Monthly Archives: January 2016

David Benson on the Perfect Health Retreat

David Benson of Duluth, Minnesota was a guest at the May 2015 Perfect Health Retreat. David kindly recorded a video for us discussing his experience at the retreat.

Some highlights:

  • “I’ve been having a great time. It’s been relaxing and a nice mix of activities, we’ve been busy, I kind of lost track of the days and I feel great.”
  • “The best part has been the science classes. Even though I read the book and thought and studied about this for a while, it really has made things make much more sense for me and given me a good basis for continuing on.”
  • “I love the beach, it’s a fabulous beach, I could just walk up and down for a long time… Really nice place to stay.”
  • “I’m really committed to moving forward and keeping things going the way they’ve been going at the retreat…. A big benefit has been learning what it will take. When you try it and see how it goes, you both see ‘oh, that’s how it’s done’ and also that ‘oh I can do this, it’s not as difficult as it may have seemed when I read about it.’”
  • “The main improvement that I’ve noticed [at the retreat] is that I feel really good. I feel great right now. I’ve had other noticeable improvements but I feel great.”
  • “It’s been a great experience.”

Thank you David!

We are taking reservations now for the next Perfect Health Retreat to be held April 30 to May 7, 2016. Don’t miss this opportunity for a luxurious vacation combined with a week of learning that will pay a lifetime of dividends.

To learn about the retreat, visit the web pages under the Perfect Health Retreat tab, starting here. To reserve a room or for more information, please contact Paul Jaminet at paul@perfecthealthretreat.com or Whitney Ross Gray at whitney@perfecthealthretreat.com.

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Tim Terlegard on the Perfect Health Retreat

Tim Terlegard of Sweden was a guest at the October 2014 Perfect Health Retreat. Tim kindly recorded a video for us discussing his experience at the retreat.

Some highlights:

  • “I enjoyed the retreat very much, every aspect of it. I very much enjoyed the science classes, and the exercise, and the cooking classes, and the food. I liked everything.”
  • “I like the setting very much. We don’t have these beaches in Sweden. It’s very warm, it’s very nice.”
  • “It’s been two great weeks.”
  • “The retreat has everything you need to get a healthy life…. You get well educated to continue this lifestyle at home.”
  • “It shouldn’t be too difficult to persuade someone to come here…. I would recommend this to anyone. Most people have some health issues that should be relatively easy to correct.”

Thank you Tim!

We are taking reservations now for the next Perfect Health Retreat to be held April 30 to May 7, 2016. Don’t miss this opportunity for a luxurious vacation combined with a week of learning that will pay a lifetime of dividends.

To learn about the retreat, visit the various web pages under the Perfect Health Retreat tab, starting here. To reserve a room or for more information, please contact Paul Jaminet at paul@perfecthealthretreat.com or Whitney Ross Gray at whitney@perfecthealthretreat.com.

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Stephanie on the Perfect Health Retreat

Stephanie of Toronto, Ontario was a guest at the October 2015 Perfect Health Retreat. Stephanie kindly authorized us to share this email discussing her experience at the retreat.

Hello Paul and Shou-Ching,

I wanted to thank you for the wonderful experience I had at the Perfect Health Retreat a couple of weeks ago.

This was honestly the most relaxing vacation I’ve ever had.  Usually I need a day to “recover” from my vacations because they’re usually full of lack of sleep and poor food!

I’ve been working at incorporating more of the PHD recommendations into my life. One of the first things I did was make liver paté – Shou-Ching’s recipe is so delicious!  I gave some to my fiancée who claims to really dislike liver, and he actually liked it!  He was so surprised and now has to revise his opinion on liver.

I’m really thankful for the experience I had. The retreat was fun, relaxing, and so informative. The cooking tips and tricks, the science classes with diet and lifestyle advice, putting all of it into play, and the exercise classes. It is hard to say what was the highlight!

Jae’s personal assessment was so helpful for me. He identified issues that I think I’ve had almost my whole life. During the assessment and afterwards, he had me do a few exercises which brought me from a chronically tense state to a relaxed state – and all the exercises did was change my pelvic alignment! The result is amazing. For the first time that I can remember, I was able to completely relax. I finally understood what feeling “grounded” was like, what it is like to feel your body being supported from your heels to your head.  It also relaxed my chronically tense shoulders and I haven’t back pain since. I’m also excited about incorporating the exercises we did in the exercise classes. I wish I had Jae, Court, or Danny here as a personal trainer but I suppose I’ll have to make do with my memory 🙂 However, I have to say that doing morning movement in my apartment is nowhere near as nice as on the beach with the porpoises playing in the waves!

Another aspect of the retreat that surprised me was how relaxing the red lights were.  My first morning away from the retreat, I woke up, switched on the regular lights, and immediately tensed up. I am shocked at how much stress the regular lights have on my body in the morning. I already have one small lamp with a red light at home but plan on going out tonight to buy more.  I think these will help me lower my stress levels and help me sleep better.

My food since I’ve come home has been so good!  I realized while I was at the retreat that I was being too restrictive with my diet at home and needed to incorporate more variety. I feel like I’ve been feasting since then!  Each meal is so tasty. Also, incorporating 3 egg yolks a day into my diet has helped so much with my blood sugar levels and hunger. Also, my time at the retreat helped me get used to daily intermittent fasting and I’ve been doing quite well with my fasting since then.

The main improvement I saw while I was at the retreat was with my acne rosacea. A few people commented on Friday at how much better it looked after only one week.  My face is continuing to slowly improve. It’s not dramatic but I have way less new bumps. The old spots will take some time to heal and I feel that with time, I’ll have my nice, clear skin back… permanently! I think the AOBiome “Mother Dirt” mist is really helping it clear up from the outside but that my diet and lifestyle will help it heal from the inside.

I still have to get my red lights, do more exercise, and make myself fermented veggies. However, I feel like I have the tools to help me heal my body and make me as healthy as possible. I am so happy to have had this opportunity and want to thank the two of you for using your knowledge to help others like me.  I feel like with this knowledge I can avoid the suite of medical conditions that my older family members are burdened with. Thank you so much.

Stephanie, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Thank you Stephanie!

We are taking reservations now for the next Perfect Health Retreat to be held April 30 to May 7, 2016. Don’t miss this opportunity for a luxurious vacation combined with a week of learning that will pay a lifetime of dividends.

To learn about the retreat, visit the web pages under the Perfect Health Retreat tab, starting here. To reserve a room or for more information, please contact Paul Jaminet at paul@perfecthealthretreat.com or Whitney Ross Gray at whitney@perfecthealthretreat.com.

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Happy New Year! 2015 in Review, 2016 in Prospect

A little belatedly, I’d like to offer an end-of-2015 review and 2016 preview, all in one.

Best Blog Posts of 2015

Although we couldn’t blog much in 2015, due to other obligations (Luke, biotech startup, retreat, cookbook, in that order), we did manage 51 blog posts in 2015, almost one per week, and some of them provided important and novel health advice.

Our important science posts of 2015 were:

The best recipe of the year was our baby food:

We put other great recipes in our cookbook, but for now only retreat guests can see them.

We had a minor controversy early in the year when Jimmy Moore, who had come to our retreat as a guest, wrote an article I thought was unfair, and led to this attempt to set the record straight: Jimmy Moore on the Perfect Health Retreat.

We also had some excellent reader reports, including Matt Farina’s Recovery from Hypothyroidism and the autoimmune recovery stories in Happy Thanksgiving! Ebook Sale Continues, and Autoimmune Recovery Stories.

Finally, we posted a number of testimonials from retreat guests, which can be found at Perfect Health Retreat Testimonials. So far we’ve posted testimonials through the October 2014 retreat; but the retreat really became outstanding in 2015, and we have a lot of great video testimonials from the two 2015 retreats that we’ll be putting up this year. Watch for them!

Perfect Health Newsletter

Another big event of 2015 was the launch of our email newsletter. See New: The Perfect Health Newsletter for information. Signing up gives you a free gift ebook, “Seven Tips for a Better Body.” If you want to lose weight or look better, sign up for our newsletter and read the ebook!

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Perfect Health Retreat

In 2015, the Perfect Health Retreat matured into a terrific product. There is nothing else like it. Some recent developments at the retreats:

