The Clean Windshield Effect

What happens when you clean a dirty windshield? You can see!

The other day I was chatting with Drake’s karate instructor, and he said, “Did you know that you can be so healthy that you are sick?”

I shrugged. Ok.

He said, “It’s true! I knew this guy. All he could eat was broccoli and peanuts. He just kept removing foods, and that’s where he landed – broccoli and peanuts. He was a recovered addict so it makes sense that you stop drinking alcohol and then end up with some other addiction, like healthy eating. He was complicated. Thing is, he died unexpectedly. He got run over by a car.”

I love my conversations with Drake’s teacher. This particular time, however, I just stood there, nodded and said, “Hmmmm…”

I mean, there’s so much to unpack. Where do I even start?

Well, I’m going to start here: I have heard people say over the years that they know a friend or have a neighbor or co-worker or a cousin or whatever who started eating healthy and now they are sensitive to EVERYTHING. “Who wants to live like that?” they say. “Not me!”

Ok. I get it. No one wants to live like that. And most people don’t want to give up their vices. After all, our food supply and world are filled with addictive drug-like substances: sugar, carbohydrates, caffeine, alcohol, tea, chocolate, and let’s not forget our cell phones and screens. These are coping mechanisms that many people employ in an effort to get through the day. I understand. I used to be there, too!

But the truth of the matter is this: being sensitive is a gift. It is a healthy state of being, and you are clueless and unconscious to your sensitivities, until you are not. It’s called The Clean Windshield Effect.

This little gem came from one of my favorite nutrition teachers – Nora Gedaugas. It’s what happens when you clean up your diet and lifestyle. All of a sudden you can observe how things are really affecting you. It’s just like cleaning the windshield of your car and now you can see the lines on the road and the squirrel you are about to run over.

The problem is that people often think that their sensitivities are increasing as they get healthy. This is NOT so. What happens is that your sensitivities are unmasked. They were there all the time but now you can SEE them.

This is what healing looks like. Healing is awareness of how the things you do either fuck you up or make you feel good. It’s never been about getting rid of symptoms. You want your body to talk to you! Healing is about paying attention to your symptoms and trying to make sense of them…trying to make connections.

Case in point: people keep sending me links to EMF protective devices. Most of these things don’t work and prevent us from making meaningful changes from using technology in a safer way. And crystals, in particular, can make you feel better while the damage to your body still occurs! I want my body to tell me when I’m in a toxic environment. That’s a state of health!

So please, don’t let a broccoli and peanut diet scare you. Clearly, these extreme examples are just that – extreme! And these particular people need help, as they are often disabled by their sensitivities. Bottom line: the perception of “increasing sensitivities” can’t stop you from cleaning up your diet and environment. That’s just your mind and addictions lying to you.

There is no higher calling than learning to listen to and respond to your body. As Dr Olle Johansson, EMF researcher from Sweden, said at the EMF conference last September, “What if the canary is the only normal human being?”

I mean, don’t you wonder what’s there in your environment or coming into your body that you’re not seeing and feeling? I know I do. It’s one of the great unfolding mysteries of being alive…and well.

Clean your windshield in peace, my friends!

Love,

Charlotte

Yoga with your phone?

Tuesday morning I went to a yoga class. That seems like a pretty ordinary thing but for me, it was a Big Deal. It’s been over a decade since I’ve done yoga. I’m not sure why it’s been so long, other than I went to a few bad classes many years ago and just stopped going. Then, I had a kid and you know the rest – time flies!

It felt good to be back on the yoga mat – breathing and feeling my body. But here’s what surprised me: many of the attendees brought their cell phone to class. I do not remember this being the case over ten years ago or maybe I was oblivious. One lady’s phone would ding. She’d leave her pose to check her text messages. I heard another phone ring twice and then a door open and shut each time. Not sure if it was the same person or two different ones.

And I’m in my pose or resting, thinking to myself, “Namaste, motherfuckers.”

Because when I was at the height of my cell phone use and super engaged with social media, I would NOT have brought my phone to a freaking yoga class!!!

