Do you Spring Clean?
We have been doing a lot of purging at our house. And brightening up things. Made me think of my body – so I started a bit of Spring Cleaning for my body too.
So many people tell me they are doing a cleanse. The first comment I have is, “if it’s like a Draino effect, don’t do it!” and the next comment I have is “Do not restrict calories”. So it is makes you drink juice only or eat soups or limits your intake of good nutrition – it’s NOT GOOD FOR YOU. Why? Because your body needs energy and nutrients to DO the process of detoxification. Otherwise you are just starving yourself and see fluids shift that look like weight loss.
(I have a patient and her friend who did the American Heart detox and didn’t even dro pa pound even though they ate soups and increased fibre! Proof that:
- Detoxification is NOT to be confused with weight loss
- Starving yourself doesn’t necessarily lead to weight loss (which is a WHOLE other topic).
Some questions to ask yourself:
First question: why should I cleanse?
Second question: Am I toxic
Third question: where do I start
Why should I cleanse (detoxify)?
No matter how pristine your lifestyle (You eat perfectly, you live in an environmentally clean house, you use only natural stuff on your body and you only drink pure water) – you live on this planet and you step outside right?
Now, Michael Jackson was on to something! If you could live in a glass bubble; you may get away with not detoxifying yourself.
If you are the perfect person described above; you simply need to increase your nutrient intake without formal detoxification.
For the rest of us who travel, eat out, drink wine, and pump our own gas, and clean our own houses: well, it builds up!
My apologies if my facetiousness offends anyone – that is not my intention.
Our planet has 80 000 more toxins and chemicals today that when our grandparents were alive.
Your liver is the most important organ for purifying your body. Your liver not only cleans out things you breathe in and chemicals in the food you eat, your liver also neutralizes your hormones, inactivates any medicines you take and also deals with chemicals absorbed through your skin from household cleaners to body products.
If your liver does not perform its functions well, things get backed up! This cannot be measured on blood tests.
A few decades ago, a system of enzymes were discovered to be responsible for processes in the liver. (cytochrome enzymes).
We now know that this is why drug interactions occur.
More and more scientific evidence is emerging to show correlation between health issues like obesity and heart diseases are linked to toxic things (lead and hypertension, obesity and pesticides, hormone disruption with phthalates and solvents).
We also know that when your liver does not perform a process called ‘methylation’ efficiently, byproducts of the abnormal process can damage DNA.
Cells with damaged DNA has the potential to become cancer cells.
Homocysteine rises when your liver is not functioning well. There is now a known association with heart disease, strokes and dementia. THIS IS SERIOUS STUFF!
Steps
1. reduce your toxic load:
- eat organic foods (especially the ‘dirty dozen’)
- eat whole foods and not processed.
2. enhance nutrition
- take nutritional supplements and provide your body and cellular processes with the building blocks and ingredients they need to work optimally.
- NAC, CoQ10 and Alpha Lipoic Acid are important nutrients.
- Milk Thistle and Sulforaphanes are good herbs/ extracts to take.
3. measure your load
- Specialised testing can give you a good idea of your baseline toxicity. Find out if you need to detoxify.
More important, find out if your health is severely at risk.
Once you know; you can do something about it!
4. start the process
Order Metabolic Optimizer
Specifically created by Douglas Laboratories, a leader in the field of natural supplements; this is an excellent kit to start with if you have ever thought about ‘detoxing’.
Who should do this?
YOU! Why??? Because you breathe air and get exposed to chemicals and pollutants everywhere.
I recommend this at least 3 times a year to optimise your most important organ that protects your body function.
It comes with a handy teaching guide and gives you recipes and shopping lists and everything you need to get started.
When it is this easy, there is NOTHING to stop you.
