Where My Healing Journey Began by Brett Austin

Six weeks to live: where my healing journey began

We all have a story. Mine starts in 2010, in a doctor’s room, being told to get my affairs in order because I had about six weeks left.

I was thirty-three. I weighed 157 kilograms. I had lung cancer from smoking more than a hundred cigarettes a day, cirrhosis of the liver from years of drinking the way I drank, and my kidneys were failing. I had been a DJ since I was fifteen and I had lived like one: the wrong food, the wrong hours, the wrong everything, for long enough that my body had finally sent the invoice.

I had already died twice by then, so death itself did not frighten me. That was not the problem. The problem was that I wanted to live. I was having a good time on this beautiful earth and I was not finished with it.

What I was offered was painkillers and medication to mask what was happening. All of it made me feel worse. So I took the thing into my own hands.

What I gave up, and how I lost 65 kilograms

I went to the internet and started reading about the anatomy of the human body. I wanted to know what my liver actually did, what my kidneys actually did, what I had been doing to them. And the further in I went, the more I found that for every part of the body there was a plant somebody somewhere had used to look after it. That was the thread I pulled, and it pulled me into subjects I have not stopped studying since.

Then I stopped. Not gradually, and not one thing at a time. Everything I was eating and drinking went. The cigarettes went. The drugs went. The television went with them. In one day I put down every single thing that was doing the damage, and I went on a healing journey.

Eighteen weeks later I had lost 45 kilograms. Sixteen weeks after that I had lost another twenty, and I felt better again.

I found some extraordinary natural healers along the way. I took up meditation. I wrote a book about the whole thing and called it Self Improvement. And somewhere in there I stopped being a man who was dying and became a man who was interested.

The plants came in right there, not afterwards. I was reading the anatomy of the body and finding that for every symptom there was a plant to heal it, and I started making things in my own kitchen while I was still sitting under that six-week sentence. Boiling, steeping, tasting, adjusting, throwing most of it away. One of those recipes was worth keeping, and it is the one that became Natural Elixir.

Brett Austin. The recipe that became Natural Elixir was made while the prognosis still stood.

Let fasting be thy medicine

Everybody has heard Hippocrates on letting food be thy medicine. Almost nobody quotes the other half of it, which is knowing when not to eat at all.

Go back far enough and we were hunter gatherers, and being hungry was simply the normal state of things. You ate when there was something to eat. It was only once we got good at storing food that we could eat whenever we felt like it, and I do not think it is a coincidence that so much of what ails us arrived with that convenience.

Why we eat three meals a day

Look at the word. Breakfast is break-fast: the meal that ends the fast your body has been running since you last ate. The name tells you that the fast is the normal condition and the meal is the interruption. We have it exactly the wrong way round.

Three meals a day plus whatever goes in between is a habit, not a requirement. And the line everyone repeats about breakfast being the most important meal of the day was not a finding. It was an advertising slogan, written to sell cereal by Kellogg’s in 1917, and pushed along again by a Grape-Nuts radio campaign in 1944 that told listeners “nutrition experts say” it. That is where it comes from.

None of which means you must never eat in the morning. It means the schedule you inherited is a marketing decision you are free to look at again.

What fasting actually does in the body

Two things happen that are worth knowing about, and both of them are real science rather than anything I invented.

The first is autophagy, which translates as self-eating. When a cell is short of fuel it starts breaking down its own worn-out and damaged parts and recycling them. It is not a fringe idea: Yoshinori Ohsumi was given the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2016 for working out the mechanism.

The second is growth hormone. Go without food for a day and your body puts out a great deal more of it. In one of the studies that established this, twenty-four hours of fasting raised growth hormone secretion by around 1,250 per cent, roughly a twelvefold rise, in healthy men.

Lemons by the crate. Everything I changed, I changed on the plate first.

One thing worth knowing. You will see a lot of very confident charts online telling you that autophagy switches on at hour sixteen, or hour eighteen, or hour thirty-six. Most of those hours come from animal studies. In people it is genuinely difficult to measure, and one study that looked at twenty-one volunteers found no significant change in the autophagy markers in their muscle even at twenty-four hours. So the process is real and well described. The exact clock is not settled, whatever the internet tells you.

I can tell you what I did and what it did for me. The exact hour it switches on is not something anybody can tell you yet.

Your body is rebuilding itself out of what you eat

This is the part that changed how I thought about food, and it is better than the version I used to tell.

You are not the same material you were last year. Your body replaces something in the order of 330 billion cells every single day, roughly one per cent of you, and it builds every one of them out of what you have handed it.

It does not happen at one speed. The lining of your gut turns over in days. Your skin takes about a month. Red blood cells last around four months. Your liver takes a few years, your skeleton about ten, and some of the cells in your brain and your eyes are the ones you were born with and will keep for life.

So you are not stuck with the body you are standing in. A very large part of it is being rebuilt continuously, out of whatever you give it, and that is going on right now whether you are paying attention or not. That was the thought that got me to the kitchen.

Losing the weight a second time, slowly

Losing 65 kilograms in thirty-six weeks is the kind of story people file under miracle and then ignore, because a miracle is not something you can copy. So I used myself as the experiment a second time.

Over about five years I put 45 kilograms back on. Then I took it off again, and this time I did it slowly and deliberately, over roughly a year, with no diet of any kind. I simply fasted one meal a day.

The slow way was easier than the fast way and it held better. That is the version I would hand to anybody, and it is the reason I tell this half of the story at all. It was not a one-off. It was repeatable, and it was repeatable at a pace an ordinary person could actually live with.

Perseverance is 100 per cent self control

What I had to learn was not really about food. It was patience, thinking properly, and staying with it long after the interesting part was over.

Everything you consume either helps you or costs you, and your body already knows which. It tells you. We are just very practised at not listening. The body has to obey the mind, that is its function, and so the work starts in the mind or it does not start at all.

One straight word of caution, because I would say this to you in person. If you are on medication, if you are pregnant or breastfeeding, if you are diabetic, or if you have any history of an eating disorder, talk to somebody who knows your case before you change how you eat. Fasting is not a small adjustment and it is not right for everybody. I am telling you what I did. I am not telling you what to do.

Be still: how Natural Elixir began

Take twenty minutes a day and be still. Sit down, clear your mind, and be still with your body, with your ego, with your mind, with your spirit, and with the universe.

Ask a question and the answer will be shown to you. Seek your healing and it will come to you. I know exactly how that sounds. I also know that when I was finally forced to be still, I was shown what to do next, and I had not been able to see it while I was busy.

The kitchen recipe, some years later.

The brand Natural Elixir was born from being still and the need for healing. The recipe itself came earlier, out of the reading and the kitchen and the six weeks. What being still gave me was the decision to do something with it.

Change begins with you

Nature is full of life and energy and resources. This earth has everything we need for both living and dying, and by our choices, conscious or not, we take some of each.

The best thing you can do about a body that is struggling is to strengthen what it already has, and to stop handing it work it does not need to do. Your whole body is your immune system, not one department of it.

All healing begins in the mind. Your body will tell you what it needs if you will listen to it. And when you want something to change, the only person who has to change is you.

A healthy mind, a healthy body and a healthy spirit make for an amazing experience on this beautiful planet while we sail through the universe. That is available to almost anybody, and it is mostly a matter of deciding.

Brett Austin, founder, Natural Elixir

This article is one person’s account of his own experience and is for general information. It is not medical advice. Natural Elixir is a natural health tonic and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Always speak to a healthcare professional before changing your diet, supplements, or medication, and never stop prescribed treatment without medical guidance.