So once you do that, what about the rest of your life? It's really about the 80 percent rule. Most of us are “toxing” 80 percent of the time and detoxing 20 percent of the time. And we should really think about flipping that—we should think about detoxing 80 percent of the time. And I’m not suggesting anything extreme. Today I did some work at home, I made a fruit and veggie smoothie for breakfast, went to spin class, I met some people for lunch, and I had a kale salad with roasted chicken and a big bottle of water. Nothing so profound, but all healthy stuff that made me feel good. And if you're doing that 80 percent of the time, you can tolerate that 20 percent of debauchery in whatever form that might be, whether you’re drinking a bit too much, or not exercising, eating the wrong food, having too much ice cream. And then we don’t have this need to constantly be detoxing and cleansing all the time.

Try to maintain these healthy habits about 80 percent of the time, and then 20 percent of the time you’ll have something that is not necessarily the best, but that you enjoy. It means you can go out to dinner and not be so rigid or careful about what you eat, but that most of the time you are paying attention. Because there’s this incredible disconnect I find in medicine today (and obviously there’s lots of commerce involved in this), that promotes the notion that disease just falls out of the sky and there’s no connection between how you live and what happens to you from a health point of view.

Of course there are diseases where we don’t know the cause, or they’re environmental, or it’s bad genes or bad luck, but certainly for a lot of the illnesses we see there is this connection. So this book tries to help people, and women, more specifically, make that connection that if you’re bloated—which can be such a large and confusing expression for women of things not being quite right in your GI tract—there are actually things that you can do to try and figure it out. You can be a bit of a medical detective, and you can look at these areas: is it the food you’re eating, is it something you’re drinking, is it lactose intolerance, is it gluten sensitivity, is it hormonal imbalance? Or, is it an anatomical problem? Do you have ovarian cancer, is it bad endometriosis, do you have a voluptuous female colon where your colon’s wrapped around your uterus?

Without giving specific medical advice, the book gives people ideas on what sort of places they can look. Because one of the things I see so often is women who come in and they’re given that pat on the head, and, “Oh, you have irritable bowel syndrome and here’s a Xanax. You’re just stressed out.” Sometimes there’s some truth to that, but when you dig a little deeper and slice up that irritable bowel syndrome pie, there often is something more tangible as well as a solution. There’s an undiagnosed parasite, there’s a food sensitivity, there’s undiscovered hypothyroidism. There’s estrogen dominance. There’s some reason, physiological, functional—or it’s because of something in the medicine cabinet. Some vitamin, prescription pill or supplement that’s not agreeing with you.

To just sort of say your bowel is irritable but we don’t know why, I feel like that's not a real diagnosis. It’s like saying, “You’re tired,” and that’s your diagnosis: Well, you have tired disease and here’s a pill to take for the rest of your life to pep you up. So, again, why are you tired? And I think that’s what people, not just women, want. They want answers. And I think that’s why there’s so much investigation on the Internet that can lead to all kinds of problems down the road when you’re self-diagnosing pancreatic cancer and you really just have heartburn. The book provides sensible, practical information. It’s a bit of a roadmap and a guide for the woman who is bloated or has digestive problems, not instead of a doctor, but in addition to, to help her figure out where she should be looking.