Feeling Good,

A Practical Guide to Living Low Toxin in

Preface
My life today is totally different from when I woke up 8 years ago in horrific pain with autoimmune
disease. My life is so different now, that it’s hard to recognize me as the same woman. And other than
getting terribly ill, the changes have all been good!

I sometimes joke that one of the best things to happen to me in my life was that I got autoimmune
disease.

Don’t get me wrong. If I had a do over, I would have learned all the things I have learned since that
moment, BEFORE I got sick. I would have learned them in time so that I would have avoided all the pain
that I went through and have now gotten past, and before my autoimmune disease was irreversible.
Although I no longer have pain, I will always have autoimmune disease.

But getting sick certainly caught my attention. It was the 2x4 that I couldn’t ignore. My toxic load
toppled over the top, I had to react.

I broke up from a long-term toxic relationship; I found another that was perfect for me, and he is my
true partner. I married him 4 1/2 years ago.

I have guested on almost 100 podcasts and I have discovered I love sharing my story and helping others.

I sold my jewelry business and have jumped into sharing what I learned about health with others who
truly need the information. I have spoken in 11 summits to share my story and information and am
scheduled to do 2 more.

I have started my own local public access TV show called It Feels Good to Feel Good, Futureproof Your
Health. It will debut in February 2020 in my immediate community. This will then become a podcast in
mid-2020 on RHG TV/ Voice America, and I will also be including interviews with others who got sick,
made lifestyle changes, and returned to relative wellness.

My goal is to give hope to others with chronic illness and to Moms raising children. It is also to help well
people stay well before their toxic load topples over the top into illness. My total goal is to impart
knowledge to everyone so that they do NOT follow my path and to reach them before they get sick.

I didn’t plan on any of this when I got sick. None of this would have happened if I were still well.

It’s been a long journey back to the light.

It started with a conventional MD running tests, and then running more and yet more and finally calling
me to tell me: 1. Nothing was wrong with me. 2. She was going to prescribe steroids to me. 3. I needed
to seek mental therapy if I wanted to be pain free, otherwise, I would be on the steroids the rest of my
life.

Hunh? Why would I take steroids if I had a mental condition?

And why would I take steroids if nothing was wrong? Unfortunately, I hear similar stories now all the
time from others that are seeking help from conventional medicine and their doctors are throwing pills
at them or dismissing their symptoms.

I just read a comment from a functional MD that the best thing that could happen to conventional
medicine is if all the conventional MD’s got a serious illness. They would have to figure out how to help
themselves. This is in fact how most functional MD’s became “functional”. They got sick and looked for
a better way to get themselves back to health.

At the time, I owned my own jewelry business and had a well-trained loyal staff, so I turned my business
over to them and dug into research and figure out what was wrong with me.

I didn’t even know what I was looking for.

The net result was that I figured out I had autoimmune disease, (the diagnosis was verified by a
functional doctor a year later.) I researched and discovered many of the keys to my own health. The
functional MD I found looked at my body from a totally different perspective than my conventional MD,
and immediately started looking for my root causes of my disease.

I discovered there were 2 things I could do for myself. I could I could lower my stress. and eliminate
toxins. I found ways to lower my stress, and I shared the early things that I learned to reset my
parasympathetic nervous system in my first book. My cortisol was so low by the time I got to my
Functional MD; I was almost to Addison’s disease. She recommended easy ways for me to rebuild my
DHEA and to lower my chronic fatigue.

I then dug into where the toxins were. What were they, where would I research, what would I replace
them with? In the end, I eliminated hundreds of toxins from my life. And, this was the significant part, I
replaced them all with low toxin items.

I shared all this in my book It Feels Good to Feel Good, Learn to Eliminate Toxins, Reduce Inflammation
and Feel Great Again which is the manual that I wish I had when I got ill. This book has won 13 awards.
In the back of my book, I list all the Functional MD’s that I now follow and continue to learn from. It’s a
great list of references.

I wrote my first book to help others who found themselves in my situation, without hope, frustrated and
very sick and not knowing where to turn. I have met so many people like me. So, I returned to school at
67 and became a health coach so that I could help others. I am now 70, and I am feeling better than I
did at 50.

Like others with autoimmune disease, I am a work in progress. My current issue is that my jewelry
office had black mold, so I am now detoxing that out of my body. More on that to come. This is a
setback I didn’t expect but am working to overcome. It has reminded me of the importance of self-care
and giving my body the tools, it needs to be well.

My first book is a wonderful guide for anyone struggling with chronic illness. We can do so much
ourselves to encourage our bodies to heal that I had no idea about before getting sick. Finding the
hundreds of toxins that I eliminated took 5 years of research and the book gives others a jump-start to
follow my lead to return to health themselves.

