Whenever you feel sluggish, run down or you have noticeable ailments or discomforts, it's usually a sign that you need to detoxify your body at some level.
Over time, your dietary and lifestyle choices, as well as environmental factors, can all play their part in causing your body to store toxicity that can eventually manifest itself as dis-ease.
And even if you do all the right things throughout your normal day-to-day life, there are still good reasons to take steps to detoxify your body as an "insurance policy" from time to time.
In other words, you don't need to be overweight or sick to benefit from detoxing.
By having a clear understanding of the way that your body detoxifies and the key factors that support this process, it can help you dial things up or down as you feel the need, so that you can stay on track with your health and wellness goals.
Here, we spotlight the most important areas that can help your body efficiently detoxify, so that you can stay on top of your health and look and feel your best more often.
Reminder: Your Body's 4 Channel's Of Elimination
In order to naturally detoxify itself, your body relies on four main channels of elimination:
- Breathing
- Urination
- Defecation
- Perspiration
Through these key channels or "vents", your body pushes out unwanted waste.
However, when these channels are not adequately supported by your lifestyle habits, they no longer operate efficiently - and this is when toxicity can begin to manifest and cause you health problems.
These are the 5 main areas that can help you to best support and re-open these four channels in order to detoxify your body.
1. Daily Exercise
You might not think of it this way, but exercising is a form of detoxification for your body.
When you exercise, you use breath and you perspire when you move at a moderate level.
Not only that, exercise kick starts your body’s "in-built" detox processes by boosting blood flow and circulation and improving digestive function, which all contribute to waste elimination.
Just 20-30 minutes a day of moderate exercise can do wonders for detoxing your body. Further more, if you drink water before during and after exercise it helps your body support greater detoxification, by flushing out the liver and kidneys, helping you produce more sweat and to transport unwanted waste and fat from your body.
Learn more in Top Low-Impact Exercises for Health & Wellness.
2. Try a Fast or Cleanse
One of the most disruptive and effective ways to detoxify your body is to do a fast or cleanse.
Fasting is such a powerful way to detox because it involves abstaining from food for a period of time, giving your body the space to divert its available energy away from digestion to detoxification.
When you fast certain metabolic processes take place whereby your body begins to recycle cells and to mop up stored proteins that can cause you harm.
There are several ways to fast or cleanse including:
- Water fast
- Juice Fast
- Raw Food Diet
- Mono Diet
- Any combination of these options.
Short spurts of water fasting such as 1-2 days can be very effective for allowing your body and digestive system to completely reset and to push your body into ketosis, whereby in the absence of glucose, it begins drawing on fat reserves for fuel.
Extended periods of water fasting are also known to be effective for dealing with chronic health conditions, however this is best done under professional supervision.
Water fasting is also great for bouts of intermittent fasting, whereby you shorten your eating window within a 24 hour period e.g. 10am - 6pm. For the remaining 16 hours - other than when you're sleeping - it's best to consume only water to get the greatest benefits.
A juice fast is another option, and it’s typically easier than a water fast because it's less intense and a lot more interesting.
A typical juice fast relies on homemade fresh juices made from locally sourced fresh fruits and vegetables. Juice fasting can be done for multiple days at a time quit easily and without too much disruption to your lifestyle.
We recommend preparing your juice with a cold-press juicer wherever possible, because it does not destroy the "living" enzymes like traditional high-speed centrifugal juicers can.
Prepare your juices in advance, store them in glass bottles or jars in the fridge and when you consume them, space them 2-3 hours apart throughout the day. Raw juicing is a great way to promote detoxification, reset your digestive system, rewire your taste buds and to re-nourish and re-energise your cells.
There are many different recipes you can experiment with when embarking on a juice fast, however we recommend keeping it simple with recipes such as these:
- CABALA (Carrot Apple, Beetroot and Lemon)
- GREEN - (Apple, Spinach/Kale, Cucumber, Lime, Parsley & Ginger)
If you're short on time or need a back up plan, try our super handy bioactive RAW Juice Powders which are the next best thing and are loaded with nutrients and vitamins.
Importantly, a "fast" or "cleanse" does not always need to mean going without food. There are many short term "Detox Diets" out there that encompass foods such as fresh salads, raw fruits, smoothies and soups.
The key is to experiment with different types of fasts and cleanses based on where you're at at any given time and your overall goals.
Finally, when choosing to do any type of fast or cleanse, it's a good idea to consider doing a natural clay and fibre colon cleanse with a product such as our Cleanse Me if you want to get maximum benefits.
