EP 115: Author of Starving to Healing in Siberia Joins Me on the Lyme360+ Podcast

Mimi MacLean:

Welcome to the Lyme 360 Podcast, for all things related to Lyme disease and other chronic illnesses. I'm Mimi MacLean, mom of five, founder of Lyme 360, and a fellow Lyme warrior. Tune in each week to hear from doctors, health practitioners, and experts to learn about their treatments, struggles, and triumphs to help you on your healing journey. I'm here to heal with you.

Hello, welcome back to the Lyme 360 podcast, this is your host, Mimi MacLean, and today I have on author Michelle Slater, and she just finished publishing Starving to Heal in Siberia: My Radical Recovery from Late-Stage Lyme Disease and How It Could Help Others. She had tried every known treatment, from aggressive allopathic methods to holistic remedies. In a last effort to save her life she found a dry fasting retreat in Siberia. This book talks about her journey from her bed, where she was sidelined often, to Siberia, where through dry fasting she was cured of debilitating effects of advanced Lyme disease. It's a fascinating memoir and a useful resource for those at wits end and looking for much better answers than the, "Get used to your new normal" diagnosis that many patients are given.

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Michelle, thank you so much for coming on today, I'm so excited to talk to you about your new book, congratulations, and hear about your experience and how you came to write the book, so thank you so much for joining us.

Michelle Slater:

Thanks for having me, Mimi.

Mimi MacLean:

Yeah, so why don't you start out about why you decided to write this book?

Michelle Slater:

Yeah, so about that, I had been a really high functioning professor at university, I ran marathons, I was a skier, an advanced skier, and I wrote the book because my life completely fell apart with Lyme and I lost everything that I had worked so hard to achieve, and the goals that I had before me were no longer possible. So when I had this really radical recovery, as I write in my subtitle, I thought, I really have to pay it forward, I have a moral obligation to share this story, because my recovery was so complete, and there's so many people out there still struggling with chronic Lyme and other diseases that I thought, I have to drop everything else I'd like to work on right now and write this book.

Mimi MacLean:

Mm-hmm. Now you tell us a little bit about, I read about it, but I would love for you to share with the audience, how sick you were. I mean, you were really sick. I think most Lyme people are functioning, they can get out of bed, but that was not the case with you.

Michelle Slater:

I was in the small percentage of people who had late stage neurological Lyme disease, and so other people with Lyme, I did have days where I thought, oh, I can get up and do stuff, and then you would ride this little wave for a few days of feeling halfway normal. Others you just get slammed back into bed again, and as the years went on, I was sick for six years, it was no longer the case that I had days where I could get up. I mean, I was really largely bedridden. I had severe memory issues, I had incredible brain fog, so I had to give up my beloved job as a professor at the university that I'd worked so hard to get. I had joint pain that traveled through my body, my hands and feet seem to be the very worst for me. I mean, I would whimper it hurt so badly.

I had the Lyme migraines, I had tachycardia, I had these night sweats and extreme chronic fatigue. I could rest and rest and stay in bed for months and think, surely I'll wake up one day popping, ready to go, and that just wasn't the case. And I'd also been a really physically active person, I volunteered, I liked to bring the light to my family and friends, and I finally came to a point where I was like, I have nothing to give to anyone anymore, and I can't live in this bed forever, it's not getting better, the doctors say, "You have to get used to this new normal." And I'm not a suicide person, I'm all for always fighting, always trying to get better, but I thought, I can't live in this body anymore and I think I have to commit assisted suicide.

So I was on my way to setting that up at a clinic in Switzerland, and I thought, while I'm doing that, let me just look for a couple of last ditch efforts that might be really radical, that might not come with peer reviewed studies, but at this point I have nothing to lose. And I'm so glad that I pursued this one in particular, because of it I completely got my life back. I felt like I, as I write in my book, Starving to Heal in Siberia, I felt like I reincarnated back into my 17 year old self, I had that much energy. That was five years ago and I haven't had a single symptom ever since. I've written four books, three are still waiting to get published, but I've written four books, I'm back to running every day, I had a child, I'm back to skiing, being there for my family and friends, I completely got my life back, so that's why I had to write this book.

Mimi MacLean:

Okay, there's so many things I want to ask about what you just said. First, I've heard a lot of things, I've been doing this now for two years, talking to people, this is the first time I've heard about any kind of help in Siberia. So how did you hear about that? How did you even think to do that? I haven't even heard of the dry fasting either.

