Detox

The beautiful thing about detoxing is that really it is about NOT doing things, rather than DOING them.

As we go through our lives we throw things at our body that we just expect it to deal with – a full English here, couple of beers there, mixed with medications, diet coke and whatever else we get up to. Most of this is fine, and our liver sorts it out there and then. However, on occasion there is just too much to do, so the body puts stuff aside, meaning to come back to it later when it has a spare afternoon. Problems start to arise when there is no spare afternoon, and the backlog is building up and up. The whole point of a detox is to allow your body the necessary spare time, by giving it as little else to do as possible.

Cut out alcohol, caffeine, sugar and all artificial ingredients. That is 4 big things less for your body to deal with. Take it a step further and eat raw foods for a week or juices for 3 days, brown rice, whatever you can manage. I used to do a week of raw food, 3 or 4 days of grapes then another week of raw food. By then your liver will be sitting round twiddling its thumbs.

So far I haven’t mentioned supplements at all. A lot of people take supplements while on a detox, but is an accessory, not the main event. There are a lot of good supplements like milk thistle and dandelion that will increase liver function or dandelion tea which will increase water flushing through the kidneys. Body brushing will increase lymph and blood circulation, which can help get the toxins eliminated more quickly. All these things can help speed up the rate at which your body can deal with the backlog of work, but none will have much effect if it is continuing to work at full capacity.

You can easily detox without supplements, just by not doing things for a couple of weeks. Taking supplements and body brushing can make this process more effective, but are by no means necessary. Just taking supplements without changing anything else on the other hand will not have much impact at all.

Tags: detox, health-a-to-z-d

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010 at 4:52 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.