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Australian entrepreneur, author and weight-loss guru Joe Cross fought against obesity and debilitating autoimmune disease by trading a heavily processed, carnivorous diet with a 60-day juice cleanse. Purist founder Cristina Cuomo sat down with Cross at the Wellness Foundation in East Hampton to discuss his path to positive change, and the trilogy of films that document his journey.
I (author) got affected by chronic autoimmune disease called chronic urticaria and angioedema, which is a fancy word for saying really bad hives that won’t go away and are not on the surface of the skin— they’re below the dermis, way down deep, which means that the histamine that’s released by your body to try and protect yourself leaks into your joints. If someone was to shake my hand with a very firm handshake, four or five hours later it could affect my hand as though it had been slammed in a car door and it would swell up to the size of a balloon. I lived with this fear of being touched, of feeling pressure, physical pressure. It was debilitating and when I went to the doctor, he gave me 80mg to 90mg of the steroid prednisone. Anybody who knows about that knows it’s an extremely high dose and the side effects are not pretty—moon-face, hunchback, excessive weight gain and, of course, osteoporosis because you’re leaching out a lot of your calcium. As soon as he started to lower the doses, the initial problem would recur. Then the doctor basically said, “You’re going to be on these for life.” That’s hard to comprehend, but because that wake-up call wasn’t enough to jog me, I did the pills for eight years until I was 40.