Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Amazon Music | Email | RSS

Podcast 197: Blood Cleanse – Part 4

In Part four of this cleansing series, Martin and Scott discuss blood.

Ever wonder about the role blood plays throughout the body? There’s no doubt that it is crucial. As we all know, blood is central to supplying the body with oxygen. It also performs a variety of functions, such as:

• Supplying cells with oxygen
• Healing wounds
• Fighting off infection
• Controlling temperature
• Eliminating toxins

Obviously, a blood cleanse to ensure your blood is clean and functioning properly can go a long way in ensuring a healthy lifestyle. One way to ensure the blood is clean is to cleanse it regularly. This is easy to do, and involves a mere three to five day cleanse.

Blood purification therapy is best achieved with juices that contain an abundance of chlorophyll. Pureeing any mixture of green vegetables will do the trick, and lemon juice, beet juice, and carrot juice are also excellent choices.

Podcast 197: Blood Cleanse – Part 4

SCOTT: Welcome back, everybody! You are listening to the Life Enthusiast Podcast, restoring vitality to you, your blood, and the planet! Starring the founder of the Life Enthusiast, Martin Pytela! I am your co-host, Scott Paton. Hey, Martin, how are you doing today?

MARTIN: I am good, thank you for asking! Aren’t you starring yourself, too?

SCOTT: I am just the co-host, executive producer, and chief bottle washer. (laughing)

MARTIN: (laughing) Indeed, we are the stars of this show, but I don’t think we should make as big a deal of it.

SCOTT: Well, you know, I have been having some problems with the paparazzi lately, and I know you have been too, they have been running all over the place, following me in my car, clicking pictures, and trying to sell them to all the newspapers… (Martin laughing in the background) I think the group is getting smaller and smaller, as they starve and die off because of course, no one is buying those pictures.

MARTIN: That is a total shame, I think.

SCOTT: So, the last few weeks we have been talking about cleanses, and we started with cleansing the colon because if you don’t cleanse the colon, all the other cleanses you do just end up stuck in the colon, and you don’t really get rid of the toxins. And then we went to the liver cleanse, and then the kidney cleanse, and now we are ready for the final stage, the fourth stage, which is cleansing our blood. That is kind of a weird thing to say.

MARTIN: Absolutely. So far, we have been describing how you cleanse by doing more, you know, we explained how you can cleanse the colon by taking probiotics, more prebiotics, and proper intestinal cultures. We have also talked about how you can use the colonics or enemas to wash out the debris. With liver, we were talking about the supplements that you can take, the mineral supplements, but also the herbal supplements that you could take, like herbal teas that are stimulating to the liver. And when we talked about the kidney cleanse, we talked about the supplements that you can take, which are parsley, lemon, things that make the kidneys more efficient. But in this last stage, we need to focus on the last supplement, which is nothing.

SCOTT: Nothing. That is quite a supplement!

MARTIN: Yeah, it reminds me of ‘Nobody for President,’ because Nobody cares. Anyway, the issue indeed is that when you want to cleanse your blood, you actually need to rest the body. You actually need to stop the inputs, so that the outputs can continue.

SCOTT: You have said that before when we have talked about other health issues people had, and I love the way you put it, which was: “Stop digging the hole. The first thing you gotta do, if you have a problem is stop digging the hole.” This kind of reminds me of that sort of philosophy where you are like: “Okay, we are gonna let our body cleanse the blood. So let’s not stick anything into the body…” Well, ‘detoxify the blood,’ I don’t know if that is a word or not… But

MARTIN: Even just your basic, normal metabolic processes have by-products. If you eat dinner, the body has work to be done. If it is cooked food, you need to make the enzymes that are going to deal with it. And of course, in come the calories, you need to deal with that. You need to raise the insulin levels so that you can put away what is not immediately required, you need to deal with the minerals, vitamins, and whatever else is in that food… So when you skip that step altogether, the body can just focus on cleansing and repair, nothing else.

SCOTT: So, what you are really saying here is that the body naturally cleanses and repairs, if we give it the opportunity, right? Of course, that is something that we don’t seem to do very often.

MARTIN: Yes. Well, there have been religious scriptures talking about this, the Old Testament, which is the basis of both the Christian, the Muslim, and the Jewish traditions, it all has in it a design that you take one day a week of rest.

SCOTT: Right, the seventh day!

MARTIN: Yes, on the seventh day, rest. It was really meant to be to shut down, rest, rest so completely that you don’t even eat food. It has been since then sort of perverted in many ways, like: “Don’t eat meat on that day, only eat fish, or don’t eat cooked food.” The Jewish say you are not supposed to cook food, but then they let you eat stuff that has already been prepared some other time, so…

SCOTT: We always try to find our way around the letter of the spirit of the law, right?

MARTIN: The spirit is lost, while the letter is somehow baited.

SCOTT: Yeah, they are like: “No cooking. Well, we cooked yesterday, so we are just eating it now.”

MARTIN: Or: “They only meant in the daylight, so after sunset, we can go do anything we want.”

SCOTT: Oh yeah, “On the seventh day, he rested.” That was not the night. So we will eat at night! (laughing) We are all lawyers, aren’t we? How can we get around the Ten Commandments? “I wasn’t greedy, I just was hungry.”

MARTIN: Yeah, “I didn’t lie, I just withheld some facts.” It reminds me of Bill Clinton: “I did not have sex with that woman.” But back to the point! What is the original intention of this commandment? It was to allow the body to rest.

SCOTT: And we do that absolutely never in our society today.

MARTIN: And that is the problem. I have to admit I am a sinner myself because I started my day many times by saying: “Oh, I am not going to eat today.” And then by the time dinner time rolls around, something shows up, and I eat it.

SCOTT: It takes discipline and persistence. I think one of the things that I have noticed, as I have been taking the Exsula Superfoods on an ongoing basis, and some of the other great Life Enthusiast products, and then following by doing a lot of the things that we talk about on the podcast, I really do see a difference in the way my body feels and looks. And I am actually really surprised with the impact hot yoga has been having, I know I keep talking about it, it is now sort of my thing, but I really love it for my body. So I stopped digging the hole, and I wouldn’t say that I am eating a pure vegan or vegetarian diet, but I don’t eat hamburgers from McDonald’s anymore, I eat lots of salads and that sort of stuff, I think I have got a lot better habits that I used to have. I was just thinking the other day about how much better I feel now, than I did 20 years ago, and I am just amazed.

MARTIN: Yeah, I have a similar story to tell, you know, at 57, I feel a whole lot better than I felt at 35 or 36. I remember then, I was two inches bigger in my waist, I was suffering from allergies, I was suffering from metabolic stress, it was pretty bad, I was unable to function.

SCOTT: So let’s get into the topic of cleansing our blood!

MARTIN: Yes! The best cleanse of the blood is when you actually do less. So number one – drink water, lots of it. Number two – you can drink juices, it is best to do vegetable juices. I certainly am not a proponent of pasteurized juices though, don’t get me wrong, I really believe that these things should be made fresh. One of the better choices would be one of the superfoods that we offer, the energizing superfood blends consisting of things like spirulina, chlorella, barley grass, wheatgrass, alfalfa leaf juice, things that are completely compatible with this blood cleanse concept. You don’t have to starve yourself, you can get some food into the body.

SCOTT: The nutrient-dense food, by the way.

MARTIN: Yeah, you want to be ingesting foods that are really not taxing your digestion a lot. Here is the recipe for the famous potassium drink, which is two large carrots, two stalks of celery, two radishes, a handful of spinach, and a handful of green parsley. Put it all in a blender, blend, and drink. Another great cleansing juice is the ‘ABC’ – apple, beets, and carrots. Great for the liver, great for the blood. If you would stay on that for three weeks, it would probably change your life dramatically.

SCOTT: Would you add any garlic or ginger into these juices?

