Detox From The COVID Shot With Christian Elliot

If you got one of the covid shots, you’re not stuck. Your body has the ability to detoxify. Where to start, though? Our guest today, Christian Elliot of Healing United, suggests avoiding what he calls “biochemical whack-a-mole”. Instead, he recommends that you purify and nourish the body to support its innate detoxing capabilities.

He begins by helping us understand what was in the shots in the first place (including 55 undeclared chemicals not on the package insert). He goes over best practices and protocols for detoxing including fasting and lifestyle changes. He also addresses shedding, what supplements he recommends, and how to support the body’s innate wisdom and clear its detox pathways.

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Episode Transcript

Within the below transcript the bolded text is Hilda Labrada Gore and the regular text is Christian Elliot.

There are 55 undeclared chemicals in the top six brands of COVID shots. These are not listed in the package insert. These are poisonous ingredients to the body. I’m talking about things like heavy metals, polyethylene glycol, and hydrogel that are introduced directly into our bodies. How do we support the body to detox from such things?

This is episode 539, and our guest is Christian Elliot. Christian is a restorative health coach, the host of the Deconstructing Conventional Podcast, and the Co-owner of Healing United, which is a private membership association that pairs doctors and coaches to create personalized detox programs for chronic illness.

In this episode, Christian goes over what it is that we need to detox from. He talks about shedding, how it is that people who haven’t gotten the shot seem to exhibit symptoms or residues in their bodies from shot ingredients. He also talks about purifying the body and nourishing it so that we can get rid of what we need to. Christian also shares best practices, the importance of lifestyle changes, for example, to support the body’s detox systems, and its innate wisdom in detoxing from the toxins that surround us and come into our bodies. Christian also goes over the supplements he recommends and other protocols, including fasting.

Before we get into the conversation, are you a parent, a would-be parent, a grandparent, or an adult interested in children’s health? Nourishing Our Children is a project of the Weston A. Price Foundation. It was established in 2005 with a focus on timeless principles for supporting learning behavior and health through optimal nutrition.

Nourishing Our Children has an active closed group on Facebook that offers support on how to nourish and not merely feed our children. If you join, you’ll also have complimentary access to the group focused on adults for a donation of only $5 for the calendar year. The moderators ensure that no question goes unanswered. To join, go to Nourishing Our Children.

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Welcome to the Wise Traditions, Christian.

Thank you for having me. It’s great to be back with you.

Unveiling The Undeclared: What’s Really In The COVID Shots?

This is an important conversation because many of our friends and loved ones, if not ourselves, took the COVID shot or have taken vaccines without any idea of what’s in them. You told me that a paper was released that showed 55 undeclared ingredients in the COVID shots. Tell us more about that.

In October 2024, the International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice, and Research published a paper. I first found it on Children’s Health Defense. It said there are 55 undeclared chemicals, which means they’re not on the package insert. They’re not declared, including heavy metals that were found in the top six brands of the shots.

The top six brands did not include the J&J shot. That was pulled off the market a while ago. Who knows how many other chemicals there might have been if we had included that one? What that says is several things. One, there’s no standardization. This doesn’t even come close to pharmaceutical grade. There are no good manufacturing practices. It forces a few questions, like, what in the world are we trying to detox from? Is this a bug or a feature? Are they testing different formulations?

If you know anything about the different batches or hot lots that created a large disproportionate amount of injuries or deaths, there are other theories that emerge as to what we might be dealing with. At some point, we have to step back and say, if we are trying to approach this puzzle simply through a biochemical puzzle or a biochemical whack-a-mole, I’ve come to call it, of moves and counter moves, we are playing the wrong game. There’s a different way we need to approach a puzzle this complicated.

Let’s back up for a second before we get into the whack-a-mole that we’re trying to practice. To detox from all of these chemicals, adjuvants, and these shots, can you name exactly or not all 50 undeclared ingredients? What were some of the things that cropped up? You said heavy metals.

People appreciate it when you speak the truth and just call it like it is.

Heavy metals are just one. That’s just a category. I’ll rewind the story a little bit. Back in early 2022, I had a client who was a naturopath. She wasn’t jabbed herself, but was working with a lot of people who were. It started to become obvious that she was having significant issues with shedding. That was my first introduction, like, “That’s real.” What in the world is transferring from one person to another?

