Dr. Johanna Budwig started her career researching fats, working for the German government. She was an incredible woman and pioneer in her field. Nominated for several Nobel prizes for her work on fats and the human cell, she eventually discovered what turned a healthy cell into a cancer cell. Bad fats. The cell membranes of our cells are made up of fatty acids. The cell communicates via protein bridges with the body, telling the body what it needs. Protein carriers working with a key lock system bring the cell the nutrients, enzymes, hormones etc. that it needs. Only the protein with the right key will be able to pass through the fat membrane.
Most things our cells need, nutrients, enzymes etc. are water soluble. Anyone who ever poured oil and water into a glass will know, that the two don't mix. The oil will stay on the top. That is exactly what happens in a cell. The fat membrane encloses the inside of the cell (water) and protects it from the outside environment of the cell (water). Imagine different types of protein, like little Sherpa carriers, transporting or carrying all the cell's provisions from one side of this insurmountable fat barrier to the other.
In cancer cells, this protein communication breaks down, practically starving the cell of what it needs. The cell then starts surviving on a fermentation process within the cell membrane. This is what we call the Warburg effect. The cell is disconnected from the body's system, which may be why the immune system cannot detect and eliminate these rogue cells. Having discovered this, Budwig spent her life researching how we could reverse this process and get the communication back on track. She believed that anything the body had created, the body could uncreate, or correct.
Eventually, she found out that the cell membranes were constantly renewed and repaired using whatever fats were available as building blocks. Good fatty acids were able to communicate with the proteins. Bad fats such as saturated and trans fats from processed foods, margarine etc. were unable to communicate with the proteins. The simple conclusion was to cut all processed foods and bad fats from a person's diet, replacing them with good fats, such as organic cold pressed oils. The membrane would then repair itself with good fats, reestablishing the communication channels with the proteins.
The best combination of fatty acids in the ratio needed by the human cell was found in linseed/flaxseed oil. This gets mixed with quark to make the famous Budwig Cream. Why quark? Quark is high in protein and naturally fat free. Budwig tried to eliminate all animal fats from the diet, as she found the body metabolised plant based fats and plant based protein much easier. For her, the body was essentially an energy system. Food was an energy source. Digestion a process that required a certain amount of energy in order to convert the food into energy. The aim was that the energy gained from digestion was more than the energy needed for the digestive process.
She also saw that at cell level, health was order and structure, illness or disease was chaos and disorder. To get the disease under control and to get the body back to health, structure and order had to be re-established in all aspects of life. She designed a whole daily routine, that the 3 E centre followed meticulously.
All human cells vibrate at a certain frequency, which can be measured. We know from research, that the energy in a diseased cell vibrates at a much lower frequency than the energy in a healthy cell. Raising the energy in the cells is one of the main goals of the Budwig approach.
The three main pillars her programme rests on are nutrition (don't put anything bad or processed into the body's system), detoxification (help the body eliminate the toxins in the system as efficiently as possible) and energy work, which is all about raising the vibrations in the cells through positive thinking, reducing stress and working through emotional obstacles.
The 3E centre reckons that 20% of success are linked to detox and nutrition, a whopping 80% are down to the energy work or stress management. Learning mindfulness is going to be the main work over the next four weeks.
During the week, we all have sessions with a life coach in addition to sessions with the healing practitioner who has specialist cancer training. Every morning there are seminars and workshops: meditation, mindfulness, lectures on Budwig, fats, nutrition, positive thinking. Afternoons are either free or filled with optional activities such as laughing yoga (one of our favourites!), mantra singing, doing a vision board.
There are massages, Thai Chi, Chi Gong, Tui na, colon hydro therapy and there is plenty of time for forest walks, thinking and realising where we might have gone wrong in life in order to have landed here. Taking responsibility for our own choices and realising that certain choices created the illness is the toughest part of the process. But it's also the most liberating.
Instead of being the victim of an incurable disease that randomly chose to attack me, my illness becomes something I in part created through my behaviour, my lifestyle choices and my beliefs. This puts me back in the driver seat. It puts me back in control over my life. If my own choices of what I ate, thought and worried about made me ill, then I can make different choices. I can choose to eat with my body's needs in mind. I can think more positive and choose not to worry about things out of my control.
Slowly, very slowly, I am beginning to see how this might work. Daily exercises help me understand just how much "worrying and overthinking things" has actually put my body into stress mode. In stress, or fight-flight, the body cannot heal and restore. It is programmed for fighting or running. It dawns on me, that my poor body has been in stress mode pretty much from the minute I would wake up in the morning to the minute I went to sleep at night. Let's face it, even having a cup of coffee or tea has in our society become a thing you do "on the go". Sitting down and resting is almost a sign of weakness. We all have to be "oh so busy" to be accepted and valued in the system we have created.
Most of us don't even wake up to this reality when we get ill. Our approach isn't one of "I need to change what I did before I became ill, because this clearly caused my illness". It is rather "cut out the problem, pop a pill and get back to normal as quickly as possible". Back to rushing, running, packing as much into our day as we can. No wonder, illnesses become chronic. If we don't change the behaviour that created them in the first place, how do we expect to achieve a different outcome the second or third time round? Einstein once said "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results." Well, he was a clever man!
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