As the weather gets warmer and warmer, do you find yourself reaching for cooler and cooler foods and drinks?  Does a crisp, green, nicoise salad sound much better than a big bowl of steaming hot minestrone soup?  You bet.

This is your intuitive wisdom taking care of you.  Your body simply doesn’t need the extra heat the way it does in cold weather.

When the temperature increases outside, your metabolic furnace gets a break inside.  In other words, your body doesn’t have to work quite as hard to produce all the energy needed to keep your body temperature at its comfortable level. This is good news for you on several fronts.

For one thing, you simply don’t need to eat as much quantity of food. This frees up the energy that is normally used for digestion to be used for other things; maybe a hike in the mountains or a picnic in the park?

And now that you’re eating a bit less food, it also means you have a bit more time freed up from shopping and cooking.

And finally, with the combination of heat provided from your external environment and less food filling up your internal environment, it is an optimal time to consider a metabolic cleansing program. These are nutritional-based programs designed to help clear out the effects of exposure to toxic substances (drugs, alcohol, car fumes, garden chemicals, junk food, etc.) and natural metabolic wastes produced daily.

All cleanses should be tailored to your unique biochemistry and ideally guided by an experienced health care practitioner who can teach you how to conduct the cleanse to your highest benefit. There are cleanses that focus on the liver, the kidneys, the gallbladder, the intestinal tract, etc. And there are many degrees of intensity in each of these cleanses.

In the early 1900’s Dr. J.H. Tilden of Denver specialized in healing pneumonia, which was then the number one killer. He used no drugs at all and never lost a patient. He simply cleaned out the colon with water therapy and gave natural, live foods. Some suggest that over 90% of disease in America is attributable to an unhealthy digestive tract. Dr. Bernard Jensen reminds us that “every tissue is fed by the blood, which is supplied by the bowel. When the bowel is dirty, the blood is dirty, and so on to the organs and tissues.” For these basic reasons, it can be especially beneficial to focus initially on intestinal cleanses.

Whether you want to prepare yourself for a cleanse or just eat in harmony with the warm weather of summer, a good guideline for food choices follows here:

  • Increase the amount of raw food
    • Green salads
    • Vegetables
    • Fruits
    • Start by increasing by one serving over the amount of raw food you currently eat.
  •  Increase the amount of vegetarian protein/decrease the amount of protein from animal flesh
    • Legumes such as pinto, black, garbanzo, soy beans, lentils, etc.
    • Nuts and seeds
    • Eggs
    • Low carbohydrate protein powders (from soy, rice, beans, or whey) made into smoothies with fruit, soy/rice milk or water
  • Focus more on non-gluten grains
    • Whole grain brown rice
    • Quinoa
    • Millet
    • Buckwheat
  • Reduce or eliminate the amount of dairy, caffeinated products, sugar, alcohol
  • LOTS of water every day!

This diet will help keep you cool throughout the heat of summer as well as get your body ready for any kind of metabolic cleanse that you choose. Go ahead, turn up the heat!