Since I wrote this article that went viral about why I’m not going to get the shots, the fun part was that a lot of doctors reached out to me. I developed this fun network of doctors. Some were publicly known, and others were like, “Thanks for saying what I feel too uncomfortable to say publicly.” I got a whole lot of people I could talk to. I could start reaching out, researching, and trying to figure out what we know about what’s in these things and what has happened.

Two people I talked to off the record, who had the vials themselves and were able to put them under microscopes and look, would swear to you on a Bible hill that they have found four different kinds of parasites in them, at least, and graphene oxide or various heavy metals such as cadmium, lead, and aluminum. You name it.

The only thing that’s explaining this is the sci-fi mRNA that has hacked the body, and we forced it to make a toxic protein. There’s polyethylene glycol in there. I’m intentionally complicating the puzzle a little bit so I can show you how beautifully simple it can get, but it is hairy, onerous, and complicated. Truthfully, we still do not know what is in the shots and how many more things might come to light later. We have to step back and think differently about the puzzle, at least in my opinion.

I’m so eager to hear your ideas on how to approach this differently. Isn’t polyethylene glycol an ingredient in antifreeze?

Yes. One of the people I talked to, who is looking at the shots, theorizes that they’ve put hydrogels in them. If you don’t know hydrogel, think diaper. Think of something small, but when it hits water, it significantly expands its footprint and holds fluid. Could that explain some of the fibrous clots we’re seeing? Is that what’s going on, or is it this amyloid folded protein or misfolded protein? Is it this spike that’s doing that?

The Occam’s razor short version of this is that it looks like we’ve been intentionally poisoned. That’s an uncomfortable thing to say. Traditionally, if you ever want to take out your enemy, that’s how they’ve done it for thousands of years. It’s that you find a poison and put it in the person that you don’t like. How you can get this problem that you have to go away is to poison them.

At the end of the day, it seems like that’s what we are dealing with there. There’s something poisonous here. It might be polyethylene glycol. It might be a hydrogel. It may be the mRNA narrative and the majority of it. There are so many questions related to this that it’s hard to say, “Here’s the definitive thing of what’s in the shot, and this is therefore what we should do.”

I am so impressed that you are willing to speak so boldly and with such clarity. Some doctors are hesitant because their reputations and their practices are on the line. Are you ever concerned about how this could affect your reputation and your work?

Possibly. I don’t have a medical license to be taken away from me, so I have this freedom that a lot of doctors feel they don’t have. I put my neck out there and wrote eighteen reasons I won’t be doing this. I braced for impact when I did that. For a day, I didn’t even want to look at it because I didn’t want all of the trolls or the “You idiot.” What ended up happening was I had 95% thank yous that came from that. I had my fact checkers, NewsGuard, and all the other people predictably come after me, but it gave me more of a backbone. People appreciate it when you speak the truth and when you call it like it is.

Let’s simplify this. We’ve been poisoned, and it’s intentional. Once you’ve metabolized that and got over the emotional grossness of that, you could step back and say, “What then can we do about it? I’m still here. I still want to be well. I want to help other people.” I don’t live from a place of fear. I’m put here on this Earth to do something, and I will do my best to do that. When the use-by date is done on my body, it’s done. Until then, I’m not going to be quiet.

I like that. I haven’t heard that term before, “When the use-by date arrives.” I also want to ask you about shedding, and then we’ll get into what to do about this. There is some controversy, even in our alternative health circle, about shedding. Some people say it’s not a thing, and yet I do know people who have had their blood analyzed that seem to have residues or indicators that they’ve gotten the shot when they haven’t.

Probably the person that I know who’s done the most work on this is Pierre Kory. He’s got a Substack with a 9 or 10-part series on shedding in particular. I’ll give you a couple of highlights. He noted that every mRNA product or gene therapy product that is on the market lists shedding as one of the side effects. Three of those medications are Luxturna, Roctavian, and Zolgensma. All three of those have shedding listed as a side effect, so they know this happens. Pfizer was looking for it in their trials. Aaron Siri and Naomi Wolf got those papers out and have been analyzing them. Sure enough, this is something they were looking for.

Wise Traditions | Christian Elliot | Detox — Detox: If you truly want to heal people, remember they’re not math equations; they are real people.

I’ve talked to two different women who, 4 or 5 years post their last period, had heavy bleeding on the first day they interacted with somebody who had those shots. With one woman, two of her sons had nosebleeds as soon as they were around those people. There’s a whole website, My Cycle Story, which is about how something has changed. There are so many people who did not get these that, at some point, all these anecdotal stories are plenty of clinical evidence. We don’t need a paper to prove this. We can already say the FDA knows it’s happening. It’s listed on these medications already. There’s so much evidence.

