Cutting out the Garbage

Introduction

During this course, our goal is to provide your body with the cleanest food experience ever! Many bodies are out of balance due to the toxic load they carry and the continuous exposure to toxins through the American diet. Giving your body a break from these challenges and supplying it with essential nutrients can lead to remarkable healing. In order to achieve this, we start by identifying the foods and chemicals that challenge your body and giving it a rest from them.

Elimination Protocol

You will systematically eliminate the foods that commonly cause problems for people, gradually introducing them after 3-7 weeks. This allows your body to heal and helps you identify problematic foods. It's astonishing how many common foods can be troublemakers. The main troublemakers to remove from your diet include:

Added sugars
Artificial sweeteners
Caffeine
Alcohol
Gluten
Corn
Soy
Dairy
All grains
Legumes
Nightshade vegetables

You may also choose to experiment with removing shellfish, red meat, and pork. Each week, you will eliminate a few more things until your food intake becomes pristine by week 5. Enjoy this period and then learn how to systematically reintroduce foods, one at a time, for a unique self-experiment.

Cutting out the things that aren't good for us

Eliminating additives, preservatives, dyes, artificial colors and flavors, sweeteners, pesticides, herbicides, and other toxins is crucial for our well-being. While some dangerous substances are regulated, the government doesn't always warn or remove them from the food supply. Factors such as resource limitations and lack of power hinder sweeping changes.

Tips for Successfully Cutting the Garbage

Shop like it's 1920: Opt for fresh, whole foods, preferably organic. Consult The Dirty Dozen and Clean Fifteen lists. Look for foods with recognizable ingredients, and it's even better if there are only one or two ingredients.
Utilize our Food Substitutions Guide: This guide will save you time and make your meals more enjoyable. Although some of the foods suggested are processed, they are created with good health in mind. Some substitutions will delight you!
Go on a Fact-Finding Mission: Spend 90 minutes slowly walking through a grocery store or a health food store if available. Alternatively, explore online resources like www.thrivemarket.com. Use our guide to reading labels and conduct your research. In just 90 minutes, you'll become an expert, making the rest of the course much easier.
Shop around the outside of the grocery store: This saves time and allows you to choose fresher and less processed options. Processed products tend to line the middle aisles.
Prep your foods early: Dedicate a couple of hours each week to prepare staples for your meals. Chop lettuce and other veggies, roast a pan full of vegetables, sauté onions and garlic, make dressings, sauces, and marinades. Consider baking chicken and sweet potatoes as well as preparing Cranberry Drink and Bone Broth in advance.
Consider Batch Cooking: Cook larger quantities, even if you're not serving many people. Leftovers can be your friend, and by using different sauces and dressings, you can enjoy varied flavors at each meal.

Trust us as we guide you through this course. Over time, you'll gain the knowledge to make the best choices for your body. Please follow our instructions closely, maintain a journal to track your progress and feelings, and remember to thank yourself for taking this important step.

If you have any questions or need further assistance, please don't hesitate to reach out to our support team. We are here to provide you with the guidance and support you need throughout this journey.

Thank you for choosing the Functional Medicine Project to embark on your total health reset. We believe that by cutting out the garbage and making mindful food choices, you can experience transformative improvements in your overall well-being.

As you progress through the course, we encourage you to keep a journal and jot down what you learn and how you feel. This journal will serve as a valuable resource to track your progress and reflect on your personal transformation. Remember to take a moment to appreciate and thank yourself for committing to this important self-care journey.

You will systematically, week by week, be eliminating the foods that most commonly cause problems for people. You will eliminate these for 3-7 weeks before very carefully and systematically reintroducing them. This allows your body to recover from foods that were causing a problem, and then as you reintroduce them back, you figure out what they are. Cutting out the things that we know aren’t good for us. This means cutting out the additives, preservatives, dyes, artificial colors and flavors, sweeteners, pesticides, herbicides, and other toxins. During this course, we try to give your body the cleanest food experience EVER! Our bodies are SO out of whack, in large part due to the fact that they are dealing with so much toxic load AND trying to continually deal with more and more toxins and insults that are coming by way of the foods Americans choose. When our bodies are given a chance to NOT HAVE TO DEAL with all of these difficult things, AND they are given the nutrients that they need, it is AMAZING what kind of healing can happen!

