Do you wonder if you should detox to lose weight and improve your health? Or do you long for sustained and effective weight loss? There are hundreds of detox packs on the market, many of which are clearly fads, ineffective and even dangerous.
Why should you detox to lose weight anyway? Your amazing body does an effective job of eliminating ‘toxins’ from our body every day.
This is a good question and one that I have been asked a lot. So today I want to give you 5 steps to detox your body for better health in addition to losing weight and reasons why you should detox to lose weight.
How The Body Detoxifies Itself
Before reading on it is important to note that the body does an efficient job of detoxing itself. No pills of diets needed! Here’s how:
- Kidneys – filter and expel toxins in urine
- Liver – filter and expel toxins in feces
- Sweat – lose excessive salts and some toxins this way
- Lungs – oxygenate our cells as well as expelling other gasses
What Is A Toxin?
A toxin is any substance that causes harm or irritation to the body. We are bombarded with toxins every day and so need all the help we can get to keep healthy. Here are some examples, and remember, these will affect different people in different ways:
- Nicotine
- Drugs – antibiotics, painkillers
- Household chemicals
- Air and water pollution
- Sugar, caffeine, alcohol
- Stress
- EMF and microwaves
- The list goes on…
Why Detox To Lose Weight?
Our bodies are made up of millions of cells and each one of our cells are surrounded with a fatty lipid layer. Yes fat is essential for our life, and this lipid layer is essential for each cell.
Since we are exposed to toxins every day, the lipids have a protective function in the body and store toxins so as to protect the body from harm. In addition to this toxic build up, if we don’t provide the body with the correct fats and nutrients the toxicity will build up – known as toxic overload.
Our body needs approximately 107 nutrients every day, including minerals, vitamins and essential fatty acids. If we don’t provide the correct nutrients, combined with exposure to every day toxins we can quickly become susceptible to toxic overload.
Nutritional Deficiency
In modern life we have a hard time avoiding toxins, and this is exacerbated by nutritional deficiencies in our diet. This is not your fault.
Modern farming practices make it harder to get nutrients through food. A couple of decades ago it was suggested that our soils had 70% less nutrients in them than they would normally have. Nutrient depletion in foods exacerbates the toxicity of our body, and even if you think you are eating nutrient dense diets this may not be as effective as it was say, 100 years ago.
Detox V Diet for effective weight loss
It has been well documented that we have got fatter. An obesity epidemic is upon us. Yet we have never spent more on health care! And why do most people who diet fail? And why do we get fat in the first place? Possibly due to indirect toxicity or a direct result of lifestyle choices.
The image above describes how this situation has resulted in the yo-yo diet and the multi-billion dollar industry that thrives on failure. As you can see we gain weight through poor diet and lifestyle. As we begin to lose weight our lipids essentially become toxic as the concentration of toxins increases. As a safety mechanism the body will gain fat to dilute the toxins. Have you experiences a yo-yo effect?
What I Do For My Own Health
I am a firm believer in nutrition for health, and as anyone who knows me will tell you, I certainly advocate the regular use of multivitamins and mineral supplements as well as fish oil and antioxidants.
I detox 3-4 times annually and this is how I do it:
1. I eliminate as many toxins as possible from my diet including wheat/gluten, sugar, caffeine, alcohol, red meat, dairy as well as chemicals in toiletries and my environment.
2. I have also tried a variety of detox products aimed at assisting the body to eliminate toxins. There are hundreds of products on the market and a lot of junk out there too, many of which may include herbs and natural ingredients such as psyllium husks to clear the system. Do your homework before falling for clever marketing.
3. I do take healthy bacteria supplement as well as approximately 1g of fish oil per percentage of body fat (up to 30% body fat) for 2 weeks, followed by a maintenance fish oil intake of 0.5g per percentage body fat daily all year. (Poloquin, Berardi)
4. I maintain the intake of a multivitamin and mineral daily all year.
5. I consume appropriate supplements to combat my deficiencies in my own real food diet. B complex vitamins, vitamin c and d, as well as magnesium ans zinc are commonly deficient in our population.
How To Detoxify – Your 5 Next Steps
1. Take the lifestyle questionnaire and take a screen shot of the results. Save the screenshot and date it. Take a picture of yourself on day 1, and log your metrics, weight and waist circumference, and body fat %.
2. Grab your free nutrition guide in the side bar and follow it for a 21 day detox before having a nutritional protocol for the next 90 days.
3. Re-take the lifestyle questionnaire and identify your key system weaknesses after 21 days. Take the appropriate nutritional supplement and real food nutrition to improve your health.
4. Log your weight and metrics every week – see your progress.
5. After 90 days take the lifestyle questionnaire again and see how you progressed. Take another picture and compare it.
That’s it! Whether you want to detox to lose weight or improve health by eliminating toxins, it may well be worth trying this protocol. It helps me and the feedback from my clients is positive too so its worth doing. Work on your health and you will see effective weight loss with no rebound.
And remember If you want to ask me about it please do comment below. If you feel you don’t want or can’t afford supplements, then that is fine and you will benefit from just the nutrition I advise. Thanks for reading and I hope it was useful. Nico