What exactly is going on is a different thing. One of the things they talk about for those medications is any fluid that could pass from one person to the other. That’s one plausible mechanism that may be going on here. My experience working with my client who had that issue is that she needed to pause her whole practice because she was so burdened. It made me step back and say, “There is something else going on here. I don’t want to be so stuck in one theory that I can’t entertain other things that might be going on.”

I like that perspective or that approach of not being stuck, because when we get stuck and rigid, that’s when things start to die, whether it’s a plant or an animal. We want to stay flexible and open to learning. Given the research you’ve done and what you’ve understood about the shot and its effects, you said we can’t just play this biochemical whack-a-mole and say, “They’ve got this ingredient. We’re going to detox it this way. They’ve got that ingredient, so we’ll detox it that way.” What is your different approach for taking care of these ramifications you’ve been describing?

Treatment Vs. Healing: A Paradigm Shift For Health

Let me complicate it one more layer for you, to have fun. There’s the question mark of what’s in the shot, what it is doing, and how it is causing our physiology to adapt. The other big thing is the complexity of the person you’re talking about. There’s what’s in it, but then there’s who we are talking about. There are age, gender, health, and weight. Do they have comorbidities? Do they have hope?

There are so many factors that go into this that we had to step back and say, “The rest of the world is taking a treatment approach to this.” It implies a level of hubris that says the body makes mistakes, or it says the body needs us to intervene and fight its battles for it. It needs us to force or override some physiological process. The way the body is handling this and attempting to respond isn’t working, so we need to nudge it differently.

There’s the treatment paradigm, and then there’s a healing paradigm. Rather than a place of hubris like the treatment does, it operates from a place of stewardship. It says the body is the only thing that could possibly handle this level of infinite calculus of what’s in the shots and all the different personal factors. Our job then is to unburden it everywhere we can, empower it, and trust the innate intelligence of the body to heal. That was the beginning of simplification and saying, “It’s not our job to play biochemical whack-a-mole. Our job is to empower the body to work as well as it possibly can.”

From there, the coaching aspect of who I am became highly relevant to the people that I’m working with, trying to put together plans for these people. How do we personalize this to someone’s health, to someone’s budget, and to their lifestyle? How do we personalize this to where they are and how much their body can handle at once, given their health, whether they’re sick or trying to optimize their health? How much can they afford to spend? How does whatever we suggest interact with their real life? What kind of onerous claims are we attempting to make on this person? When is it too much that it’s going to crash their schedule, drain their willpower, and sacrifice their friendships? We can’t do that.

I love asking that question. I always say it’s got to be user-friendly. This is one reason I ask at the end of the show, “What’s the one thing the reader can do to improve their health?” There’s so much advice and so much information. We need to be able to put wheels on it and have the rubber meet the road. It can’t be some esoteric concept that we need to do these 10 or 12 things. Weren’t you telling me that there was some detox protocol you came across that required ten things somebody had to swallow, and you were like, “They’re never going to do that.”

It was more than that. We collected all these different detox guides. I put it in one document, trying to find out what is similar and what everyone is recommending, and then I stepped back from it. For whatever reason, I had the thought to make a pie chart, and I did. It was 95% things you can swallow. One of the guides had 40 different things to swallow. You should not need a spreadsheet and a Gantt chart to figure out how to get well. It’s too much.

I know the work goes into this, and there are brilliant doctors creating these, but they’re not coaches. They don’t understand what they’re asking people to do. They’re so stuck in the sandbox of things to swallow, biochemical moves, and counter moves. That doesn’t work when you’re trying to heal. There are so many free things.

There’s so much more of a needle mover that can be done to get the engine started and get the detox pathways open. If we don’t focus on that at all, and all we’re trying to do is figure out the next thing for them to swallow and what we’re looking at in a lab test, and try to reduce them to a math equation, we’re not seeing and serving the whole person.

I’ve got to spar with a lot of doctors on those philosophies. We’ve had 3 or 4 doctors take our course. I’m asking them, “How do I make this better?” They’re like, “I don’t know what to tell you to make that better.” In summary, “That’s brilliant” is the feedback we’re getting. If you want to heal people, they’re not math equations. They are real people.

Go to the beach, mall, or airport, and you’ll visibly see our bodies packing in more calories. But they’re not craving more calories; they’re craving more nourishment.

