Eight Weeks to Optimum Health, Revised Edition: A Proven Program for Taking Full Advantage of Your Body's Natural Healing Power

309 Pages·2006·1.14 MB·English

by  Andrew Weil M.D.

CONTENTS
Title Page
I. THE CAPACITY TO CHANGE
1. People Can Change
2. An Overview of Health and Healing
A Healing Story: Defying a Prognosis
3. The Whole Picture
A Healing Story: The Spiritual Roots of Health
A Healing Story: Better Breathing
4. Why Eight Weeks?
II. THE EIGHT-WEEK PROGRAM
5. WEEK ONE
A Healing Story: The Value of Supplements
6. WEEK TWO
A Healing Story: Seeing Better with Carrots
7. WEEK THREE
A Healing Story: Effects of Breathing Exercises
8. WEEK FOUR
A Healing Story: Giving the Liver a Chance
9. WEEK FIVE
A Healing Story: The Power of Ginger
10. WEEK SIX
A Healing Story: A Testimonial to Ashwagandha (and Ayurveda)
11. WEEK SEVEN
A Healing Story: The Power of Intimacy
12. WEEK EIGHT
A Healing Story: A Couple Follows the Program
A Healing Story: Mind over Back Pain
A Healing Story: Report from Michigan
A Healing Story: K.G.’s Adventure
13. WEEK NINE AND BEYOND
A Healing Story: Selected Elements of the Program
A Healing Story: Report from a Barber
A Healing Story: A Patient with Multiple Sclerosis
A Healing Story: Peripheral Neuropathy
III. THE CUSTOMIZED PLANS
14. For Those Over Age Fifty
15. For Those Over Age Seventy
16. For Those Under Age Twenty
17. For Men
18. For Women
19. For Pregnant Women (and Those Considering Pregnancy)
20. For Parents of Young Children
21. For Those Living in Big Cities
22. For Those Who Travel Frequently
23. For Those Who Are Overweight
24. For Those at Risk for Cardiovascular Disease
25. For Those at Risk for Cancer
Appendix: Finding Information and Supplies
Notes
Acknowledgments
A Note About the Author
Also by Andrew Weil, M.D.
Copyright
PART ONE
THE CAPACITY TO CHANGE
1
PEOPLE CAN CHANGE
YOU HAVE IN YOUR HANDS a tool for changing your life, an Eight-Week
Program for improving health and gaining access to the power of spontaneous
healing in your body. I will guide you through this program step by step,
explaining the changes I will ask you to make in how you eat, how you exercise,
how you breathe, and how you use your mind. I will recommend vitamins,
minerals, and herbs you can use to protect your body’s healing system, and I will
give you ideas about how you can change long-standing patterns of behavior that
impair optimal health.
Maybe you have picked up this book because you want to have more energy.
Maybe you want to lose some weight. Maybe you worry about getting older and
developing diseases that disabled your parents. Perhaps you travel frequently
and find it hard to maintain a healthy lifestyle on the road. Or perhaps you have
a chronic illness, minor or major, and want to be less dependent on
pharmaceutical drugs. Regardless of the specific nature of your need or concern,
the information I have assembled in these pages will help you draw on your
body’s own resources for natural healing.
The Eight-Week Program consists of small steps that build on each other
until, by the time you complete it, you have laid the foundation for healthy
living. You can then decide how much of the program you want to maintain on a
permanent basis. I assume that you want to make changes in your life—
otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this book. I see my job as pointing you in the
right direction. I have no doubt that you can change, because I know from my
own experience that people can do so if they really want to.
In moving files recently, I came across a yellowed clipping from The New
York Times of August 12, 1971, with the headline: “Meat-Eating 230-Pound
Doctor Is Now 175-Pound Vegetarian.” The article was the featured story in the
Food–Fashions–Family Furnishings section of that day’s paper and carried the
byline of Raymond A. Sokolov, then a Times food writer. It concerns a twenty-
nine-year-old physician in rural Virginia who gave up animal foods except for
dairy products, with a resultant increase in energy, well-being, and overall
health. There is a photograph of the doctor in his kitchen preparing fresh corn.
He has a full black beard, is wearing blue jeans and a work shirt, and looks
content. Next to the picture is his recipe for a rich corn soup containing milk and
butter, and another recipe for a barley-and-vegetable casserole that calls for a
quarter-cup of peanut oil. According to the article, the doctor’s interest in
consciousness led him to experiment with yoga and meditation, and “since yoga
calls for a vegetarian diet, he gave up meat ‘in order to really do it right.’ He has
been vegetarian ever since, to the amazement of his friends, who remember him
as a voracious meat eater and a fat person while at Harvard…. In one year on his
new diet [he] has reduced [his weight] from 230 to 175 pounds. His recurring
colds and allergies have vanished.”
My beard is no longer black, and I have not been able to maintain my weight
at 175 pounds. I am still mostly vegetarian (I have eaten fish for the past twenty
years), though now I don’t make rich soups with milk and butter, use oil in such
quantities, or ever cook with peanut oil. I think I am wiser with age and in
general feel much happier now than I did when I was twenty-nine.
That was a watershed year for me. I had quit a frustrating job with the
National Institute of Mental Health in July 1970, dropped out of professional
medicine to write my first book, and made a great many changes in my way of
living besides giving up meat. For the first time ever, I lived alone in a natural
setting well away from a city. I had no office to go to, no obligations to meet. I
began each morning with sitting meditation for as long as I could tolerate, which
was not much in those days. I took long walks in the woods, practiced yoga
