Spring is in the air, trees are budding, spring flowers are blooming and it’s a time of renewal. We spring clean our houses, but what about our bodies? At Root Cause Medical Clinic, we encourage our patients to give their bodies a spring cleaning to improve health.

If you wanted to shed some pounds, gain energy, think clearer, and reduce your risk of developing degenerative diseases like heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and autoimmune disease, where would you start?

7 Easy Steps to Spring Clean and Renew Your Body!

1. Assess the number of servings of fruits and vegetables you are consuming each day and increase that number to 9. What’s a serving? Typically it’s ½ cup or if the veggie is leafy like kale, a full cup. You can also look online for more specifics. Keep track for a few days and assess where you are serving-wise and then increase on a gradient until you hit 9.

The quality of fruits and vegetables, in addition to the quantity, is also important if you want to attain any of the energy, disease prevention, mental clarity, or weight loss goals stated above.

At Root Cause Medical Clinic, we teach our patients that the best fruits, from an anti-oxidant and alkalinity standpoint, are citrus, berries (all types), and cranberries. Avoid the tropical and dried fruits that are highest in sugar.

The best vegetables are found in the crucifer family (broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, kale, arugula, green, red, and curly cabbage), and alum/garlic family (green onions, yellow onions, leeks, garlic, kale, and arugula), along with dark green leafy such as spinach.)

Note: Garlic is the #1 vegetable that kills cancer cells across the board. It is toxic to cancer cells but creates no negative effect on healthy cells. It, along with the rest of the veggies found in the alum family and crucifer family mentioned above should be on your “must eat” veggies daily.

The final qualifying factor is organic vs non-organic. Root Cause Medical Clinic encourages patients to know the list of “dirty dozen” and “clean fifteen” fruits and veggies. You can easily find these online but the “dirty” list includes some commonly eaten fruits and vegetables such as cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, potatoes, strawberries, and grapes. I just keep the list on my phone so I don’t forget and can check it when shopping. Basically the dirty dozen should not be consumed if not organic and the clean fifteen are okay to eat if you can’t locate them in their organic state. As an example, spinach and apples are so high in pesticides that they are best not eaten if you cannot find them organic.

2. You must stay hydrated. At Root Cause Medical Clinic, the doctors have frequently done the experiment, often unintentionally, of eating the same quantity of food on two successive days, exercising the same and only changing water consumption. If we don’t hydrate we gain weight. The body detoxifies and cleanses much more efficiently when hydrated and it becomes more toxic when dehydrated. Patients often comment on how making this simple change makes a drastic change in how they feel. And of course, it only makes sense that fewer toxins = better health, but this simple step is often missed.

The amount of water needed is about half your body weight in ounces of water per day. Therefore if you weighed 175 lb, you would need 88 ounces of water each day, or about 11, 8 oz glasses. If you hardly drink water, like most Americans, consider starting with a goal of 8 glasses of clean purified per day, equivalent to 64 oz or 2 liters.

How you consume your water is also important. Don’t drink more than 8 ounces per hour for maximal detoxification to occur. Yes, you will feel like you “live in the bathroom” when you first start to drink more, but that will balance out. Stop your consumption a couple of hours before bed so that your bladder won’t wake you up at night.

3. Decrease your consumption of animal flesh and dairy products. This includes fish, fowl, red meat, poultry, and the milk of all mammals and its byproducts such as yogurt and cheese. A plant-based diet is associated, by research, to extend life expectancy and reduce mortality from all causes, especially heart disease, cancer, and diabetes. Considering these are the diseases killing most Americans, it is good advice to heed. One for one, patients who move towards a more plant-based diet, lessening their consumption of animal products, comment that they feel better, they lose their “taste” for meat and notice they react negatively to dairy products if they eat them again. At Root Cause Medical Clinic, we suggest that our patients go on a modified elimination diet to test how certain foods will make them feel.

Here’s an example: If you didn’t consume broccoli or cranberries for a month, would your body react negatively upon their reintroduction? No, it wouldn’t. Yet time after time when a patient completely eliminates dairy products for 4 to 6 weeks, the reintroduction is met with an initial negative reaction. That’s not normal and it’s a sign that the dairy isn’t healthy. And do appreciate these aren’t patients with lactose intolerance or dairy allergy, this is all patients who eliminate dairy.