I’m so glad you’re bringing that to the front. I’ll never forget when I interviewed Dr. Cassie Huckaby. She said that as she was training to become a nurse, people in the medical field were telling her, “You are spending too much time with each patient.” She was like, “What?” They were like, “You need to focus on one thing. It’s an arm injury or 9B.” They were trying to reduce these human beings to categories and numbers. You are very cognizant of the fact that we’re much more than that.

Just yesterday, I was talking to a client. He had an accident and got injured in his knee and shoulder. He tried to schedule a chiropractor, but the chiropractor wouldn’t take him. He went to the urgent care and then the ER. They recommended an osteopath. He went to schedule an appointment, and they were like, “You have to make two different appointments, one for the knee and one for the shoulder.” He was like, “What?”

We have to stop thinking of the body as individual parts and systems that don’t depend on each other. That’s not how this works. Healing is so much simpler than that. You can step back and look at it like, “Maybe this person needs a hug. Maybe they’re thirsty. Maybe they need some sunshine. Maybe they need some hope.” That is more medicinal than whatever pill they could swallow. If you’ve got a dehydrated, constipated, underslept, and undernourished couch potato, it doesn’t matter what they swallow. We’ve got to look at the situation we are dealing with. It’s a crime that we’re not spending more time with people to figure that out. That is how we do it.

Ancestral Wisdom: Simple Steps For Detox And Nourishment

Given that that’s your approach and understanding that we’re on a show, we can’t possibly individualize some of the recommendations you’re going to give us. Yet, I have a feeling that some of them may be as simple as the ancestral practices that we promote all the time. It’s that nutrient-dense food and reduced stress lifestyle where you’re going outside and getting the sun and so forth.

On this show, we’ve interviewed two people. We’ve interviewed Dr. Louisa Williams, who recommended using activated bamboo charcoal for detoxification from the COVID shot, and Anke Zimmermann, who talked about homeopathy. Let’s get specific about some of the steps for your detoxing protocol.

What we did was we stepped back and said, “Of all the shiny objects out there marketed, which ones are the biggest needle movers?” We created some categories. We had purifying agents people could use, and we had nourishing agents. We stepped back and said, “There are self-administered healing modalities people can practice, and there are some that you need a practitioner for.” It gave us categories to start to organize how we would get someone well.

To your point, walking in sunshine, grounding in spiritual practice, hydration, and fasting. There are so many simple, free things we can do. If healing is unburdened and empowered, one of the obvious things that far pre-dates COVID is toxins and poisons. We’ve been poisoned for over 100 years to the tune of tens of thousands of chemicals. We’re already in a profoundly sick society.

How do we purify these agents from our bodies? We looked for what has the most breadth of benefit and the least cost. There are powerful things there. The simplicity of herbs can be amazing. You mentioned homeopathy, which is not expensive. It’s one of the big things that’ll get you banned on YouTube. I’ve tried it, if you want to go there. Chlorine dioxide is fantastically powerful at dissolving so many pathogens, including glyphosate, spike protein, and heavy metals. It’s remarkable and dirt cheap. You could purify your whole neighborhood for a couple of hundred bucks if you know where to buy the ingredients and make it yourself. It’s amazing.

That’s so cool. We had someone speak about chlorine dioxide at the recent Wise Traditions Conference in Orlando.

I was fortunate enough to interview probably the biggest name in the world, Andreas Kalcker, about that. It is far and away my most downloaded podcast. It is tremendously powerful. It’s got so much use outside the US. Here, they’ll throw you in jail for talking about this and selling it. Somebody got thrown in jail for this.

There are things like chlorine dioxide. There’s algae, which is remarkably simple. There’s juicing that people can do. There’s something called OSR. Most people don’t know about that. That’s not cheap, but it’s remarkably powerful. Like chlorine dioxide, it’s sold for water purification. We have to stay in our lanes and know the linguistic handcuffs we are put in to talk about these things. There are so many powerful, inexpensive, and purifying agents. If you can create a simple plan for people, it’s not that hard to get well. You just need patience and consistency.

I like the word that you use about empowering and empowerment. Sometimes, we’re trying to run a track race with our ankles tied together, or we’re in one of those old potato sack races. We’re hindering ourselves, and we don’t realize it. If we can release or purify, we make space for the healing that the body can handle.

