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Volume I       Number 14                                     Copyright © 2011 All Rights Reserved
DETOXING -
What You Need to Know and How to Avoid the Pitfalls
 
Detoxing is an essential skill for maintaining and improving your health. 
 
Learn how to do it safely and you'll improve your health, otherwise you could end up much sicker!
Why should you learn how to DETOX?
 
Learning how to detox your body is one simple skill you can learn that can improve your health in major ways, including: 
 
  • decreasing puffiness,
  • clearing of brain fog,
  • diminishing achiness in joints,
  • increased vitality,
  • clearer skin,
  • better resistance to colds, flu, and infections,
  • reduction in sluggish colon,
  • reduced stiffness on awakening,
  • lower irritability,
  • declining cholesterol levels,
  • less gas and bloating, 
  • fewer sensitivities to allergens, and
  • reduction in weight. 
 
What is DETOXING do - why do you need it?
 
All these seemingly magical results are obtained by putting your body into its discharge mode. This is the process through which your body rids itself of accumulations of all descriptions: mucus, congestion, extra fats, toxins, chemicals and decaying matter.  Just as your household has a need for you to collect up, take out, carry away  and dispose of the garbage, so your body needs regular times to do the same.
 
What are the consequences of failing to DETOX?
 
If you don't arrange times for your body to discharge, your inner garbage collects in your cells, creating stiffness and heaviness, overloading your immune system's ability to keep things clean. 
 
Then, when you least expect it, at some inconvenient time, your body succumbs to the attack of all these collected free radicals and decides to go into discharge mode anyway. 
 
Instead of enjoying that Holiday party you'd been looking forward to, that vacation for which you paid so dearly, you spend your time in bed.  'I have a cold," you say, or, "I have the flu - there is a lot of it going around." 
 
But really, your body has determined that, like it or not, cleaning your internal house takes precedence over any other agenda.  "It can't be helped," you might think.  But that would be untrue because you can take charge of the process, carrying it out in smaller increments that don't cause symptoms.
 
How does a regular DETOX schedule help prevent colds and the flu?

Regular detoxing is how you support your body to keep up with it's healthy need to discharge, and that means you're lowering the likelihood that you'll be sideswiped by unwelcome visits of pain and achiness, fatigue, swollen joints and congestion. 
 
And the less you keep up with it, the more likely you'll be knocked down when "the flu's going around."  Why?  Because you have allowed your body to become a walking environment where bugs love to grow and multiply.
 
After all, the role of 'bugs' in the ecological system of the world is to prepare things to return to the earth.  And in allowing your body to become toxic, you have become the proverbial living, breathing swamp: warm, moist, dark, and full of rich, decaying matter to feed on.
 
"Well," you might say, "my immune system should take care of this."  And if your immune system could talk, it would likely reply, "I've been doing my best, and I can only do so much. Give me a break!"
 
Detoxing via the body's discharge channels is the way your immune system gets that break.
 
 
 

"The best way to detoxify is to stop putting toxic things into the body and depend upon it's own mechanisms."                          Andrew Weil, M.D.


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Ten Top Tips to Support a Regular'
Discharge Mode'
 
So that your body can detox routinely, use thefollowing  ways to "give it a break" and put your body in discharge mode:

1. Avoid eating in the 2 - 3 hour time period just before bed. Your body goes on a discharge cycle while you sleep, and if you've eaten, you've interfered with that cycle because you are requiring it to assimilate, a function it has a hard time doing during sleep.
 
2. Add down time to your schedule.  While you rest, recuperate, read that novel, watch that sunset, your body can catch up with some cleaning chores.
  
3. Slowly, constantly diminish your intake of things that gunk up your body: white sugar, refined foods of any kind including white bread and pastas, heavy intake of dairy, alcohol, coffee, trans fats such as those found in margarine and fast foods, especially those that are fried.
 
4. Increase your intake of real, organic fruits and vegetables (but not the canned ones with all the heavy syrup added!)
 
5. Including some juices is fine, but first, read the labels and avoid those with chemicals of any kind or high fructose corn syrup. Best of all, make your own juices.
 
6. Cook your vegetables less; steam them lightly.
  
7. If you are a woman, your body naturally goes on a discharge cycle. during your period.  Take advantage of that time to eat more lightly. If you are a man, you can plan regular intervals to eat more lightly.
 
8. The times all bodies -male or female - naturally want to discharge are the 7 days immediately before the two solstices and equinoxes.  Get out your calendar now and mark those days "detox time."
 
9. Elson Haas, M.D., author of The Detox Diet, says that for most Westerners, switching your diet to fruits, vegetables, rice and a protein source  will allow your body to start playing catch-up with its cleaning chores and allow you to continue your regular daily schedule.
 
10. Undertake more intensive cleansing programs, including fasting, only under the care of a knowledgeable health care practitioner.  Check with her or him to help you assess what your body can currently tolerate. 
 
Why? Because you can't safely go from a state of nutritional inadequacy, heavy toxicity and severe medical diseases to maximum discharge mode without causing more problems.  Do what is best for you, with your unique body in your unique situation.
 
"Spiritual progress is like detoxification. Things have to come up in order to be released. Once we have asked to be healed, then our unhealed places are forced to the surface."

 Marianne Williamson

 
HOW  NOT TO DETOX:
 
The detoxification process is a powerful one and should be treated with the greatest respect.  General, mild body detoxification processes can usually be undertaken in complete safety without the services of a qualified health professional; however attempting more than that on your own can cause big problems.  For example:
 
A young man had been experimenting with some substances that were not good for him.  Happily, he figured that out and decided to take steps to cleanse his body and recover his health.  Great, so far.  However, he made a big mistake and undertook a powerful gall bladder cleansing procedure on his own without effective help and ended up in the hospital. 
 
Turns out his gall bladder contained some stones, and when he pushed his bile production in the cleansing process, the stones were pushed into his bile duct, blocking it, creating an infection and requiring antibiotics and surgery.

Detox Options:
 
If you started searching on your own, you'd find a huge variety of detox options, some of them products, some programs, some both.  You'll find detox recipes, detox foods, juice detoxes such as cranberry or lemon juice, water fasting, detox foods, 3 day detoxes; 21 day detoxes, raw food detoxes and on and on.
 
That's another reason to work with a qualified professional for any but the simplest detox processes - to help you sort through the myriad of ways to cleanse your body and find what's right for you.  And even at that, the choice you make now may not be the right one for you later.  It all depends on the state of your body at the time. 

 

For example, if you were fighting an infection, you'd need lots of good quality protein to aid your recovery, so undertaking some variety of juice fast (a very low protein choice) would actually work against you.

 


 
 
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