The pH of the body moves us towards or away from disease. Simply put, alkaline is healthy, and acidic is disease-producing. Plants create alkalinity; animals produce acidity. We could also address what our animals in feedlots are being fed (GMO grains), the hormones they are given and the multitude of drugs and antibiotics to prevent or treat their diseases. All these factors create, not healthy food, but in fact a hazardous animal product. When nitrates, preservatives, and other chemicals are added to the final processed “food”, as we see in hot dogs, bacon, salami, and sausage, just to name a few, we then enter the “known carcinogen” category.

Must you eschew ALL meat? No, you can consume a little, now and then, on special occasions and it likely won’t affect you too negatively. Just remember to avoid processed meats. The bottom line really lies in your current health status and that I don’t know. If you are in poor health and wish to improve it quickly, vastly limit your animal intake. If you are in good health and want to prevent degenerative disease, consuming meat in the quantity that the average American consumes vegetables, might be fine. But the current intake of animal products in this country is moving us toward obesity and degenerative heart disease, diabetes, and cancer too fast and too young.

4. Eating healthy oils and fat is another very important step to take. Fat is vital for brain health, heart health, hormonal balance, and weight loss. Yes, you need good fat to maintain a healthy weight. My new book on fats has not yet been released, but here’s a good summary. Beneficial fats in the form of nuts are pecans, walnuts, and, believe it or not, peanuts, for cancer-fighting. Peanut is a legume but we often put it in the nut category – maybe it’s the name! Studies on nuts that prevent cancer found walnuts, pecans, and peanuts heading the list. The overall healthiest nuts still had pecans and walnuts leading, with hazelnuts, pistachios, almonds, and peanuts rounding out the top six. Do you love pesto? Don’t bother making it with traditional pine nuts, (I sense my Italian relatives frowning) but rather substitute walnuts or pecans. Pine nuts fell last in the healthiest nut race.

Seeds such as flax, sunflower, and pumpkin are also extremely healthy and should be consumed daily. Check out my granola recipe on YouTube or on my website – it’s a favorite among our patients coming to Root Cause Medical Clinic

Don’t worry about gaining weight, as long as the oil is fresh (think raw organic nuts, seeds, and healthy cooking oils) you won’t gain weight eating these daily. They fill you up, making overeating difficult, plus, they are anti-cancer and longevity producers.

Best cooking oils – avocado, coconut, almond, hazelnut, and macadamia.

Worst cooking oils – vegetable oils such as corn, sunflower, and safflower, along with soybean, cottonseed, and canola.

5. Find out if you have any food sensitivities. I already cautioned you against dairy products, one of the most common foods we find the patient’s sensitive to. And while whole grains such as rice, quinoa, and buckwheat can be healthy when eaten in their whole, unprocessed state, I would be remiss not caution you against gluten as one of the most common food sensitivities we find in patients at Root Cause Medical Clinic. Considering the great damage gluten can cause in a susceptible individual, missing a diagnosis of celiac disease or gluten sensitivity is something that shouldn’t be overlooked. Find a clinician who can help you with this and if you need assistance, feel free to contact me.

6. Get moving! You can’t clean the house without moving and you can’t spring clean your body without getting some exercise. If you’ve never exercised much, consider getting a good pair of walking shoes and committing to a half-hour of brisk walking at least 5 days per week. Build up to some cardio and weights on a gradient. If walking or any sort of weight-bearing is too harsh on your joints, find a class with a pool for some aquatic exercise. Our bodies are designed to be used and unfortunately, we are either building muscle or gaining fat. Muscle begets muscle; fat begets fat, and a fat body isn’t just unhealthy and toxic but it is weaker and more injury-prone than one with better muscle mass. You’ll come to enjoy exercising once you get going – I promise!

7. Clean out the cupboard, freezer, and fridge. Temptations in the form of baking mixes, ice creams, chocolate stashes, etc can lurk in your kitchen. When you are ready to get “clean” and healthy, there’s no point getting sabotaged by something “calling your name” every time you open your pantry or refrigerator. Clean out the junk and get stocked with all the good healthy food we’ve been speaking about. The exciting truth is that when you are eating healthy you want to continue eating healthy and cravings do go away pretty fast. As long as you’re not tempted the process goes very well.