Let’s just deal with the elephant in the room straight away. This post isn’t about a detox diet.
While the idea behind detoxing, which is that you can enjoy health benefits by ridding the body of the toxins that accumulate from a poor diet and lifestyle, is sound, many of the applications and regimens of the different methods of detoxing involve a number of questionable practices, and a few dangerous ones.
What Toxins Are We Talking About
There are a variety of toxins in everyone’s body. They come from the food we eat, the environment around us and some of our bad habits, like smoking cigarettes. The number and variety of sources of toxins in our food is astonishing – here are just a few:
- Pesticides – Used to increase the yield of fresh produce
- BHA (Butylated Hydroxyanisole) & BHT (Butylated Hydroxytoluene) – food preservatives
- Recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone (rBGH/rBST) – used to reduce the time it takes meat-producing animals to mature
- Sodium Aluminum Sulphate and Potassium Aluminum Sulphate – Found in processed foods like cheese, baked products and popcorn
- Bisphenol-A (BPA) – used in the lining of food and drink cans
- Brominated Vegetable Oil – Found in fruit-flavoured drinks and pop
- Dioxins – Accumulate in processed fatty foods
Toxins in our food have been linked to cancer, hormonal imbalances, liver disease, obesity, diabetes and numerous other serious health issues.
So you can see how the idea of detoxing can be an attractive one.
Why Detoxing Isn’t the Best Way to Detox
The problem with detoxing, or at least detox diets, gut cleansing, juicing or many other common methods of detoxing, isn’t the detox itself, but how it is achieved. In addition to ridding the body of toxic substances, many detox diets claim to promote weight loss. And that’s one of the first clues that your detox regimen may not be as healthy as it sounds.
Most detoxes, including juicing, gut cleanses and the famous ‘master cleanse’, involve substituting part or all of the solids in your diet with a variety of liquids and supplements. While they might produce the detoxification and weight loss they claim, they can also rob your body of two things that can affect your health:
1. Homeostasis
Making significant changes to your diet, even for something as worthy as getting rid of toxins, can cause unexpected and unwanted reactions in your body. Primarily, your body likes to keep things the way they are. That’s called ‘homeostasis’. If changes to your diet affect your body’s homeostasis, you can suffer reactions that counter the effects you are trying to achieve, and be detrimental to your health.
2. Proper Nutrition
One of the most important things that we tend to forget when dieting, even for detoxing, is that your body needs proper nutrition to maintain your health and to give it the strength you need to enact the changes you want.
Detox Your Balanced Diet and Lifestyle, Not Your Body
While there may be beneficial ways to deliberately dwetox your body – many liver detoxes do not reduce or eliminate solid foods and have been shown to be beneficial – they must take place in combination with a healthy, balanced diet.
That puts what you eat within that diet at the root of reducing your intake of toxins, versus making questionable changes to your diet to eliminate the toxins that are already in your body. In that way, you shouldn’t detox your body, you should detox your diet and lifestyle.
If, instead of a detox diet, you eat a healthy, balanced diet, and curtail habits that add toxins to your body, like smoking and alcohol consumption, not only will you reduce the toxins you consume, but you will, in turn, eliminate those that are already there.
Where the Real Weight Loss Comes In
Your body knows that toxins are bad for you. It has various systems to help deal with toxins, including your liver, which essentially filters your blood and detoxifies chemicals. Excess toxins are taken away from your vital organs and stored in fat cells until they can be expelled.
When you reduce your toxin consumption, your body can work on eliminating the toxins stored in fat, which has the bonus of eliminating the fat too, because it’s no longer needed.
If you want to learn more about putting a nutritious and balanced diet at the root of a healthy lifestyle and weight loss, visit or call your nearest Herbal One Centre and talk to one of our trained nutritional consultants today.