The book We Want To Live: the Primal Diet first came out in 1997. 

 Primal Diet is a formally and legally registered trademark owned by the author of the book, Aajonus Vonderplanitz (see http://www.WeWant2Live.com).  I suggest you read the book to gain a full understanding of the importance and relevance to health.

I spoke with a medical doctor once, asking her if she agreed to “Let food be your medicine and let medicine be your food” as brought down to us over the centuries from Hippocrates.

She said “yes, but that was then (meaning in the time of Hippocrates) and this is now”.

She is right about that. If you walk through the isles of a supermarket today and pull various items off the shelf – then try to live by eating these items and be healthy – you will not get the nutrients you need.

There are two huge differences between what is available today and what food was in the time of Hippocrates:

• The food of today has been altered in some way and
• something has been added or taken away from the original source of the food.

Find Out for Yourself:

I suggest you make a field trip to a grocery store, choosing the items for daily consumption – such as milk, breakfast cereal, juice, bread, prepared meat, pastries, desserts and so on, including catsup, mustard and butter.

I suggest you make a game of this, even involving your kids.

This reminds me of the kind of puzzle you can find in a children's magazine – for instance one challenging you to find the hidden animals in a picture. Take these common items and see how they have been altered from the original. You are invited to post what you find, at the bottom of this page.

Then - if it is available to you – take another field trip to a self-sustaining farm. There was a Greek Orthodox monastery not far from where I grew up. You may find an Amish farm. If you do not find a self-sustaining farm, look on the right side of this page, to see the blog labels then click on Amish. You will find several refreshing weeks recorded by Nathan Donahoe... Start at the bottom and read up.

You will notice the distinct absence of table salt, an absence of refined sugars in any of its names (for example corn syrup), and anything you do find there has a simple name such as chicken or egg. No long confusing words or complex chemicals.

I am not trying to set myself up as an authority, but rather to get you to see how this works for yourself.  I suggest you research this a bit more yourself, including reading Aajonus's books.

Success with the Hot-Water Baths

After hearing Aajonus speak on interviews about the hot baths

[on the www.WeWant2Live.com site], we were convinced that we needed to do this therapy [see pg 286 of We Want To Live: the Primal Diet for details]. We have a big, deep bathtub. It's 25 years old, and we never used it. So, we got a candy thermometer to check the water temperature. We keep the water temp between 106 and 108 degrees. It takes 2 loads of hot water to fill up the tub. We drain one hot-water-heater load into the tub, cover the tub (with a make-shift cover) to hold in the heat while the water heater heats up another load -- then we drain that load into the tub.

It registers around 108 degrees when we get into the tub.

We just slide the cover back and get into the tub, with our heads sticking out. (Only one of us can get into the tub at a time.) You stay very warm that way. We also heat up the bathroom with our electric space heater, so it's warm in the room to begin with. I have only worked up to 10 to 15 minutes, and Keith up to 20. But, we go a second step. Right after we get out of the tub and dry off, we immediately get into a bed in a warm room, and wrap ourselves (including our heads) in towels and blankets for half an hour (or more if we fall asleep). We look like mummies with a small breathing hole over our face. Boy do we sweat! We have a regular infrared sauna that we used to use, and we never sweated like we do in the hot bath and bed. We switched over to the hot bath after we heard Aajonus say that he felt the sauna was too high a temperature.

Keith has had some amazing detoxes through this. During his third hot-bath-bed session, he was smelling the organic solvent toluene coming out of his breath. He started smelling this while he was in the hot bath, and it continued on during the bed-sweating session. Over 35 years ago, my husband worked for several years in a plastic manufacturing plant as a chemical engineer. Without mask or fan, he breathed in toluene and other bad chemicals 8 hours per day.

This stuff was detoxing out of his body.

It was amazing to us, after all these years, -- to the point where he could smell it. It's funny -- he hasn't smelled it since, during any of the subsequent hot-bath-bed sessions. Another amazing detox episode was this past week, during his weekly hot-bath-bed-sweating session. He started feeling bad when he was soaking in the water -- just feeling yucky. Shortly after he got wrapped up in his "mummy" outfit in bed, he started violently chilling and shaking. I turned up the heater in the room, and put a lot more blankets on him. His forehead was not hot to the touch, so I knew he wasn't running a high temperature. He started having an "acid" stomach, which is not normal for him. He said he felt like he was getting a Dengue Fever flashback. (He contracted Dengue Fever -- a mosquito born infection like malaria -- while he was in high school in India. At that time, he had violent chills and shakes for 2 days. That was 47 years ago.) He has never had chills and shakes in all these years until this episode. This lasted for about 5 hours. We figure he was detoxing the Dengue Fever, because it was the same symptoms.

Between the Primal Diet and Hot Baths, we are seeing quick results.

We remember that Aajonus said that sometimes the body will dump it's toxins into the stomach to be neutralized by the stomach acids. During the 5 hours of chills and shakes, his stomach stayed very acid -- almost feeling like throwing up. He stayed in bed much of the next day, feeling wiped out and not hungry. But, the chills and shakes and reactions were over. So, we feel he had gone through another major detox.

The reason we get into bed to sweat after the hot baths is because of an incident I had when I was in High School. One time I had flu symptoms real bad. I took a real hot bath, because I was aching so bad. And then got into my bed,,, And I started sweating in the hot bed. After this I felt so much better. So, when Aajonus talked about the hot baths, I though about my experience in high school, and thought we should add the bed-sweating session to the hot-bath session. :o)

Happy, healthy new year!

Linda & Keith B.