Detoxification from sugar and white flour takes about ten days and patients have to be warned of the common withdrawal symptoms that they might experience: headaches, dizziness and irritability. Patients who have given up recreational drugs will sometimes tell us that they found withdrawal from sugar and white flour just as difficult. At the same time we recommend patients to give up caffeine. Withdrawal symptoms from caffeine also include headaches, dizziness and irritability. It is only when one gives up these substances that one realises just how addictive they are and how much one has become dependent upon them physiologically as well as emotionally. A life without them is not deprived: it is enhanced.

The basic work in a Minnesota Method treatment centre such as PROMIS is in helping patients to begin to develop an understanding of the Twelve Step programme of the Anonymous Fellowships. I have put the Steps mostly in the future tense in this example so as to emphasise that recovery comes as a result of working them in the Anonymous Fellowships rather than simply becoming familiar with them in a treatment centre.

1. I admit that I am powerless over the mood-altering substances, behaviours and relationships that affect me and that my life has become unmanageable.
2. I shall come to believe that a power greater than myself could restore me to sanity.
3. I shall make a decision to turn my will and my life over to the care of God asI understand Him.
4. I shall make a searching and fearless moral inventory of myself.
5. I shall admit to God, to myself and to another human being the exact nature of my wrongs.
6. I shall become entirely ready to have God remove all my defects of character.
7. I shall humbly ask Him to remove my shortcomings.
8. I will make a list of all persons I have harmed and become willing to make amends to them all.
9. I shall make direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others
10. I shall continue to take a personal inventory and when I am wrong promptly admit it.