On a recent visit to his East Village digs, I asked Gil to talk through some of the key tenets of his philosophy. Here’s our conversation:
Cindy: Tell us about your approach to creating health. What is health? And what is the radical cleansing life?
Gil: What is health? Health is the opposite of death. I mean that’s what it is, in the long haul. Health is the opposite of exhaustion. It’s the opposite of feeling miserable (in the absence of drugs and stimulants!) That’s basically what health is.
In terms of creating health, the belief system is much more important than the steps. If people get too locked into the steps, if they miss the big picture, I just don’t believe the motivation is going to be there in the long haul.
So, the belief system is that the only cause of illness, aging, disease and loss of vitality is the retention of matter unfit for human consumption. That’s the only cause of ill health, which eventually leads to death. Ergo, the only way to promote health is to stop the intake of matter which creates blockage, encumbrance and accumulation and learn what to do to get out all the accumulation done through years of ignorance. Those two things are health: the removal of all that which you are holding that is inhibiting your being and the ceasing of putting in of matter which would inhibit it in the future. Those two things are it. That’s all it is. And when it gets viewed that way and when you learn the techniques and what needs to be done to maintain clean cells and how to get clean cells through the removal of matter, it all falls into place.
Cindy: So what exactly are the foods fit for human consumption? And is that all we should eat?
Gil: This is where it gets tricky because so many people in our culture are impulsive. We’re not in an era of reflection, we’re in an era of reaction. So while you can speak the philosophical absolute, that doesn’t mean that’s how you go out and live. And that’s the big mistake amidst the radical left. The fruitarians are very guilty of this.
The absolute truth is the only human food is breast milk, when you’re a baby, fruit and green leaves. That’s all. Everything else, on a continuum, is a compromise of that or somewhat below that. Now that does not mean, in any way shape or form, that somebody wakes up and just starts living on lettuce, spinach and apples. It doesn’t mean that. It means in a perfect world, we get ourselves to a very high place, much like the speed of light that gets approached but never reached. We want to understand that that’s what’s optimum. Ergo, let’s get as close as we can within our own limitations.
Look on the internet and see how many sick, screwed up fruitarians there are because they’re mistaking the philosophical ideal for the pragmatic. It’s a misreading of a lot of literature. There are a lot of books and people say “Hey, this guy told me to be fruitarian.” No he didn’t! He told you you were meant to be fruitarian. It doesn’t mean you can do it now.
Cindy: In other words, we shouldn’t dive too deep too fast?
Gil: Yeah, it’s a philosophical understanding but it’s not the pragmatic game.
Cindy: So practically speaking what are some of the patterns we can follow or the lifestyle recommendations to start moving towards that higher state?
Gil: They claim that if 80% of the diet is of a fruit/vegetable nature eaten in the right order in the right combinations, that allows 20% not to be and you can still be radically healthy. And that’s what I think everybody should aim for. As you get older, you hit your 70s, maybe you drop that 20% to 5%, but if anyone thinks they’re gonna go out and do a 100% alkaline diet, it’s just very hard and they better be living with a colonic unit.
And so for most people, if they’re really invested and if they’re in decent shape, the best way to go about it, especially now because the summer is coming, is you make a commitment: there’s no cooked food until the evening, if there is at all. That’s the first commitment. You make a commitment: there’s no protein in the body until the evening.
So, the beginning of the day is a juice. If you’re a beginner and want fruits after that, it’s fine. Salads or avocados for lunch, and that’s basically it. I mean, people tend to do very well with simplicity and if you can get people into that space where they do juice, if they have to eat twice, fruit a half hour or hour later, and lunch is salads, avocados or fruits. That’s it, DAS for Dummies. It’s why those guys made all that money. Just keep it simple. And then in the evening the body can lean towards the 20% where you do a big green salad, you do salmon and broccoli, or quinoa and asparagus, or lentils and brussels sprouts. Whatever it is you want. That’s how you would outline it where the body would cleanse very well, it’s a diet that’s thriving on produce. It’s not so over cleansing that it gets you deathly ill.
Cindy: You mentioned food order and food combinations, and I know these concepts are fundamental to this way of life. Can you explain them a bit more?
