The Healing Power of Whole Foods

Introduction by Dr. Walt Stoll, M.D., A.B.F.P

The importance of diet in the area of human nutrition and well-being was dramatically demonstrated to me in 1977.  This was after I had practiced conventional medicine as a Board Certified Family Physician for fifteen years.

At that time I was still teaching my patients that, and living my own life as though, diet had nothing whatsoever to do with disease or how people felt.  Of course, at that time, I was experiencing a number of chronic medical conditions common to citizens of civilized countries.  None of those conditions were truly curable by conventional medical approaches even though we had many effective treatments for them.

In 1976 I reopened my private practice of medicine, having just finished teaching medicine for three years at the University of Kentucky.  As is usual with a newly opened practice, I was not very busy and had time to take some community education classes, one of which, Dr. Lerner's class, had been highly recommended to me by one of my patients.

Mike Lerner, a well known dentist practicing in Lexington, Kentucky, was teaching an introduction to Applied Kinesiology.  The term meant nothing to me then by I know now that it opened the door to my practice of Holistic Medicine.  Dr. Lerner, Dr. "Mike" to his patients, and now Mike to me, as he has become a good friend, showed me that one grain of sugar on my tongue caused a sudden loss of 90% of my muscular strength.

Since this experience could not be explained on the basis of my training and experience, I did not want to believe it.  I later went to his office several times to experience Applied Kinesiology personally before I was suficiently convinced to be ready to follow advice based upon the results of Applied Kinesiology testing.

Mike suggested I stop eating refined carbohydrates and caffeine (a diet I now know as a whole foods diet).  To further test the validity of Applied Kinesiology, I resolved to follow the diet with the purity of a laboratory experiment.  Consequently, I totally eliminated refined carbohydrates and caffeine from my diet with the single-minded focus I had seen previously only in my obsessive-compulsive or paranoid patients.  I resolved that if one grain of sugar could make my body react so strongly, the diet might need to be perfect to work (at least in the short period of time I was willing to try it).

As it turned out, quick and dramatic results rarely occur until the practitioner has been compulsive about the diet for five to seven days.  Even then, the changes are significant, but not nearly complete - most results occur over a period of three to six months.  Even if you're not perfect on the diet, just moving in the direction of the whole foods diet will eventually improve anyone's health and feeling of well-being.  The problem with not being perfect is that you will continue to suffer the symptoms of withdrawal for weeks or months that would normally be gone in three or four days if perfect.

I don't want to bore you with a list of my diseases, but I would not have believed the effect of diet on health had I not experienced it in my own mind, body, and spirit:  On the day I started my diet my blood pressure was 160/110 and my cholesterol over 300.  I was wearing a steel brace for ruptured discs in my back and had just been told I either had to stop jogging or I would need my knee caps surgically replaced with plastic ones.  I always wore shirts with two pockets because I needed one pocket for nose drops for chronic sinus problems and the other for antacids for my chronic acid stomach.  My previous ten years had been marked with several visits to the emergency room where one of my colleagues would surgically incise one of my severe hemorrhoids which had become thrombosed.  I also suffered from a number of minor problems which included a life long battle with depression and obesity (at that time 263 pounds).

Within two weeks my stuffy nose and acid stomach were gone for the first time in more than ten years.  Within six months all of the problems I mentioned were gone.  In addition, I now had a soft stool every day shortly after arising.  For twenty years I normally had a constipated stool only every seven to ten days.

The changes were so dramatic that my patients began to ask me what I was doing for my health.  Sharing that information was what started my career in Holistic Medicine.  I now routinely see these same changes in my patients who are willing to give the whole foods diet a try.

The problem has never been what to tell people to do but to help them to be able to do it.  That is what this book, The Healing Power of Whole Foods, is all about.  It not only gives you the tools to get the job done but also assures reliable and quick results.

Withdrawal symptoms are possible for three to four days after total elimination of refined carbohydrates.  From then on you will begin to feel better than you have in many years.  So long as you avoid re-contact, you should notice improvement in your health on a weekly basis for several months.  Some of the symptoms of withdrawal include: