#91 How to fight Cancer with Vitamin C, alternatives to chemotherapy, and how to eat when you have cancer. With James Templeton!
Welcome back to another episode of the Waist Away Podcast! Our guest this week is a fifth-generation Texan, James Templeton tapped into his fighting spirit and became an over 30-year cancer survivor who healed himself from a terminal diagnosis with the use of alternative medicine and healing modalities. As the visionary founder of Uni Key Health Systems and the Templeton Wellness Foundation, James has since utilized his wisdom and experience in helping others achieve optimum health and wellness. His latest book, I USED TO HAVE CANCER is his memoir chronicling his journey back to health (in typical fashion, he insists that all proceeds from the sale of his book go to the Foundation). He is also the co-author of Your Body Knows Best. It’s such an honor to have James on the show today!
Audio Version: https://chantelray.podbean.com/e/wa91/
Video version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTD7r7tTQtg&feature=youtu.be
His website: https://templetonwellness.com/
Chantel: Okay, guys, I’m so excited for today’s guest, because he is going to be talking about something that affects all of us in some way or another. And unfortunately, most of us know someone who’s life has been affected by cancer. And so I think our guest is going to bring a lot of hope to people.
Chantel: He is a Texan, he’s a good old Texas guy. James Templeton. He fought cancer himself. He’s over 30 year cancer survivor, and he healed himself from terminal diagnosis, and we are just so excited to have him. He has written a book about it, so welcome, and tell us all about it, James.
James: Thank you, Chantel. It’s great to be with you today.
Chantel: Thank you so much. So tell us about your book and a little bit of a kind of quick glimpse of what inspired you to write the book.
James: Well, I got inspired because back in 1985, I was living the life in Texas. Everything was going my way, and I thought I had life by the tail. I had a beautiful wife, I had a little daughter that wasn’t even two years old, and I had three successful business. Everything was just great, and I thought I was in good physical fitness, shape, I was a runner, and I ran everywhere.
James: People would see me running down the road and they’d say, “Boy, this guy’s in tremendous shape.” And my grandfather and my father both passed away of heart disease at a young age, and I didn’t want to be the next one, and so I got into this thinking it was going to stay this heart disease off, and I’d be able to maybe live a long life.
James: So I got into this and, one day, I decided to go get a stress test, a cardio stress test at the doctor, because I wanted to see how well I was doing. So I go to the doctor, he does the stress test, I get on the treadmill, and he says, “Oh my goodness.” He says, “You have broke the record. Nobody’s ever done this well.” Well, I’d been running up to 60 miles a week, and working out three days a week in the gym at least, and no wonder. I could see why.
James: But he says, “Everything’s great, you’re the picture of health.” He said, “Just keep doing what you’re doing.” He says, “You’re going to go a long way.” But he said, “There’s one thing,” he said, “That I see. The only thing I see that maybe you need to have checked out,” he said, “There’s a mole on your back,” and he said, “It looks a little different to me.” He says, “It’s just a little strange looking, but probably nothing to it. So if I was you, I would just go get it checked out, go down to the dermatologist, get it checked out when you get the chance.”
James: So I didn’t think much about it, so I did a few weeks later. I went down to the dermatologist. I go in there, and the dermatologist looks at it, and he goes, “Oh my God, I think you have melanoma.” Well, I’m like, “Melanoma? How could I have melanoma? What is melanoma?” I didn’t even know, it sounded scary to me. He basically went on to tell me, he said, “You could die from this.” And he didn’t have a very good bedside manner. It scared the hell out of me.
James: And all of a sudden, my feeling that I had everything going for me in life kind of stopped, and I realized that I didn’t want to see this guy. I was going to leave this guy, and I wasn’t coming back to him. But I went on home, and I decided to get a second opinion, because maybe this guy just thought it was something and he didn’t know for sure.
James: And I went to a dermatologist, and long story short, I ended up in an oncologist office, recommended by this dermatologist. And I go into the oncologist office, and he tells me, “Well, it looks a little suspicious to me, too,” but he said, “There’s only one way we’re going to know. Let’s take it out. Let’s just take it out. We’ll do it right here in the office.”
James: So he went in, he took a big plug out of my back, probably a two inch square plug, and he says, “I’ll let you know in a few days what the lab said. Don’t worry, go home, don’t worry, there’s nothing you can do about it.” Well, I went home and all I did was worry. And I didn’t know what I was going to do. I couldn’t sleep at night, I paced the floor, and it was almost two weeks before I got a call from the doctor. It seemed like forever, and it was a long time. And he calls me up, and he says, “I got some good news, and I got some bad news.”
James: And that’s not something we want to hear, good news and bad news. Because what’s the bad news? So he says, “Well, the good news is, you’ve got melanoma.” And I’m like, “Good news? That’s not good news. How can that be good?” And he says, “But we think we got it all around that perimeter area, that plug we took out of you,” and he says, “That’s a good thing, we think we got it all, and hopefully we never see it again.”
James: And then he went on to tell me, “But the bad news is, it’s very deep. It’s deep, and that means that it’s stage four. Stage four melanoma,” and he says, “This is something we’re going to really have to keep an eye on.” He said, “Stage four melanoma tends to spread, it tends to spread to other organs. And we really got to keep an eye on it. I want you to come in and see me every three months, and we’ll check you out thoroughly and see if we can find it anywhere. Check your lymph nodes, and all that kind of thing.”
James: So I did, I went in two different times to get checked out. Everything seemed to be okay. By then, I was a wreck, though, because all I wanted to do was worry about myself. I didn’t want to work anymore, my ambition that I had had gone down the drain, and before I knew it, I basically ran my wife off, because she didn’t want to be around me anymore, I guess, and couldn’t deal with this whole thing.
James: So she moved into town, took my daughter, and after that, I just decided that I didn’t really care about too much of anything, and I went through this depression, heavy duty. Started to drink, go out with people that I didn’t see very often, got to drinking again. Because when I’d do that, all my troubles would go away until the next day.
James: So I’d go out and do that, but before I knew it, I was taking a shower one day, and I found this lump in my groin area, and it was like a big marble. And I got, “Oh my God, this isn’t good. This can’t be good.” So I go to the doctor, the doctor says to me, he says, “Well, I think that we’re going to have to remove this and see what it is.” He says, “There’s probably nothing to it. Let’s go in, let’s just remove it, though, and why don’t you check in the hospital in the morning? Hopefully, it won’t be much, and it’ll be just a small little incision, and won’t be much to it.”
James: Well, I knew when I woke up that next morning after the surgery that I was in trouble, because I could see all those bandages in my groin area, and it was very, very sore already. And I knew that wasn’t probably good, and here comes the doctor in the door, and he tells me, he says, “Well, I’m very sorry to tell you that I think the cancer is spread, of course. I think that we’re going to have to do 80 chemotherapy treatments, experimental chemotherapy treatments.”
James: And he said, “I don’t know what else to do for this.” And he only gave me a 20% chance of surviving three to five years, if I could get through those 80 chemotherapy treatments alive. And it just wasn’t good news at all. And he went on to tell me that he was sorry, and he wished that it was better news, but that’s all he knew to do.
James: Well, I became very, very desperate, and I didn’t know what else to do. And I got a phone call. And the phone call was from a minister of mine at the church that I’d gone to, on and off, and I wasn’t a real religious guy, I was just a regular guy, and had small businesses, but I went to church two or three times a month, and I knew this guy. And I respected him. And he was an ex-baseball player, professional baseball player, and I liked him, because he was a tough kind of guy.
James: And he was a guy that ran, and he was like me. You’d go out and you’d see him running around town and everything. And this guy comes in, he tells me, he says, “James,” he says, “I’ve been praying for you, I heard you had cancer. People have been praying for you at the church.”
James: And he tells me, he says, “You got to fight.” He says, “You really got to fight.” He says, “You don’t give into this.” He says, “I know it’s hard, I know you’re depressed, I know what’s happened with your marriage,” but he says, “You get in there and you fight.” And he says, “You beat this SOB and cancer.” And he didn’t say it like that, he said it the other way.
James: But he got my attention. And I just, all of a sudden, I knew I needed to do something, and not just lay there and die, basically, because I knew that my chances, not too far from there, if I didn’t do something, I might not be around to enjoy my life anymore, to be with my daughter, to be able to have the life that I thought I deserved. So I started to pray. I prayed very, very hard. And I’d never prayed so hard in my life, because I was very desperate.
James: And I prayed like every cell in my body was praying. And it wasn’t one of these prayers like a guy does, that’s like, “Oh, God, help me,” and this or that. But I prayed to God to help me, and I said to God, I said, “If you’re there, and if you’re listening, I’m not a great person, I’ve done things that aren’t probably the best, but I’m asking you. I’m desperate.”
James: So I just felt like something was going to happen after that, and that’s when, 20 minutes later or so, I got a knock on the door, and it was a friend of mine that came through that hospital room door that I hadn’t seen in seven years, out of the blue. He comes through the door, and he says to me, he says, “James,” he says, “I heard that you were in here from a friend of ours, an old buddy of ours.”
James: He said, “And I’ve been driving around, because I wanted to come to see you,” and he says, “I’ve got this piece of paper in my head, and this is a book review. And it’s about a guy that cured himself of cancer, and I had this, and something told me this day to stop in and see you, because now is the time that I felt was the right time to come see you. I hope I’m doing the right thing.”
James: But he went on to share with me about this book review, and it was about a guy that cured himself using a diet, and I told him right then, “I’m going to do what you’ve got in your hand. That’s what I’m supposed to do.” Something inside of me, deep inside of me, says, “James, this is the answer. This is what you’re supposed to do.”
James: So I got very excited. I had to go out and get the book that he had, that this guy talked about, the guy that wrote this book that healed himself. And he went out and got this book for me, and the book was called Confessions Of A Kamikaze Cowboy. And it was about a guy that was from Montana, he was actually a movie star and a TV celebrity.
James: And it was very, very interesting story, but I could relate to that, because I was from Texas and this guy was from Montana, and he had been raised on a ranch, and he was like this cowboy, had a cowboy mentality. And I felt like if this guy can do it, why can’t I do it? So I got very excited. So I started to get hope, started to build up. I started to feel like, hey, maybe I can get well after all.
James: So I had my friend go get the book. Go ahead.
Chantel: Now, let me ask you this. Did you ever start any of the conventional methods that your doctor said? Did you ever do … You got the book, but did you ever start doing some of the conventional methods that your doctor said? Did you do some of the chemotherapy, or did you say, “You know what, forget it, all my eggs are in this guy’s basket,” or did you say, “Look, I’m going to just do it from the food heals method?”
James: What I was going to do was I was going to do the chemo, and now I’m going to do this diet, because now I felt like I got a diet to do. I’ll do the chemo, if a little’s good, a lot’s better. The next day, I got a book, knock on the door, and a book came through the door, and the book was about vitamin C and cancer. It was a book talking about people that have had severe cancer, terminal cancer, that have healed from vitamin C. And the book was by Linus Pauling.
James: And I’d never heard of anything like that, so now, I felt like, hey, if it’ll work for them, it’ll work for me. I’ve got vitamin C, I’ve got the diet. I’ll do the chemotherapy, too. So I’m going to do all of these things. So the next day, I got another knock on the door. It was a strange kind of three days, there, for me, but it was like a miracle that happened for me, and it was a psychotherapist from the hospital.
James: He walks through the door and he says, “Can I talk to you? I hear you’re depressed. I think I can help you.” And I said, “Sure, come on in.” And I asked him right off the bat, I said, “Have you ever heard of a diet called macrobiotic?” And he says to me, it was the strangest thing, he says to me, “Hold on a minute.”
James: He goes over and he shuts the door, really tight, and he comes back over, and I thought, “What’s he shutting the door for?” He shuts the door, he comes over there and sits next to me at the bed, and he says, “Listen, this is very good for a lot of people. A lot of people have healed from this diet.” He says, “I think it can help a person, but they got to put 150% into it. You can’t cut corners. There’s a right way and a wrong way. If you do it the right way, I think it can help you.”
James: He says, “It’s helped a lot of people. I’ve read a lot about it.” He said, “But you’ve got to stick with it.” Well, I knew then, I was really onto something. And I knew that, I got so excited. I wanted to hug the guy I was so excited. And I said, “Now, I’ve got these things, I’m going to do the chemotherapy,” so I did start the chemotherapy.
James: And long story short, after 10 treatments of the chemotherapy, it made me so sick, sicker than I’d ever been, and the doctor came in, and he said, “I’m sorry, your body’s not responding to these treatments.”
Chantel: So how many did you take? How many chemos did you actually do?
James: 10. I did 10.
Chantel: 10, and the doctor said, “Your body’s not responding?”
James: He said I wasn’t responding, and I was laying there, I had no energy. And I felt like if I didn’t do something, I wasn’t going to make it, and I was just wasting away. I felt like I had been in a concentration camp or something. I was so weak. And I got up, and I decided to … I had to get out of that place.
James: And I asked the doctor. I said, “Isn’t there something else I can do?” And he said, “Nothing else you can do. This is all we know to do.” And I said, “Well, what if it was your son or your daughter? What would you do?” And he said, “I’d do the same thing.” And he went on to tell me, he says, “This is all we know to do,” and he said, “We’re all going to die someday.”
James: And when he said that, I got furious. Because I had all this hope, and I was so excited about going forward, and now I felt like he was messing with my hope. And I got really mad, and I raised up in the bed, and I said, “Listen here,” and I looked right at his face, and I said, this was a big time oncologist, and I said, “If I could get out of this bed, I’d tear you apart.” And I basically said to him, I said, “I am not going to put up with this.”
James: And he walked out of that room like he’d seen a ghost. Two nights later, I decided to sneak out of the hospital at two in the morning. And I basically just crawled down the stairs at two in the morning. I put on my clothes, and I never looked back, and that’s when my healing started, that day.
James: Because I decided that day, I wasn’t going to mess around with anything else. I didn’t know if it was going to kill me or not, but I was going to go out and go for everything, I was going to go to war, I was going to go to battle, I was going to roll up my sleeves, and I was going to have the attitude that if it didn’t work for me, it wasn’t going to work for anyone else. And I was going to scratch, claw, kick, whatever it took to get well.
Chantel: So tell us about your eatings. Very specifically, what did you eat in that healing time that really healed your body? And what supplements did you take that you felt like, “This was a game changer for me?”
James: Well, I tell you what, I ate this macrobiotic diet back then, and I didn’t know anything about it when I started, but this diet consisted of 50% whole grains, 25% of organic vegetables, everything was organic, but 25% or so of whole grains, back then, that’s what I ate. And there was 10% soups every day, healing, healthy soups. 10% bean dishes, because we didn’t eat meat. It was all about beans, lentils, chickpeas, azduki beans, which were a certain kind of beans, and that’s the kind of beans that we ate.
James: And we ate seaweed. We ate sea vegetables and seaweed in our dishes, which were very healing. And all these foods were all anti-cancer, and when I learned more as I went along, I understood that all these cancer-fighting foods were so important, they were so detoxifying, they were very good for elimination, and they got rid of all the heavy metal toxicity in my system, they started to just [inaudible 00:19:28] detoxification, and there’s no wonder that it was so wonderful for me. And then I took supplements. The vitamin C. I was taking 20,000 milligrams of vitamin C a day.
Chantel: Wow. I’m a big proponent of vitamin C. The thing that you have to be very careful with is that you’re taking vitamin C that’s made from whole foods and that it’s whole food powders, and there’s no magnesium stearate, and all of that. I’m a big proponent of that.
James: Yeah. And back then, I didn’t know anything, but I took a vitamin C that was ascorbic acid, back then. And I took lysine, was in there. The one that I found that I liked the best was time released, it was magnesium and lysine and vitamin C, and that very slow released into my system. So it’s water soluble, so you need to take it throughout the day, but I took it at each meal, basically, so it stayed in my system, and I still take high amounts of vitamin C. Not quite that much, but I take a lot now.
James: I also learned to take, also, with that, a lot of lysine, so I increased my lysine and prolene, prolene which are amino acids, and the body does not manufacture vitamin C, of course. It does not manufacture lysine, and I found out later, through certain studies out there, why it was so important to do this. And these are chief supplements, but it’s the vitamin C, it’s the lysine, prolene, EGCG, which is a green tea extract that was used in a study, that’s very high, it’s anti-tumor. It suppresses tumor growth.
James: I also learned a lot about enzymes. Enzyme, pancreatic enzymes, taking a lot of enzymes between meals are very, very important, because cancer cells have this fibrinogen membrane that protects them from the immune system. So what we want to do is take enough enzymes, because the enzymes are one of our bodies’ most important defense mechanisms in the body to fight against cancer cells. We all have cancer cells in our body, and our immune system can just go in and take care of it on a regular basis.
James: But high amounts of enzymes, especially if you have cancer, are very important along with the vitamin C, because cancer, as we have learned, is a collagen disease, and cancer spreads the tissue, through the connected tissue, which is collagen, and when it spreads through that, when it metastasizes, that’s what usually, 90% of the time, kills people. And it causes an inflammation and goes to different organs and all that, so we want to stop it with healthy diet, we want to stop putting in more toxins. So many toxins in my book lists all that in the book.
James: But the thing is is that you want to stop putting in things that cause cancer, and you want to start to put in things that fight cancer and kill cancer. And it’s so important. That’s the key to battling cancer. Cancer is just an immune system that’s broken down, and it can’t do it’s job.
James: So I did that, and then I used something for my thymus gland, because that’s the immune gland, in the thymus, and your spleen, and then bone marrow. I even took bone marrow, because the bone marrow, this is where your white blood cells, your cancer-fighting cells, immune system cells, are produced. And so you want to make them strong, and it’s very, very important.
James: And I take a lot of things for different things, for inflammation, to keep the inflammation down. But there’s so many things that you can do.
Chantel: Well, your book, I love the title, by the way. I Used To Have Cancer is the name of it, and it tells all about James’s amazing journey back to health, and very practical keys of exactly what you need to do, what foods to eat, what supplements to take. So go out now, we’ll put that in the show notes.
Chantel: We are giving away four copies of James’s book to four lucky winners. If you go to our Facebook page, you’re going to comment below and share the post, and you will be able to be eligible, we’re going to give four lucky winners a copy of this amazing book.
Chantel: James, thank you so much for joining us today, and if you have a question that you want answered, go to questions at chantelrayway.com. We’ll see you guys next time. Bye bye.
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