I just revised It Feels Good to Feel Good, Learn to Eliminate Toxins, Reduce Inflammation and Feel Great
Again (2019) to include all chronic illnesses, because I now know that this information is critical whether
you have autoimmune disease, cancer or heart disease. The book discusses all the things that you can
do to change your lifestyle and feel great again. I learned that the body wants to heal, we just need to
give it the building blocks so that it can do that.

In the revised book, I added new findings, and I included a chapter on Blue Zones, because my
information truly is for everyone whether they are struggling with any chronic illness or not. Blue Zones
are the National Geographic study about the 5 areas in the world where people live the longest and
what they have in common. There is so much to learn from that study.

There are also new statistics that make toxins mind boggling and that prove my point. Keep in mind, it
can take up to 20 years for inflammation to grow in the body to the tipping point into toxic load.

These are the statistics: • We are 37th in the world in health. We spend more on healthcare than any
other country in the world. And our system is broken. Our healthcare system cannot keep up with the
expense of the rapid rise of chronic illness in our country. • 53% of our children are suffering from a
chronic illness. 53%. Yikes • Newborns are being born with more than 287 toxins in their bodies which
they are inheriting from their mothers’ bodies through the umbilical cord. Of the 287 chemicals we
detected in umbilical cord blood, we know that 180 cause cancer in humans or animals, 217 are

toxic to the brain and nervous system, and 208 cause birth defects or abnormal development in animal
testsi • By the time a child is 5, they have eaten 7 pounds of toxins. No wonder they are getting ill, their
little bodies cannot handle all these toxins. • Childhood asthma rose 300% in 40 years (GMO’s
exasperate allergies) • Childhood leukemia and brain cancer rose 40% in 40 years • Millennials health
now peaks at 27 and then declines. • A Gen X’er makes it all the way to 37. Still totally frightening. •
American couples dealing with fertility issues rose 20% in 10 years • And Boomers, my generation,
accept that they should live a life of pain and pills. And they are stuck, they don’t want to change, or be
“deprived” by giving up what is making them sick. Finally, our government is not protecting us. They are
heavily influenced by Big Agriculture, Big Chemical, Big Pharm and Big Food. I got angry about this in the
beginning, but then I figured out that we need to join together and make the change we want to see.
We have more power than we give ourselves credit for. The Institute of Responsible Technology says
that a 5% shift in spending habits will begin to change what is happening. In the last 3 years, I have seen
the needle slowly start to move.

My first book does not go far enough. It really is discussing what I did in my immediate environment to
clean up my life, my body and my health.

Feeling Good, A Practical Guide to Living Low Toxin in Community and Everyday Life addresses the fact
that we do not live in an isolated bubble, we live in a community, and living a low toxin life out in
community is more complicated. I have now been doing this, really, as self-defense, for more than 3
years. Living “clean” is something that I have figured out because I do not want the pain back, but I am a
very social person. I interact fully now within my community in a way that does not interfere with my
commitment to keep toxins as low in my life as possible, and in this book, I want to share all those tips.
It is also common, once one gets one autoimmune disease, to get multiple autoimmune diseases, and I
wanted to ensure that this didn’t happen to me. In other words, I was very motivated to figure this out.

I now want to share this all with you. Once you clean up the toxins in your immediate life, these tips will
help you avoid getting flares and they will help you minimize the pain.

Living out in the community is swimming upstream. America eats the SAD, the Standard American Diet,
which is loaded with toxins, synthetic ingredients and fake food. The SAD does not offer our bodies any
nutrients and instead serves up a healthy amount of synthetic ingredients that the body does not
recognize as food.

Ever think about how a restaurant can have such a vast offering? Restaurants now often serve meals
that they get in baggies that they microwave, and these meals are loaded with nonfoods and synthetic
ingredients without much food value, and these foods are loaded with toxins at every level, from the
vegetables to the meats in their meals. And there are ingredients that have been added to all these
foods that are unhealthy, and worst of all addictive.

Even healthy restaurants often use unhealthy ingredients like their choice of oils. It’s important to know
what questions to ask and what to do to avoid these unhealthy ingredients.

Most restaurants use conventional produce, which means, if the produce is on the Dirty Dozen list, they
are laden with nasty pesticide and herbicides that our bodies are not meant to process and that are
making us sick.

I had to figure this out, these foods made me ill. Yet, I refused to give up eating with my friends, family
and with my business associates.

I want to share all the tips I have discovered so that I can still thrive in my community. It can be done; it
just takes planning. After time, it becomes a way of life. So much of our social interaction takes place
over food. Figuring out how to still participate in the social occasions of my life has been a growing
experience.

