Ten Common Detoxification Pitfalls : Continuing to eat harmful foods , Failing to change your eating habits , Depriving your body of exercise and sweat and Ignoring your body’s supplement and water needs .

Ten Common Detoxification Pitfalls

In This Chapter

▶ Continuing to eat harmful foods

▶ Failing to change your eating habits

▶ Depriving your body of exercise and sweat

▶ Ignoring your body’s supplement and water needs 

 

You know what they say about the best-laid plans, don’t you?

Unfortunately, that old chestnut extends to the best-laid detoxification plans. Even if you’re completely sold on the idea that you need to correct your current dietary blunders with a healthy detox diet and take additional steps to detoxify your body, you have plenty of chances to slip up on the road to your new, improved, detoxified life.

I’ve been helping patients with their detoxification efforts for decades, and by now I know where many of them go wrong. From these many, many years of hindsight, I offer the material in this chapter, which clues you in on ten of the most common ways that your detox endeavors can go astray. These pitfalls pertain to both detox dieting and general detoxification.

I want you to succeed in your quest to rid your body of toxins and keep them out, so I don’t pull any punches here. My hope is that if you can see potential pitfalls coming, you’ll be more likely to sail smoothly past them on your way to a longer, healthier, detoxified life.

Keeping Unhealthy Food in the House

When you start out on any detoxification endeavor, particularly a detox diet, one of the very first steps you should take is to clear out all the toxin-laden, processed, and generally unhealthy food from your kitchen. You can read all about the kinds of food you should avoid in Chapters 3 and 6 of this book.

Don’t hang on to any of it — clear out the cabinets, the pantry, the fridge, and the freezer. (And don’t forget your secret stash of cookies or snack cakes!)

If you have unhealthy food in your home, it will continually tempt you. Eventually, you’ll probably end up caving to that temptation, so it’s always best to clear out the bad foods from the get-go.

When the unhealthy and toxic foods are out of your home, restock your kitchen with wholesome, healthy foods like the ones I describe in Chapter 7. The change may seem like a bit of a shock at first, but before long you won’t miss all the nasty and unhealthy foods you used to eat because you’ll feel so good from eating nutritious, toxin-free foods.

Not Reading Labels

Want to avoid eating and drinking toxins? If so, you have to abide by this extremely important (yet wonderfully simple) rule: Always read labels. You can’t really know what’s in the food you eat and the beverages you drink unless you read the labels, particularly the ingredients lists. If you take the time to examine a label, you’ll know right away if a food or drink contains toxic or otherwise questionable ingredients, and you’ll know to steer clear of it and opt for a toxin-free alternative.

If you’ve tried to really examine and analyze food labels in the past but you’ve been caught up in all the jargon and confusing information, check out Chapter 3. In that chapter, I give you the full rundown on how you can be smart about labels in order to keep toxin-filled foods away from you and your family. For now, let me quickly clue you in on the three things you should always do when you’re evaluating a label:

✓ Don’t buy a food that has ingredients you’ve never heard of or can’t pronounce.

✓ Pay special attention to the order in which ingredients are listed on the label. They’re supposed to be listed in decreasing order of amounts included.

✓ Keep an eye out for different variations of the same toxin.

What’s not included on a label can be just as important as what is clearly listed. For example, if you’re shopping for organic food and you don’t see “100% organic” on the label, you know there’s always a chance that the food contains or was produced using some sort of toxic materials.

Eating Out

If I told you that every restaurant or eatery out there served food that contained toxins, I’d be lying. A handful of restaurants pride themselves on pro- viding natural, organic, wholesome food, and if you’re lucky enough to live in an area where one of these establishments is located, I fully support you going there to eat.

That said, the vast majority of restaurants don’t have much of a commitment to serving up toxin-free food. If you make a plan to eat out, you’re likely making a plan to have a side of toxins with your meal. The people running these restaurants aren’t bad; they usually are just not focused on what foods and additives are toxic.

