Singapore, 4 December 2011. I’m very happy to be able to sip three tablespoons of Virgin Coconut Oil (VCO) this morning before my regular tea and cereal. Having run out of this wonder potion, I was a little desperate to get a bottle as quickly as possible. My very first bottle had been procured from The Farm in Batangas, the Philippines, last year and it had since run out.

Living in Singapore, I was wondering where to get a new bottle from and sent out an SOS on Facebook for hints. Friends replied saying VCO can be found at Mustaffa and Wild Rice. I’m not a huge fan of Mustaffa’s Shopping Center and Wild Rice sounded fascinating, but I hadn’t found the time to locate it. Luckily I bumped into my uncle who said he knew somebody who sells VCO, made in Johor, Malaysia under the brand of ItWorks. And he too takes it regularly, which helped improve his health, he says.

I ordered four 250ml bottles, each RM40, to distribute to my family apart from reserving two bottles for myself. Why do I take Virgin Coconut Oil? Thanks to the wonderful doctors and nurses at The Farm, a wellness and healing resort with an amazing spa and colon cleansing treatments, they explained to me about the healing properties of VCO. Being skeptical I was hesitant to drink oil – I might just get fat!

But I was told that, on the contrary, it helps one lose weight by raising the body’s metabolism, and the laxative side effect for some helps flush out waste better. As a writer reviewing The Farm, I decided to give it a try and go for the Full Monty! That was a four-day detox treatment that came with drinking VCO every morning, energy juice, cleansing drink, colonics and detox massages. It was a difficult journey, feeling the side effects of a typical person on a detoxification program, but at the end of it I felt like a brand new person and lost 2 kgs!

This wonder coconut oil has many properties, according to The Farm’s general manager Michael Di Lonardo and head of medics team Dr Rounville Bardonado (who has since left to work in Hongkong). VCO has anti-bacterial, anti-fungal and anti-microbial properties. “It cleanses from the mouth to the anus, killing parasites, viruses, fungi and bacteria,” says Dr Bardonado. What this means is that taking this oil daily, which is nice tasting without leaving an oily film on the mouth, helps boost the body’s immune system.

Michael passed me a book to read about the benefits of VCO by Dr Bruce Fife, and it helped open up a whole new perspective of this oil. Coconut oil isn’t bad, as what we’ve been led to believe, in fact it is very good with numerable curative properties.

Within weeks of taking VCO, I no longer fell ill as often as before; definitely not catching a cold or flu as often even when everybody else around me were sneezing and coughing their lungs out. And when I once did get a cold, it lasted for just three days.

I’m sure the effect of VCO is different on others. Some claim it reduces diabetes, hypertension, helps prevent heart diseases… to me, it just makes me feel fine.