Michelle Slater:

Yeah, so no one had, and I was his first American patient. So I was constantly, even though I could really barely read, write, or text, it hurt my hands to hold my phone, my brain hurt when I tried to read, but still as a trained, I have a PhD from Johns Hopkins, so I'm a trained researcher, I was constantly trying to just find different ways for a cure. And I had tried every conventional medicine treatment, I had tried all the alternative treatments. So I was on a forum for patients who had autoimmune disorders, because I'd also developed an autoimmune disorder in conjunction with Lyme because my immune system was fighting so hard.

And I found on this forum for patients with autoimmune disorders this quote from this Siberian MD, Dr. Sergei Filonov, and it said that dry fasting turns the cells in the body into thermonuclear reactors that destroy diseased cells and tissues. And somehow knowing about the science of autophagy and how the body self eats to recycle cellular debris I thought, okay, in my adult state that made sense to me, and I decided I was going to find this doctor. And that was a process too, but I did, and I found a way to get there. He wasn't thrilled about taking on an American patient, as I said, I was his first.

Mimi MacLean:

Wow.

Michelle Slater:

Even at the time there were political tensions, it's a very long journey, I was bedridden, so I couldn't even get there by myself, my husband had to really haul me to Siberia. But it was in a lovely place, his clinic is in the mountains, it looks like something out of Vermont. It was very pretty, it was very peaceful there, and I spent two months with him and his family at his clinic.

Mimi MacLean:

For the two months, are you not eating the entire time? Can you talk a little bit about what you did, the fasting and the protocol?

Michelle Slater:

Absolutely. And I always want to state this for the viewers and listeners on these podcasts and interviews that you have to do these fasts with medical supervision, so I would not want anyone to listen to this podcast, drop everything and go out and do what I did on their own, because that's not how it works, and it has to be done really safely. So I just want to say that for your listeners. He put me on a protocol before I left of reducing and eliminating my medications, all of my supplements, which was scary, I took a mountain of natural supplements every day for Lyme. And then he put me on initial short fasts at home, I did a 24-hour dry fast, I did a three day dry fast. It's all in my book, the protocol for everything that I did, that I went over with him, is all in Starving to Heal in Siberia.

And then when I got there, he let me sink in and settle in, and then he put me on the first dry fast. And he never really tells you how long it's going to be, he doesn't say, "This is going to be a seven day dry fast," because he's always observing your body and clinically seeing where you are, so he doesn't like to say how long it's going to be because it really is contingent on how your body responds to it. But by that time, because I had stopped taking all of these things and I had done the initial dry fasts, it ended up being a seven day dry fast, and I actually felt very peaceful on it. I felt better as the days went by of no food and no water because it was like my body was clearing all this, I felt like I had sludge in my body, and it felt like my body was just clearing that all out.

So as the days went by and I didn't have any food or water, it was miraculous to me that I was actually feeling better. And then when he had me break that, we did a week, or maybe it was two weeks, I used my journals to write my book, because I'm a fastidious journal writer, so everything was written out as to what I had done in my journals. And then so you sort of rehabilitate the body with some massage treatments, they do liver massages, and then you're doing hot water and plant-based foods, so that's called the exit, and you have to be very careful that you don't eat too much, you don't drink too much, because he calls it natural surgery in your body, so you have to treat your body very gently and carefully after the dry fast.

And after a couple of weeks of eating and drinking he put me on what is called the medical dry fast of nine days. So it's very important that it's nine consecutive days with no food and no water, it's not that on day four you have, this is hot water actually, you have some hot water and then say, oh, I'm going to jump back into it, it has to be consecutive with no interruption, because it takes that many days for the body to go into this extreme autophagy so it can really get in deep. So the organs are on rest, and the healthy cells are preserved, and you're living on whatever fat, or these great internal reserves of water that we do have.

But if you're someone with autoimmune, or Lyme, or one of these other mystery illnesses, there's so much inflammation that it's like swampy water inside, to put it in layperson terms. And so as the dry fast progresses, it's filtering through this swampy water and getting rid of the cells that are not helping the body, they're no longer serving the body, and it takes that many days, and he calls it the mythical ninth day and ninth night when the body is doing the most healing work.

Mimi MacLean:

I mean, how did you feel during that?

Michelle Slater:

So by that time, I describe it in my book as a marathon runner doesn't just go and run a marathon, you train up to it.

Mimi MacLean:

Yeah.