You can have nearly total control of the quality and toxicity of the food you eat in only one place, and that’s at home. Prepare your own food whenever you can. If you find yourself in a situation where you know you won’t be able to make your food and eat at home, either pack some food from your kitchen or do plenty of research ahead of time to discover nearby restaurants that can accommodate your desire to eat healthy and toxin-free.

Eating Too Fast and Not Chewing Enough

So many people act like they’re in a competitive eating match when they have a meal. Don’t be one of them! If you shovel down your food and don’t take the time to chew it properly, you’re putting your digestive system at a huge disadvantage. Leisurely eating, with lots and lots of chewing, is an extremely important first step in any healthy digestive process (see Chapter 9).

When you eat slowly and chew your food thoroughly, you break everything down into a nice food slurpy, which is just perfect for your stomach. Doing so allows your stomach to carry out its critical functions and prepare your food for the intestines, which is really where the digestive magic happens.

If you swallow your food before you’ve chewed it into a semi-liquid and soaked it thoroughly with your saliva, you get the delicate digestive dance off on the wrong foot. The results can range from poor nutrient absorption to increased toxicity.

Washing Food Down with Drinks

This one always surprises my patients, so don’t feel like you’re alone if my advice catches you off guard. Ready? Don’t drink liquids when you eat a meal. Sound crazy? It’s actually the healthiest way to eat. Let me explain why.

When you drink beverages while eating a meal, you dilute two important digestive liquids: your saliva and your stomach acid. Watering down your saliva compromises its ability to start breaking down your food, and it makes the food you swallow less slick and more likely to irritate your esophagus. Diluting your stomach acid is even worse. Your stomach acid is a marvel of nature; it’s so powerful that it can destroy many toxins — especially biologic toxins like bacteria, viruses, and parasites. When you drink a lot of liquids with your food, your stomach acid is diluted, which makes it a lot more difficult for the acid to penetrate your food and get to all the toxins that may be lurking in it. You need your stomach acid to be robust in terms of quantity and acidity, and having a beverage with your meal is a real hindrance to both.

Want to make sure your saliva and stomach acid are able to work at the highest possible level? Don’t drink liquids when you’re eating. Wait at least one hour after a meal, and then feel free to have a big, refreshing glass of clean, purified water.

Not Doing an Annual Bowel Cleanse

In Chapter 4 I write extensively about all the amazing things your bowels do to absorb what your body needs and keep out the toxins and other materials that can be a serious drag on your body’s many complex systems. The last time I checked, bowels weren’t included on any list of the world’s natural wonders, but I think it’s time we reevaluate that omission.

Your bowels are wonderfully effective, but in the toxic environment in which we live today, you need to do everything you can to keep your bowels in healthy working order. That includes getting a bowel cleanse once each year. The bowel cleanse process helps to ensure that your bowels aren’t being negatively affected by a range of toxins. It also helps to make sure that your bowels are able to operate as they should, which in turn helps many aspects of your health from your weight to your immune function.

A bowel cleanse is really a relatively simple process, and it’s one that people used to go through all the time just a few decades ago. To get a rounded view of the available bowel cleansing techniques, check out Chapter 5.

Not Exercising 30 Minutes per Day

Our bodies are built for activity, and it’s always a shame to me when people don’t realize and embrace that fact. No matter your age or physical condition, regular exercise is a key way that you can keep your body functioning as it’s supposed to. If you don’t exercise, you’re simply asking for trouble.

I’m not talking about running a marathon or bench-pressing 300 pounds here. For most adults, just 30 minutes per day of vigorous exercise — enough to get you up near your target heart rate — can make a tremendously positive impact on your overall health. Yet many people don’t do it, and as a result we’re more overweight and prone to diseases than ever before.

Besides the well-known and well-documented reasons to exercise, here are two other important benefits that you stand to enjoy if you can commit to engaging in physical activity for just a half hour every day:

✓ Better sleep: Study after study has proven that exercising during the day — particularly in the morning — helps to regulate your sleep cycle and make your body ready to shut down for sleep when bedtime rolls around. With so many people living extremely busy lives these days, who can afford not to get quality sleep?

