Crazy Sexy Diet: Eat Your Veggies, Ignite Your Spark, and Live Like You Mean It! (14 page)

Now that I understand
the importance of pH, I’m totally liberated from neurotic food calculations. Fad diets hold no power over me. When we consider the true measure of health, many popular diets just don’t make sense. I don’t need to know that I’m blood type O in order to shop for the right food for myself, and I certainly don’t need a degree in anthropology. And while I appreciate the benefits of traditional diets, I stop at the emphatic advice to only eat foods from my culture of origin. I’m a Colombian, Irish, and Scottish mutt who respects and understands body chemistry. Empanadas, a slab of soda bread, and haggis (the boiled and minced windpipe, lungs, heart, and liver of a sheep) ain’t gonna make me thrive.

Many nutritionists and wellness counselors advocate moderation without any true understanding of what that actually means. Moderation is not a green light. Moderation is education and conscious decision making. Will your body tell you what it needs? For sure! But will you be able to read the signs if you have no clue what to look for? My body used to tell me to eat two pints of Ben & Jerry’s and flirt with cocaine. You can’t be moderate if you don’t know how to find your center. Once you build a solid home base, you can certainly play,
stretch, and expand. But let’s get our health ducks in a row first.

In the beginning of my journey with cancer I turned to a macrobiotic diet. In fact, during the filming of my documentary
Crazy Sexy Cancer
, macrobiotics was my sun, moon, and stars. The macrobiotic diet is a low-fat, high-fiber, predominantly vegetarian diet that is heavy on grains and soy products. After a while I felt depleted. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, strict macrobiotic eating made me too acidic. This was my first clue that something was wrong.

Though there are many good principles to this way of eating, I was consuming far too much cooked foods and not enough raw, alkaline foods, water, and good oils—each of which I was prohibited from eating on the “healing” plan. I was told, “You’re too yin, your cancer is yin, you can’t eat raw yin foods.” Try and explain that one to your oncologist!

Moving away from the macrobiotic diet was my first experience in “take the best and leave the rest.” It got me off the horrible Standard American Diet way of eating, and for that I will forever be grateful. Plus, macrobiotics taught me how to tolerate seaweed, love kale, make healthy (and delish) soups, de-fart my beans, and use a pressure cooker without having to call 911.

When I did my first green juice fast (with lots of liquid nutrition), everything changed. Almost immediately my circulation came back and my blood work improved. With the addition of good fats, a moderate amount of whole grains, fresh veggies and low-glycemic fruits, my energy levels soared, my weight balanced out, and other chronic issues cleared up. From that day forward I was hooked on juice, adding more raw foods to my diet and recognizing the power of pH. Remember, raw foods isn’t about eating only mangoes and bananas in 10-degree weather and then complaining about feeling drained. Leave that non-sense for the wacky fruitarians. Raw foods, Crazy Sexy style = more blood-sugar-stabilizing greens and less sugar, more chlorophyll and less chaos.

During the 21-Day Cleanse outlined in
chapter 10
, you will be flooding your body with alkalinity. This is an incredibly important component to the detoxification process, because the acids that have been stored in your tissue in order to protect the blood can finally be eliminated. With this new information, can you see why some of the popular cleanses can only take you so far?

If your body is a temple, then your mouth is the altar. From this day forward, vow to treat yourself like a Divine Being. Health is much simpler and far more scientific than we’re led to believe. Your pH will never lie. That’s why I honor and trust it. In return, it’s given me phenomenal health in the midst of challenging circumstances.