Gil: Since humans are only meant to live on fruit and green leaves, all of which combine, once people started eating other stuff, there needs to be an understanding of how to mitigate their bad effects. The main two things obviously being that carbohydrate foods (which would basically be grains, potatoes, yams and heavy veggies) and proteins (which would be fish, chicken, eggs, lentils and peanut butter) can’t get mixed because they digest totally differently. And since neither one of them is meant for human food, that’s why we have to get picky with how we work with them. People say, combinations aren’t natural, human beings would never be able to figure it out without technology. The answer is, human beings weren’t meant to eat any of these things, ergo there was no need for combination knowledge, because fruits and green leaves (the only real human food) can all mix. You see? So once the wrong thing was done, then we needed the intellect to figure out how to mitigate the effects of all the wrong things, basically which is protein and grain. They can’t mix. Do them separate. If you do just that food combination, you’re basically okay. That’s the main one.
And then the other one, because fruit is the normal human food, the food humans are meant to live on, fruits go alone. Don’t mix them with anything Don’t eat them after anything. When you’re doing this life, (not counting juicing, which is something else), once food that isn’t a fruit goes in the body on a given day, you shouldn’t do fruit until the next day. That’s a good way to play it to avoid gas, bloating and all the symptoms people get.
The food order is important because light food flies through the stomach. It must fly through the stomach. If it gets hit by a roadblock, it blows up and turns to gas. So salads always precede grains or proteins. And that’s how a meal should be structured. Green salad followed immediately by either grains or proteins or heavy vegetables with light cooked vegetables and that’s your algorithm for a dinner. Salad, salmon, broccoli. Salad, quinoa, brussels sprouts. Like that.
Cindy: So the food ordering applies not only to the day in general but also to each meal.
Gil: Yeah, most definitely. If somebody’s doing, say a big bowl of wild rice with a salad and a bunch of cooked beets, the salad precedes the other two.
Cindy: I’ve heard that there are some fruits and vegetables that are actually bad to eat raw. Even some doctors are saying there are toxic elements in tomatoes unless you cook them. And things that are bad for the thyroid, like kale?
Gil: That’s a controversial one. If the thyroid’s damaged, there’s a belief that certain cruciferous vegetables are damaging to it. I don’t know if that’s true. I don’t know how it's been proven. I don’t think it’s true. I can’t say for certain. You look at a vegetable like cabbage which I believe is a big no no for these people about the thyroid. Cabbage is the universal vegetable. It’s all over the world. It’s a staple everywhere. It’s a kind of hard push to claim that cabbage is damaging to the thyroid when it’s the most universally eaten and the easiest grown plant in the world. It’s kind of hard to say that. Again, if you want to operate on the grounds that you don’t need cabbage to live, (even though it all sounds like a lot of nonsense), you don’t need cabbage, so if you know you have thyroid issues and you want to avoid it in case those people are correct, go ahead. You can do other stuff. But I can tell you that if they’re claiming that cabbage and kale destroy a healthy thyroid, we can unequivocally say, they’re full of shit. That’s nonsense. That’s total bullshit. That’s microscope nutrition.
Cindy: And what about zucchini and tomatoes?
Gil: Alright, zucchini and tomatoes are fruits. They’re seed bearing plants and all seed bearing plants are meant to be human food. Anyone who’s telling people that fruits with seeds are not human food is a moron. It’s just totally stupid and moronic. It’s microscopic nutrition. People who put things under a microscope and pick out parts of them and then start spouting shit, just don’t get it.
All fruits, provided they’re grown properly, are human food. Now, is the government, is the given country, fucking around with the seeds and screwing up the process by hybridizing it silly, that certain fruits are no longer edible? It’s debatable. Probably not because even hybrid fruits are still better than fish, grain or anything else. So, in terms of the zucchini and what not, it’s human food, it has seeds in it, there’s no reason people shouldn’t eat it. Tomatoes are the same thing. I know a lot of raw food people, a lot of people that have done this life that have thrived on mediterranean type diets. Iff you’re new to this stuff, worrying about zucchini is crazy. You need to just get into the game, get into the loop and make sure you’re on point with food combinations, order, and what not.
The other thing is, anyone who tells you you can’t eat zucchini but you can eat lean meat is a moron. Because even a chemicalled-up tomato is less harmful—if its as pink as a pink Crayola crayon which means its unripe and inedible—it’s still a better choice than a protein or a fat because it’s in a better category. So there’s no reason anyone who’s just getting into the diet should be nitpicking the fruit and vegetable category. It’s just dumb. It makes no sense. You put potatoes under a microscope, you can find a whole bunch of micro poisons. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t eat them because they’re placed in a space that makes them okay within the structure.
