Transition Diet: Helpful Tips for a Mucus-free Lifestyle

Below is a response to questions about the “Transition Diet” on Arnold Ehret’s Mucusless Diet Healing System (the ORIGINAL Vegan/Plant-based Lifestyle).

Written by Prof. Spira on April 17, 2013

What are your Thoughts on the Transition Diet? How long will it take?

I recommend establishing various ‘plateau’ points for different levels of eating/fasting. By ‘plateau’ I mean common daily menus that correlate to different modes of eating that satisfy. You are already on the way to doing this. As you experiment with different levels of fasting and eating, and become familiar with how your body reacts to them, you can shift dietary gears like shifting a manual car (as you become more advanced you can develop “automatic transmission” that shifts gears for you). These plateaus should be fairly comfortable (once you get used to them) and foods should always eliminate relatively well.

Juice Fasting Plateau

For example, my juice fasting plateau consists of either mono fresh orange juice fasting or grape/blackberry/lemon juice/optional apple (my current favorite). My liquid-only mode consists of one of the fruit juices above, perhaps in the afternoon, and then a green drink in the evening (something like juiced celery/spinach/cucumber/collard/a few carrots/one or two apples/optional ginger root). My all-fruit plateau is usually either grapes (all available kinds) and black berries with occasional mission figs. I have also done melon fruit periods, but do not consider them one of my plateau points because it is not as comfortable for me to do as the grapes and blackberries. Mono-apple periods are also a default when neither good melon nor grapes are available. I’ve also done extended mono periods on oranges, but these days it is really hard to find them properly ripened and sweet.

Classic Mucusless Diet Plateau

My mucusless plateau consists of a fruit meal in the afternoon (usually one of the above or what is in season although I will eat more of a diversity if I am moved to do so) and a raw combination salad at supper time. I might drink juices or lemon water throughout the day. It is harder for me to maintain the mucusless raw mode than it is for the ones mentioned above (which might seem counter intuitive at first). My mucusless raw mode usually moves fairly quickly into a cooked mucusless mode which is a fruit meal in the afternoon and a combination salad with steamed vegetables (optional onion saute or freshly prepared tomato sauce as a dressing). Particularly important cooked vegetables in this mode are steamed or baked squashes. These are very filling and tasty, but are relatively mucus-free when cooked long enough. You can eat this with a large raw salad and not crave anything else.

Cooked Mucuslean Mode

My cooked mucuslean mode may go from ‘fairly clean’ to ‘vegetaric’. Fairly clean would consist of adding a toasted piece of sprouted wheat (or some other 100% organic grain) bread after the combination salad. Vegetaric would consist of a range of items that I’ve experimented with over the years and found to eliminate fairly well while doing the least amount of harm. Certain legumes, grains, nuts, and even the occasional processed vegan food item could make an appearance (you may recall me talking about some of these mucuslean items in the Samantha Claire chapter of Spira Speaks).

Vegetaric cooked mucuslean meals eating is the worst I will eat (some raw foodist heads explode), but I visit it less and less as time moves forward. When I began the diet I found myself in this mode several times a month. Now I might visit it once or twice a year. Brother Air had been on a mostly fruits and juices for about 10 years after starting the diet, and says he went back into some processed vegetaric foods for a while mainly to help influence his future wife who was beginning the transition diet.

It is not the end of the world, and if you are applying the system, including periodic fasting and colon irrigation, you will naturally lose your desire for these foods. Every once in a while you may revisit them, but eventually you will never go back, and arrive in a brand new reality.

Baked or Stewed Fruit Periods

In the early stages of my transition the use of baked banana or lightly cooked apples were fairly common. As Ehret pointed out

But the mucusless diet as a healing system uses raw, rough vegetables for their cleansing qualities; baked ones as food; and baked and stewed fruits AS A LESS AGGRESSIVE DISSOLVER of poisons and mucus to MODERATE THE ELIMINATION IN SEVERE CASES. That is one of the most important principles of the system, a point the raw-food fanatic ignores entirely (Arnold Ehret, Annotated Mucusless Diet Healing System).

As you read in Spira Speaks: Dialogs and Essays on the Mucusless Diet, one of my favorite combinations was baked banana combined with fresh apples sauce and chopped dates. This meal actually helped me take care of bad cravings for dessert items like pies, cakes, ice cream sundaes, etc.