Michelle Slater:

So by the time the nine day, my body was feeling pretty clean. And so you don't feel hungry dry fasting, your mouth can get dry, but I was outside a lot, and it was in this lovely time of the year, I was there in August, September, October in Siberia, and it was just, the air was dewy, and I was outside a lot, I even slept outside of my sleeping bag, he thinks that that's a good environment for patients while they're dry fasting. So I didn't feel badly at all on the nine day dry fast, I felt really peaceful, I came with this mantra that the mind is resting and the body is the doctor, and I'll just be very peaceful through the whole thing. I meditated a lot. He had me walking, and by that time I could actually walk, so I did these long slow walks, and he thinks that that facilitates the filtering of the debris through the body. You would be surprised at how much I still peed. So no food, no water, and I'm still like, oh, I have to go to the bathroom.

Mimi MacLean:

Really?

Michelle Slater:

Really. So I guess, like I said, the body has all these internal reserves of water, and so it's just, it's still coming out. I slept well, I felt really peaceful. I did all of the complimentary treatments, they do cupping to break up congestion in the body, and then the liver massages, and so you just feel like you're very supported, and I was like, I have nothing to lose, so I'm going to make it through this nine day dry fast, and he has been conducting these fasts with patients who have everything from early stage cancer, brain tumors, rheumatoid arthritis, all sorts of diseases, for 30 years, so even while I was there there were 30 other patients who were also on a nine day dry fast so I wasn't like, oh my god, I'm going to die, I haven't had food or water for three days.

Mimi MacLean:

Yeah, because they always say you can only live three days without water, or something. I don't know.

Michelle Slater:

Right, which is really not true, and the body adapts to this. And so I really worked up to it, and then my body was ready to go and just clear this junk out. And so when I came out of the nine day dry fast, and I broke it on day 10, that's even a more careful recovery and exit, as they call it in Russian. So I just had hot water for two days before I had, he breaks it with watermelon, but it was just two days of hot water, and it's hot water because it would shock the organs to drink cold water after everything's been heating up to do all of this cleansing work.

And then he does want you to rest a lot for the first two or three weeks after you break a nine day dry fast, because so much debris is being carried out of the body when you start drinking the hot water, and white blood cells are getting renewed, even stem cells. So he's done all of these studies on what happens to the body afterwards. So when I came out of that, it was really remarkable how well and clear I felt. So my autoimmune disorder had been psoriasis, I had these awful patches up and down my arms, and even after the seven day and I took a shower, my arms were just baby skin, it was all completely gone, and it never came back.

Mimi MacLean:

Oh my gosh.

Michelle Slater:

And all of my symptoms cleared up. He did have me, he believes that everyone should dry fast just to bolster the immune system, so even though I felt better he was like, "Like all of my patients I want you to do an annual longer dry fast, which you can now do at home, because you have been trained in the protocol." And then he would say, "Do one day a week as much as you can with a busy modern lifestyle." So sure enough when I came home, and I came back to New York, I really felt like I was shining and bouncing, as I write in my book, and I really never have looked back. So that was five years ago, and I have had a complete recovery, I do not have one lingering system.

Mimi MacLean:

Now have you gone back to your lifestyle before, or what have you changed about your lifestyle from before and after?

Michelle Slater:

Well, I think that in my lifestyle before, I've always, I think I came out of the womb driven, and so when you're lying flat in bed feeling totally broken, your drive, it's very humbling. You're like, I will just take this day, if I can make it down to the kitchen, that will be fine for me, I will accept that. So I found it was a very humbling experience, and my crazy drive, okay, get the tenure track job, then you write a book, then you do this, look at your publishing history, and I just felt like I would just accept myself as I was and be grateful for that. So I don't have that crazy drive that I'm always on top of myself.

Mimi MacLean:

What's next? What's next? Yeah.

Michelle Slater:

Yeah. And I was always a grateful person, but I really do still wake up every day, and I run every morning, and I'm like, I can run, I'm so grateful. That does not get old, I would say that I'm just grateful for that every day. And then I found that if I don't have that drive, all these amazing things have happened, I have been able to write four books in the five years since I recovered. And so I think that I'm happier and I'm more at peace with just myself as is, so that's a great feeling. So that's something that the Lyme taught me, I think, was just take a step back and-

Mimi MacLean:

Slow down.

Michelle Slater:

Yeah, slow down.

Mimi MacLean:

Smell the roses.

Michelle Slater:

Yeah.

Mimi MacLean:

What about eating wise? Have you gone all plant-based? Are you only drinking hot water now? As far as your eating lifestyle, supplements, that kind of stuff.