I cook 90% of what we eat. I have learned a great deal over this 3-year period that I want to share. Food
quality matters, and I want to explain more what that means, and how I utilize that information. By
cooking (or my hubby cooking) I can control what goes into my mouth and into my body. I want to
share some of my tips about cooking most of our meals.

As a society we have just gotten into bad habits. We are not making our health a priority. We are
making convenience a priority. We need to go back to the way our great grandparents prepared their
food.

It does not take that long to cook real organic live food, and the rewards are enormous.

There is a new definitive book out on toxins by Dr. Joseph Pizzorno, The Toxin Solution: How Hidden
Poisons in the Air, Water, Food, and Products We Use Are Destroying Our Health--AND WHAT WE CAN
DO TO FIX IT HarperOne; Reprint edition (February 27, 2018), which gives all the scientific evidence that
verifies what I discuss in my first book about toxins and I want to share
that with you as well. In general, this book offers information so that when you adopt a low toxin life
you understand clearly why that is important for your health and the health of your family.

There is also important new information available about Epigenetics. I want to share findings from
amazing thinkers like Dr. Bruce Lipton that may surprise you.

One of the big push backs I get when I am out speaking about health, is that eating healthy is expensive.
I will share all my tips to buying healthy food on a budget. But think about it. Since it is now proven that
toxins are creating ill health, you can pay now or pay later. As one organic farmer said, “Have you priced
out the cost of cancer lately?” If you can avoid getting a chronic illness later in your life, it becomes very
cost efficient to eat as low toxin as possible, and to eliminate the toxins in the rest of your life now.

I don’t know where health insurance is going in this country but learning how to live low toxin is an
insurance policy in itself for your future and the future of your families.

Finally, some people tell me that discussing toxins is boring. I had to laugh, because when Dr. Joseph
Pizzorno speaks at Integrative Medical Conferences, he hears the same thing. And he hears that it is
depressing. All I can say is knowledge is power. And we need to know where the toxins are lurking so
that we can “futureproof” our health. It isn’t boring to stay healthy.

Toxins may be an inconvenient truth, to borrow a phrase, but in the end, it can save your health and
your mind, and allow you to grow old with grace and to prosper. Do you want to grow old with
dementia and illness and pain, or do you want to thrive until the end? Since, at one point, I lost my
health, I can clearly tell you how I want to grow old, and everything you will learn about living low toxin
is worth it in spades.

I am in a group on Facebook for a compounded drug called Naltrexone or LDN and it is the closest thing
to a “magic pill” that I have come across. It works extremely well for me, but I added it after I did
everything in my power to clean up the toxins in my life and to lead a healthier life to eliminate my pain.
This pill took me over the finishing line to a pain-free life. If you struggle with chronic pain, I
recommend that you investigate this medication with your doctor.

The drug is compounded, and although it works very well for me, it does not work as well for others in
this group.
I know that we are all different, but I got to thinking, many in this group have not cleaned up their lives
and adopted healthy habits. The medication implicitly states no alcohol on the label of the medication,
and yet many are still drinking.

Health must start with healthy habits. And many in the group are getting more autoimmune conditions.
This is not unusual if they still have “leaky gut”. Multiple syndrome autoimmune conditions are not
unusual. The “magic” pill won’t avoid that. The “magic” pill cannot be the only remedy. It’s not that
magic.

Eating organic live food of all the colors of the rainbow from a farm as close to you as possible and, if
possible, in season is the real magic pill. You control that.

The Naltrexone does not take the place of healthy habits; it should be an addition to healthy habits.
Perhaps this is why the pill works so well for me and not so well for others.

If you follow these tips, and live a low toxin life, your body will celebrate. Learn to listen to your body, it
will make implementing these tips so worthwhile. And living a healthy life, solves a multitude of health
issues and gives your body a strong foundation to thrive.

One final thought, and this is important. YOU are responsible for your health and for your child’s health.
Not your doctor, not your grocery store, not your farmers market, not your friends, not your druggist.
You. And you are responsible for teaching your child good health so that they can grow up healthy and
then teach their children all aspects of good health. Talk to your child about the importance of being a
healthy influencer with their friends. The child’s school in not responsible for their health, and again
neither is their doctor. Many of these people play a role in health but own it yourself and be actively
involved. It’s your body and it’s your child. Teach your child to take care of their body so that they have
a happy place to live.

Put healthy habits into place now and reap the benefits. Nothing can beat healthy habits and a low
toxin life.

To your health, with hugs, Cheryl

i EWG https://www.ewg.org/research/body-burden-pollution-newborns