Tell me, is this a thing now? Am I that out of the loop? I mean, who in the holy fuck needs their phone during a yoga class? No one is that important. And if you are, then hire a private yoga instructor, stay at home, do your poses with your cell phone in your bra, and radiate the fuck out of yourself AND your teacher, ok?

Think about it for a moment: I got rid of my cell phone when I realized its effects on my cardiovascular and nervous systems. I could feel my cell phone affecting my heart and making me sweat. Isn’t yoga a heart-based practice? I go to a goddamn yoga class to relax. Tune into my body. Breathe. Be present. And calm my heart. Not to be assaulted in a small space by your invisible secondhand smoke called wireless radiation.

So the question swimming through my head is this: will I have the guts at the next class to ask the instructor to tell people to put their phone in airplane mode so that the environment will be safer? And does asking even matter? Because addicts are fucking liars.

After all, at the end of the day, we are all a bunch of cell phone and screen addicts. We can’t help ourselves; technology has hijacked our brains. That is, until it doesn’t and we wake up…

Now, I’m going to take a minute to hit the pause button in our little one-way conversation to say that a few months ago, I was completely unaware of the health hazards of wireless technology. I know that. But can you put yourself in my shoes and empathize with my newfound anger?

My cell phone made my heart skip beats. It made it race. It made it thump. It made it flutter.

My cell phone made me sweat. It made me anxious.

My cell phone gave me a rising feeling in my chest of trapped energy that had nowhere to go.

My cell phone made my body buzz.

My cell phone gave me sleep onset insomnia and made my legs squirmy at night.

My cell phone gave me dark thoughts of impending doom.

So I got rid of it, almost all of the above symptoms have resolved and hopefully now you can see why I don’t want your phone anywhere fucking near me…especially in a yoga class, or in a car, on a train, or on a bus, or on a plane!

Excuse the fuck out of me if I sound preachy, but this isn’t just about me…

It’s estimated that 35% of the population is moderately electrically sensitive (and probably don’t know it, like me) and that 3% are disabled by electrohypersensitivity (EHS) - that’s 115 million and 10 million in the US, respectively. So I know I’m not alone in that yoga class or in the world.

Arthur Firstenberg, author of The Invisible Rainbow, says it best: “How many will it take before people no longer feel too alone to say, ‘Your cell phone is killing me,’ instead of ‘I’m electrically sensitive?” (p367).

Good question.

In the spirit of asserting that enough is enough, I want to share an excerpt from a book I just started reading - In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology & the Survival of Indian Nations by Jerry Mander. He keeps these statements posted in his bathroom to remind him to stay skeptical. If we all took these into account, we probably wouldn’t be in our current predicament - with our cell phones and iPads or with our genetically modified foods and fake meat products.

10 Recommended Attitudes About Technology

1. "Since most of what we are told about new technology comes from its proponents, be deeply skeptical of all claims.

2. Assume all technology “guilty until proven innocent.”

3. Eschew the idea that technology is neutral or “value free.” Every technology has inherent and identifiable social, political, and environmental consequences.

4. The fact that technology has a natural flash and appeal is meaningless. Negative attributes are slow to emerge.

5. Never judge a technology by the way it benefits you personally. Seek a holistic view of its impacts. The operative question is not whether it benefits you, but who benefits most? And to what end?

6. Keep in mind that an individual technology is only one piece of a larger web of technologies, “megatechnology.” The operative question here is how the individual technology fits into the larger one.

7. Make distinctions between technologies that primarily serve the individual or small community (eg solar energy) and those that operate on a scale outside of community control (eg nuclear energy). The latter kind is the major problem of the day.

8. When it is argued that the benefits of the technological lifeway are worthwhile despite harmful outcomes, recall that Lewis Mumford referred to these alleged benefits as “bribery.” Cite the figures about crime, suicide, alienation, drug abuse, as well as environmental and cultural degradation.

9. Do not accept the homily that “once the genie is out of the bottle you cannot put it back,” or that rejecting a technology is impossible. Such attitudes induce passivity and confirm victimization.

10. In thinking about technology with the present climate of technological worship, emphasize the negative. This brings balance. Negativity is positive" (p49-50).