Cindy: It seems like a lot of the popular diets right now are really pushing high fats. What’s your take on fat?
Gil: They push high fats because while they’re pushing high fats they’re also pushing no grain, no artificial sugars, no beans, nothing of a nature that can blow up a body. You know, we say this over and over again, and it’s a biggie: the average American who weighs 300 pounds or 250 didn’t get that way eating too many Brazil nuts. It takes a lot of work to get really fucked up. Ergo, if somebody comes along and says, “No bread, no pizza, no cake, no cookies,” off that alone, you will shrink. So when the people who do the high fat diet do the high fat diet, the reason it works is because of what they’re telling people not to do. And when you eliminate the Twinkles and the cupcakes and all the other shit, the foccacia, the white bread, that are making people huge, the mixing of all that disaster, you’re left with pig fat and a couple of leaves of cilantro. If that’s who you are starting out, it’s gonna work. You’re gonna lose weight and that’s why all the morons pushing a high fat diet get rich. Because the bulk of the people buying their material started out in a very bad way. If you have a planet of unemployed people, a $6 an hour job will improve the economy.
But it doesn’t mean that’s what you seek. See, for a health person, for someone in the loop, the diets that push high high fat and eschew a whole bunch of other things are bullshit. There’s no truth to them whatsoever. Fat is not human food. It’s not necessary. It’s not human food.
Cindy: Right. Clearly, fruits and vegetables are generally not high in fat.
Gil: Right! Exactly. Now, having said that, does that mean people shouldn’t eat fat? No. What makes the high fat diet so bad is that they’re making the fat the center of the diet and if you have any intrinsic belief in evolution and zoology, you know that humans are primates. Everybody knows that. That’s not a controversial topic. We’re in the gorilla family. This just does not fit one iota. In the jungle, which is where primates are, the last thing a person or an animal wants to do is fill up full of the foods that will heat the organism. High fat diets heat the organism. The last thing a primate living in the jungles of Africa would do would be to fill up on fat to warm up. It makes no sense. It’s also not attainable, a high fat diet in a tropical area. Where would you get the stuff? It wouldn't exist other than in coconuts, because in the tropics, it’s clear, humans are meant to eat hanging fruit and leaves.
And if you have any belief in anything beyond human consciousness, who would set up a diet where its most developed organism would live off part of a dead carcass of another organism? It just creates death, violence. Its a stupid, illogical diet, the fat game. It’s only in the loop because it helps 300 pound people get to 200 pounds. That’s all it is. It shouldn’t be discussed by people who are heavily into health pursuits.
Cindy: The diet is half the equation. What is the connection between the diet and colonics?
Gil: Because the diet is gonna awaken all the years you lived normally. When you think of all the normal stuff you put in your body, the residue of all that stuff is still there. It’s not gone. It doesn’t leave with time. So when you start putting in all the right things and all that residue awakens, your body’s not gonna pass things very well. If I had a dollar for every time I heard somebody say they “converted to veganism but…” I could retire. It’s so common it’s almost not worth discussing. For a middle aged person, someone even in their 20s, especially women, who grew up eating normally to just take on a high produce diet and try to feel great on their own, it’s gonna happen probably for one of every five. Which isn’t a high enough percentage. What the colonics do is they make the goal of the diet, which is to cleanse the cells, a possibility by removing the matter the diet awakens. People say “Why doesn’t that happen naturally?” Because the human body is meant to pass yesterday’s papayas. It is not meant to pass ten years ago’s foccacia and when that awakens in the cells, the colon cannot do it by itself.
Cindy: In other words, when people talk about “going on a cleanse,” they’re really just awakening matter. It still has to leave the body.
Gil: Yeah. The cleanse occurs when the bowels dump. That’s what cleansing is. It’s a physical, mechanical, biochemical occurrence. It’s not an abstract. If you’re cleansing, you’re shitting. In plain king’s English. If you’re cleansing, you’re shitting. If you're not shitting, you’re not cleansing and then you’re autointoxicating. If you’re eating a super clean diet and your bowels are not working, you’re in a much worse space than people eating a normal American diet, because that food doesn’t shake up anything. It just collects, collects, collects which is why the average American is okay in their 40s weighing 50 pounds more than they should. Everything sits dormant, but once you get into this and start awakening the demons, if they don’t leave, you could get deathly sick. I’ve seen people die.
Cindy: I think you said to me once that colonics without the diet are a waste of time, and that the diet without colonics is dangerous.
