Welcome, Chalkboarders! It’s a great honor for me and my team to be your guest editors for the month of July. Summer is here and this is a great time to find the motivation to get and stay truly healthy.
I am a practicing cardiologist, but the most powerful tools to help myself and my patients with their health I did not learn in medical school or in the hospitals in New York where I trained. In fact, hospital life made me really sick. I started to suffer from allergies, irritable bowel syndrome and depression. When I consulted my specialist colleagues, I ended up with seven prescription medications.
The shock was two-fold. On one hand, I now needed to take pills every day in order to function. On the other hand, it dawned on me that it was the same way I was treating my own patients. So I dropped everything, including the prescriptions, and I took off on a healing journey, determined to find my way back to health.
My first stop was a monastery in India where I offered my services as a doctor in exchange for an opportunity to learn about meditation. I directed a clinic with health practitioners from different healing philosophies who came from all over the world. My own health greatly improved by following the ashram’s vegetarian diet and meditation schedule, but soon declined once I returned to the US and started working in the hospital system again.
By chance, if there are any, I stumbled upon the We Care Spa near Palm Springs, where I completed my first cleansing and detox program. In 10 days of juice fasting, colonics and certain supplements, all my symptoms disappeared and I was looking and feeling 10 years younger.
After a long search, I had finally found a way to reset my body into a state of true health. My family, friends and patients started demanding I teach them how to use these new tools I had found. Since then and for the past 10 years, I have been designing cleansing and detox programs for hundreds of people around the world, but more importantly, inspiring and supporting them to stay healthy for life.
I wanted to make these tools available to many more people than I could personally see, so I wrote a book, Clean, which outlines a 21-day cleansing and detox program designed for people who live a busy city life. I am now writing a book about how to stay clean for life. Throughout this month, the Clean Team and I will share with you some of the principles and tricks that we are writing about. Many of these ideas are the result of working with members of our My Clean Program Community. The Clean Team and I read the daily posts and answer questions from over 42,000 community members from around the world. Their questions and insights will provide the inspiration behind this month’s Chalkboard articles.
Community is one of the main pillars of true health. This is why the Clean Team jumped at the opportunity to join forces with the Chalkboard community. We both value the same basic principles – to bring awareness and promote healthy living while doing it with love, respect, integrity and fun.
Here’s to a clean and healthy summer.
Warmly,
Alejandro Junger MD
