Bitter melon is one of my favourites. But you need to prepare it properly. Kevin’s mom when she found out I love bitter melon invited me home and made this for me… THANK YOU!
Preparing Bitter Melon (Karela)
Cut in half and remove white inner
Slice in half moons place in water and squeeze slices and strain
Place in water with salt and pressure cook for 4 whistles
Strain and save the water to drink later this is good if you have diabetes* side note from mom 🙂
Making the Curry Base
Add oil and mustard seed until seeds pop
Add in onions, curry leaves, turmeric, ginger garlic paste, coriander, chilli powder and cinnamon
Lastly add tomato, tamarind water and small/medium size of jaggery.
Bring to a boil.
Once curry sauce is ready add karela, mix and serve with coconut rice.
This is what I followed. It helped me get back to basics.
Water
Drinking water should be distilled / or reverse osmosis. I did the for about 2 years. After which I switched to a filter that removed all the usual plus fluoride.
Avoid plastics, especially water bottles.
Filter your bath and shower water. Your skin absorbs more water than you can drink.
Food & Eating
Intermittent fasting aim for 13-16 hours every day. A must!
Mediterranean diet is an overall healthy diet mainly whole fruits and vegetables with very occasional beef, lamb, or dairy (once a month or less). This is perhaps one of the safest diets and has data to prove longevity.
Ketogenic diet I have to mention this diet, ONLY because it is a hot topic. But after 6 months on the Keto Diet my cancer started growing faster. SO take caution, this diet is only for some cancers while and specifically only studied while on treatment. It is not ideal off of treatment and for long term use. Get keto strips to check your body for keytones. The beginning is hard, you will feel terrible. After 2 months your body will become accustomed to keytones and will not show on the strips anymore. By that point you will be able to tell by your sleep and energy levels if you are still in ketosis.
To eat meats or not? If you do stick to: Grass-fed beef or lamb. Very occasionally. Pastured eggs and chicken. Limited. Eat wild fish, salmon is best.
Going Vegan. I recommend mainly sticking to a mediterranean / vegan diet to avoid any unwanted animal byproducts. However, make sure you body can assimilate omega 3’s and other essential nutrients, if your like me my body cannot break down omega 3 from chia seeds or other vegan products so I need to supplement with fish oils or eat fish.
Organic fruits and vegetables only. Pesticides must be avoided as much as possible.
Very low carbohydrates and starches. This includes quinoa, millet, brown rice, beans, spelt bread, potatoes, yams.
Absolutely no dairy. Use organic unsweetened coconut milk, other dairy milks are too high in carbohydrates and additives. Or try making your own almond milk. Just soak almonds overnight in filtered salted water. Rinse, remove skins and place in high speed blender with water.
Soy products must be organic non-GMO. There is a lot of controversy around soy, so just keep things in moderation.
No caffeine. Stick to green tea for a boost, chamomile, peppermint, or ginger.
Aim to keep your urine alkaline 7.0. Use test strips to check your urine first thing in the morning and through out the day. If you are unable to get your body to a consistent alkaline state with food, then start off every day with drinking sauerkraut juice on an empty stomach. The shift will take about 2 months. Remember cancer releases lactic acid and like attracts like. Sauerkraut juices are high in lactic acid and help remove excess acid from the body.
Exercise
15-20 mins of cardio exercise daily – rebounding is best for lymphatic drainage. Whatever exercise you choose you must work up a sweat.
In addition to cardio, aim for 10,000 steps a day or more on top of cardio exercise.
Sleep & Rest
Sleep by 10-11pm and aim for 8 – 10 hours sleep. This is crucial for healing, as the liver works to clean the body from 11 to 3am.
Rest. Outside of exercising the other time should be spent resting.
Take care of yourself as you would a baby.
Detoxification
Keep a high body temperature. You can do this through taking hot baths in filtered water, using an infrared mats or infrared sauna daily.
Remove toxicity. This includes eating clean, stress, people, thoughts/emotions.
Stop any bad habits. Smoking, drinking, working long hours…
Emotional healing. Work on healing past emotions through therapy. Look for practitioners that heal past emotions using tapping or through healing journeys.
Aim for 2 to 3 bowel movements daily. You want to keep things moving. Eating a high fibre diet will help get things moving along with drinking plenty of water. Another aid, is using far infrared heat, this helps stimulate the bowel especially in the morning. I also recommend enemas, to help keep things moving and cleared out. To start do a 10 day enema detox and then maintain 2 times per week. See The Famous Coffee Enema for details.
