"Health," Dr. Andrew Weil writes, "is a dynamic and temporary state of equilibrium destined to break down as conditions change." In other words, there's no such thing as the type of health that allows you to feel equally great every day of your life. Instead, Weil suggests, your goal should be to improve your resilience to disease, and while you're at it, feel more joy and strength.

As to how you should gain this strength, joy, and resilience, Weil doesn't come on with a hard sell to give up every bad habit or all of the foods you enjoy. Instead, he suggests gradual changes: clean your pantry of whatever cooking oils you have there, except olive oil; start taking vitamin C three times a day; walk a few minutes a day; eat some fish and broccoli. The program is so simple and sensible that anyone trying it probably will feel better in a week.

The program then gets progressively more involved--more supplements; more of a shift toward a diet based on whole grains, fruits, and vegetables; more exercise. Besides these steady changes, each week's program has a focus: In week 2, you start drinking bottled or filtered water; week 3 focuses on organic produce; week 4, on sleep; week 5, using a steam bath or sauna; week 6, trying a "universal tonic" like ginseng; week 7, volunteering in your community; and finally, in week 8, figuring out how to integrate permanently the elements of the program into your life.

Even those who don't go for the entire program will probably find something here to like--the recipes, maybe, or the suggestion that you cut back on strenuous types of exercise like running and competitive sports in favor of brisk walks. It's perfectly useful either way: as a total lifestyle overhaul, or a series of suggestions, any one or two of which will probably help you feel better. --Lou Schuler


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From Library Journal
Reader, heal thyself. That's the idea behind Weil's best-selling Spontaneous Healing, which he expands on in his new book. Weil even customizes his book, offering specific advice to everyone from pregnant women to senior citizens. Look for lots of techniques?and lots of promotion; this BOMC alternate has a 300,000-copy first printing.Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Knopf's editor-in-chief asked holistic practitioner Weil to write this book, for he saw the need of a companion to Weil's big best-seller, Spontaneous Healing (1995). Even if part of that perceived need was for more best-seller proceeds in Knopf's coffers, Weil's response to the request is as cogent, compelling, and companionable a self-help health guide as anyone has ever written. At its heart is the eight-week program of the title, a schedule of incremental changes in diet (recipes are included), dietary supplements, exercise, and such mental-spiritual practices as breath work, art and music appreciation, and spending some time in a sauna. The program goal is to facilitate the body's natural capacity to heal and, so doing, to increase everyday well-being. In general, Weil teaches that achieving this end involves exchanging meat, dairy products, most oils, and refined foodstuffs for fish, olive oil, and plenty of whole grains, fruits, and vegetables; taking a formula of antioxidant supplements; walking a lot; and de-stressing and connecting more charitably with other people. Later chapters customize the eight-week plan for particular kinds of people (men, women, the elderly, those under 20, the overweight, frequent travelers, etc.). Ray Olson


Midwest Book Review
Overall healthy living is promoted based on the body's natural abilities to heal. A series of simple, small steps are explored from adjusting eating habits to establishing an exercise program based on walking, improving breathing patterns, and eliminating toxins from a diet. The results builds upon the body's natural ability to heal.


Book Description
In Eight Weeks to Optimum Health, Dr. Andrew Weil translates the brilliant insights and discoveries he outlined in his acclaimed bestseller, Spontaneous Healing, into a practical plan of action: a week-by-week, step-by-step program for enhancing and protecting present and lifelong health. The Eight-Week Program sets up a foundation for healthy living that will keep your body's natural healing system in peak working order. With clearly defined and authoritatively informed recommendations, Dr. Weil explains how to

 ¸  Build a lifestyle that protects you from premature illness and disability
 ¸  Fine-tune your current eating habits so that your diet is more nutritious
 ¸  Walk and stretch in regimens that satisfy weekly exercise requirements
 ¸  Safeguard your healing system by adding four antioxidant supplements--vitamin C and E, selenium, and mixed carotenes--to your diet
 ¸  Incorporate five basic breathing exercises for greater relaxation and energy
 ¸  Benefit from visualization, overcome sleeping problems, and test and filter your water supply
 ¸  Make art, music, and the natural world more important parts of your life

PLUS--a dozen tailored programs that address the specific needs of pregnant women, senior citizens, overweight people, and those at risk for cancer.


From the Publisher
When my mother went on the Sugarbusters diet recently, she had made a decision to change not only her eating habits, but her physical exercise habits as well. She'd heard about Eight Weeks on Oprah and asked me to get her a copy. We now have lengthy discussions about the principles of Dr. Weil's approach, and she is leading a much healthier life. It's been a great way for us to bond as well.
A. Scheibe, Editor, Ballantine Publishing Group


From the Inside Flap
In Eight Weeks to Optimum Health, Dr. Andrew Weil translates the brilliant insights and discoveries he outlined in his acclaimed bestseller, Spontaneous Healing, into a practical plan of action: a week-by-week, step-by-step program for enhancing and protecting present and lifelong health. The Eight-Week Program sets up a foundation for healthy living that will keep your body's natural healing system in peak working order. With clearly defined and authoritatively informed recommendations, Dr. Weil explains how to

¸  Build a lifestyle that protects you from premature illness and disability
¸  Fine-tune your current eating habits so that your diet is more nutritious
¸  Walk and stretch in regimens that satisfy weekly exercise requirements
¸  Safeguard your healing system by adding four antioxidant supplements--vitamin C and E, selenium, and mixed carotenes--to your diet
¸  Incorporate five basic breathing exercises for greater relaxation and energy
¸  Benefit from visualization, overcome sleeping problems, and test and filter your water supply
¸  Make art, music, and the natural world more important parts of your life

PLUS--a dozen tailored programs that address the specific needs of pregnant women, senior citizens, overweight people, and those at risk for cancer.


