I was scared because I knew what I was facing. As a pastor, I had sat at the bedside of many cancer victims and conducted their funerals throughout my ministry. And I had recently watched my own Mother die a slow, torturous death after her colon cancer was treated with chemotherapy, radiation and surgery. Refusing to subject my body to those same medical treatments that I felt had helped kill my Mom, I sought an alternative.

Fortunately, I had a preacher friend in Texas by the name of Lester Roloff who encouraged me to simply change my diet and lifestyle and drink lots of freshly extracted carrot juice! It sounded too simple, but, I took his advise... drastically and overnight changed my diet and lifestyle and almost immediately started to get well! Within one year, not only was my cancer gone, but so were all my other physical problems. These included high blood pressure, severe sinus and allergy problems, hemorrhoids, hypoglycemia, fatigue, pimples... even body odor and dandruff!

With this new diet and lifestyle, I have not suffered any sickness, not even a cold or sore throat, not been to a doctor, nor taken as much as an aspirin in over 20 years!

Were my experiences unique or unusual?... not at all! I have seen and heard the testimonies of hundreds of others who experienced the same complete reversal and healing of their physical problems when they changed their diet and lifestyle.

In our first four issues of Back to the Garden, we have featured personal testimonies of people who have healed themselves from five years of near-constant stomach pain, heart disease, cancer, diverticulitis, constipation, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity, debilitating arthritis, a degenerated spine, and more through the program we teach at Hallelujah Acres. In this issue, we are sharing the success stories of two Multiple Sclerosis patients who now live healthy lives. MS is considered in medical circles to be an incurable and untreatable disease that gets progressively worse with time, leading generally to a wheel chair or worse. That's not the route taken by Becky McClellan and Bob East.

Bob East, a dear friend of mine, was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis more than 30 years ago. At that time he could not take a step without falling. He too learned of the raw diet which included large amounts of freshly extracted vegetable juice... adopted this new diet and today he and I go mountain climbing together.

Becky McClellan was diagnosed with MS seven years ago, and has tried everything from handfuls of vitamins to a macrobiotic diet during this time, yet her condition steadily deteriorated. This past May, she came to Hallelujah Acres and has been on our program since then. "I feel like somebody handed me my life back this summer," Becky said.

These are not isolated incidences.

In the third issue of Back to the Garden is the testimony of Patsy Stockton, a Pastor’s wife on 130-140 units of injection insulin a day for her diabetes. She also had high blood pressure, high cholesterol and sores in her mouth. Within three days after going on the Hallelujah Diet her blood sugar had dropped from 371 to 112. And in four months she was able to reduce insulin to four units, her blood pressure and cholesterol were in normal range, sores in her mouth gone, liver spots on hands and arms had disappeared and she had lost 48 pounds. She has now lost another five pounds and is doing great!

My wife Rhonda, featured in issue No. 4 of Back to the Garden, attended my Seminar two and a half years ago. At that time she was overweight, wearing a size 20 dress, had severe debilitating arthritis and a degenerated spine. After going on the nutritional program we teach at Hallelujah Aces, she has lost over 80 pounds (down to a size 10), her arthritis is gone, her degenerated spine is healed and she has had a dramatic increase in energy.

How is it that such a wide range of totally different diseases -- from arthritis and diabetes to cancer and heart attacks -- can be healed by something as simple as a change in diet and lifestyle? And even Multiple Sclerosis! A disease that has shown no response to any medication or therapy ever developed by medical science!

The diet and lifestyle taught here at Hallelujah Acres is the result of what I have learned in my more than 20 years of study and research. This includes two years at the Shangri-La Health Institute in Florida where Natural Hygiene is taught; study at the Hippocrates Health Institute in Boston, under Dr. Ann Wigmore, where I learned the "wheat grass therapy"; and classes under Dr. Carey Rheams in Georgia and T. C. Fry in Texas. I have taken several home study courses and devoured every book, article, cassette and video on the subject that I could get my hands on.

As the result of more than 20 years of research and experimenting on my own body, and listening to the testimonies of hundreds of others, I am totally convinced that practically every physical problem we experience is caused by improper diet and lifestyle! But the most exciting thing that I have learned is that if we will but stop putting into our bodies the things that caused these physical problems . . and give our bodies the proper building materials , the body will heal itself of whatever ails it!

Today, we are bombarding our bodies with substances they were never designed to handle. These substances either clog our bodies' plumbing systems (blood, lymph, etc.), upset the chemical balance, or outright poison, kill or starve our cells. We are literally filling our bodies with poison! Because God gave us such a fabulous body, it can take a lot of abuse over quite an extended period of time. . . but eventually the abuse will manifest itself! As a child, this breakdown may reveal itself as a cold, fever, sore throat or earache. As we grow older, it may be pimples, eyesight deterioration, overweight, dandruff or body odor. Then as we get older still, and the improper diet and lifestyle continues... these breakdowns often become more serious... like heart attacks, strokes, cancer, diabetes, arthritis, obesity, etc.

