Adi and I have been spending quite a bit of time lately at a place in the Texas Hill Country called Sovereignty Ranch, which belongs to some dear friends of ours and which I have come to love with the kind of affection that one loves a feral cat that won’t go away. It grows on you over time and before long, you kind of even like it. This past fall, the ranch was hosting a Halloween Festival and found themselves short-staffed in the restaurant, and Adi, who has never once in her life passed up the opportunity to be useful to someone she loves, volunteered us immediately and with the kind of enthusiasm that left very little room for a counter-offer. I want to be honest with you: I was not crazy about going. If you were grading my attitude on a traditional academic scale, I would give myself a C minus, and only because I showed up. I was doing nothing stellar outside of simply showing up, and even that required Adi pointing out, in her not-so-subtle way, that there is something genuinely worth cultivating in a person who is willing to step outside the comfortable perimeter of their own life to offer themselves to something larger than their own agenda.

This is why people say that behind all great men there is a woman, forcing them to do things they wouldn’t do on their own. So I went. I bussed tables. I bartended. I pretended I was a team player and… played chess, a whole lot of chess, in our downtime when the restaurant slowed down. I would love to report I got better at chess, but I didn’t. And then something truly amazing happened—I actually began enjoying myself.

Now, there is something you have to know about Adi. She cares about people, and she truly cares about their health. To say she is a holistic juggernaut is an understatement. She loves castor oil packs, flower essences, herbal teas, parasite cleanses and she can talk about gut health like you’re analyzing the Zapruder Film. But more than anything, she loves a good enema. I want you to know I did not write that sentence lightly. I weighed it. I considered it. And I left it in because it is completely true and she would tell you herself without a trace of embarrassment, because Adi believes in total transparency when it comes to the body and most importantly, the booty, that enemas are the key to long term health. Guys, welcome to my world.

What started as Adi simply being Adi around the ranch has, over time, evolved into something larger than either of us anticipated. People would talk to her, she would listen to what was going on with them, and then she would gently begin sharing what she knew, which turns out to be quite a lot, because Adi has spent years studying holistic health with the focused intensity of a woman who has decided that people being unwell is a problem she personally intends to do something about. Before long, she wasn’t just talking to people at the ranch, she was scanning them with the Bio Rez, building protocols for them, walking them through cleanses, and sending them home with herbal teas and a level of specific instruction that makes an Ikea manual look like a Post-It Note.

Last week, on the ranch, one of the staples suffered from a bout of kidney stones, which brought up the conversation of doing cleanses, specifically the liver and gallbladder cleanse. Here is something worth knowing, and I say this gently but plainly: gallbladder surgery is the single most performed surgery in the United States. The single most. Not because people are uniquely unlucky with their gallbladders, but because most of us are walking around with stones we don’t know about, stones that accumulate quietly over decades, and when they finally make themselves known the standard response is to remove the organ entirely rather than simply remove what is inside it. What most people are never told, because telling them would be considerably less profitable than the alternative, is that a proper liver and gallbladder cleanse can move those stones out of the body without a scalpel, an anesthesiologist, or a bill that arrives six weeks later and makes you want to lie down. I say this not to alarm anyone but because it seems like the kind of information a person deserves to have before they make a decision about their own body.

When Adi learned about the kidney stones on the ranch, something shifted in her. Removing stones from the human body became one of her missions, one of her obsessions, a creative project, and I mean this in the most loving possible way because her obsessions have a way of producing real results for real people who were not feeling well and then suddenly were. She didn’t invent the protocol herself, to be fair. That credit belongs to Andreas Moritz, whose bookThe Liver and Gallbladder Miracle Cleanselaid out the roadmap that Adi has since studied, refined, and deployed on anyone within a reasonable radius who will hold still long enough to listen.

What Adi brought to it was something Moritz couldn’t provide in a book, which is the gift of making you feel safe enough to try something you absolutely would not try alone. Of course, years ago, before she tried this on the general public, she needed, as any good scientist does, a willing test subject to demonstrate that the protocol was sound and that a person could survive it and ideally write about the experience in enough detail that other people would understand what they were getting into before they agreed.

That test subject was me. I want to be clear that I use the word “willing” in the loosest possible interpretation of that term.

In fact, when people at the ranch became squeamish, Adi deployed her secret weapon:

“David did the full liver/gallbladder cleanse, and he journaled about it for 40 days. You can read about it!” There it was, I was the official Guinea Pig for every man on the ranch who resisted and the women that were on the fence. “If he can do it, anyone can,” she proclaimed triumphantly. I nodded, “Thanks for the support,” I thought. “If I can do it anyone can. Because I am just an idiot fumbling through life.”

What actually happened, approximately four years ago, is that Adi informed me that we were going to do a liver and gallbladder cleanse together, that she thought I should keep a journal of what I experienced so that other people could understand what it felt like, and that it was going to be wonderful. I looked at her with the expression of a man who has been in a relationship long enough to understand that the discussion phase of this particular decision was already over. So my little Lucy Ricardo asked her Ricky to do a cleanse and then write about it.

And so I give you, newly released on Amazon:Letting Go: A Liver/Gallbladder Detox,One Stone at a Time:One Man’s 40-Day Cleanse of the Body, the Mind, and Everything He Thought He Knew.

My hope is that you enjoy the journey and become stone-free.

Get the book on Amazon!

David