What to Know Before you Detox

​Detox tends to be “all the rage” these days.

Every time you turn around someone is doing a juice cleanse, a water fast, or going entire days without eating, and there’s actually good reasoning behind it all, beyond being super healthy. Fascinatingly, purification/cleansing processes have been around for thousands of years and are found in seemingly all cultures around the world in one form or another. As the years have passed, I’ve always been a person that just chalked it up to some sort of drastic-measure hollywood hype people did, that I didn’t give much more thought to besides determining I didn’t need to do it for myself, because I had plenty of health-minded procedures in place already. I’ve come to learn two important things in my life: 1. What you think you don’t need, you most likely do. 2. Be open minded, there’s a story behind everything, and an opportunity to have your perspective flipped.

What I’ve come to learn is that detoxification is the way the body heals and repairs itself.

It always has an internal cleansing process that takes place continuously and naturally through our digestion, urine, sweat, respiratory, lymph channels, and even tears. My knee-jerk reaction asks, well if the body is so great at healing itself and is continuously repairing itself, why would I ever need a detox? (I’m actually having deja-vu right now, knowing I’ve thought before).

What it comes down to is that most people’s systems aren’t working as smooth and great as they are designed to.

We live in a chronically stressed culture, consistently living in a sympathetic nervous system state as opposed to our relax+digest state of the parasympathetic mode. When we are stressed our digestive system turns off, literally preventing us from being able to absorb nutrients properly. When we are not digesting our food properly, we sure as heck aren’t breaking it down properly either, and therefore large chunks of undigested food makes it way down into the small intestine and on through the rest of the GI tract. This puts excess stress on the liver when the gallbladder cannot deliver proper bile to help further more break down the food, then these larger chunks disrupt the colon.

Additionally, a mass majority of us are consuming foods that we are allergic or intolerant to on some level.

Whether it’s the food itself or the chemicals in the food. It’s so hard in this day and age to eat foods without chemical/toxic additives. It’s another one of those conscious living things and doing something like a Whole30 really makes you slow down and have to read all your food labels. When you do that, you might start to grasp the concept of how much literal shit is being pumped into our foods, and in turn being pumped into our bodies. This overwhelming amount of toxins combo-ed up with indigestion clogs up our systems’ natural detoxification methods. That is why it is imperative that you make sure your digestion and elimination processes are working properly, for an extended period of time (30-90 days), before you decide to embark on any sort of detoxification protocol. I suppose you could just jump straight to it, but besides blatantly advising against it, I will have you expect it to be unpleasant to the point of no explanation.

Why would you want to put yourself through something insanely awful, that will most likely make you hate detoxing and never want to do it again?

When, on the flip side, it actually could be this relatively painless process that opens you up spiritually, emotionally, and supports you in becoming more authentic in your daily life. I know it sounds exciting, it sounds like a fresh start, but I guarantee starting with a real foods diet, giving special focus to your digestion and mental health, is going to have similar if not exponential results.

PIN IT & NEVER FORGET IT!