Michelle Slater:

So I haven't taken any supplements really since I got back, and I haven't needed any kind of medications, I rarely get sick. I have had this recent thing, the ragweed pollen is insane this year, but all I need to do is dry fast for a few days and it clears it right up, any allergy symptoms or spring symptoms.

My nutrition history is really long. So I was the kid that wanted to eat organic and go vegan as a teenager, so I already, even when I had Lyme, I had a really, really clean diet, I had been raw vegan for a long time. I'm no longer that, he actually doesn't think that that's the optimal for the body, so I also eat wild caught fish, and I do keep it to a lot of greens, and I'm still very, very plant based. I don't eat dairy, I don't eat gluten. I've never been a sugar person, I've been on the no sugar plan most of my life, so I didn't have a lot of changes to do. I do think that that is, for me, the optimal way to eat, I think everyone has their own way, but I do think that not overeating, not eating processed foods, really not having sugar, if you're someone who struggles with Lyme or autoimmune, is generally a good way to go.

Mimi MacLean:

Mm-hmm, no, that's great. Anything else that we haven't covered that you think would be poignant? I mean, obviously anybody who is listening to this, or read your book and wants to do it, they're probably not going to all head to Siberia. Is there any place in the United States that you would recommend?

Michelle Slater:

That's a great question, Mimi, thanks for asking that. So I would say that, so here's my book, and the whole protocol for a one day, a three day, a shorter five day, it's all in the book. I do include recipes too, and even some meditations, and just how to prepare in general, so you can do some of the shorter ones on your own. Clearly Siberia is not in the works for most people these days, which is unfortunate because it's really a very beautiful place, this part of Altai where his clinic is. But he is conducting dry fast retreats in places that are more accessible for the rest of the world. He likes to do them by water, so he's found a resort in Montenegro that he really likes.

So I do know, after me, aside, I also had written a blog, and so people started reading my blog and reaching out to him, and so now there are quite a few American patients who have gone to see him for Lyme disease. Another place is Turkey, and I did go to that one, in Antalya. It's a lovely place in an orange grove right on the sea. He would also like me to come and co-lead a retreat and I would lead the meditation for me, so we're working on that, and it would probably be in Montenegro. He's also accessible on Zoom if people want to have consultations.

Mimi MacLean:

Okay, great.

Michelle Slater:

And he is very accessible. He only speaks Russian, but he has a translator. So there's nowhere in the US, and that's part of the reason I wrote the book too, that there is no good information on the internet about dry fasting unless it's coming from him, or, I would say, my book, because I worked with him. There is a lot of spurious stuff out there that is not reliable, so I would be very careful about just Googling dry fasting, but he does have some of his books that are translated and on Amazon as well. So for now, until we can bring it to the States more, those are the options.

Mimi MacLean:

Now those retreats, how long do they last? Do you have to do a full two months to see the benefit? Do you think you could do, what's the bare minimum that some-

Michelle Slater:

He doesn't run two month retreats, because my case was so advanced and I was so ill it was just a different scenario. Also, I could go to his clinic in Siberian, and we weren't at a popup clinic. But they typically could be done in about two weeks, or a little more than that, because you need the nine days for the nine day dry fast, and then he typically has people come on day two of the nine day and then stay, you have to stay for a proper exit from the dry fast, you don't just finish dry fasting and go, because your body really needs to rest afterwards. So I would say two weeks, a little bit more could probably take care of it.

Mimi MacLean:

Right, okay that's great. So do you have a website, or what's the best way for someone to learn more about you, and maybe watch your upcoming books that are also coming out?

Michelle Slater:

I do, it's MichelleSlater.com, and I have an Instagram it's @MichelleSlaterNY, and various other social media accounts. My book, Starving to Heal in Siberia, has been out since September, it's available on Amazon and other places where books are sold. I'm just really glad to be able to share my story and the protocol, I want to get the book into the hands of the people who need it the most.

Mimi MacLean:

That's great, that's awesome. Thank you so much, Michelle, congratulations, and I'm so glad you're feeling better, and hopefully through your book others will learn about dry fasting and get healthy as well.

Michelle Slater:

Excellent, thank you so much for having me, Mimi.

Mimi MacLean:

Each week I will bring you different voices from the wellness community so that they can share how they help their clients heal. You will come away with tips and strategies to help you get your life back. Thank you so much for coming on, and I am so happy you are here. Subscribe now and tune in next week if you want to learn how I detox, and if you want to check out my detox for Lyme checklist go to Lyme360.com/detoxchecklist. You can also join our community at Lyme 360 Warriors on Facebook, and let's heal together. Thank you.