During this course, you will be:

Giving your body a break from all of the CRAP
Using special nutrition and supplements to HEAL your gut and remove toxins
Showering your body with all of the nutrients it needs to HEAL and Function at its best!
Learning the special body that is YOU and learning what makes YOU thrive!
Hopefully stopping, lessening, or turning around unwanted diagnoses or symptoms

To do this, the first thing we need to do is learn what foods and chemicals challenge our bodies and give our bodies a rest from them. The most common troublemakers in foods, the ones that you will be taking out of your diet for a while, include:

Added sugars, artificial sweeteners
Caffeine
Alcohol
Gluten
Corn
Soy
Dairy
All grains
Legumes
Nightshade vegetables

You can experiment also, if you wish, removing shellfish, red meat, and pork. Stick with the weekly eliminations so that by week 5 your food intake will be PRISTINE. Revel in that for a couple more weeks, and then we will show you how to systematically add foods back in, one at a time, to do the best once-in-a-lifetime experiment you’ve ever done for yourself!

Many people ask: "If something is dangerous for me or causes cancer, doesn’t the government warn about this or take it out of the food supply?" The answer is: sometimes. Not always. There are many places in which the government has come through. When things are downright horrible, as in the case of trans-fats, big decisions are made. More often than not, however, there is a combination of factors that work against the government having the resources and power to make sweeping changes.

The dairy industry and the soybean, wheat, and corn industries are integrated into the government in very complex ways. The government supports many of these food growers with subsidies, helping to ensure that farmers stay solvent; the result is that more and more of these food products are produced. The subsidies and increased production also keep prices down, which helps to feed more people. The government’s dietitians have a need to work these foods into their recommendations for the American diet. Government programs like WIC and food vouchers support people buying these foods. For the government to turn around and say that we should not have so much of something goes against the support it is already giving these industries.
It is all relative. Our government needs to pick its issues. And there are some issues that are so complex and expensive to fix that some of those issues will NEVER be picked.
Multiple Toxins. Our government has required every toxin to be evaluated to come up with an estimate regarding how much it might take to kill or sicken a person. This is good. What is not looked at is the fact that there are more than 75,000 of these toxins circulating, and nobody AT ALL knows what happens when two or three of them get together in someone's body.
Individual variations in humans also play a significant role. What happens if there are toxins PLUS immune dysfunction, poor nutrition, or high blood sugar? What about the variation in how each person's body is able to detoxify and eliminate different types of toxins? No WONDER we are living in a world of epidemics.
It is a BIG DEAL to get anything to change. This is true when it comes to the safety of some of these foods as well. It took DECADES for the FDA to be willing to change the food pyramid to one that didn't outright kill people and CAUSE diabetes, obesity, and heart disease. It took SO much effort and SO much time to change. And still, it is not accurate.
The loudest voice wins. This is also true when it comes to which health experts the government is listening to. Take the question about whether low fat, high carbohydrate diets are better for our bodies and particularly our hearts than a normal fat and lower carbohydrate diet. We will study this later in your course, but here's a tickler: FAT doesn't cause FAT!! FAT doesn't cause cholesterol or triglycerides or obesity. It's the carbs. If you want to get ahead of the course, feel free to read the book "Good Fats/Bad Fats" by Dr. Mark Hyman. Eye-opening truths in there from this most esteemed Functional Medicine doctor.

So, we are asking you to trust us a little bit. And, as time goes on, this course will give you the education you need to make the best choices for your body. If you have questions,search the literature. The real literature. Not WebMD or Mayo or Healthline. Look at the studies. At the end, we will give you a compilation of further resources for more study if you like. Until then, please follow our simple instructions as closely as you can, keep a journal and jot down what you learn and how you feel, and thank yourself!