Introduction to Ten Days to Optimal Health
(Book Excerpt)

"I write about people, mostly, and the things they contrive to do for, against, or with one another. I write about the likes of liberty, equality, and world peace, on an extremely domestic scale."

— from an essay titled "Knowing our Place" by Barbara Kingsolver

My name is Kristina. I am a survivor. Today, I am healthy, happy, and proud that after a long battle filled with despair, I am winning! I'd like to share with you my experiences of being sick and my experiences attaining health. I am doing this because I want you to see clearly why I am an expert on the subject of health and healing. Imagine that for many years my days were filled with chronic pain that forced me to be bedridden. My weeks were filled with visiting doctors and specialists who cost a lot of money and still provided no cure. Not only was I facing challenges using modern medicine, but my alternative health path was equally confusing.

My Road to Recovery

First of all, I worked with a naturopathic doctor who had me taking 20-30 different supplements daily and following a strict diet of organic vegetable juice, minimal grains, no meat and vegetable fat. I was also told to do daily colonics, regular fasting and liver cleanses. While on this program, I had my mercury fillings out. This program left me sick in bed for six weeks and with chronic intestinal pain for over five years. I left the guidance of that naturopathic doctor to work with a registered nurse turned health consultant. She again had me taking lots of supplements and following a strict eating program. Even though I diligently followed her guidance, my Irritable Bowel Syndrome caused me tremendous pain every single day. After two years of working with her to attain a partial recovery, she discovered that she had cancer and died three weeks later.

Learning to Think for Myself

These tragic experiences have led me on a path that forced me to continue to learn, to figure out how to think for myself, and to heal deeply by digging deep into my pain. My recovery from alcohol and drug use paved the way for this entire experience. I am grateful for the recovery, but it was heartbreaking to have dug myself out of a tremendous amount of emotional pain and addiction, only to be sideswiped by a debilitating illness that I thought would kill me. From these experiences, I have gathered well-researched and broadly applied tools that have worked excellently for me. I know that many of these tools will also work well for you. However, I do encourage you to gather your own tools. My hope for this book is that its contents will assist you in being able to think for yourself about what to look for in a tool that can deeply improve the quality of YOUR life.

Our Body's Healing Ability

Ironically, the many tools that I needed to regain an active, healthy life were readily available. As it turned out, many were packaged within my body, which was just waiting to unleash its marvelous powers. You see, the body is an ingenious, efficient organism, designed to heal and overcome the emotional and physical things that strain it. Unfortunately, we interfere with our body's healing abilities, usually by our lifestyle choices. Through my emotional and physical health struggles, I discovered that systematic laughter, crying, shaking, yawning, and sweating, along with the best possible nutrition, creative exploration, and wellplaced detoxification, brought me profound healing from emotional or physical imbalances. This work has brought me to a place of knowing with complete confidence that people have the potential to heal from the mental and physical health struggles we face.

Choosing Optimal Health

Perhaps you have selected this Optimal Health Center plan because you have been feeling run-down or you have symptoms that make your life harder. Whatever the state of your health, chances are it is not quite where you want it to be and you would like some help making improvements. You have made a sound choice because this is my specialty! I am certain that all of us can have better health and even reach our individual Optimal Health level. Optimal Health is the ideal state of our bodies, which allows us increased energy, peace of mind, and a richer life. Unfortunately, this attitude that most of us can choose to set up our lives to enjoy optimal health is not a part of the way that we think as a culture.

My philosophy and ongoing mission are to shift our collective standards of what we mean by health. Optimal Health is more than the, "If it isn't broke, don't fix it," mindset, where after years of ignoring and abusing our bodies (often without realizing it), we try to manage the symptoms that we dutifully accept as, "just part of the aging process" — a mindset in which seventy is considered old and still being alive at eighty is considered lucky. I believe a shift in that paradigm is possible. My ambition is to be old at one hundred and lucky to reach one hundred twenty or more. Would you like twenty to forty extra years of joyful and vigorous living?

Daily Decisions

We need to seize the courage of these convictions and refuse to allow the status quo to wash us down the drain before our time. This mission is big and very appealing; however, through daily decisions, we must take a stand to end the shortsighted view of health that robs us of our vitality.

Let us strive toward our own optimal health. We do this when we realize that to pursue optimal health is to embrace a way of life. Optimal Health doesn't just mean that we take ten different supplements daily, or that we see our doctor for our yearly checkup, or that we are satisfied with taking our cholesterol-lowering medication, or our Prozac. Rather, the path to optimal health is a lifestyle that constantly questions the status quo and holds the view that when given the proper conditions, the human body can heal, adjust, and function beautifully.

Caring for Our Bodies

Optimal Health is a mindset. It is a way of revering life, allowing rational choice and not convenience, comfort, habit, economy, fear, boredom, or other forces to guide the actions that affect human health. Optimal Health is a path; it is not just a place to reach or a set of skills to attain. It is a journey. It is the daily decision to do things as though your health really matters. When this new lifestyle becomes second nature, we have attained our goal. When we make daily rational choices that promote our health, as naturally as we would choose to remove our hands from a hot oven, then we will love the way we feel and feel more fully the way we love to feel. I believe that if enough of us choose (and yes, it is a choice) to live long, vibrant, and powerful (optimally healthy) lives, our evolutionary trend will shift dramatically in the direction that affirms our human goodness and our ultimate ability to share Earth's bounty for optimal health for all.

Did you know that at this point in history, all of us, unless we are killed by a tragedy, will die of a disease created by the way in which we care for ourselves? This is unacceptable to me. I take issue with the standards that we collectively hold regarding what it means to care for our bodies.

Perhaps this is the time in your path to take stock and to take control of your life and body. You and you alone can make your life the way you want it. You and you alone can pursue your dreams.