit it out. That’s the cheapest wheatgrass juicer around.

Tera: I’m sorry. I have a very visceral reaction to wheatgrass. Just thinking about chewing it is distasteful. I know some people say that is because I’m toxic, but, oooh! I can’t do wheatgrass.

Dr. Ritamarie: I shudder when I drink it.

Tera: Yeah OK. I don’t mean to go on about that. You said not to combine fats and sweets?

Dr. Ritamarie: Right.

Tera: What about the recommended coconut in the smoothies?

Dr. Ritamarie: Oh, yes, that’s a good point.

Tera: Could you put it on salads or something?

Dr. Ritamarie: Yes, you can put it on salads. I hadn’t thought about that. Coconut tends to be digested differently than nuts and seeds. The body doesn’t require as much bile to handle coconut oil because it’s mostly medium chain triglycerides already. But, yes, you’d be best to put it on your salads instead of in your sweeter smoothies.

Tera: If you have an irritated small intestine, how often do you recommend to eat? Is it better to eat small portions every couple of hours, or just twice a day?

Dr. Ritamarie: It’s better to have long periods and gaps between your eating, and it’s best to liquefy your food as much as possible. You can do juices in between if you get hungry.

Tera: How do you order the bioflavonoids? Did you address that one?

Dr. Ritamarie: To get the quercetin bioflavonoid, and any of the supplements (glutamine, etc.) for which I didn’t specifically list a place to order them, you can follow the link for Emerson Ecological site. They have a wide variety of choices. I’ve created an order form in there that has a sub-set of their stuff, and if you go through my sub-set you’ll find anything that I’ve mentioned.

Tera: Perfect. I am going to leave that topic for now. I think you have answered most of the other questions.

Dr. Ritamarie: Just let me say one more thing about ordering supplements: Most of those supplements are also available at any good health food store. You can get quercetin at a health food store like Whole Foods. If you want to get certain brands, and I did mention the brands I prefer in my list, you will get that information.

Tera: I think that this is a good start for everybody. So, I’d like to wrap up this call. I encour-age everyone to just take it one day at a time, one week at a time. I just want to thank you guys for being here and taking the time to fit this call into your schedules.

I’m excited about this process. I think we all just kind of have to team up and be in this to-gether. Dr. Ritamarie needs to get more sleep, I need to eat less at night…

“Most of those supplements are also available at any good

health food store.”



Dr. Ritamarie: We are all in this together!

Tera: Exactly! We are all in this together. So, let’s be supportive and positive about the ex-perience. Let’s remember that we have six weeks, or seven, and the intent is to implement a lot of these changes for the long haul. That’s why we’re following it up with an entire year of support calls and menu plans.

Dr. Ritamarie: Right.

Tera: Let’s just be grateful and let the stress go. We are not in a rush. We’re going to put the right steps in place at the right time. You are exactly where you need to be, so just observe the process and let’s see what happens.

Dr. Ritamarie: That’s great. Can I end with one last thing?

Tera: Please.

Dr. Ritamarie: Wherever you are, whatever you are doing right now, close your eyes, and take a deep breath. If you’re driving, don’t close you’re eyes, but still take a deep breath and really fill your lungs. Then, just let your breath out. When you think you’ve let out all your breath, just go just a little bit further and let out that stale air that’s sitting at the bottom of your lungs. Then take another really clean purifying breath.

Know that inside of each and every one of us there is a healer. There is a healer that knows way more than modern science, way more than any textbook. That healer knows way more than your conscious brain will ever know. It knows how to close a wound. It knows how to heal a broken bone. It can heal your gut, and it can bring your liver up to speed. It can heal anything that’s going on inside you.

We just have to unleash it. We just have to stop polluting it. We just have to nourish it. I want you to envision that inner healer. Maybe it looks like a small child. Maybe it looks like an old sage guru with a long beard. Just envision whatever that inner healer looks like to you. Maybe it looks just like you. Or maybe it’s a white light. Give that inner healer some shape and form. Make friends with it. Smile at it. Tell it you’re ready to let it take over.

Ask its advice. Be open to suggestions. The way that you can access the wisdom of that inner healer, when there’s a lot of confusion and choices to be made, is to take some deep breaths, let go, and ask, “What is my best choice in this situation?”

Then, wait for something to pop into your mind. What pops in might be a picture, a color, a thought, or a word. Maybe it’s a word you never even knew before and you have to go look it up. Just really listen, and your inner healer will give you words. It will give you advice. When you let that inner healer take over, there is no stopping you, baby.

Thank you very much.

Tera: Thank you. My inner healer needs some lunch.

Dr. Ritamarie: Good. Ask it what it needs before you choose.

Tera: It’s looking at the collard greens with love.

Dr. Ritamarie: Yay! All right everybody. I will look forward to talking to you soon.

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