How to Super-Charge your Detox
It wasn’t many years ago that ‘Detox’ was a banned word. After years of people happily jumping on to diets in the new year in the hopes of ridding themselves of Christmas over-indulgence the regulators decided that you could not support detoxification in any way through external factors because their effect could not be measured, and as a result advertising with use of the word detox or toxins was banned. This affected everything and everyone from magazine articles, drinks, natural medicine therapies, and products stocked at large High Street Chemists.
Whether the general public noticed that ‘detox’ disappeared for a while commercially is debateable, but the fact is that its popularity has never been stronger than it is again now as people constantly seek out ways to try and proactively improve their health. Once again you cannot open a magazine or walk down a supplements aisle without having detoxification products and approaches coming at you from every angle. Possibly the one thing that was helpful is that products and services have to be more informed in their advertising now about what they mean by detox and how the product or service may actually help.
Detoxification – a natural daily process
The argument behind when advertising ‘detox’ was banned was that our bodies are built with an inbuilt detoxification system which adequately chugs along every day. It neither needed help, nor could be helped, was the argument – it was just one of those things our bodies do. So, let’s remind ourselves what detoxification means and what body systems are involved.
To De-toxify is the act of processing and eliminating ‘toxins’. From a physiology point of view, ie what your body gets up to daily when detoxifying, the toxins can come from two main sources. These are either from things you come into contact with daily like chemicals in your food or water, in your skincare products, or breathing in eg petrol fumes. Or they are chemicals which your body produces itself as part of daily processes for example in processing the food that you eat, breathing, etc. Your body has a system of fluids which circulate; picking up these toxins and taking them off to the organs of detoxification for them to be neutralised and excreted.
The Organs of Detoxification
The Lymphatic system is not usually the first organ people think of but its key in that process of collecting toxins that your body has produced, filtering them down and transporting them off to the detoxification ‘engines’ via lymphatic fluid
The Liver – everyone’s favourite detox organ! Those transported toxins usually end up at the liver – imagine a giant factory with the ability to take in dangerous rubbish (toxins) and treat it in different ways by adding different chemicals, adding water or fat, applying complex processing until it is ready to shuttle the safer residue out to be eliminated via the kidneys, bowel, lungs and skin
The Kidneys – those processed toxins have to be transported out of the body somehow, and those that are soluble in water generally are transported off to the kidneys to be eliminated. The kidneys have to work very hard with balancing body fluids and helping to keep blood and cells at the right level of chemical balance
The Lungs and Skin – If the kidneys are overworked or not functioning as well as they should those water-soluble toxins can be routed to the lungs and skin to be eliminated
The Bowel is for elimination, particularly of those toxins that are not water soluble, but this can only be achieved adequately where it is working optimally.
Why give detoxification a helping hand?
If you listen intuitively your body will send signals when it needs some extra help with detoxification. Maybe you have some constipation and headaches – that could indicate that you are not eating sufficient fibre in your diet, need more water, and need overall to support the elimination of toxins via the liver and bowel. You may notice other symptoms like a bad odour when sweating, smelly feet or bad breath, PMT, poor skin, cellulite, puffy eyes, weight going up and down …. the list goes on.
Turn to us when you want extra help.
A diet to support detoxification
A Nutritional Therapist will take you through a full Health Questionnaire to get a real understanding of your symptoms and how detoxification may help
The skill with Nutritional Therapy is not just rushing in with a full-blown really aggressive diet for a few days or a couple of weeks and expecting that to fix everything. Quick-fix diets from popular news sources are not necessarily suitable for everyone – they could cause you to release toxins too quickly without having adequate ways to excrete them which can cause side-effects.
A detoxification approach will be designed specifically for you, easing you in at the rate that’s truly supportive to your detoxification systems and then, rather than drop you after a couple of weeks, it will take you forward so that through the upcoming year and beyond you have all the tools you need to continue to improve your bodies detoxification capacity and the knowledge to reduce your exposure to toxins in the first place.
Even just increasing the amount of fruit and vegetables that you eat can help plus making sure you get the full coverage of all the colours of the rainbow in that food every day. You can see lots of ideas in our Rainbow Eating blog.
Supplements
Detoxification and excretion takes a lot of effort and energy by your liver, kidneys, bowel, etc and relies on lots of good chemicals being available (like vitamins, minerals and fatty acids)
Often it is beneficial to provide support through either broad-spectrum supplements (like professional grade multi-nutrients) or other more targeted supplements
When organs need extra energetic support
We use a form of Homeopathy often referred to as complex, or modern, homeopathy which is a form of homeopathy that developed in the post-war years of the 1950’s. It was becoming clear that people’s systems were rapidly being affected by the post-war chemicals that were being used in industrial and farming practices meaning that people were being exposed to more toxins than ever before. This form of homeopathy is called Homotoxicology (homo-toxic-ology) which, if you interpret in reverse order translates out to The Study (ology), of toxins (toxic), on man (homo). This is a unique form of homeopathy especially designed to be knowledgeable in supporting the organs and systems of detoxification.
Support can be given to the liver, kidneys and lymphatic system through simple remedies taken daily with water for 3 weeks, and then a more detailed therapeutic approach designed as necessary utilising additional remedies given by drops, sub-lingual tablets, or small injections.
Mind Body Detox
As well as toxins at the cellular level, that have reached you via your external environment, we all influence the state of our body’s toxic burden through our thoughts and emotions. Stress is one of the most likely ways you are increasing your toxic body burden due to activating your pre-historic ‘fight or flight’ hormone responses but without then having the ability to use, and detoxify, those extra stress hormones that have been produced. Such a pattern accumulates over years into chronic imbalances which further reduce the systems’ ability to detoxify and so you are in a downwards spiral with an increasing toxic burden which can become detrimental to vital systems such as your Immune system.
We use the NESHealth BioEnergetix System to scan and read your Bodyfield energetic system which, as well as measuring the vibration of organs and systems, also maps to emotions and spiritual aspects. You can see an example of a few of the screens from the scan HERE
We provide one-off scans to get an insight into your bodyfield Mind Body ‘health’ to support most therapies, and this can then be picked up as an individual programme if required
Lab work
Sometimes only Lab-work gets you the deep-dive you need and we can offer blood test and stool sample referrals and interpretation depending on your personal circumstances
A Word of Caution
You should never undertake deep detoxification without professional guidance. Always speak to your Doctor before embarking on major changes to your diet. This article has been for information only and should not be considered prescribing in any way.