It starts with rebooting and purging systems. If the exits are closed, it’s probably not going to matter what you swallow. We’ve got to get the lifestyle. The number of people who aren’t pooping every day blows my mind. You should poop at least once a day, hopefully twice. There’s bathing, breathing, sweating, emoting, and sleeping. You have a whole lymphatic system in your brain that flushes when you sleep.

If you’re not doing the basics, we cannot fight the biological laws of physics and think we’re going to get well. I had a consultation I did months ago where the person told me, “I want you to help me get well, but I won’t quit smoking and drinking every day.” I’m like, “I can’t help you. You’re saying, “Train me to run faster with handcuffs on.” There’s some ownership we have to take in order for us to experience the benefit.

There’s this mental recalibration of how long this takes. If you’re 80, it’s probably going to take 2 or 3 times longer than it did when you were 20. It is to be able to be okay with that, calibrate to that, and then have somebody patiently walk you through the ups and downs of, “That’s a little bit too much.” I’ve been through that. If you don’t have somebody who knows how to help you adjust when you’re having a hard time, that can be the thing that stops you. It wasn’t that your body couldn’t heal. It’s that you didn’t know what to do when you started running into a wall, and started feeling a little bit worse when you were trying to heal.

Maybe it is undertaking one of these purifying modalities at too rapid a pace. The body has some die-off and some symptoms where you’re irritable or with headaches or brain fog, and you’re like, “I wasn’t even feeling that way before.”

That was me. I did a parasite cleanse back in 2019. It was a month-long protocol. I couldn’t make it past week two because I was in so much pain. The lady I was working with, the naturopath, was great, but she didn’t set me up to know, “Here’s how you adjust. Here are things we can do to accelerate the purging.” If you think about roadkill and see an animal side of the road, eventually, it’s going to burst. You’re killing off parasites. Never mind the toxins they’re producing in your body. That rot and burden that is on your body as these things die off has got to go somewhere. If you don’t know how to get that out, you can feel way worse.

Chlorine dioxide can do the same thing. There are plenty of purifying agents. If you haven’t primed the pathways before you get into this, then you think, “This is too much. I can’t handle it,” when you had an approach that could have been modified. That has been my delight to help. Like you, I’ve tested so many things on my own body, trying to figure out how to do this. It is not an unsolvable puzzle. It’s a level of patience and kindness toward yourself as you do it.

The Guiding Hand: Why A Coach Matters In Your Health Journey

It’s good to have a guide. I’ve also interviewed people like Tommy John and others who are like, “Stop outsourcing your health. You heal you.” I agree with this so much. At the same time, it is helpful to have someone walk alongside you to give you input that you can either take or leave, but at least it’s guidance that may be needed as you journey forward, especially in a detoxing protocol.

The reality is that all of us are limited to the ideas that we can think of. If you go out into the marketplace of ideas, you find other guides or people who can spare you wrong turns or accelerate your process and lay out, “This is plausibly where you’re going to go. If so, here’s how we can adapt.” It’s preemptive expectation management. It calibrates you, “It’s silly to think I can do it all myself and I know everything.” You’re probably smart enough to figure all that out, but do you have the time, and do you want to go through the learning curve? You don’t have to. Find people who know what they’re doing. They can help take you through it themselves.

You’ve given us a taste of the purifying aspect of the detox protocol. What about the nutritional or nourishing part of the protocol?

There are so many things you would already know. The Wise Traditions diet is intimately involved in that. The depleted nature of our food supply is real. It’s not some made-up thing to sell supplements. We proudly proclaim that we are supplement minimalists when it comes to adding some nourishment to the body. All the things we recommend are going to be more in the form of food and similar to purifying a broad spectrum. They can cover so many bases.

We recommend things like bee pollen granules, fermented cod liver oil, and desiccated organs. A lot of people are surprised to find that good sea salt is on our list of purifying supplements, as well as occasionally powdered plants. That’s about it. Bone broth will be another one. They’re all food-based. There’s so much breadth and depth of nutrition in those things I listed. They fill holes or backfill sinkholes that we have in our diets.

You can get people well in short order. If you’ve got the gut humming, if you’ve got parasites munching up all your fruits, or if you’ve got a gut that’s toxic and you’ve got nutrition coming in but can’t absorb it because your gut is not functioning well, we need to clean that up first. There can be some binders or digestive aids that can be relevant.

