Tips for Understanding the Difference Between Detox Symptoms and Sickness
Tips For Understanding the Difference Between Detox Symptoms and Sickness
This interview is an excerpt from Kevin Gianni’s Renegade Roundtable, which can be found at http://www.RenegadeRoundtable.com. In this excerpt, Nomi Shannon shares on understanding cleansing and the differences between detox symptoms and sickness.
Renegade Water Secrets with Nomi Shannon, raw food chef and author of The Raw Gourmet and a new book, Raw Food Celebrations.
Kevin: Today let’s just briefly start very, very quickly, because I know some people on this call have heard of who you are and know who you are, but very briefly just explain a little bit about your background, about the Hippocrates Institute and your book.
Nomi: Okey-doke, you already kind of talked a little bit about “The Raw Gourmet” which has been out for a few years. It’s considered the best first book to buy, it’s kind of like the raw food bible. I wanted it to be like that, I wasn’t sure, even when I was done, that it would be like that, but it turned out to be like that and I’m very, very happy. “The Raw Gourmet” in particular, is based on the program at Hippocrates Health Institute, which is a truly wonderful, wonderful place, it’s in West Palm Beach, Florida. It’s not an inexpensive program, there are others similar to it that are more budget. For example, Optimum Health Institute, in both San Diego and Texas, and a few other places, most of them are listed in the back of my book, where you can go for a three week all raw retreat.
And all of these programs follow the protocols, more or less, started by a lady by the name of Ann Wigmore. And she is the one who developed the use of wheat grass as a cleansing and healing product and also growing sprouts, soil grown sprouts, such as sunflower and buckwheat and the other kinds of sprouts that you are more familiar with like alfalfa.
I already was raw for probably a year or so, when through serendipity, and it would take an hour to even explain how it all came about, as a girl who was living in California wound up working in West Palm Beach Florida at Hippocrates Health Institute. It was a truly profound learning experience for me. I had absolutely no idea at all that I would ever wind up writing a book. It couldn’t have been further from my personal radar screen. But I learned so much there, not only the program itself, I did run the nine-week health educator course — I didn’t teach it, I ran it — and I was able to take everything that Hippocrates had to offer. I think the most enriching experience there was getting to know all the people that stayed. Everyone would come and most people would stay for three weeks. So it would go through a three-week cycle, three-week cycle, three-week cycle. It was a very interesting experience because you started to see trends.
I don’t remember if I mentioned it when we were in person, it was only a week ago Sunday Kevin, about how, on the fifth day, everybody would become all angry and hated their roommate and all that stuff. I don’t know if we talked about that, but that was the detox symptoms. So I learned a great deal there and I kept in touch with a lot of people.
And then when, in ’95 I left there and moved back to California, I couldn’t find any books that had delicious food in them. They were all the real basic kind of energy soup. Ann Wigmore was just wonderful, but it’s a little hard to live on that day in and day out. So I decided to write one, and thus “The Raw Gourmet” was born. And then just about two weeks ago my new book came out and that’s called “Raw Food Celebrations.” It’s a very different book to “The Raw Gourmet.” I co-wrote it with my friend Sheryl Duruz, who at the time was running a very vibrant raw food business called rawpleasure.com.au, which is in Australia. That company still exists, but Sheryl and her husband Peers have moved to Canada. And we decided to co-write a book. And it’s wonderful recipes. Most of them are make ahead, but they’re more like, I would say party food, but I don’t want anybody to think, “Oh, I’m not going to get that because it’s really complex stuff.” Each thing is broken down into tiny little steps and most of the recipes are very make ahead. So, for example, I created a new lasagna, and yes it’s about eight other things that are served in that suggested meal, it’s a theme book, Thai, Italian, that kind of thing, bunch, cocktails. So in the Italian section there are all kinds of other things, a divine chocolate cheesecake and things like that. Or you could just go in and make lasagna for a wonderful weekend dinner or something like that. So that was a lot of fun because it was different. I guess I’ve talked to you about myself enough. I bore myself when I talk about myself too much.
Kevin: [laughs] Well let’s talk about these over 400 questions that we’ve gotten here. I think I want to start with cleansing because I think people think that