Greatest Staple Menus

Overall, my greatest staple modes are raw/cooked mucusless menus, including all fruit meals, fruit juices, and raw combination salads with one or two steamed or baked vegetables. But I always like to push myself forward to new heights. I am currently working to develop a raw fruit and green drink mode, i.e. solid fruit during the day and a fresh green drink in the evening.

Stepping Back to Move FORWARD

It should be clear that it is okay to use the vegetarian-like periods as part of the transition when necessary. We have generations of wrong eating to rectify, and we should never feel pressured to try and be perfect or remain in the most advanced modes for periods that are too long.

Over the years, instead of trying to resist stepping backwards, I just let myself naturally shift between modes. One rule I’ve imposed is that I usually do not skip over levels. For instance, I do not go from fruit juice fasting to cooked mucuslean, or even raw mucusless (vegetables), without at least some transitional days or weeks downward. I also usually do not go from vegetaric to fasting without visiting the middle stages for a period.

I also usually remain on a no breakfast plan, two meal a day plan, with at least one meal being fruit. I also never combine fruits with vegetables at the same time while juicing or eating (except for an apple–which is like sweet water to me–in a green drink). If I do have fruit and vegetables in the same meal, I eat the fruit first, wait 5 to 10 minutes, and then follow with the raw combination salad and then mix in cooked items if applicable. For me these parameters are essential to keep things always moving forward, even when I take a step backward.

What I do not ever really do is eat the way many ‘raw foodists’ eat, which is to commonly combine raw mucusless foods and raw plant-based mucus-forming ones. When I move down to raw mucus-formers like nuts, or something like avocados (which I really only introduced into my diet recently for experimental and research purposes so that I could talk about them from experience), I am usually always in a cooked mucusless mode. I find that such raw mucus-formers do not eliminate well for me without combining it with cooked mucus-free or mucuslean (vegetarian) menus. The cooked mucus-free foods are important for helping me eliminate the raw mucus-formers successfully. Conceptually and practically, I want my ‘cleaner’ eating to be as pristine as possible to set up good habits for the future.

When I eat fruit, I usually eat mono fruit meals and then transition back down as gracefully as I can. I would never eat an avocado, or even nuts, anywhere near my (mucus-free) raw all-fruit periods. I plan to spend increasing amounts of time in these upper modes in the years to come, and I do not want to create any bad habits for these higher fruit eating levels. Don’t get me wrong, I do my dirt like everybody else and fall back to eating some bad stuff, but I let it always happen in the mucuslean and cooked vegetable realms.

I’m not afraid to eat some mucus-forming vegetaric stuff from time to time when I’m drawn to that mode, but I control the experience by making sure I’m not shifting from the heights of a fruit fast to the depths of a mucus-forming foods binge. Since I’ve developed and spent so much time in the fasting and mucus-free states, my body will just not allow me to spend too much time messing around with unnecessary mucus-forming foods (even if I’m still mentally addicted to them).

Nature’s Classical Conditioning Mode

I purposely designed my transition like this. Instead of ‘trying’ to stop eating mucus through will-power, I let my body naturally (dare I say scientifically) do it. As my physiology changes, lower level food items are neither craved nor able to easily be eliminated. When necessary, my body resorts to ‘classical conditioning mode’ whereby I eat some foods that I used to be able to tolerate, but end up feeling horrible afterword. If I feel bad enough, and I know that it’s a food item I shouldn’t be eating anyway, I will never eat that item again. Yet, over time my body does not need to resort to classical conditioning and I can usually intuitively sense when something (or some combination) is going to make me feel bad and I just shift away.

Brother Air’s old technique with lower level modes was to stay there and eat the addiction away. Instead of fighting the urge, he found items to eat that were not too harmful, but just stayed into them while doing his enemas and periodic fasting until the craving left never to return.

Conclusion

Hopefully this gives you some ideas and techniques to use on the transition. If you can identify the worst meal that you think you would be able to consume and your most refined meal (probably fruit juice), then you can see what you have to work with in the middle. Instead of yo-yoing from lower levels to higher without visiting the central modes (which I see many raw foodists, vegan detoxers, and aspiring fruitarians do) allow yourself to shift up and down when necessary. Time is relative, so see how long you can wear out a particular mode. Yet, overall you want to learn how to spend more time in the higher realms and less in the lower.

Peace, Love, and Breath!

Prof. Spira

“Transition Diet” Lesson 15 Part #1 Video | Spira’s Mucusless Diet Study Sessions

 Check out the New Annotated, Revised, and Edited Edition of the Mucusless Diet Healing System from Amazon.