This probably should have been my first post because this is really the key to the whole thing. I can tell you what I've learned from my research and what has been helpful to me. But I can only speculate as to what can be beneficial to others. Over the years I have gotten extremely good at listening to my body, and I can give you some tips on how to listen to your body and hopefully avoid some pitfalls along the way.

Of course there are the obvious things that are signs that tell you in a very obvious way that something in your body is wrong. These are all of your symptoms, acne, fatigue, constipation, diarrhea, whatever symptoms you have that are telling you very directly something is wrong with your health. This is what brings us to curezone in the first place. But then once you know, "okay I am sick something is wrong", then what to do. You read all kinds of different diet recommendations, this person says this, this one says the opposite who to believe, what is the underlying cause of my disease etc.? Of course doctors are no help, you're on your own. So you try some diet changes, but it's so hard to tell what is helping what is hurting. "I'm hungry for certain foods, should I eat these should I not eat these?"

Well the first thing you need to do is some initial cleansing, to get your body back into some level of good health. I recommend more gentle cleanses rather than hard cleanses. Colon Cleanses are great, my favorite is the Bentonite clay and psyllium husk cleanse. I did this cleanse twice and had great results. You can order this from blessedherbs.com (if they are still in business) or you can also make it yourself if you can figure out how. There are many others, but it should be something that really gets some of those toxins out. I'm a huge fan of juice fasting for initial cleansing. High-level raw food diets are also good for cleansing. Also short Water Fasting is okay. It's good to take some anti- parasite herbs, and you have to watch and see what comes out, when I did my initial parasite cleanses, a lot of stuff came out, this means you should repeat it after a couple of months, and again watch. Taking probiotics and anti-fungals are good to clear out some stuff that should not be there. You are not going for perfection with these initial cleanses, you are just trying to clear some of that gunk out of there, and get your body into some kind of health where you can at least start listening to your body a little bit. I can't tell you how long it will take you to do these initial cleanses. It really depends on your level of health, but you shouldn't get stuck in cleanse mode. This is a mistake that I and many other people have made. The cleanses are not the cure for your problem, they are just to get you back to a state where you feel like a human being again.

The real cure for your disease comes after the cleansing is finished. This is when you need to start researching and experimenting with what works for your body. The longer and the more you do it, the better you will get at listening to your body and understanding what is helpful to you. Once you get to some level of health, you should be able to feel the effects of food that you are eating. It can still be tricky though because food takes a long time to pass through your entire alimentary canal. It various from person to person, but food generally stays in the stomach alone for about 4 hours or so, then it still has to pass through the small intestine, large intestine. And by the time you get that new breakout of Acne or pain in your stomach you have eaten so many foods that you don't know what the culprit was and then we hear so much about die-off, maybe that stomach pain is a good thing?

Here is what to do. Start with a very simple diet. Eat only chicken, brown rice, and lightly cooked vegetables, use a small amount of sunflower seed oil for your cooking. No spices at all except a little bit of salt. If you are vegetarian (like me), just eat brown rice and vegetables. Stick to safe vegetables, like squashes and green peppers as even some vegetables could be aggravating to your condition. Then one day add in a food or spice, oil or fat that you are curious about. Whatever food you are adding, add a good amount so you can really feel its effect. Go for 2 or 3 days and really pay attention to the difference in the way you feel, how do you feel just after eating? 3,4 hours after eating, 1 day, 2 days after adding the new food. You should be able to have a better idea of the effect on your body. Slowly, you will start to find other foods that are safe for you and you can add them into your regular diet.

Another big question that comes up is okay yes I feel something bad, but maybe this is die-off. So maybe the fact that I feel bad is actually good. It has been my experience that this is not so. Yes there is such a thing as die-off, and definitely in your initial cleanses you will have quite a bit of die-off. But once the initial cleansing is over, you should be going for complete body health, bringing everything into balance and harmony. So you are looking for foods that do make you feel good. But with things like candida, it is a little tricky because you do need to eat a good amount of healthy carbohydrates and at the same time, these will make your candida flare up. This is not a bad thing, you are not trying to destroy your candida. You are trying to bring your body back into proper health and the candida will go away on its own. See my previous posts about negative effects of high protein diets and long-term high raw food diets. These are both misleading because they do make you feel better, but they are not part of a candida cure. But if you really get good at listening to your body, you can even see through these, because you will notice, hey after being so strict on this diet and I add a little regular food in I feel WORSE than I used to. Aha, so this high protein diet was really harming me even though my symptoms were less. Or maybe for you it will be different, after following this high protein diet then I add some regular food back in and wow I feel really good. Okay, great if it worked for you, but I really want to emphasize not getting stuck in these extreme diets, such as high protein and high level raw food, or even fasting and such. Try it for a while, see how you feel, then after some time add back in some regular foods and pay attention. Do I feel better now on regular foods or do I feel worse? The key is a healthy body should be able to maintain its health on a normal healthy diet.

My last topic is about taste. Can you trust your taste or not? The short answer is unfortunately no. It would be great if the foods that we are craving were the foods that were healthy for us. Sometimes what you are craving is really good for you, but not all the time, especially if your body is unhealthy and out of balance. But you should pay attention to your cravings and try to understand what they are telling you. But this is very difficult and all but impossible to explain. When your body is healthy and balanced than you actually can trust your taste and you will not have cravings for unhealthy foods.