MARTIN: You can do that! Ginger is stimulating, so it will push on the elimination, it will cause your body to want to get rid of things faster. Also cayenne, cayenne pepper. Some people are really comfortable with that, others don’t do too well on it. Garlic has a strong flavor, that pretty much overpowers everything, garlic is a bit of a double-edged sword. It will be good if you want to deal with infections, both bacterial and viral, but it will also knock you back as far as your spiritual advancement. Take a large dose of garlic all at once, it will really knock you back a few notches, but that is okay if you need to kill off some infections. Then, you can try something for the evening, some soothing, calming tea, chamomile is really popular, it is the best anti-inflammatory herb there is, it can be used topically, too. And that is it! I think we are making it too simple, aren’t we?

SCOTT: Well, it doesn’t have to be hard, right?

MARTIN: So just to lay it all in a larger perspective: For the blood cleansing, you might want to take a day out of the week, or a week out of the year, some people do 10 days, some even do a 40-day fast. The 10-day is often called a Master Cleanse, where all you ingest is water with lemon juice, maple syrup, and some cayenne. The cayenne is the stimulant, the lemon juice is there to balance pH. That combination alone would be very good at helping your body get rid of all the metabolic waste that it needs to get rid. So whether you do one day, three days, or seven days, it really will depend on the current state of your health. I would like to share this story, it is really quite neat, let me read it for you: “25 years ago, I was so incapacitated by arthritis, that I was practically bedridden. After trying all the available medical treatments, consulting, dozens of doctors, and several stays in hospitals, I was becoming progressively worse. My hands and fingers were stiff, in constant pain, I could not bend myself, walk, or even turn myself in bed. In addition, I had chronic inflammation and a constant migraine. I was suffering from a bad case of insomnia, I was chronically constipated. It was pretty bad. I felt hopeless, nobody could help me, I couldn’t see any way out of the indescribable suffering I had to endure, but my spirit was strong, and I wouldn’t give up. I was not willing to accept being a bedridden invalid for the rest of my life.

MARTIN: I found a book by a British physician, Sir Robert Garrison, and it opened my eyes to the relation between nutrition and health. So I started to experiment, changed my diet, fasted, drank fresh vegetable juices, and broths made with cooked vegetables, I drank herbal teas, took enemas, I utilized colonic irrigation to cleanse my intestines of accumulated toxins and waste. I read all I could on the natural cure methods, I picked up ideas here and there. I started making living foods, I took heat treatments, hydro baths…”

SCOTT: Wow, he went all out, right?

MARTIN: Well, he was a she, sorry, now that I am looking at it, this is a story from a lady! Let’s keep reading: “Imagine my surprise, when I started to feel better and better! The stiffness in the joints started to disappear, I slept better, and after just a few months, I was, to mine and everybody else’s amazement, completely cured. This was 25 years ago, and I never had a sick day since. No traces of arthritis.” What can we say about that? We have a person that is completely sick, bedridden, sick with arthritis, lives like that for 25 years, then discovers that life could be different, cures herself completely with juicing, fasting, raw food diet, and then proudly displays her flexibility and health. Who wouldn’t want that?

SCOTT: I think that is a great story!

MARTIN: Yeah, it illustrates well! It illustrates the fact that you can manage your health, and it starts in the colon, with the major eliminating organs, and ends with managing the fluids, the blood, and the lymph. Any questions?

SCOTT: No, I think we have actually covered that, the important points are fasting, letting the blood rest, and letting the body kind of clear out the stuff naturally, it is a natural method of healing. We see that in the animal kingdom, right? When an animal gets ill, it fasts, it stops eating. Of course, it can’t hunt if it is sick anyway. And it occurred to me that when I was young, and I got the flu or something, I usually ate a couple of bowls of soup, and I had no appetite. I think we tend to forget what we should normally do when we get ill, and we just continue piling on the toxins, right?

MARTIN: That is correct. So the suggestion would be to remember, that cutting the calories at least one day a week is a great idea.

SCOTT: And we have talked about addiction to food before, this is when you really understand and see how addicted you might be to processed food! For me, when it is eight o’clock in the evening, I used to be opening every cupboard in my kitchen, looking for something to stick in my mouth, and I am not even hungry!

MARTIN: Does this still happen to you, or has it diminished?

SCOTT: No, not anymore, I actually can’t remember when the last time that happened, but I remember it happening a lot in the past.

