The holidays are past and the New Year has started. It is time to clean up our act once again. Most of us indulged in fattening foods, inflammatory foods, and just plain poisonous foods sometime over the last two months. The short days have slowed down our metabolism and the toxins have built up in our systems.
Toxins come from many different sources. A whole boatload come from the natural metabolic processes every healthy body has. Another load comes from the heavier wintertime foods we eat during the holidays. Then comes the sugar toxicity, cooked polyunsaturated fats, bright food colors, preservatives, and just plain too much food. The last one is a real sneaky source of toxicity, because of snacking on goodies. Our system needs a minimum of 12 hours a day, every day, without food so our system can switch over to detoxification mode to clean up things from the days’ activities. Snacking blocks that by having us eat during more hours of the day.
So what does it take to kick our bodies into clean out mode?
Freeing up the time for our liver to do its job detoxifying our body is the simplest and most critical step we can take. The idea is to confine our eating to only 8 hours of the day. It does not matter which 8 hours we choose, as long as they are all continuous. From the time we eat our last morsel of food we want to give the body 16 hours without any other food. It will use 8 of those hours to finish up processing the food from the day, then it automatically kicks into detox mode for the next 8 hours.
The liver is the main player in cleaning up our body, and there are many things you can use to support its successful cleanup of the toxic wastes that have been building up in our system. Dark bitter greens, like beet tops and dandelion, are really helpful to stimulate flushing of the wastes into the intestine to then be dumped out into the toilet. Eating lots of fiber helps to carry the wastes out of the body, especially fibers like oat bran, vegetables, apples, and chlorella.
Many people focus on cleaning out the colon, but this is largely unnecessary as long as you have regular bowel movements. If you tend toward constipation, I suggest taking about 400 to 900 milligrams of magnesium a day along with extra fiber and water.
The second most important organ for detoxifying the body is the skin. The skin acts as an extra kidney for filtering out toxins from the body. It does this when we sweat, so sweating is an important detoxification method. This can be stimulated through vigorous exercise or through the use of a sauna. Serious detoxification in clinical settings uses both exercise and a low temperature sauna, combined with high doses of niacin to stimulate a lot of sweating. Be sure when promoting sweating to drink lots of good quality water and take replacement electrolytes with it.
Good quality rest is also a detoxification requirement. It is when we sleep that poisons are removed from the brain and hormones are rebalanced.
Obviously while engaging in a detoxification process we want to eat only foods that will support detoxification and support healthy rebuilding of the body. Sugars, carbohydrates, as well as an excess of any food of any kind stimulate the release of insulin. Insulin inhibits detoxification. Insulin is the hormone that tells our body to store the stuff in our blood stream by opening the doors into our cells. We want the opposite to happen and have the cells dump out the poisons so our liver can process them and eliminate them. So avoid all sugars and most carbs while detoxifying. The only good carbs are those found naturally in non-starchy vegetables. Eat lots of those.
If you really want to get that detoxification moving, you will want to lose some fat weight, as most poisons are stored in our fat cells. That means your total calories during a detoxification will want to be under 1500 calories for men and under 1200 calories for women. That would look like lots of salads, steamed veggies, 2-4 ounces of protein three times a day within an eight hour period. Eat only one serving of fresh fruit per day – preferably berries, cherries, pomegranate, or citrus (no grapefruit). Bone broth is a good drink that promotes detoxification.
If you really want to kick that detoxification up to the total commitment, then I recommend going on a green fast. That means cutting your calories down to under 600 calories per day and eating the same types of food mentioned before, but cutting the protein down and upping the green leafy stuff. I suggest doing this for 3 weeks.
If your goal is to also lose weight, then you can do this 3 week green fast cycled between 3 weeks of the higher calorie diet mentioned above. Combine this with interval aerobic exercise training a couple times a week, and once a week very slow weight lifting, plus, as a bonus, a daily sauna. Do this and then you have a powerhouse weight loss protocol. This type of eating is perfectly healthy if you eat enough vegetables in enough variety.
Bonus detox can be achieved through the use of specific nutraceuticals – vitamins, herbs, and other supplements. I have a number of different types at the office.
Let’s start the year off on our best possible footing – a healthy body. This is the time of year the body likes to do this clean out process – it is built into our genes to do this during the natural time of food scarcity in the winter season.