Detoxification is essential to a healthy body.
It’s also a confusing and often overlooked part of daily health and disease prevention. To clarify, I’m not talking about cleansing, I’m referring to your internal detoxification pathways that allow toxins to be removed every single day.
Or at least that’s what’s supposed to happen.
If your ability to detoxify is blocked or sluggish, you begin experiencing any number of health issues, while over time damaging your gut and leading to disease.
Because this is such an important daily need for your body (but rarely addressed in the industry), I want you to have a better understanding of it to help motivate you to take small daily steps to improve this process.
WHAT IS DETOXIFICATION
First of all, detoxification is what your body does every day, whereas a cleanse is what you actively do to help clear toxins out.
Detoxification itself refers to physical pathways within your body that clear out the toxins you’re regularly exposed to.
External toxins can include your environment, foods, cleaning supplies, makeup, and clothing, etc.
You also create toxins internally every time your body makes hormones, neurotransmitters, and chemicals – it’s a natural part of your body’s internal processes.
While nutrients bind to toxins for removal (hence the effectiveness of a cleanse), your detoxification pathways open up the doors so you can take that trash out. However, these pathways can become sluggish over time (for various reasons), which is why taking daily steps to improve this process is so important for your health.
WHY SHOULD YOU DETOXIFY
Daily detoxification is critical for keeping your system functioning as it should – from top to bottom. It affects digestion, mood, hormones, skin, bacteria, and sleep.
Overtime a build-up of toxins will lead to internal issues that will affect your health and eventually lead to disease.
If you think about it, the Standard American Diet (SAD) is full of toxins and deficient in nutrients which are critical to detoxification. Plus, toxins in the environment are basically unavoidable – so daily detoxification needs to happen.
Making a small daily effort to keep those pathways open so toxins can be safely and regularly eliminated, is a necessary part of your health.
HOW CAN YOU DETOXIFY
In order to detoxify, your body needs to be able to efficiently eliminate toxins, while decreasing the amount coming into your body.
While a cleanse can help with detoxification, focusing on improving elimination needs to be the first priority because a cleanse binds up the toxins, but you need to be able to remove them from the body through elimination also.
Detoxification happens through five main pathways – your bowels, kidneys, lungs, skin, and mind (there are secondary pathways as well, but let’s talk about these ones for now). Focusing on digestion (you should be pooping 1-3 times a day!), drinking enough water, sweating, and finding healthy ways to release stress and frustration help to improve those pathways.
Removing environmental toxins like cleaning products, plastics, conventional makeup, and unclean water and switching to safer options like norwex, glass containers, BeautyCounter, and water filters like Santevia, are important ways to decrease toxic exposure.
20 EASY STEPS TO DAILY DETOXIFICATION
Doing a cleanse once or twice a year is great (especially in the Spring and Fall), but before you jump into your first cleanse of the new year – I want you to work on improving your body’s ability to detoxify daily by tuning up your elimination pathways.
Here are some easy steps to make it happen:
1. Begin your day with a large glass of lemon water
2. Add more greens to your breakfast, or diet in general
3. Start journalling for 5-15 minutes each day to release any stress or frustration
4. Switch to more natural cleaning supplies (I’m all about Norwex!)
5. Go to bed before 11:00pm each night
6. Dry brush your skin before each shower
7. Add in a daily green juice (see recipe below)
8. Use a good quality chlorella supplement as an afternoon snack
9. Toss your toxic kitchenware start using more environmentally friendly products
10. Use deep breathing for your lungs and mind
11. Ditch social media for 5 days – it’s liberating!
12. Start buying organic foods
13. Drink green tea daily
14. Try a sauna to help you sweat out the toxins
15. Use activated charcoal to help bind up and eliminate toxins
16. Daily stretching and yoga help to clear your mind and expand your lungs
17. Chuck your mainstream hygiene and makeup products for more natural ones (I’m all about BeautyCounter!)
18. Drink lots of clean water (I love Santevia)
19. Add in dandelion tea into your routine
20. Talk to a healthcare practitioner to find out what foods and supplements would best support your own detoxification pathways