For the most part, when it comes to nourishing, all we need to do is give the body time, make sure that the tube is not toxic and poisoned, and let the body do its thing. It knows how to heal. All the stories you hear in marketing are the outlier stories. They’re the fast ones that didn’t take long. That’s our frame of reference for what healing is supposed to be. Some people are like, “I’m not having this result, so this didn’t work.” Hang on. That person was probably at a tipping point. That’s a great story. Let’s catch up with them 6 or 12 months from now and see if it’s still going.

Adjust to the fact that the body needs time to heal. If you break a bone, it’s not going to heal in two weeks. There are timeframes for how it heals everything. Muscle and nerve damage are on the long end of things. If you’ve got that going on and calibrating through a year or two of healing, and you’re like, “That’s longer than I wanted. That’s not fast. How do I do that? I don’t even know if I could stay consistent for that long,” those are mindset puzzles. They’re not biology puzzles. As a coach, I go after that stuff all day.

Fasting is the number one self-healing mechanism we have at body and soul level. It’s just remarkable, and it’s free.

It’s helpful to remember we didn’t get to where we are overnight, so it’s likely that we’re not going to heal overnight. I remember when I got pregnant, and I would try to get back to my pre-baby weight. I would tell myself that it took nine months to get to the place where I had that baby, and it’s going to take at least nine months to get back. That always helped me, because in our competitive image-based society, there are other pressures there. I heard you say hypernourished. I like that term because generally, as a population in the US and probably worldwide, we are overfed and undernourished.

If you go to the beach, the mall, or the airport, you can visibly see where our bodies are packing in more calories, but they’re not craving more calories. They’re craving more nourishment. Hopefully, in the breadth of all this stuff you can eat, you find something nourishing. Our hunger signals and our taste buds are all screwed up, looking for nourishment.

I’ll tell you a fun story. I had two clients who were married. They were both chefs. We took them through an elimination diet. We got them on a Wise Traditions diet to reset their gut, and then we put them through a fast. They delightfully went back to normal eating and made themselves a carrot soup. They’re great chefs. Neither of them could finish the carrot soup because it was sickeningly sweet, in their words. They had so resensitized their palate that they didn’t know how sweet things were. The wife had such a sweet tooth that she could not stop eating sugar. She, not surprisingly, was overweight.

You look at them now, and they’ve had kids. They’re both great. They have a healthy body weight, and they’re beaming. It took stepping back and saying, “This isn’t nourishing.” What is? Reset the system. When you go back to real food, you find you don’t need to eat as much. What you are eating is so full of nutrition that your satiation level kicks in much sooner. Your body has the resources it needs, so it’s not giving you weird cravings. When you learn a few things about timing and find your sweet spot of when to eat and how much, nutrition is so much simpler and, not to mention, delicious.

Fasting For Newbies: Simple Steps To Metabolic Agility

You’ve mentioned fasting a few times as a very simple way to help clean out the body so that it can be empowered to heal. How do you recommend that people approach fasting? Do you have any first steps for fasting newbies?

Yeah. If you’ve never done it before, it’s a rough transition to go from eating normally or whatever that is to “Let me not eat for a week,” or whatever that is. There’s a window of becoming a metabolic decathlete. You’re nimble in your agility for your metabolism to adjust to different ways of eating. On the fastest timeline for somebody who has never done it, we typically recommend a couple of weeks of eating differently than you’re used to. That can mean shrinking your eating window if you tend to eat around the clock. That can mean, if you are already eating in a small window, that you might eat less and spread it out more. Give your metabolism something different to respond to.

In the second week, we start shrinking the eating window down. We start with ten, eight, and six. We get down to smaller windows and get your body prepped for it, and then slide into a fast. Zach Bush would say roughly, a five-day water fast once a year, we’d probably eliminate 80% of cancer. It’s that powerful. Aim for and hold loosely that you can make it that long.

If you make it a day, celebrate. Every single fast you ever do will be a little bit different than the last one. Aim for right around five because apparently, day four is when autophagy kicks in. It’s this deep internal scrubbing where all your cellular debris is being munched up and escorted to the exits. I had one woman go for 40 days.

One of the things I mentioned in a lecture somewhere is that this primal hunger, where you’re like, “I’m ready to eat that squirrel. I’ll eat anything I can find,” if your body gives you that, it’s time to call it. You want to start gently refeeding. Another way to mess up fasting is to gorge. You want to find a way to gently restart your digestive processes.

