Self Inventory 101replacement. He described the head of the femur as looking like a mass of
accumulated candle wax (the operation was done under local anesthetic and
he got to see inside his own hip joint).
James argued that what was found at operation proved that the
hip joint was finished and my notions of a cure were absurd. I tried to get
him to see that even with a hip so deformed he had been completely pain
free and that Nature could have done the repair, given time. He was never
convinced.
James died a few years later of a stroke, a common exit for people
who take too much cocaine.
Just remember his story: if your symptoms go away, even for just
one day, you can be without them for life!
Review the lists
Now is the time to look over the above lists objectively. Ask yourself, what
looks unnatural? Potato chips are an occasional indulgence for most of
us. But one of my patients consumed five bags of them every day, along
with, incidentally, two chocolate bars. She had already had one nervous
breakdown and was rapidly heading for another, despite heavy doses of
tranquillizers. Not surprisingly, these excesses turned out to be contributing
to her illness. But the point I am trying to make is that you only had to look
at her diet to realize it was abnormal:
Five slices of bread a day, ten cups of coffee, two or three bananas
- these are all suspicious amounts when judged objectively. Does your list
reveal similar flaws? Be honest and underline foods that you are overdoing;
cut them out as part of the elimination diet in the next chapter whether
specifically banned or not.
That completes the inventory, then. Somewhere staring you in the
face on these lists may be one or more foods that have been making you
suffer unnecessarily for years. Keep these records: there may be valuable
information buried in them, for use later on. Also, you may use the list
of symptoms as an objective guide to what progress you are making.
Sometimes patients feel so well they begin to forget what terrible symptoms
they started out with!
The question remains: do you have toxic foods? The only way to
find out is to follow the next step in the Diet Wise plan.
First, a brief note for cancer sufferers...