Gil: Yes, the colonics, if you eat normally, should be done once a year, for shock value. That’s all it's gonna do. No one’s gonna get any benefit from repetition if they’re eating normally.
The diet done to a high degree without colonics is dangerous because it puts the onus on the bowel to keep up. There are slews of websites about recovery from raw diets and fruitarianism. There’s a fruitarian recovery group that has, I don’t know, a couple of thousand members. There are raw food recovery groups, convalescents from getting deathly ill on vegan diets, not because of lack of nutrition or lack of protein, but because of lack of removal. You know, the “mushy vegans.” If you think about this, the vegans that, back in the day, did the tofu turkeys, those people may have been mushy and pale but they weren’t deathly ill. You never heard about those people hitting walls and getting traumatized. That’s the stuff that happens with the vegans eating the right food but not doing the right process. Tofu heads, their thyroid blows out eventually, but it's a slow process like a normal person. There is no such thing, for instance, as a macrobiotic recovery group. That doesn’t exist because the food is middle of the road. It's moderately, slowly, little mini bit cleansing, ergo, people can do it without hitting the walls that fruitarians and raw food people hit. And believe me, they hit them.
Cindy: Not all colonics are equal. For someone who’s not in New York, who can’t come see you, what should they look for in a colon hydrotherapist?
Gil: When you do colonics, there’s two questions. Two questions only. It’s easy. Do you do the gravity method? You want a yes. Do you do the hydraulic pressure method? You want a no. If the person doesn’t know which they’re doing, it means it's hydraulic pressure, because anyone doing gravity has it drilled into their head that that’s what it's called. So if they’re not clear, it’s hydraulic pressure. Don’t go. That’s the first question. The second one is: do you use disposable equipment? You want no. Disposable equipment doesn’t work very well. Actually it doesn’t work at all, you want latex rubber tubing and stainless steel speculums. So if you get a yes to gravity and a yes to stainless steel speculums (and no to disposable), the place has a decent shot at being good. Those are the two main things you want. If those two things are in place, you should definitely go.
Cindy: What types of transformation can people expect once they start this life and start getting colonics regularly?
Gil: If the colonics work, and if the bowels open up, basically everything in your being that’s been way off will fix. It’s not just digestion. Skin, bad sleep, lower back pain, bad menstrual cycles, sterility, vision…
Cindy: Varicose veins! (ed note: I’m speaking from experience here!)
Gil: Varicose veins! Fatness. Of course, the fatness. Bloating, the tricep fat underneath that women hate. From the sublime to the ridiculous, things will get better. But the key element is: are the bowels emptying and are the colonics effective? For this life to really work to the max, those two things have to be in place.
Cindy: So we’ve introduced the diet and colonics. Is there anything else we should be doing?
Gil: Lots of sunlight! Lots of direct light with the summer coming. (Chemical) sunblocks are nonsense. They don’t prevent skin cancer. They prevent burning. You won’t get burned but you’re baking chemicals into your skin. It’s deadly. So we don’t want to play that game. Lots of light and tons of sweating. It’s the biggest missed element by the radical health left. They poo poo the sweat. It’s 70% of the colonic action which, coming from me, (to someone that might not sound like a big deal, but if you know how I look at this), it’s HUGE. So if you are in a space where there’s a sauna near you, a Russian bathhouse or anything of that nature, GO! Join. Do the packages. Get in it as much as you can. Sweat your brains out. Jump in ice water, pour ice water on your head, take ice showers. Fabulous. It’s mega important especially to help the kidney and bladder.
Now people are gonna ask, what about infrared? If you have a history of alcoholism, drug use, if you were medicated heavily as a kid, if you’re coming off chemotherapy, any druggie thing, if you sit in front of the internet all day for work and get radiated silly, then the infrared sauna is a good move. But if you’re none of those things, if you were never a drug person, if you don’t sit in front of the internet, if you were never a drinker, really hot bathhouse saunas, up to like 200°, are superior to infrared. So if you live in a city with a bathhouse, like Russian or Turkish bathhouse, join. Go. Go as often as you can. It’s a huge factor in this move, especially if you live in an urban, environmentally polluted area, the bathhouse is the bomb. So that’s a really big, big thing.
And the other thing is lymphatic drainage. Seven minutes on a rebounder or a dry brush or both. Lymphatic drainage is important because the air we breathe is so poisoned. Those are biggies.
Cindy: Thanks, Gil! We can go deeper and answer questions at your talk on the 16th!