She went for 40 days because she never got hungry. That was her cue. She wasn’t planning on going that long. Her thought was, “Jesus and Elijah both went for 40 days. If that worked for them, then I’ll aim for that. That’ll be my cutoff if I make it that far.” She was in her 70s. Any number of people or any number of ways this can be used. There are a few key things to learn, and then you own it for the rest of your life. It’s a fun experience.

Can you remember when you first got into fasting?

I do. I had an emotional aversion to it. I was stuck on, “I cannot figure out how becoming hangry is supposed to somehow make me more spiritual.” I knew about fasting in the spiritual lane. I’m like, “I don’t know how in the world my being cranky is going to serve anyone.” I hired another health coach. I’m a coach, and I like to hire coaches.

This guy pushed me into some of what I didn’t know about fasting, and more to look into the physiology of it. I went and looked at the physiology of what the body is doing, and it blew me away. I was like, “There are this many healing opportunities I’m leaving off the table because I’m stubborn or uneducated about this particular discipline.”

There’s one quote I found. Fasting is the number one self-healing mechanism we have at a body and soul level. It’s remarkable. It’s free. Hardly anybody talks about it because they don’t make money telling people not to eat. The food industry tells us the opposite. When I did it the first time, I made it through to day four. I was on the couch in the fetal position. I was like, “I don’t know if I can keep going. I’m already not very heavy.” I was shrinking, getting cold, and feeling achy.

There are different rescues you can use to make sure you need to call it. My wife made me a simple quarter cup or half cup of juice. It was made of carrot, apple, and ginger. It was like all the house lights turned back on. My mood improved instantly. I went grocery shopping for the family after that. I needed something to buoy me through it. You can have amazing ups and downs. It’s weird because there’s that normal itch to go get something to eat. I started going for walks in the middle of the day to give myself something to break up the workday.

That’s interesting.

It was great.

It wasn’t without its hurdles. The last time I fasted for a very long time was on a flight. I tend to choose not to eat because I don’t want to have extra work for my body since it’s already going through some stressors. I was hungry. When they came by with the trays of airplane food, it didn’t tempt me, but you get the smells and the cues. I remember the stewardess was extremely surprised when I said, “I don’t want any food.” She said, “You don’t want the pasta?” I said, “No.” She said, “Do you want cake?” I was like, “No, thank you.”

What helped me was that I had brought some powdered bone broth made by my friend Galia from La Cocina de Galia in Mexico. It’s a long story, but I know it’s regeneratively raised beef bones that are used. It was so delicious. It was enough to nourish me and tide me over. The flight was ten and a half hours long. I’m like you. I’m a lightweight person. I don’t like to fast too much, but it’s nice to be reminded that this is a wonderful healing detox protocol, and we can challenge ourselves with it from time to time.

There’s such a history of using fasting therapeutically. There are two clinics in Europe, and they’re gigantic multi-acre facilities. They bring people in and give them the white glove, high-touch, pampered version of fasting. They do some of the largest fasting studies that have ever been done. The amount of health gains people make just with fasting is remarkable. We’ve got to incorporate this.

Forget biochemical whack-a-mole. Let’s take things out of the system and purify. To your point, if we need some bone broth, if we need some juicing, or if we need some oils here and there, let’s use that to get us through this and trust that the body knows what it’s doing. It’s the only thing that knows where all these toxins are buried. If we don’t use that wisdom to heal, we’re typically leaving the most potent things we could use on the shelf. Why not leverage them?

Debunking Detox Myths: Gimmicks Vs. True Healing

I love it. What do you say to the person who’s like, “The whole detox idea is so trendy. The liver cleanse or colon cleanse or flush is very trendy right now, and I don’t buy into it.” What do you say to the skeptic?

I’d say, “I’m right there with you.” The number of gimmicky things I have looked at to try to find some things that work is remarkable. One of my favorite ones is that instead of getting your juice from a plastic bottle, you can get your juice from a wine bottle. The packaging is amazing. They send you juice with sweeteners and other questionable ingredients in it. They show you these amazing stories of transformation, and you’re like, “Wow.” It’s just juicing. There are so many things like that.

We live in a world of specialization, where if I have this one tool or there’s one lane I’m in, I look at that as the hammer and nail problem. This is my tool. Everything looks like a nail. We tell people fantastic promises that inflate what’s possible. There’s so much junk. There are so many gimmicks. There are so many things that have merit in the right context. To me, that’s majoring in minor things. We’ve got to get the axis open first. Let’s start there.

