Regardless of our age, we all want to look and feel younger, healthier, and more alive. That’s the goal of The Body Ecology Guide to Growing Younger: a holistic program that will redesign your relationship to your body and your life.

Expanding on the principles in the landmark bestseller The Body Ecology Diet, this long-awaited book provides a blueprint for restoring a vital friendship with our bodies as the years pass and, in turn, creating beauty, longevity, and well-being in ourselves and our world. Through diet and unique anti-aging therapies, Donna Gates – the originator of Body Ecology, a world-renowned system of healing – shows us how we can live fuller, healthier, more meaningful lives.

A fascinating blend of cutting-edge medical information, practical health advice, and spiritual wisdom, The Body Ecology Guide to Growing Younger is relevant for people of any age. This groundbreaking book suggests that we don’t simply have to age gracefully, we can age with panache.

What’s Inside:

- Anti-aging remedies that will make you feel and look younger
- The missing piece to all traditional diet programs
- Insight into why we age and how we can prevent it
- Little-known wellness secrets that address the stresses and pressures of our modern world
- Superfood recommendations for increased energy, vitality, and disease prevention

EXCERPT

How Body Ecology Came to Be

My own healing and happiness evolved out of a very personal health crisis and recovery. I was born with a sensitive constitution. It seemed as a child I was always coming down with lung infections and suffering stomachaches, and many of the foods I ate didn’t agree with me. When I was 15, my skin began to break out, and a well-meaning but misguided dermatologist prescribed antibiotics. Fifteen years later, frequent use of antibiotics had weakened my body to the point where I had almost no functional immune system, and my stomach burned whenever I ate anything. By the time I was 30, I could tolerate only about five foods.

This launched me on a personal quest; and I began to explore every kind of diet available, including vegetarian, raw, macro, natural hygiene, and high protein. I also spent a fortune on supplements and found real value in neuromuscular massage, acupuncture, colonics, and craniosacral therapy. Everything helped, but I still felt weak, and my digestion never improved.

At the age of 38, confused and uncertain as to where to turn next, I found that fate intervened. I met Dr. William Crook, who had just written The Yeast Connection. After reading his book, I realized that I had a classic case of an extremely common systemic infection called candidiasis. The infection and its toxins had seriously compromised my digestive, immune, and endocrine systems.

After much study and trial and error, I eventually created an entire system of health and healing centered around repairing and restoring my inner ecosystem—killing off the bad yeast and the accompanying viruses and then recolonizing my intestines with friendly microbiota, thus restoring proper digestion. I called this system “Body Ecology.”

More than anything else, I am a teacher, so naturally I began to share what I was learning with others. I knew my discoveries needed to reach more people, and in 1994, I published the first edition of The Body Ecology Diet—a program designed to help others heal their own inner ecosystems through dietary and lifestyle changes. Slowly the book made its way around the world to the people who needed it. I also founded a nutrition company called Body Ecology, Inc.

Two decades later, the system of healing I was guided to create is providing answers to many other health challenges—including the problems associated with aging. Unbelievably, The Body Ecology Diet is currently in its 11th edition and is now published by Hay House. It has helped tens of thousands of people return to optimal health. I can see so clearly the happier, healthier, younger world that is possible through the Body Ecology Way of Life.

What Is the Body Ecology Way of Life?

While it has evolved into a way of life, Body Ecology began as a diet. Our digestive systems are intimately linked to our immune, endocrine, circulatory, and central nervous systems. A healthy digestive ecosystem—which I will talk about much more later in this book—is the first step toward a long and vibrant life. In the same way, most if not all of the signs of aging can be ultimately connected back to the way we eat—how we allow toxins to build up in our bodies, and how effectively we eliminate them from our systems.

But the Body Ecology Way of Life also includes lifestyle choices that go beyond diet. By learning how to honor the gifts we were given at birth—including our relationship to the sun, our breathing, our connection to the earth, and more—we are able to foster well-being and increase longevity naturally and effectively. For this reason the first two parts of The Body Ecology Guide to Growing Younger will focus on the healthiest approach to food and diet, but in Part III we’ll cover effective and sometimes unexpected anti-aging therapies that support maximum health at any age. Together, these approaches form the “Body Ecology Way of Life.”

It Starts with Our Thoughts

From the Body Ecology point of view, growing younger starts with our thoughts. Our thoughts and emotions are always reassembling and reorganizing, but they follow our instructions! We can transform our reality if we change our beliefs. In fact, the body acts like a puppet to our thoughts, and it has a tremendous capacity for self-healing if we focus on health, not disease.

My friend Louise Hay, the founder of Hay House (the publisher of this book), is a wonderful example of how thinking “different” can change the future. I first met Louise when she attended a Body Ecologist workshop. I was quickly inspired by her balanced way of taking care of her own growth and needs while helping the world and seeking the truth. Her openness and availability to new ideas keeps her perennially young and engaging. She follows the Body Ecology Way of Life, and it is wonderful to see how her body and demeanor are in harmony with her youthful spirit.Louise is a great inspiration to me, and a powerful model for those who may think getting older means limitations rather than opportunities.

Have you been resigned to or obsessing over the changes in your body? If this continues to be your focus, you will certainly find more and more signs of aging with each passing year. Instead, I encourage you to begin—right this moment—to direct your thoughts to how it looks and feels to be young. Focus on what you want to become, not on what you currently are. Your body will begin to respond with new health and vitality.

Now, imagine if all of us collectively start to concentrate our thoughts on how it looks and feels to be young. Our cells will respond immediately, and the universe will begin to give us what we want. Why would it do this? Because the universe wants this, too! If millions of us remain young and healthy, we can be of much greater service to the world. We can begin the work we have come here to do.

It is my greatest hope that this book will become the first in a series of “inspired thoughts” that will guide you toward a younger, healthier, and even happier you.

This excerpt was taken from the book Body Ecology’s Guide to Growing Younger by Donna Gates. It is published by Hay House and available at all bookstores or online at: www.hayhouse.com