Thought provoking, yes? #9 is my jam. Watch me shove that genie right back in that fucking bottle. Done.

While each one of us continues to evaluate our relationship with our devices, can we at least agree to leave our cell phones in our cars when attending a yoga class? I think that’s a decent start.

Just think of me, my heart skipping a beat in response to your device, and leave that phone behind. Do you WANT to hurt the people around you? Better yet, forget about me - think about your future health. Because what’s happened to me and what’s happened to countless others, can happen to anyone.

Reflect in peace, my friends.

Love,

Charlotte

PS – How about some good news for herbal medicine? In a long, drawn out court case against three herbalists, the herbalists won. Long story short, a company that used to call themselves Shire City Herbals wanted to trademark the name Fire Cider. The court said that they can’t do that. Yippee! Justice has been served. You can read and listen to more about the situation here.

Thanks for reading!

Healing Leaky Gut in Your Kitchen

“Ultimately, this research on apples indicates how important whole foods are to our overall health. Apples are not medicine, rather, they are the means by which medicines become unnecessary. It is through authentic nourishment and detoxification…that we prevent and treat disease.” -Sayer Ji, Founder of GreenMed Info

A few weeks ago, I was privileged to attend a weekend seminar with one of my most beloved nutrition and herbal teachers – Paul Bergner. The topic: Botanicals, Microbiome, Biofilms, and Chronic Infections.

He reminded us of such things that we can easily forget, like don’t take antibiotics unless your life is at risk. Just like vaccines (my words), it’s not the first round of antibiotics that takes you down; it’s the second course, third course, fourth course, etc that can permanently damage your microbiome. I am most certain that many of my current health struggles at 43 years of age are a direct result of countless rounds of antibiotics I took up until my mid-twenties when I finally learned better. The microbiome I have now isn’t the one I was born with and never will be (so please pardon my prolific, stinky farts - it’s not my fault).

But most importantly and directly related to the ongoing use of antibiotics, he reminded us that we rarely need to kill microbes as it relates to our bodies. What we need to instead is alter the environment in which they are growing. This is easy to forget in the culture of modern medicine and the political tone of our country which loves to create wars. The war on cancer and war on drugs come immediately to mind. And what do all wars have in common? Wars want to kill the enemy. It’s such an appealing mindset: good guy, bad guy, kill the bad guy.

Many doctors will use antibiotics to treat Small Intestinal Bacterial Overgrowth (SIBO), for example. While this may take care of the bacterial overgrowth in the bowels, what about the health of the rest of the person? His/her overall vitality will be injured and the root cause is never addressed. [Side note: how do we know that SIBO isn’t really SIFO – small intestinal fungal overgrowth – or SIMO – small intestinal microbial overgrowth? We don’t, which would both make antibiotics ineffective and not worth it].

In addition, the main cause of SIBO is the on-going use of proton pump inhibitors which attempt to address indigestion and acid reflux. The other two causes are hepatic (liver) and pancreatic disease. These 3 things all have one thing in common: they negatively impact the motility of the gut.

Think of your intestinal tract as a giant tube of toothpaste and when it slowly squeezes throughout the day, the muscles move and you have will have an urge for a bowel movement. That’s how things should work but it many people this peristalsis isn’t occurring and bile from the liver and gall bladder which is the body’s natural laxative isn’t moving, and the gut is stagnant and slowly transforms into a swamp. And what do we know about swamps? Nasty shit grows there.

Maybe, just maybe, the bacteria or other microbes in SIBO or general dysbiosis in the gut aren’t the actual problem. Instead it’s the environment in which they are growing in. As Paul put forth in his lecture, maybe SIBO is really amotility syndrome (the letter ‘a’ before a word means ‘without’ so here we have without-motility syndrome meaning that the toothpaste tube squeeze in the gut isn’t happening).

So what do we do to address this? How do we alter the environment? It’s pretty fucking simple. We reduce the inflammatory load on the gut by eating real food. We discover and remove any food sensitivities (the big 4 are wheat, dairy, corn and soy). We utilize bitter herbs which I discuss more in my book. And finally, we make sure our mucus membranes are robust! Because without a healthy, happy mucus membrane, we have nothing. That’s where our immune system resides and where beneficial bacteria like to grow, and we are going to do that with this:

Homemade applesauce with the powder (and power) of gut healing herbs.