Prepared from a blend of Australian food-grade bentonite clay, ground psyllium husk, flaxseed and dried ginger, cinnamon and apple, Cleanse Me helps bind and release stored waste from your digestive tract so that you can get the most from your fast or cleanse diet program.
Learn more in Fasting: What You Should Know.
3. Eat Clean
Even though a fast or cleanse will net you results quickly and have you feeling better in a short period of time, there’s no point in doing it if you immediately revert to unhealthy eating patterns right thereafter!
Eating clean means adopting a clean-eating approach to your diet over the long term.
It's basically a lifestyle choice, where you become more conscious of the foods that you put into your body, ensuring the bulk of what you eat is fresh, locally sourced, seasonal whole food.
Remember, the less stress you place on your body and digestive system over time and distance through the foods you eat, the better it will function and the less toxicity your body will accumulate and store.
Never forget... You are what you eat!
And that means what you eat affects how you feel minute to minute, hour to hour and day to day.
When you constantly eat refined sugar, carbs, processed foods and animal products, you not only make yourself more susceptible to sickness and disease, you weigh yourself down, begin to feel tired, irritable, sluggish and run down.
Remind yourself that nature's table in the form of fresh fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, whole grains and legumes, contains everything you need for nourishment and sustained energy. Your only job is to incorporated more of these foods into your diet more often, which will ensure your body is naturally supporting and detoxifying itself the way that it should.
4. Stress Detox
It's very clear that the food you eat and your overall lifestyle play a big role in how you feel from day to day and the extent to which your body accumulates toxicity over time.
In addition, stress can be a significant factor that can counter much of the good work you do in the areas of nutrition and exercise, if it gets out of control.
Stress can manifest in areas such as finances, work, relationships and emotional trauma, which are all part of life's never ending challenges.
It's important to realise that stress becomes a form of toxicity in your body if you don't find ways to keep it in check.
For this reason, it's so important to manage stress through daily exercise, getting out into nature, being around happy, positive people, daily meditation and short spurts of daily mindset training by reading or listening to messages that give you perspective and inspire you.
Managing stress should be a life-long self care skill that you should practice daily.
Even a 30 minute early morning walk, 5 minutes of deep breathing, or a 10 minute daily meditation, can go a long way to helping you reduce stress significantly and release the intangible burdens that can weigh you down.
Learn more in 6 Effective Types of Meditation & How to Practise Them.
5. Increase Sleep
Most people don't associate sleep with detoxification, but so many vital restorative metabolic processes take place while you sleep, that it cannot be ignored in the detoxification equation.
With lives that are busier than ever, we think nothing of cutting out a few hours of sleep to get more done. But not getting 7-8 hours of sleep a night is one of the worst things we can do for our health and wellness. Sleep is when your body and mind can rest and recharge, not to mention perform vital processes that support the general elimination of toxic waste.
When you don't get enough sleep, you don't give your body enough time to perform its "living temple work" (the ancient phrase often used to describe the process of detoxification).
So if you want to ensure your body is running efficiently and not being a breeding ground for toxicity, getting plenty of sleep each night is key.
Turn off all electronics 30 minutes to an hour before bedtime, avoid caffeine and exercise at least 2 hour before sleep, and make sure your bedroom is set up to support a restful night's sleep.
Essential oils can help you achieve a deeper, longer-lasting sleep.
Learn more in Natural Ways to Promote Deeper Sleep & Improve Its Quality.
Extra Tips To Help Detoxify Your Body:
- Switch to natural products for personal care, cosmetic use and household cleaning. Many products come with hidden chemical ingredients that are adding to your toxic load without you realising it. Browse the selection of handcrafted natural options in our self care store
- Drink plenty of water every day - at least two litres or a full glass every hour, to support the flushing toxins from your body
- Include a selection of natural probiotic rich foods in your diet regularly to help ensure a balanced gut flora. Recommended foods include, olives, sauerkraut, kimchi, pickles, organic cheese or yogurt, kumbucha.
The Main Takeaway
What you eat, your lifestyle, environment and stress, can all have a big impact on the level of toxicity that builds up in your body over time.
For this reason, it's important to be conscious of how your body naturally eliminates toxins and to take steps as part of your daily routine to support detoxification.
Here, we've highlighted five key factors to help you achieve that and now it's up to you to ensure that you're doing all you can to embrace them for great ongoing health so that you can look and feel your best more often.
Tolman Self Care.