Spend time in nature gaining negative ions. You can do this by walking barefoot on grass, resting by trees or being on water.
Daily Supplementation Backed by Research
Firstly, always take breaks from your supplements and change them up. If you have had or live with cancer, your cancer will learn them and start to ignore them… rotating your supplements every several months will help avoid this. When ever possible try getting your nutrients from food rather than through supplements.
Vitamin D3 with K2 – 20 mins of sun a day on skin, face and eyelids, if no access to sun use 3000 UI per day. Get a blood test to check your vitamin D levels, if low increase supplementation until they reach the high normal range.
Modified Citrus Pectin, PectaSol-C by ecoNugenics – 15 grams daily. Shown to help combat cancer from spreading pre-and post- surgically and keeps your electrolyte balance and potassium levels up.
Vitamin C – 2000mg with bioflavonoids daily minimum and high-dose vitamin C IVs minimum 50,000mg via vein or if you have a port-line higher doses are more beneficial. A blood test is required before starting. This works to boost your immune system and is cytotoxic to cancer cells. However, the benefit is lost when you stop.
Mushrooms – not all mushrooms are equal, look for high beta-glucans, 30% or more.
Resveratrol – Found on skin of grapes this is shown to combat cancer.
Curcumin – CurQFen – combats inflammation associated with cancer.
CoQ10 – must be ubiquinol form – increases energy and cellular health.
Zinc – minimum 25mg – 50 mg daily immune function and healing.
Vitamin E8 – 400mg cellular health and healing.
Selenium 200mcg as essential as magnesium. Take 2 brazil nuts daily or supplement. Shown to work synergistically with tamoxifen to increase efficacy of the drug.
Probiotic taken before bed and should contain Bacillus Subtilis gut health is your foundation for cellular health. Include fermented foods as sauerkraut in your diet as prebiotic nutrition.
Digestive enzymes – Hypo-Zymase by Physica Energetics with each meal or minimum with dinner. Get this from your naturopath.
Melatonin 15-20 mg time-released an hour before bed – build up from 3mg over time and stick with what you can tolerate, for me 15mg is my maximum more than that and it wakes me up. Shown to inhibit breast cancer cells and works synergistically with tamoxifen.
Magnesium 400 – 600mg daily 10pm essential for health and wellbeing.
Calcium D-Glucarate part of your daily detox regime.
BioResponse DIM/ or I3C– 400mg daily – shown to reduce breast cancer risk and recurrence. If you have low testosterone levels I caution with DIM. This lowers testosterone and increases oestrogen levels. Many are not aware of this!
Alpha-Liopic Acid – Detoxes heavy metals in the body, start with 150 – 300mg and build up over time as part of your detox process.
Inositol hexaphosphate(IP6). Good to increase your immune system. Fast to increase your serum lymphocytes counts. One month of use increased mine by .3.
Note: Do not take vitamin B12, Iron, Glutathione, NAC or any precursorto glutathione unless this is part of your treatment plan. These can drive cancer not every naturopathy or physician knows this so do your research.
There are 4 basic aspects to epidemiology: figuring out the cause of the disease of concern, the incidence or frequency (how often it occurs), distribution (who it affects and where), and ways to control or treat the disease.
Of anything I have ever studied, breast cancer seems to be the most vaguely touched on when it comes the “cause”. As far as my physicians are concerned the cause is not important, it’s getting rid of it that is.
However, if we are truly offering individualized care, as it so clearly says on the side of the hospital I have been attending, then as an epidemiologist, in order to prevent a disease we must know the cause for each person in order to prevent recurrence. Even more importantly what we learn from these individuals we can extrapolate to family practice to prevent our society from ever getting cancer. This to me, is what continues to attract me to epidemiology and what I feel is my responsibility to others.
As a side note, one huge missing link is getting this information back to primary care providers… so that we can prevent the disease from occurring. In my opinion, family medicine should require more years of training and also should be defined or sub-specialised in terms of male or female, and age. With the amount of information that is out there it is virtually impossible for a family doctor to be able to help keep society healthy with so many differing variables.
I do not see individualized care when it comes to breast cancer and I don’t see anything being done in regards to prevention.
