People Can Change

Eight Weeks to Optimum Health
by Andrew Weil, M.D.

In Eight Weeks to Optimum Health, Dr. Andrew Weil translates the brilliant insights and discoveries he outlined in his acclaimed bestseller, Spontaneous Healing, into a practical plan of action: a week-by-week, step-by-step program for enhancing and protecting present and lifelong health.

The Eight-Week Program sets up a foundation for healthy living that will keep your body's natural healing system in peak working order. With clearly defined and authoritatively informed recommendations, Dr. Weil explains how to

• Build a lifestyle that protects you from premature illness and disability
• Fine-tune your current eating habits so that your diet is more nutritious
• Walk and stretch in regimens that satisfy weekly exercise requirements
• Safeguard your healing system by adding four antioxidant supplements—vitamin C and E, selenium, and mixed carotenes—to your diet
• Incorporate five basic breathing exercises for greater relaxation and energy
• Benefit from visualization, overcome sleeping problems, and test and filter your water supply
• Make art, music, and the natural world more important parts of your life

PLUS—a dozen tailored programs that address the specific needs of pregnant women, senior citizens, overweight people, and those at risk for cancer.

You have in your hands a tool for changing your life, an Eight-Week Program for improving your health and gaining access to the power of spontaneous healing in your body. I will guide you through this program step by step, explaining the changes I will ask you to make in how you eat, how you exercise, how you breathe, and how you use your mind. I will recommend vitamins, minerals, and herbs you can use to protect your body's healing system, and I will give you ideas about how you can change long-standing patterns of behavior that impair optimal health.

The Eight-Week Program consists of small steps that build on each other until, but the time you complete it, you have laid the foundation for healthy living. You can then decide how much of the program you want to maintain on a permanent basis. I assume that you want to make changes in your life — otherwise you wouldn't be reading this book. I see my job as pointing you in the right direction. I have no doubt that you can change, because I know from my own experience that people can do so if they really want to.

In moving files recently, I came across a yellowed clipping from The New York Times of August 12, 1971, with the headline: "Meat-Eating 230-Pound Doctor Is Now 175-Pound Vegetarian." The story concerns a twenty-nine-year old physician in rural Virginia who gave up animal foods except for dairy products, with a resultant increase in energy, well-being, and overall health. There is a photograph of the doctor in his kitchen preparing fresh corn. He has a full black beard, is wearing blue jeans and a work shirt, and looks content. Next to the picture is his recipe for a rich corn soup containing milk and butter, and another recipe for a barley-and-vegetable casserole that calls for a quarter-cup of peanut oil. According to the article, the doctor's interest in consciousness led him to experiment with yoga and meditation, and "since yoga calls for a vegetarian diet, he gave up meat 'in order to really do it right.' He has been a vegetarian ever since, to the amazement of his friends, who remember him as a voracious meat eater and a fat person while at Harvard ... In one year on his new diet he has reduced from 230 to 175 pounds. His recurring colds and allergies have vanished..."

My beard is no longer black, and I have not been able to maintain my weight at 175-pounds. I am still mostly vegetarian (I have eaten fish for the past 10 years), though now I don't make rich soups with milk and butter , use oil in such quantities, or ever cook with peanut oil. I think I am wiser with age and in general feel much happier now than I did when I was twenty-nine.

That was a watershed year for me. I had quit a frustrating job with the National Institute of Mental Health in July 1970, dropped out of professional medicine to write my first book, and made a great many changed in my way of living besides giving up meat. For the first time ever, I lived alone in a natural setting well away from a city. I had no office to go to, no obligations to meet. I began each morning with sitting meditation for as long as I could tolerate, which was not much in those days. I took long walks in the woods, practiced yoga postures in the afternoons, wrote, and read on a variety of subjects that interested me, from Native American shamanism to mushrooms and other wild foods. By August 1971, I was nearing another transition. The New York Times article noted, "Dr. Weil will be traveling to the Amazon jungle this fall for an extended visit to some primitive tribes on a fellowship from the Institute of Current World Affairs, a New York foundation."

I held that fellowship from 1971 to 1975 and have written elsewhere about those travels. In my recent book, Spontaneous Healing, I describe seeking out a shaman in Columbia during that period and explain that my studies of ethnobotany and medicine at Harvard made me want to see the rain forest, meet native healers, and try t understand the source of healing. Mostly I wanted to learn how to help people get well and stay well without using so many of the invasive and suppressive methods of conventional medicine, and I thought the knowledge I needed was to be found in remote mountains and jingles, far from classroom and clinics. My plan was to go to southern Mexico to learn Spanish, then to make my way down to Columbia, Ecuador, and Peru to live with Indians and learn their ways with plants and healing.

I knew this journey would be demanding, and when I first settled on the idea, I was in no way prepared, either physically or mentally, to undertake such an adventure. I had grown up in a row house in Philadelphia with little opportunity to spend time in nature, let alone in wilderness. On leaving Philadelphia, I attended collage and medical school in Boston, then completed a medical internship in San Francisco-more urban, indoor experience. I was not very comfortable out-of-doors, being nervous about insects and wary of the sun, since I had fair skin that never tanned, only burned; I accepted this as inherited trait that could never disappear. Although I was able to concentrate enough to handle schoolwork easily, I was restless, very susceptible to boredom, and I craved distraction. I was largely sedentary, hating exercise, and since I also liked to eat, I was overweight. My diet was free-form and thoughtless. I ate anything and everything in large quantities, including very high-far foods. I was a frequent consumer of alcohol and Coca-Cola.

Though I had no significant health problems, I knew from the way I huffed and puffed climbing stairs that I was not in good cardiovascular condition. I suffered from intense pollen allergies, mostly in the summer, and also had allergic reactions to a number of medications and some foods. Sometimes I would get hives for no apparent reason.

* * *

I will try to accomplish three things in the pages that follow. First, I want to try to share with you my vision of the body's healing system and encourage you to rely on it in all matters concerning your health. Second, I want to convince you of the importance of developing a healthy lifestyle and the possibility of doing so quickly and easily. Third, I want to give you very specific suggestions about those aspects of lifestyle I consider most important to health and healing. I know that I cannot motivate you to undertake the Eight-Week Program — you must do that yourself — but since you have read this far, I believe you are already interested in moving forward, and I will assume that you now want to know what moving forward entails and how to do it.

Excerpted from Eight Weeks to Optimum Health by Andrew Weil, M.D.. Excerpted by permission of Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

About the Author

Andrew Weil, M.D. is the author of ten previous books, including Spontaneous Healing, Eight Weeks to Optimum Health, Eating Well for Optimum Health, and, with Rosie Daley, The Healthy Kitchen. A graduate of Harvard Medical School, he is clinical professor of medicine and director of the Program in Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona. He writes Self Healing, a monthly newsletter, and maintains the Web site DrWeil.com.