My Present Moment

written May 13, 2008
At this very moment, I am sitting at a beachside restaurant. My table and thus also my feet are in the sand. There is a palm tree immediately to my left, thus providing some shade, although its already a bit cloudy today. The clouds don’t mean its cold, of course. They just mean its less hot. The boat taxi from Koh Phangan, the island I’ve been on for my detox vacation over the past week, just dropped me off here about 20 minutes ago. No pier…we just pulled up right on the sand, and stepped off into the gently flowing waves.

This island I am now on, Koh Samui, is a famously beautiful island in Thailand; one of the top vacation spots in the country. This beach that I’m looking at right now stretches about a mile or two in each direction. Along its edge sits many other open-air, thatched roof restaurants and numerous quaint little bungalows, which probably cost around $30 per night. The town stretches out behind me. Light tan colored sand. Clear blue water. Various other dots of islands visible in the distance. A cruise ship far down to my right. Some small pleasure boats and taxi boats anchored right in front of me. I’m here because this is where the airport is located in order to fly to Bangkok, and then catch a two hour shuttle back to my ‘home’ in Hua Hin. My trip down here last week was much more arduous…overnight bus ride followed by a 4 hour bumpy boat ride. So after feeling as horrible as I have been, I knew I needed to give myself the gift of an airplane ride home instead! I have a few hours before I need to head to the airport, so I thought I’d take this moment to do a little writing….my new favorite hobby.

This past week of detoxing was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I can honestly say that I have never felt so horrible for an entire week in my entire life. But yes, I’m very glad I did it. It might have changed my life. Today I feel more clear-headed than I’ve ever felt. My stomach is flatter than it’s ever been. One key thing I learned (or I suppose I should say, was reminded of first hand because I already learned this in school…) was that the western lifestyle…high stress, pollutants in our foods, eating wrong foods, eating too much, etc…creates a very acidic environment in the body. Some of the biggest acid producing foods are red meat, alcohol, coffee, and sugar. Simply eating on the go, regardless if its healthy food or not, does not send the signal to the stomach to create the needed acid for digestion. That signal is only sent when we are in a relaxed state, the condition in which nature intended for us to eat. The body was not built to digest food and at the same time, be active.

So our western lifestyle…stress, improper foods, polluted foods, eating on the go…raises the acid level throughout the body. But acid’s very nature is one of destruction. Imagine pouring acid on your skin, on your cells. The only place we want high acid in our body is in our stomach. The acid properly serves there to breakdown our food in order for the nutrient’s to become available to our body. It also acts to kill any unwanted bacteria that enter our body from food, when we put our fingers in our mouth, from kissing, old toothbrushes, breath in someone else’s coughed out germs… When our stomach turns down its acid production, this unwanted bacteria get a free ticket to live in our body. Well, when a lifestyle is already creating an acidic environment throughout the body, the body certainly doesn’t want to continue creating its own acid. So it drastically shuts this process down.

What does this mean? It means that the nutrient levels in our body drop dramatically due to insufficient digestion and it means that unwanted bacteria are allowed to start living in the body. As for your intestinal lining, it needs to protect itself from this improper food stuffs entering into it, so it starts creating a mucous barrier along its surface. This further worsens the insufficient digestion problem because many digestive enzymes are located along this intestinal lining…but if food never comes into contact with them, it doesn’t get digested. Furthermore, this mucous lining becomes a perfect breeding ground for unwanted bacteria, parasites, and fungus. Hmm, where have we heard about this problem before?

Now, there is much debate amongst health professionals about this ‘mucoid plaque’ that may or may not form inside of our digestive tracts. So I can’t say this theory is sound but it’s an interesting theory nonetheless. What I can say is that we DO need acid in our stomach…to thoroughly digest our food and to kill unwanted bacteria, parasites and fungus that happen to enter our body via our mouth. Stress suppresses acid production….and thus the domino effect of poorly absorbed nutrients and the risk of bugs thriving in the body occurs.

Dating all the way back to the time of Hippocrates, the father of medicine, many wise doctors have said, “Disease starts in the digestive tract.” The nutrients, or lack there of, that every cell in our body is dependent on, originate from our digestive tract. Smoking kills. Drugs and alcohol kill. Everyone knows that. The great masked villain that everyone has come to accept so readily in our society is STRESS. What can you do today to take a break, put your feet up, and smile at how relaxed and peaceful you feel. Every cell in your body will thank you for it. I have a bunch more I want to write about but I’m going to take my own advice and go take a dip in the ocean. Ahhhhh. Bye for now!