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8 Weeks to Optimum Health
A Proven Program for Taking Full Advantage of Your Body’s
Natural Healing Power
by Andrew Weil ’68
(revised paperback edition, Ballantine Books, 2007)

My child—like yours—is perfect in every way, except that she does not take my advice. For reasons I fully understand (yet cannot fully accept), she will not look to my years of culled professional knowledge and life experiences to guide her physical and mental health. There is no glow of the follower in her loving eye. She would rather suffer and learn on her own. She is still young.

Lucky Andrew Weil ’68. He has followers eager to learn from his knowledge and experiences. Perhaps this has caused a certain confidence. “If,” he writes in his revised and expanded 8 Weeks to Optimum Health, “you are motivated to read this book and begin the program, you need no other outside help.” A lovely idea it is.

Readers of the Bulletin and O, The Oprah Magazine already know Weil as an expert in integrative medicine, a prolific writer, and a personality with a strong and jolly twinkle in his media-sensitive eye. The book is intended as a guide for the general audience.

Each week, Weil assigns homework: one new project (purify the water, lean toward organic produce); one new piece of dietary advice (add salmon, soybeans, green tea); one new supplement; sequential walking and breathing techniques; and one spiritual recommendation (buy flowers, visit a park). There are also optional exercises—extra credit for the soul—and recipes. Two hundred and sixty-four pages boil down to this counsel: be good to yourself and others. The rest is merely detail.

When the first edition of the book emerged a decade ago, this advice, especially the details, seemed revelatory. It is in part the result of Weil’s efforts that most of his guidance now seems merely sensible. Alternative and integrative treatments are pro forma; Harvard itself has a whole division dedicated to their research and practice. And the influence of mind upon body is also indisputable, as Weil’s work has helped show.

His special interest is the healing system, which, he explains, is not structural but functional. It is more inclusive than the Western medical model, expanding to include soma, psyche, and spirit, and operating from the level of DNA “up to the level of cut fingers, and into the mental realm, where it helps us adjust to emotional shocks.” This is the kind of philosophy you either believe or you don’t.

To illustrate its potential, Weil begins his book at his own beginning: an overweight, over-burdened person. His diet was “free form and thoughtless.” His mind was “restless [and] susceptible to boredom.” He suffered from hives, migraines, and sunburns. The treatment he needed was not medicine but a lifestyle adjustment. He made that adjustment and now offers the same treatment to others. “Patients come to me with stories of woe,” he explains, “and instead of giving them magical cures, I tell them they must change their diets, habits of exercise, ways of handling stress, even their breathing.”

The testimonials in each chapter are not as interesting as Weil’s writings about alternative treatments. His chapter on tonics includes wonderful descriptions of herbs with poems for names (ashwagandha and cordyceps) and an unexpected endorsement of aspirin. He informs us that more than 400 compounds contribute to ginger”s smell, taste, and biological activity, and that coenzyme Q₁₀ should be taken with a fatty meal to increase bioavailability. This information is useful, at least to the believer.

But the program has some problems. Some of the advice is dated (ginseng has seen better days). Also, it is easiest for those followers with both feet on firm financial ground. In the shelters where I work, patients cannot afford many of Weil’s suggestions, including wild Alaska salmon, saunas, and hypnotherapists. And while I am quibbling, there is something about a recipe for “Dr. Andrew Weil’s Favorite Low-Fat Salad Dressing” that sends a rebel straight to the high-fat salad dressing section of the supermarket. Too much first person can bring out unspiritual and belittling tendencies in a reader. This is a shame, as the book was written for my own good.

As I finish this, my daughter is refusing my suggestions for organizing her fourth-grade homework folder—again. It could use help. Her refusal does not discourage me, since I am never tired of giving advice. Interestingly, though, I’m sometimes tired of getting it.

Elissa Ely ’88 is a psychiatrist at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center.

Photo: Thomas Northcut/Stockbyte/Getty images