MARTIN: It is a carb addiction. When you start your days with high calorie, low nutrient density foods, like the breakfast cereals, that are so popular, it sets you up for a cycle that ends up exactly as you described. Soon after breakfast, you are searching for some more calories, you have these blood sugar spikes because you start early in the day with some high-glycemic-index food that calls for a lot of insulin. As soon as you eat it, the body goes to work, saying: “Oh my God, this is a lot of energy! We need to sweep it clean here.” And the amount of insulin that is released to manage it is actually too high, so you will have a rise of the glucose levels, and then a fall, a crash, and all of a sudden, you can be hypoglycemic. You feel terrible, and you need to eat more carbs, you are on this swing, where your energy is crashing, and you need to feed it quickly, and a quick fix is sugar and carbs again.

SCOTT: Right! I was looking at this article recently, and they say one of the things that happens when you have a fast is you get more growth hormone released more frequently, it is an anti-aging hormone, and it is also produced more efficiently. And the article goes on to say: “The only reliable way to extend the lifespan of a mammal is undernutrition without malnutrition.” And then it talks about the study of earthworms, it is just a fascinating piece of information that demonstrated the extension of life due to fasting. It was performed in the 1930s, and they isolated one worm and put it on a cycle of fasting and feeding. The isolated worm outlasted its relatives by 19 generations, while still maintaining its youthful physiological traits! This lifespan extension of this particular worm was the equivalent of keeping a man alive 600 to 700 years! (laughing) We are not saying you are going to live for 600 years, but it makes me kind of think about what you said about the Bible, they talk about people there who lived for 500 years, and I am thinking, maybe they were following these specific laws and commandments, which we kind of worked our way around, and maybe they actually did live that long in the past!

MARTIN: Right! Methuselah and his children! I have read another study, where they were doing the same thing with rodents, mice, and rats, lab rats, and they called it the ‘calorie-restricted diet.’ They would essentially have a test group that was allowed to eat however much they wanted, and the other group was given 30% less, so they were always a little bit hungry, not starving, just a little bit hungry. And the life-extension there was 30-40%. I don’t remember the exact typical lifespan of a mouse, but if it was three months on the regular diet, it would be four months on the restricted diet. So I guess if a normal person would live for 90 years, the restricted diet person would live until 120. In fact, it is quite popular out there, there are people who practice calorie-restricted lifestyles, intermittent fasting, and they have amazing results. When you eat mostly raw food, it is very easy. In fact, I remember when I went raw vegan, I lost huge amounts of weight. I remember I was looking like a returning prisoner of war because when I was eating only raw, I found it difficult to eat enough calories.

SCOTT: Right, that is an amazing thing, you can be eating so much, and it’s very nutrient-dense, but calorie poor. It is not like eating a Big Mac.

MARTIN: Yeah, it takes a lot of work to eat 500 calories, when you are eating raw foods. So there we have it! Calorie restriction. Join us on the nutrient-rich, calorie-poor foods! Again, back to the superfood blends, they will keep you satiated, but they will not add calories. They will add lots of important nutrients. Also, another reason people are feeling miserable is that they are too acidic, and the reason for that is they eat too many calories from the wrong foods, especially from processed carbohydrates. So consider that!

SCOTT: And you can certainly try it for a short period of time, and see how you feel. And maybe once you have tried that, you will realize that it is pretty important to give your body some rest.

MARTIN: And that is what we should give our listeners to.

SCOTT: We are going to give you rest!

MARTIN: Yes. For the next seven days!

SCOTT: And then we will be back!

MARTIN: We will be back! I promise we will be back with yet another important topic. If you want to read more of this educational material, you will find it on our website, www.life-enthusiast.com. If you have a specific health concern, or if you are just confused, call me at (866) 543 3388. We will help you get unconfused. This is Scott and Martin for the Life Enthusiast, restoring vitality to you and to the planet. Thank you for listening!

SCOTT: See you next time, everybody, bye-bye.

Note: the information provided are not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always consult with your medical professional(s) if you are dealing with a specific medical issue.