The Maintenance Stage

[shelley]

Here are guidelines for remaining symptom free once you go back to "regular life."

Even tho you are in the maintenance stage, you still need to do periodic cleansing and support the paths of elimination. In fact, it becomes more important to do these things because you're taking in more calories than the cleansing diet. More calories means more metablic wastes, and these may build up unless you support your body properly.

To this end, your routines should include:

Dry Skin Brushing - near daily
Detox Baths - weekly or twice a month. You should sweat a little each day somehow, preferably through exercise.
Self-Massage - Daily, prior to your shower. Apply a good expeller-pressed oil to your skin, massage, shower. You don't have to use soap, just hot water. Some people (Vata and Kapha Dosha) prefer to perform the massage after the shower and leave the oil on all day to keep warm. You can also massage the feet and head with oil right before bed to ensure a good night's sleep.
Salute to the Sun and Tibetan 5 Rites - great daily exercises.
Tongue Analysis - check each morning before brushing your teeth and adjust your diet/teas accordingly.
Oil Swish followed by Tongue Scrape and Teeth Brushing - daily. You can get a special tool for scraping the tongue, it's quite cheap.

Breath Remedy Tongue Scraper - 1 ea

Periodic Cleansing/Fasting:

Each Equinox and either Full or New Moon about once a week, fast.
About 2 weeks twice a year (Equinox is ideal time) switch to Cleansing Diet and do bowel, liver and other maintancence, even if symptom-free.

The Maintenance Diet is highly flexible and should cycle with the seasons, your age, level of activity, and Dosha.

The general guidelines are these:

The majority of your foods should be fresh whole foods as close to their original state as possible, from organic sources.

Frozen veggies are better than canned.

Your diet should be mainly vegetarian (as in, don't neglect to eat your veggies!) and include many fermented foods and drinks. It should be high-fiber thanks to hot whole-grain cereal, alternative grains, Kichadi, rice/legumes, vegetables, fruit and nuts.

Your meat sources should be from free-range, hormone-free, pasture-grazed or completely wild sources. Search out and find good kosher butchers or butchers that buy from small herds of free-ranging cattle and buffalo. It's better to eat liver than muscle meat (steak), better to fix beef with bones so you get the gelatin (pot roast, beef stew).

Your seafood should be wild rather than farmed and should be enjoyed at least once every 10 days. Most fish are not safe to eat more than once a week due to mercury poisoning. Wild king salmon is one of the most nourishing foods available. Sardines are a handy-dandy protein and EFA treat, when tiny and packed in olive oil they actually taste rather good and are a pleasant change from tuna. Tiny Tots from Sweden are worth trying if you think you hate sardines but don't know for sure. Oysters and clams are highly nutritious.

It should include super-foods rather than synthetic vitamins, apart from Emergen-C and Cal-Mag Fizz or similar.

The proportion of cooked to raw is dependent on your Dosha, the weather, and the power of your digestion. The stronger and hotter, the more raw you may include.

Your diet should include broths and digestive teas frequently, liver twice a month, eggs near daily, fish/seafood once every 10 days.

Cheats are allowed and even encouraged. At least one night a week should be devoted to purely fun foods, just be sure to manage them properly, such as drinking ginger tea if you're eating ice cream, or following a high-protein meal with a cleansing drink. The trick with cheating is don't do it every day. Anything that breaks the rules of good digestion is a cheat. Yeast-risen breads are always a cheat. Refined foods, microwave meals, "Hamburger Helper" are cheats.

Your main meal should be lunch and you should not eat solids after 8:00 pm. Follow the guidelines for digestive power.

A good lunch would go like this:

A bite of sauerkraut/kim chee/cortido
A bite of raw cucumbers, grated carrots and burdock root marinated in ACV
A small bowl of dark leafy green salad or cilantro chutney
4 ounces of protein and 1/2 cup of rice/legumes
small cup of peppermint tea

You may have about 1/4 to 1/2 cup of sugar a day provided you are not hypoglycemic or diabetic. If you have a sugar-free day, do not have more sugar the next day. Try to get most of your sugar from dehydrated cane juice rather than table sugar. Use more natural, less refined sweeteners like molasses, brown rice syrup, maple syrup, whenever possible. Use Stevia wherever possible, such as in lemonade.

Don't try to eat the same things every day, every week. Have a vegetarian day followed by a fruit day followed by a high-protein day followed by a high-calcium day followed by a seafood day or a probiotic day ... get the idea?

[Shawnamarie]

Hi Shelley,

I have a question. I have seen you reference the book Nourishing Traditions, which doesn't really advocate a vegetarian diet, yet it seems that you are recommending a strongly vegetarian diet. I have no particular stance that I favor, and I know that diet can be pretty unique from person to person. Just curious how you came to decide that a mostly vegetarian diet is preferred.

Thanks,
Shawna

[h0ppy]

She's not advocating a vegetarian diet...

[Shawnamarie]

Ah, see....this is what I was referring to:

[Rozenkwarts]

Shelley,

Thanks for this very clear information, very helpful.

After 6 months cleansing, anti-candida diet i'm now on a maintenance diet. I will certainly try to include your recommendations.

I surely don't miss convenience foods, packaged biscuits or any of the "bad" foods any more (not even ice cream). I much prefer to eat organic, fresh veggies and the kind of food you make from scratch at home. An added bonus is that its also much cheaper than anything prepared or packaged that you buy. Furthermore, I find i have lost interest for a lot of sweet foods that i used to crave. This must have to do with being more balanced now, having candida under control and less deficiencies of vitamins and minerals (my blood test when i started the anti-candida diet showed very low zinc, selenium, vit A, vit E. Rather low iron, B12) I have yet to take another blood test but i know these must be better because i have so much more energy and feel a lot better.

Having said that, i do enjoy an occasional cheat

The one thing i find hard to understand though is why is bread always a cheat? I love some toasted whole wheat bread in the morning with butter, coconut oil or almond butter, it's delicious! and find it hard to understand why this is bad for me. Of course, this may have something to do with the way i (and many others) was programmed. At home, bread was considered essential and healthy food. And it has been a staple food in our diets for so long. Is it the wheat that is bad or the refined to flour then baked part or the gluten or what?

Is this all bread, sourdough and yeast based? What about sourdough bread from rye flour?

Ezekiel bread is sprouted wheat, then its ok, right? Why?

If you could explain a little more about this bread mystery i would be very happy.

[shelley]

It's a combination of all that - needing to adjust our consciousness from the food pyramid recommendations, which says to eat slices of bread every day (ouch!) to something a bit more reasonable.

Yeast-risen wheat bread is a problem because of the gluten and the anti-nutrients and almost total lack of nutrients coupled with a lot of carbs and rancid oil - all bread is made from oil, and all store-bought bread is made with the worst kind of oils.

When bread is yeast-risen, the grains are not fermented so the phytic acids and other anti-nutrients are still alive and well, ready to block absorption of precious minerals and calcium.

Flour and water make a paste, GLUE, and that's what bread tends to turn into in the bowels, especially if you don't chew it thoroughly.

Also, for anyone who weighs less than 150 pounds, or is over 40 years of age, or is overweight, bread is a total waste of calories. You really can't afford these empty calories all that often.

Sourdough breads, non-wheat breads, breads prepared the old-fashioned way that involves fermentation, and Ezekial bread are much better choices than either white or whole wheat bread.

[shelley]