There are many such “approved” tests available, that still at the doctors discretion are employed; as OnchoType Dx, a test that examines a sample of your tumour post surgically to assess whether the risks of chemotherapy out weight the benefits.
For me it was crucial to understand the cause of my disease. This is truly the only way to prevent it.
Cancer is not simple and there is definitely more than one contributing factor in order to develop this disease, but knowing the triggers can help you take control from ever being sick again.
From my research there where several tests that led me to understand how I developed breast cancer including emotional manifestations that impact these ‘weaknesses in my DNA’, when I didn’t have any of the ‘so called’ associated risks: smoking, drinking, BRCA1/2 gene mutation, and family history.
So then how did I get this? A relatively young 40 year old women. I would have also included healthy, but for me there were so many warning signs from the age of 20 that to me I didn’t feel healthy, even though doctors would have described me as healthy.
At first glance I thought the best place to first look was at my hormones,
considering I was diagnosed with estrogen receptor (ER) and progesterone receptor (PR) positive cancer. The dutch test, is the only test I would recommend for hormone investigation. This test on me clearly showed that my hormones had taken a walk down a dangerous path that would make them carcinogenic. However, they also showed that my testosterone was low which is caused by increased cortisol levels. Combined with my years of insomnia, I knew this was correct and one very crucial piece of the puzzle in learning about my risk factors in developing breast cancer.
Second, was understanding my body’s genetic capabilities.
This can be done though DNA testing from 23andMe or Ancestry.com and then requesting the raw data and sending it to your naturopath to analyse in PureGenome free software.
After learning that I am unable to methylate estrogen, it become clear to me that my cancer could be prevented through B vitamins, magnesium and other supplements that encourage detoxification of hormones as Indole 3 Carbinol, Calcium D Glucarate, glutathione, and a diet rich in cruciferous vegetables.
Knowing all this, I feel it is important to educate other women in hopes they can avoid ever having to walk this path…
Is it a coincidence that women who eat the most amount of dairy and red meat have the highest rates of breast cancer? The China Study by T. Colin Campbell eludes to this and looks at workplace environmental plausible causes that were not strong enough to cause a disease so many women are now getting.
Only being diagnosed less than a year ago, there have been way too many instances that have not made sense and lacked serious reasoning. These led me to question the validity of everything and come to the conclusion that much of the bigger picture is missing or perhaps hidden from all of us. I don’t doubt that money and politics play a part but it really doesn’t matter. Getting to the truth of the cause of your illness within your body is what you need to know in order to help you prevent and even hopefully lessen the degree in which it expresses itself in your body.
Doubt is one of the greatest issues that is posed in the overload of information now available to us. It is also one of the greatest strategies to keep you locked in your seat continuing down the path that go you where you are today. Use common sense and some investigation into the truth at all times in order to come to your own conclusion.
This is one topic that has been bounced around a lot, whether to eat organic or not? Every single last one of the people I have read about and researched all say organic and when you are in the hot seat of your illness, this is a must.
A typical morning breakfast
I have learn’t that organic is crucial to obtain the most amount of nutrients from a food and to limit the amount of toxins coming into an already very sick body. Here is a meta-analysis from the British Journal of Nutrition.
The second is it must be a whole food: Nothing processed. Your body is already fighting disease and you want to conserve your energy for that. Keep it simple and don’t mix too many different things, especially in a smoothie, your body will just shut down and all your energy will literally will be deleted.
Stick to pastured chicken and eggs and wild fish. Or even better go completely vegan.
Frequently eat small meals but not all the time. Intermitted fasting is very good for allowing your body a break to just focus on the disease (13-16 hours overnight), but during your eating hours it is as equally important to eat small meals frequently, eating every 2-3 hours, balancing fruit with protein to keep you insulin levels from spiking.
Eliminate all sugars, this includes white rice, flour and potatoes.
Eliminate all dairy, this means butter and substitutes, yogurt, greek yogurt, kefir, and anything that comes from a cow, goat or sheep. Enjoy occasional buffalo mozzarella.
Balance your fibre in take with LOTS of water. When changing your diet you may experience many different bowel changes and one is becoming constipated or not taking in enough water and having too much fibre in your system. this will cause cramping and can easily be relieved by drinking lots of boiled hot water with lemon or lime.
Although I have cancer, this regimen is as equally important for diabetes and heart disease and stroke, which all account for the majority of early mortality.