Paul’s favorite trio includes calendula flowers, plantain leaves, and marshmallow root. I might also consider gotu kola or chamomile, depending on the patient’s presentation and access to quality plant material. All of these herbs have the honor of being vulneraries which means that they heal the skin – outside and in. These are the exact same herbs I use in my Magic Herbal Salve. If we can make contact with the tissue, these herbs can help heal. (In addition, these plants are also antimicrobial and anti-inflammatory. Show me a drug that can do all that! It simply doesn’t exist).

The overall idea here is to deliver the herbs in a way that can actually reach the mid-to-lower GI tract, and powders are more likely to do that. Teas would be slightly helpful here as well, but liquid extracts not so much as they are typically absorbed into the body in the stomach and exert their influence in the bloodstream. Neither teas, nor tinctures, can act as prebiotics, which is food for good bacteria, in the large intestine, like a marshmallow or slippery elm powder can – never mind the brilliance of delivering these herbs in applesauce!

For a moment, let’s set the herbs aside and review the power of apples which can be used for:

Cancer prevention, specifically colorectal, liver, breast, multi-drug resistant cancer, esophageal and stomach

Removal of carcinogenic radioisotopes from the bodies of people in Chernobyl and Fukushima

Diarrhea

Atherosclerosis

Weight loss

Anti-aging

Bowel inflammation

Vaccine-induced toxicity

Periodontal disease

Advanced glycation end products (AGEs) – this has to do with oxidation of sugars in the bloodstream, making your blood sticky

Hair loss

Staphylococcal infections

Influenza

Now, THAT’S food as medicine, right? Most of the medicine in an apple comes from the skin and pectin which can both be conveniently found in applesauce. When you hear the word pectin, you can think binder, soother and healer. You can buy it in capsules or…you can just simply eat it. This was absolutely delicious:

Homemade Applesauce Recipe

3 pounds of green organic apples (that’s about 9 medium-sized apples)*

1 teaspoon cinnamon, ground

¼ teaspoon cardamom, ground

¼ teaspoon ginger, ground

Juice of 1 organic lemon

¼ cup filtered water

Coconut oil

Coat the bottom and sides of your crockpot in coconut oil. Core and slice apples. I use this to make it fast and easy. No need to peel (the skin contains a lot of nutrition and fiber that you don’t want to miss out on). Add spices, lemon juice and water. Cover and cook 4-5 hours on low.

Now comes the fun part: do you like your applesauce chunky, smooth or somewhere in between? I like mine smooth so I gently pulse it in my Vitamix, but you could use a potato masher, immersion blender or hand mixer to achieve your desired texture.

*The reason you want to use green apples is because of the additional tannins. This is why green apples are tart, sort of like that green tea phenomenon that makes your mouth pucker. Tannins, not only act as antimicrobial agents, but will help to tighten and heal tissues making tannins the perfect answer to both leaky gut AND dysbiosis.

For people concerned about carbohydrate intake, a medium-sized apple has roughly 20 metabolic carbohydrates (that’s not counting the fiber), so it will be a case-by-case basis as to whose metabolism can handle an apple without disturbing blood sugar.

Now, all you need to do is get a small bowl for the applesauce and then add your herbal powders for a gut healing treat in your kitchen!

Heal in peace, my friends!

Love,

Charlotte

P.S. – A note about herbal powders…

The minute you make powder out of an herb, thus increasing its surface area, it starts to degrade and medicine is lost. So what I would recommend doing here is buying your herbs in bulk and powdering them with a coffee grinder. Some of my favorite companies to source from are: Pacific Botanicals, Mountain Rose Herbs and Starwest Botanicals. I try to buy the ones that are organic and harvested in the US. Please store them in a dark, cool area and not in plastic.

I would aim to use a tablespoon of herbal powder per day in the applesauce and if you’re working with a child, cut that in half.

And don’t forget to have fun!