JEANNIE IN A BOTTLE

(FROM A WEEKEND NOTE, THE EDITOR'S LETTER IN STYLE WEEKEND, THE WEEKLY SPECIAL LIFESTYLE EDITION IN MANILA BULLETIN, FRIDAY, 22 FEBRUARY 2008)

But it’s more like a genie in five glasses of natural, organic drinks that flush decades of poison out of your life and make so much more than three of your wishes come true.

BLURB
Internal cleansing, which gets each organ functioning with maximum efficiency, is the core of health and beauty of the mind and body. —Jeannie Goulbourn

I have long been acquainted with Jeannie Goulbourn’s generous, charitable nature, but it was only last weekend that I saw the extent of her commitment to spread the good—and to share the good life—with as many people as she could possibly draw to her many projects.

One of these life-changing projects is last weekend’s “My Self-Discovery to Well-Being” seminar, a detox flush aimed at cleansing the gallbladder Jeannie and her partner Dale Flores, an expert in holistic nutrition, have been conducting every two months or so over the past year at the Discovery Suites in Pasig.

The non-invasive treatment starts at 8 a.m. on Saturday morning, although mine started the night before, when messages from Jeannie’s assistant Joyce flooded the inbox of my mobile phone urging me to refrain from meat and oily food. That early, I realized how terribly careless I had been with my food intake that it was stressful to go over my list of favorite restaurants in search of a clean, simple, fresh, hardly unadulterated steamed fish. I ended up ordering a whole lapu-lapu from The President’s in Binondo, with specific and absolute instructions to keep it MSG-free.

The next day, the first day of the two-day seminar, began with the healthiest (or only healthy) and most refreshingly enjoyable breakfast of my life: a series of gourmet organic soups, accompanied by a platter of fruits and glasses upon glasses of fruit juices and water, from the kitchen of Discovery Suites’ Colombian chef David Pardo de Ayala. Jeannie and Dale devoted the early part of Saturday to hydration, during which our motley crew of 60 or so, from ages 18 or 20 to 80+, was also plied with information through the talks given by health experts Dr. Ricky Soler and Dr. Madeline Valera, themselves graduates of the detox flush seminar and, in the case of Dr. Valera, a co-participant of mine in the detox flush scheduled that weekend.

Fasting began in earnest at 2 p.m., just before Raya Mananquil and Corey Wills took us through the basic yet calming and de-stressing steps of yoga. Strangely, the whole diet of fruits and soups in the morning was enough to keep me full and I hardly ever clamored for food and water, except late at night when I fleetingly fantasized about chocolate.

The five drinks, glasses full of electrolytes powerful enough to empty out the gallbladder as well as other organs like the liver and the intestines, were served at carefully calculated intervals beginning at 6 p.m. on Saturday night. We were told to expect the release of toxins through bowel movement beginning at 6 a.m. the next day, but mine started right away, not later than 30 minutes after I took the first drink. I spent the greater part of the evening in my suite, ridding myself of a lifetime of toxins with about five trips to the toilet before I fell asleep at midnight and maybe another five after I woke up on Sunday morning at 9:30. Congratulating me, Jeannie called me “an early bloomer.”

The toxin comes out in various sizes and shapes. For some, it is the size of a golf ball; for others, the size of a fine grain of “Boracay sand,” as Jeannie described it. It also comes in a whole palette of colors, from olive green to deep black, the darker it is, the more of a health hazard it is stuck in your system. On my last trip to the toilet before I slept on Saturday night, I released only water, as clear as spring water, and, for the first time in my life, I felt clean as a whistle, imagining all the passages in my digestive system washed clean of extraneous, hazardous, poisonous material like unprocessed fats and cholesterol. What’s more, I lost two pounds immediately after the overnight detox treatment. One of us in the batch, however, lost as much as 10 pounds.

So here I am on the very first day of my new life, although I believe I am only in the awareness stage and it will take more than a weekend of detox to convert me into a health buff.

My only wish is that Jeannie Goulbourn, whose passion for living well and wisely is very infectious, will succeed in her “health is wealth” campaign and, more important, in her vision to make health not only accessible to the wealthy. With her determination, I believe it is not impossible that her search for healthy food will soon yield something as cheap and conveniently obtainable as French fries and a can of sardines to satiate our need to eat and our need to draw pleasure from what we eat.

A
post me at aapatawaran@yahoo.com