Detoxifying your body at least once a year is a must-do.
You live in a world filled with toxins: With over 8,000 chemicals in circulation in the environment, you need to protect your body by boosting the detoxification and removal of these damaging compounds. Otherwise, your liver’s detox pathways get jammed, become overburdened, and the toxins can accumulate in your tissues and fat cells. You may not even realize that this accumulation is making you feel crappy!
Clearing toxins out of your body is critical for preventing illness and reversing chronic conditions like heart disease, diabetes, autoimmune diseases, and cancer.
But, here’s the thing: You have to do it right to reap the benefits.
That’s why we run our popular online group coaching program, 14-Day Whole Life Detox, every spring!
7 Mistakes to Avoid to Get the Most out of your Detox
Eat Enough Food — A real detox — a medically-sound, healthy, safe detox — reduces your body’s toxic load with targeted nutrients to help your liver effectively do its job. A proper detox includes real whole foods. Detoxification does not include starvation!
Skip the Juices — A low-sugar juice, made primarily of green vegetables, every day is fine, but a proper detox is not a “juice cleanse.” Too high in sugar, many juices, particularly made with fruit, create spikes in your blood sugar and often result in an energy crash that comes from too much sugar and too little fiber.
Use the Correct Supplements — A medically-sound detox is very different than a colon cleanse that you pick up at your local natural foods market. A colon cleanse does just that — makes you poop, which is necessary to eliminate toxins. But proper detox supplements do much more. They help support the detoxification process in your liver, which then helps clear the toxins from your body. Proper detox support also provides the right kind of fiber to bind toxins in your stool — a very necessary step for elimination.
Avoid “Healthy” Packaged Foods — Skip the majority of gluten-free crackers and breads, for instance. While the marketing on the package may make it sound like a great choice — Gluten-free! Dairy-free! High protein! — most of those claims hide the bad stuff that you find on the nutrition label. Look for whole foods in the ingredients, and make sure the product is low in sugar, and high in fiber. Recently I saw a gluten-free bread with potato starch as the first ingredient. Honestly, would you eat potato starch by the spoonful?
Set Aside Some Down Time Every Day — Our lives are rush, rush, rush. Our stress hormones keep pace. Stress is toxifying, and adds to your toxic burden. While you’re detoxifying your body, it’s essential to give your body a break to do this heaving lifting. It’s a good time to add some meditation, an epsom salts bath or a walk in the woods to your day. Breathe, your body depends on it.
Be Sure to Sweat — Toxins escape your body in three ways — through your bowel movements, your urine, and your sweat. Aerobic exercise, sauna and steam rooms are all ways you can turn up the heat. Aerobic exercise, in particular, increases the blood flowing through your body, releasing toxins through your sweat, and encourages detoxification by bringing more oxygen to your tissues.
Reintroduce the Foods You Eliminated One-by-One — If you jump right back into your “pre-detox” ways, well, you will be right back at Square One. Add one food back at a time over the course of 3 days. The most successful people keep a written log of their symptoms when reintroducing foods. It might be the most overlooked part of detoxifying — nearly everyone who does a detox, comes off without making the changes their body is telegraphing it needs.
Meet Melissa: Melissa Rapoport is the Manager of Health Coaching and Lifestyle Programming at Blum Center for Health in Rye Brook, NY. She combines her graduate work in Developmental Psychology with her education in nutrition, health and coaching to create highly individualized programs that result in lifetime change. A contributing author to three international bestselling books, Melissa’s greatest joy is her relationship with her two daughters. To learn more about Melissa’s coaching practice at Blum Center for Health, click here.