  • I do pre-retreat health coaching for every guest. For several years now, I’ve been building up a database of natural healing methods for the various health conditions guests have brought to the retreat. This database now has advice for almost 200 health conditions. With every new guest I do further research, and our advice has been getting steadily more effective at improving health. At recent retreats, several people have had rapid recoveries from longstanding debilitating health conditions. That is immensely satisfying.
  • Shou-Ching has developed a terrific meal plan for the retreat. All recipes – over 70 of them – are made available to guests in an online cookbook. The food is delicious and easy to prepare. Guests are amazed how tasty nourishing food can be. The best part: it’s all made with simple recipes requiring no more than 30 minutes of effort at home. If you want to learn to cook for better health, the retreat kitchen is the best classroom you’ll find.
  • We hired a Head of Movement in 2015, Jae Chung, and he has been a revelation. Jae was trained at the Postural Restoration Institute and is an expert in re-training the brain to enable better body positioning, posture, breathing, and movement. Jae does one hour one-on-one assessments with every guest and guests commonly come out raving at how much better they feel and how much more freely they breath and move. When Jae assessed me, I walked and ran more fluidly for days afterward – it was amazing. Jae is supported by a team of terrific trainers and has continued to improve our movement curriculum. We now have four movement sessions per day that teach movement modalities appropriate for that time of day – including a “night movement” session teaching relaxation, stress relief, and preparation for sleep.
  • The science curriculum, consisting of a 1.5-hour lecture per day by me, is really solid now. Science motivates everything we do at the retreat and, surprisingly, about half the guests in recent retreats have named the science classes as their favorite part. A surprising number of people like to hear me talk!
  • 2015 saw us form partnerships with Ubiome for gut microbiome sequencing and AOBiome for Mother Dirt skin microbiome products.
  • The retreat offers many other amenities including a luxurious property with two salt water hot tubs and two heated salt water pools, a magnificent and nearly private beach, great kitchens and modern bedrooms and baths. Several guests have told me that the retreat is the most relaxing vacation they’ve ever had.

The next retreat is April 30 to May 7, 2016. We’re about half booked and taking reservations now. Please join us!

To learn more about the retreat, visit the various web pages under the Perfect Health Retreat tab, starting here. To reserve a room or for more information, please contact Paul Jaminet at paul@perfecthealthretreat.com or Whitney Ross Gray at whitney@perfecthealthretreat.com.

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Perfect Health Diet goes to Europe

I was delighted to speak at the first German Paleo conference in Berlin, PaleoConvention.de. It was a lot of fun! It will be an annual event and I highly recommend keeping an eye out for the 2016 convention.

Another exciting development in 2015: a prestigious German publisher, the Thieme Publishing Group’s Haug imprint, agreed to bring out a German language edition of Perfect Health Diet. It should be out around October. It’s possible I may visit Germany around the time of the launch.

We also have a Hungarian edition, and I was able to meet a number of our Hungarian fans at the Berlin conference. We would love to find publishers in France, Italy, and Spain – if you know one, please encourage them to contact us!

Perfect Health Cookbook

Long-promised, but long-delayed, the cookbook has been a labor of love for us for over three years now, going on four. Why is it taking so long? All the recipes are of our creation and have been cooked and refined many times. If you consider that we cook once per day, and plan to include at least 150 recipes each of which we’ll have cooked at least 3-4 times, you’ll see why it can take 4 years to finish a cookbook.

It is shaping up at last; in fact we made the online cookbook available to retreat guests last year. We plan to finish it this year. Every recipe will not only be fully Perfect Health Diet compliant, it will also be easy and quick to cook (we aim for 30 minutes to make a complete meal), and highly nourishing and healthful. Moreover, the recipes are not so much recipes as templates: we show how to vary ingredients to make very different flavors with the same recipe design and cooking methods. With this technique you can mix and match ingredients, making shopping and cooking easy and stress-free, yet every meal is a delicious novelty.

The Formation of Angiex

I’ve mentioned over the years that Shou-Ching was doing important cancer research that might eventually lead to an effective therapy. She’s been studying a novel approach to treating cancer for 13 years, and by 2015 had developed it about as far as it can go in an academic environment.

It was time to take the next step: form a company, create a therapy, and bring it to clinical trials.

We started working on this last March and incorporated in December. The new company is Angiex Inc, and you’ll see updates about it on this blog from time to time. Wish us well!

Looking Ahead to 2016

The new year is shaping up as a busy one. Our top priorities are raising Luke and curing cancer. After that, we want to continue improving the Perfect Health Retreat, and publish the Perfect Health Cookbook. Blog posts will be our fifth priority – which means there won’t be many long science posts.

Still, we have a huge mass of interesting material ready to be turned into posts, so don’t give up on us.

We are more convinced than ever that a natural lifestyle and a nutritionally optimized, low toxicity diet are the keys to great health and long life. The evidence for natural healing grows stronger every year. We’ll continue to bring you practical advice that will help you and yours achieve a long lifetime of terrific health.

To a happy and healthy 2016! Our best wishes to all our readers.