About the Author
Andrew Weil, M.D., has worked for the National Institute of Mental Health and for fifteen years was a Research Associate in Ethnopharmacology at the Harvard Botanical Museum. He has traveled extensively throughout the world collecting information about the medicinal properties of plants, altered states of consciousness, and healing. He has written for the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Nature, The New England Journal of Medicine and other national publications. He is under constant demand to lecture and appear on radio and television. He is currently Associate Director of the Division of Social Perspectives in Medicine, and Director of the Program in Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where he practices natural and preventive medicine. Eight Weeks to Optimum Health is his seventh book.


From the Hardcover edition.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
From Chapter One:

You have in your hands a tool for changing your life, an Eight-Week Program for improving your health and gaining access to the power of spontaneous healing in your body. I will guide you through this program step by step, explaining the changes I will ask you to make in how you eat, how you exercise, how you breathe, and how you use your mind. I will recommend vitamins, minerals, and herbs you can use to protect your body's healing system, and I will give you ideas about how you can change long-standing patterns of behavior that impair optimal health.

The Eight-Week Program consists of small steps that build on each other until, but the time you complete it, you have laid the foundation for healthy living. You can then decide how much of the program you want to maintain on a permanent basis. I assume that you want to make changes in your life -- otherwise you wouldn't be reading this book. I see my job as pointing you in the right direction. I have no doubt that you can change, because I know from my own experience that people can do so if they really want to.

In moving files recently, I came across a yellowed clipping from The New York Times of August 12, 1971, with the headline: "Meat-Eating 230-Pound Doctor Is Now 175-Pound Vegetarian." The story concerns a twenty-nine-year old physician in rural Virginia who gave up animal foods except for dairy products, with a resultant increase in energy, well-being, and overall health. There is a photograph of the doctor in his kitchen preparing fresh corn. He has a full black beard, is wearing blue jeans and a work shirt, and looks content. Next to the picture is his recipe for a rich corn soup containing milk and butter, and another recipe for a barley-and-vegetable casserole that calls for a quarter-cup of peanut oil. According to the article, the doctor's interest in consciousness led him to experiment with yoga and meditation, and "since yoga calls for a vegetarian diet, he gave up meat 'in order to really do it right.' He has been a vegetarian ever since, to the amazement of his friends, who remember him as a voracious meat eater and a fat person while at Harvard ... In one year on his new diet he has reduced from 230 to 175 pounds. His recurring colds and allergies have vanished..."

My beard is no longer black, and I have not been able to maintain my weight at 175-pounds. I am still mostly vegetarian (I have eaten fish for the past 10 years), though now I don't make rich soups with milk and butter , use oil in such quantities, or ever cook with peanut oil. I think I am wiser with age and in general feel much happier now than I did when I was twenty-nine.

I will try to accomplish three things in the pages that follow. First, I want to try to share with you my vision of the body's healing system and encourage you to rely on it in all matters concerning your health. Second, I want to convince you of the importance of developing a healthy lifestyle and the possibility of doing so quickly and easily. Third, I want to give you very specific suggestions about those aspects of lifestyle I consider most important to health and healing. I know that I cannot motivate you to undertake the Eight-Week Program -- you must do that yourself -- but since you have read this far, I believe you are already interested in moving forward, and I will assume that you now want to know what moving forward entails and how to do it.


From the Hardcover edition.

ANNOTATION

"...the best-selling author of Spontaneous Healing describes the array of changes that people can make in their lives to reduce stress, strengthen their immune system, and avoid illness."

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The Eight-Week Program sets up a foundation for healthy living that is preventative in the broadest sense. Not only does Dr. Weil provide information with which you can keep your body's inherent healing system in peak working order as you encounter the challenges of day-to-day life; he also shows you how to construct a lifestyle that will protect you from premature illness and disability, and teaches practices and skills that will enable you to prepare for any eventual health crisis you may face. With clearly explained and authoritatively informed recommendations, Dr. Weil guides you in fine-tuning your current eating habits - to eat less fat and animal protein, more whole grains and other complex carbohydrates, and more fruits and vegetables - so that your diet becomes more nutritious and increasingly beneficial to general health (he also includes simple, flavorful recipes to help you make the dietary changes quickly and easily). He shows how walking and stretching will satisfy all your exercise requirements throughout your life, and provides a gradual plan by which you can make brisk forty-five-minute walks and some simple stretches part of your weekly regimen. Dr. Weil recommends the addition of four antioxidant supplements - vitamins C and E, selenium, and mixed carotenes - to further protect your healing system. He provides instruction in five basic breathing exercises that can impart both greater relaxation and energy. He discusses the benefits and techniques of visualization. He explains ways to overcome sleeping problems; to test and filter your water supply; to eliminate toxins from your diet; and to avoid environmental hazards such as the sun's ultraviolet rays. He suggests ways to make art, music, and the natural world more important parts of your life. For those who wish to experiment further, he outlines several projects and activities such as cleansing fasts. There are a dozen additional programs that concentrate on the specific needs of pregnant

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal