Why Water is so Fundamental to our Approach
I believe that what we drink is for cleansing, and what we eat is for re-nurturing. The body does not like to do both together. It is necessary to cleanse before you can re-nurture.
I believe that healing happens in water, that water has to be there, however you define healing. If you study the longevity of human beings on our planet and the areas in which this is most marked you will find that the length of the life-span, and therefore the healthiness of the indigenous population, relates not so much to their food intake, to what they eat in their normal diet, as to the quality of the water that they drink.
The older naturopaths used to say that treatment would not be possible unless the patient would be willing to drink a gallon of water a day! We are in a very different situation with regard to water consumption now from the time of the naturopaths' heyday, when it would have been a much more common drink. Water consumption is very important to the healthy functioning of the body, and initially you may have some difficulty drinking enough of it.
For instance, an ex-student was not having any success with treating a case of acne because his patient would not drink the water as recommended to her. My response at that time was to say: 'Why not tell her, then, that you can't treat her?' How do we get people to drink the amount of water? We do so by giving them enough information to empower them to be able to take charge of their treatment. I always say people must drink a minimum of 4 pints of pure water in addition to any other liquids.
The amount of water lost in normal metabolic processes is about 4 pints a day. So 4 pints a day is my recommended lower limit because, at less than this, you just create much more stressful conditions rather than helping. An important point regarding drinking water however is to advise against drinking more than 2 pints in an hour because otherwise you will set up a diuresis with your kidneys. That is not desirable because it implies a mineral loss. Further, be careful if you find you really want to drink more than 6 pints a day, because this will mean that the body is not receiving the message that it has enough water.
Stress occurs when the body is not presented with the desirable quantity of pure water. It goes on dehydration alert. Nothing is more stressful to the body. This is a stress that is not perceived as such by most people, since they have no idea that the dehydration process is so significant. The body's response is to produce cholesterol, not the kind that hangs around in the bloodstream, but the kind that the body enmeshes in the lipid membrane (fatty outer wall) that surrounds the cells.
Going back to the patient who was suffering from acne: unless she was prepared to attend to her water problem, she was not going to get any real improvement. There would be no change; the body being so busy making the extra cholesterol that there was no chance of helping liver function (the liver is the "master chemist" of the body and the main organ of detoxification) nor of stopping the misplacement of fats and oils which was showing up on the skin.
People have to be empowered to enable them to take responsibility for their own health. They soon see the amazing effects of drinking enough water. Those who come to me have often got to the end of the road, as it were, having tried all the other treatments they could find but without experiencing satisfying improvement. At first, when you start to take in pure water, you notice that you get very thirsty. Thirst has previously been mistaken for hunger signals and it is exciting to find the messages becoming clearer. I find that, once I have explained the dehydration situation to patients, they are very willing to change to drinking the vital water required by the cells.
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