Detox and healing are two different things. Cleaning out the body is different from healing the body. If you’ve got corrosive termites in the wood and your walls, you can get the termites out, but you still have the problem with the wood. The body is the same. If heavy metals have whittled away your bones or glyphosates ruined the lining of your gut, we’ve got to get that influx out, but we’ve got to heal.

We’re stuck thinking detox is the healing. It’s not. It’s the purifying that opens up a greater windfall of healing. They have categories. That’s why we went purifying and nourishing. Are these things that you could practice more or less indefinitely, or is this some sort of attempted hack to force the body to do something so that you mask this symptom while you’re creating a different one? It takes a while to get your sea legs under you to see that.

With hope, we can overcome anything; humans are amazing at prevailing when hopeful..

There’s no such thing as a silver bullet. The idea that you’re going to swallow one thing that’s going to undo all of the things you’ve done isn’t possible. Let’s stop looking for that, and let’s start saying, “How would I build a lifestyle? How would I build a detox?” One of the problems people have is that they underestimate the planning work that goes into doing this. It’s going to be disruptive. You might have some symptoms, so maybe we should create some margin to absorb that a little bit. It’s so much more fun to go through this with other people.

My wife and I have discovered the parasite cleanse that we’re tickled to death about. I finally found someone who knew what the heck they’re talking about. One of my wife’s friends was saying, “Tell me when you’re going to do it so I can do it with you.” I was like, “She can do this anytime. She doesn’t have to wait for us.” There’s something about playing in the community when you do it that makes it more fun.

If you can see through the gimmicks, if you can find some supervision, and if you can have some community while you do it, that makes it so much more approachable. You’re more likely to stick with it when it gets hard. You don’t want to be the one in the room who’s like, “I didn’t do anything.” That’s not as fun. There are a lot of gimmicks. Please don’t fall for them. Find some people who know what they’re talking about, and build a real plan around your lifestyle, your budget, and your health.

I love this so much. That’s exactly what we intend to do in terms of the Weston A. Price Foundation. We have chapters and little groups all around the world where people can find resources for real food. Oftentimes, they’ll find a community that they can count on to nourish, detox, and do all the things together. As we come to the end here, I wanted to ask you the question I love to pose at the end. You’ve been on the show before, so I know you know it, but you might have a different answer this time. If the reader could do one thing to improve their health, what would you recommend that they do?

I would say to never give up hope. That might be the thing that’s coming to the surface. Your body knows how to heal. It’s not uninterested or incapable of doing that. Your mind is so important. One of the ways you nourish yourself is to cut off the toxic inputs that could be thoughts and fear-inducing whatever, and nourish your body with hope. Never let that be something that breaks your will.

If you have hope, you can get through anything. Humans are amazing at overcoming when we have hope. Lean into the hope that you do have, whether that’s a spiritual frame or whether that’s the reality that your body’s innately intelligent and knows what to do. Never give up hope. Let your body have the opportunity to show off, and it will blow your mind.

I love it. Thanks again. On behalf of Weston A. Price Foundation, we’re grateful for your time.

Thank you so much for having me.

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Our guest was Christian Elliot. You can visit his website, Healing United, to learn more. Here’s a review from Apple Podcasts. It says, “Great podcast. I really enjoy this podcast. Highly recommend.” There are 2,200 ratings on Apple Podcasts. Why not make your rating and review number 2,201? Go to Apple Podcasts and click on Ratings & Reviews. Give us a bunch of stars and tell the world why they should tune in. Your review can be succinct or lengthy about how this diet or this way of living has made a difference in your life. Thank you so much for tuning in. Stay well, my friend, and remember to keep your feet on the ground and your face to the sun.

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Wise Traditions is a project of The Weston A. Price Foundation for wise traditions in food, farming, and the healing arts. The content on this show is provided for informational purposes only and is not intended to substitute for the advice provided by your doctor or other healthcare professional. It is not intended to be, nor does it constitute, healthcare or medical advice.

About Christian Elliot

Christian Elliot is a husband, and father of six homeschooled kids. He has worked full time in restorative health since 2005, logging about 20,000 hours of 1-1 coaching in fitness, nutrition, lifestyle, mindset and relationships. Besides various health certifications he also earned a Masters of Divinity from seminary in 2003.He is the co-owner of a Private Membership Association called Healing United which is a collaboration between doctors and coaches where they help people with a myriad of chronic illnesses by creating holistic and personalized detox programs. Christian also runs a podcast called Deconstructing Conventional that covers all things holistic health.