postures in the afternoons, wrote, and read on a variety of subjects that interested
me, from Native American shamanism to mushrooms and other wild foods. By
August 1971, I was nearing another transition. The New York Times article
noted, “Dr. Weil will be traveling to the Amazon jungle this fall for an extended
visit to some primitive tribes on a fellowship from the Institute of Current World
Affairs, a New York foundation.”
I held that fellowship from 1971 to 1975 and have written elsewhere about
those travels. In another book, Spontaneous Healing, I describe seeking out a
shaman in Colombia during that period and explain that my studies of
ethnobotany and medicine at Harvard made me want to see the rain forest, meet
native healers, and try to understand the source of healing. Mostly I wanted to
learn how to help people get well and stay well without using so many of the
invasive and suppressive methods of conventional medicine, and I thought the
knowledge I needed was to be found in remote mountains and jungles, far from
classrooms and clinics. My plan was to go to southern Mexico to learn Spanish,
then to make my way down to Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru to live with Indians
and learn their ways with plants and healing.
I knew this journey would be demanding, and when I first settled on the idea,
I was in no way prepared, either physically or mentally, to undertake such an
adventure. I had grown up in a row house in Philadelphia with little opportunity
to spend time in nature, let alone in wilderness. On leaving Philadelphia, I
attended college and medical school in Boston, then completed a medical
internship in San Francisco—more urban, indoor experience. I was not very
comfortable out-of-doors, being nervous about insects and wary of the sun, since
I had fair skin that never tanned, only burned; I accepted this as an inherited trait
that could never disappear. Although I was able to concentrate enough to handle
schoolwork easily, I was restless, very susceptible to boredom, and I craved
distraction. I was largely sedentary, hating exercise, and since I also liked to eat,
I was overweight. My diet was free form and thoughtless. I ate anything and
everything in large quantities, including very high-fat foods. I was a frequent
consumer of alcohol and Coca-Cola.
Though I had no significant health problems, I knew from the way I huffed
and puffed climbing stairs that I was not in good cardiovascular condition. I
suffered from intense pollen allergies, mostly in the summer, and also had
allergic reactions to a number of medications and some foods. Sometimes I
would get hives for no apparent reason. On occasion I got bad migraines.
So it was clear that I was going to have to change in order to set out by myself
for unknown lands and peoples in the Andes and the Amazon basin. Many of my
friends could not imagine my doing any such thing, but I was determined to do
so, because I believed it was the only way for me to become a true physician,
one who could work with the healing power of nature. When I think back on all
the changes I made in the year before I left the United States, I do not remember
their being hard, even though I had to give up lifelong habits and adopt new
ways of being. My memories of that year are of much fun and discovery along
with a gratifying sense of accomplishment. When I look at before and after
pictures of myself, I am amazed at the difference. Not only did I lose weight and
grow a beard, I became aware of my strength and flexibility, got much more
comfortable with myself and nature, and even, miraculously, was able to stay out
in the sun and tan for the first time in my life. My allergies and headaches
disappeared. By the time I got to southern Mexico, I was feeling better than I
ever had in my life, full of energy, ready to plunge into unknown waters.
My late friend and mentor Norman Zinberg, a Harvard psychoanalyst, used to
keep that photo of me from The New York Times— and a more recent photo—to
refute those who complained to him that people could not change, and change
permanently. His profession was about helping patients give up dysfunctional
patterns of thought and behavior, not an easy job. As a physician and director of
a university program in integrative medicine, I find myself in the same position.
Patients come to me with stories of woe, and instead of giving them magical
cures, I tell them they must change their diets, their habits of exercise, their ways
of handling stress, even their breathing. Fortunately, the patients who come to
me are self-selected. They share my philosophy of health and healing and are
highly motivated to take responsibility for their well-being. They are looking for
advice about what to do, and when they get it, they will act on it. Unfortunately,
most doctors deal with patients who are not so motivated and are instead looking
for quick fixes, who would rather take a prescribed drug than change their
behavior.
But I know from my experience as a physician that many of the common
complaints that people have these days respond much better to simple
adjustments of lifestyle than to taking medicine. You can certainly medicate
yourself regularly with painkillers if you are prone to headaches, or with
antihistamines if you have allergies, anti-inflammatories if you have arthritis, or
sedatives if you can’t sleep, but how much better it would be to solve those
problems by modifying diet and patterns of activity and rest and by using natural
remedies. The Eight-Week Program presented in this book gives you all the
information you need to do that and more. Above all, it will enhance and protect
your body’s own healing system, which is your best defense against illness, the