✓ Detoxification through sweating: A good 30-minute exercise session will get you sweating, and sweating is one of the most effective ways to detoxify your body. You can excrete all manner of toxins with your sweat, from chemicals to heavy metals. Just be sure you take a good shower when you’re done exercising so those toxins don’t sit around on and irritate your skin.

Not Sweating Enough

Working up a good sweat is a fantastic way to get toxins out of your system. Your sweat glands are great at removing toxic materials from your body, and you should take advantage of their talents.

Not long ago — back before air conditioning and before people started settling into sedentary lifestyles — just about everyone on earth spent a good portion of the year sweating quite a bit every day. Unless you live in a very cold area, you can imagine what it would be like in the heat of summer if air conditioning weren’t widely available. In those days, people were detoxifying their bodies all the time. But fast forward to the present day, when people don’t sweat nearly as much and the toxic load in our environment has been greatly increased. We need to sweat more than ever before.

You should strive to sweat often in the interest of aiding your body’s natural detoxification processes. Here are three ways you can do just that:

✓ Exercise regularly. I cover this topic in the previous section.

✓ Spend time in a sauna. This is a great way to work up a sweat, and I recommend it for anyone who is in good physical condition. Three types of sauna are available: wet, dry, and infrared. For details, have a look at Chapter 18.

Consult your doctor before beginning to use a sauna. People who suffer from blood pressure problems, cardiovascular disease, or epilepsy should not use saunas. Pregnant women should also avoid saunas.

✓ Drink plenty of water. Your body can sweat effectively only if you’re very well hydrated. To make sure you’re getting the most out of your sweat, drink plenty of purified water. (Have a look at Chapter 3 for information on how to ensure your water is clean and toxin free.)

Not Supplementing

Unless you eat a completely healthy, 100 percent organic diet that is made up of huge amounts of fresh vegetables, you’re more than likely not getting all the critical nutrients and other materials your body needs to perform at its very best. I encourage you to strive for the best diet you can achieve, but if your diet isn’t perfect, you can always add to the vitamins, minerals, essential fatty acids, essential amino acids, and other key substances you need through supplementing.

I talk a lot about supplementing in this book, and I really do recommend it for just about everyone. Some people question the effectiveness of supplements, but I’ve always found them to be an extremely useful way to augment a healthy diet for both me and my patients.

Some people choose not to supplement because they think doing so will be too much of a hassle, or they think it’ll be expensive, or they don’t really know which supplement choices to make when they’re faced with an intimidating (and enormous) wall of options at their health food or vitamin store. But supplementing can be easy, cost-effective, and confusion free if you know how to go about it, and I’m happy to help you figure out the ins and outs. Start with my explanation on how to pick out supplements in Chapter 5, and then consider my list of recommended supplements in Chapter 21.

Drinking Inadequate Amounts of Water

As far as we know, there’s one substance that all life requires: liquid water. Your body needs it, in the truest sense of the word “need.” Therefore, you should drink plenty of water every day — not just when it’s hot out, or when you’re exercising, or when you’ve recently eaten a lot of salty food. (You shouldn’t be doing that last one anyway, of course.) Drink water steadily throughout the day, and you’ll not only keep your body healthy on a general level, but you’ll assist your body in its quest to rid itself of toxins.

When you’re well hydrated, your lymph system — a sort of secondary circulatory system that excels at flushing toxins out of your cells and tissues — is at its best. Your digestive system is also on top of its game when there’s plenty of water to go around, and you don’t have to read too many pages of this book to realize how important your digestive system is in getting the right materials in your body and keeping the wrong materials (toxins) out.

A good general rule is to drink enough water to keep your urine clear. At the same time, beware of toxin-emitting plastic water bottles. Flip back to Chapter 3 for ways to make sure the water you drink is pure and toxin-free.