How tragic, that no one ever told us that we are creating our own physical problems and those of our children by the things we put into our bodies day-by-day! But how wonderful to know that almost all sickness can be PREVENTED by simply providing our body with the nutrition (foods) by which God designed these bodies of ours to be sustained and nourished.

The most thrilling thing of all is to know that even after we have abused our bodies and experienced physical breakdown

. . . the physical problems will usually disappear if we will simply change to a proper diet and lifestyle!

And that is where the juicing comes in! Because drinking the freshly-extracted juices of vegetables is the fastest way I have found to obtain the nutrients necessary to restore the human body to wellness.

To understand why this is true, we must understand what our body is made of, how our body’s amazing process of self-healing works... and what is the best way of consuming the elements that contribute to this self-healing.

Our body is a living organism made of living cells that require living food (raw food) to function properly. Cooked food is dead food and has very little nutritional value. Cooking destroys all enzymes, about 83 percent of vitamin content, changes the molecular structure of the protein and turns organic minerals into an inorganic form that is not usable by our bodies. Here at Hallelujah Acres we encourage a diet composed of at least 75 to 85 percent raw foods, and teach that raw fruits and vegetables were the original diet God gave to mankind in Genesis 1:29.

Raw vegetables are the perfect source of nutrition, but eating raw vegetables is not the best way to obtain this nutrition. Compare the benefits of eating raw vegetables versus juicing raw vegetables: When you eat a raw carrot, you must first chew it and digest it. Even if we chew well, this is a less-than-perfect process of breaking down nutrients to make them available at the cellular level. Digestion takes energy, which means part of the energy you are getting from the carrot must be used up to get it. And digestion takes time, which leads to some deterioration of nutrients. And the sicker a person is, the more likely it is that his or her digestive system is not functioning well enough to assimilate raw vegetables.

So the obvious solution is to juice the raw vegetables. With the pulp or fiber removed, the nutrients do not have to go through the long and energy-consuming process of digestion. This allows the nutrients to pass directly into the blood stream. It is almost like intravenous feeding! Within minutes these nutrients are feeding the cells and restoring the immune system.

Unlike drugs, which are a foreign substance to the body, these nutrients work with the body to invigorate its own healing capabilities. We teach that TRUE HEALING IS SELF-HEALING. All healing must come from within the body as we give it the proper building materials with which to heal itself.

We emphasize that the juices themselves do not heal! But what they do is provide the body with concentrated building material so that the body can heal itself! And the first part of the body that will restore when given proper nutrients is the immune system. As the immune system restores, it starts expelling poisons within the body and seeking out the trouble spots to heal them.

When you understand this concept, it is easy to see how a diet with an emphasis on freshly-extracted vegetable juice and raw foods can help the body to heal anything from abdominal pain, arthritis and diabetes to heart disease, cancer, Multiple Sclerosis and more.

And when you understand the advantage of juicing vegetables to get their nutrients in minutes without having to spend time and energy digesting their fiber, you should know about BarleyGreen.

BarleyGreen is obtained from the juice of young, organically grown barley grass. Barley grass at this young stage is the most nutritionally dense food -- containing the widest spectrum of vitamins, minerals, enzymes, protein and chlorophyll -- that has been found on the earth today. This juice is reduced to a power form through a patented, no-heat, spray-drying process.

After more than 20 years of personal experience and research, I consider BarleyGreen the single most important food I put into my body each day. It is the most nutritionally dense food I know of on earth today, and it provides my body cells with all the nutrients they need to remain strong and healthy. I personally consume three to four tablespoons of BarleyGreen daily.

The second most important food in my diet is carrot juice. Presently I consume an average of 16 ounces of freshly extracted carrot juice from a Champion Juicer daily. During my bout with cancer more than 20 years ago I consumed one to two quarts daily as BarleyGreen did not exist at that time. At the Gerson Clinic today, they give eight 8-ounce servings of carrot juice daily to their patients along with 4 glasses of a green drink similar to BarleyGreen. Using this juice therapy along with a cleansing program, they are healing "incurable" diseases, such as lung cancer, brain cancer, spreading melanoma and more.

The third most important food I put into my body is the raw fruits and vegetables, which are consumed at the noon and evening meals. I eat no breakfast and haven’t for over 20 years. (A glass of BarleyGreen is my only breakfast food.) Thus, my average daily food intake consists of approximately 85% raw food. I do allow myself some cooked food at the end of the evening meal, which might consist of a baked white or sweet potato, brown rice or steamed vegetables, but this is more for its taste than nutritional value.

On this basically raw food diet, which has included large amounts of raw vegetable juices, I have not only been able to remove all my physical problems and keep them gone for over 20 years, but also experience abundant energy, great enthusiasm, wonderful clarity of mind, freedom from stress (even though I am in a potentially stressful ministry), and have marvelous physical endurance. What more could anyone ask or want from their body? And my desire is that everyone might be able to know how they too can experience the same … thus the reason for Hallelujah Acres!

"And God said, behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed (vegetables), which is upon the face of the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat." (Genesis 1:29)