Hidden toxins can be sabotaging your weight loss efforts (or weight maintenance efforts) and no one is immune to it no matter how clean you think you eat.
We’re learning that there’s a whole new content of chemicals called obesogens that are independent of the food we eat. These chemicals can trigger the body to go into a storage mode, which can trigger weight gain or prevent weight loss.
One way to flush out these toxins is by maximizing your fiber and reducing your fructose (sugar), both of which lead to gaining freedom from cravings. Being free from cravings makes it easier to be intentional about eating only the foods that serve you the most. This freedom helps you move toward effortless weight loss or maintenance, without struggle or strain. What a great thing right?!
However, there are certain things our liver and kidneys cannot process, especially when back loaded with toxin build up. To explain, what happens if you have a lot of dirt on your floor, have guests coming over and not enough time to clean it properly? You have a big rug on the floor, so what do you do with the dirt? You sweep it under the rug, right? You can’t see it. It’s still there, but at least it is hidden. That’s what our bodies do, too. The “under the rug” in our bodies is in our visceral fat. This fat can take on more toxins because they are less harmful when stored there. Our bodies do that intentionally to protect us. The consequence, though, is if too many toxins keep coming in, we may need more fat to store more toxins. The other consequence is our bodies do not want to break down fat when it’s carrying a lot of toxins. The body senses it will be injurious to us. The good news is this can all change when the toxins come out.
Experiencing aches and pains? Our connective tissues are also places where a lot of toxins get stuck. So, when we’re moving things through our bodies more effectively and freely, we have more mobility, less stiffness, and fewer aches and pains.
Detox Myths
Myth #1: Detoxing is really hard, and it has to make you miserable. We have this idea that cleansing involves diarrhea, skin eruptions, and all this terrible stuff. That is not a detox; that’s retox. That’s just your body recirculating wastes and having a hard time getting anything out, so it’s not productive. When a detox goes well, nothing painful or dramatic happens.
Myth #2: You detox once a year, and you’re done with it. While it’s smart to have strategies to take your load down by a bunch, your main objective is to have ongoing strategies. I call this pretox. Pretox keeps the junk from getting in your body in the first place. We are all exposed on a daily basis. (Quite literally, there are high amounts of DDT and other compounds in the Antarctic ice half a mile deep.) We cannot escape all of it, but we can escape the worst of it by having strategies to keep toxins from building up in our bodies.
Myth #3: Only some people detox because they have weird exposure at work, but most everyone does not. This is just not the case. Basically, if you answer ‘yes’ to one or more of these questions, “Do you have a pulse, and are you breathing?” then you’re at risk for carrying toxins in your body.
Journalist Bill Moyers wrote an exposé, called “Trade Secrets”. This was specifically about the plastic industry and plastic manufacturing. He had testing done on himself and others for over 300 different environmental chemicals. He found every adult screened for things like this had high levels of at least 290. Even though he had no unexpected exposure, he had the same high levels. So, we’re all swimming in this soup. Detoxing is not a once-a-year thing, and it doesn’t have to make you feel sick. It can be totally effective and totally easy.
Next week I’ll share some basic steps we can all take to pretox, avoid retox, and easily detox our bodies for high quality living.
Leave a Reply