The next time you pull into the service station to get gas think about this – the instant you smell the gasoline fumes your body and particularly your liver is working hard to detoxify the toxins that have just entered your system.
The livers first phase of detoxification is recognising the nasties trying to breach your internal environment and turning them into a water soluble solution to be readily excreted – this is why we vomit, foam at mouth, get the runs etc. Now what is interesting is this is a built in survival mechanism, basically there to keep us from dying if we induce the likes of poisons, venoms and so on. The problem is with the environment we live in today our phase one detoxification is literally running over time – pesticides on our food, pollutants in the air, chemicals in our water, the list really does go on and on. Although these things may not be potentially fatal in the dosages consumed, your liver doesn’t have the time to think about that, it has to react immediately in order to start the detoxification process to keep you alive.
Now moving onto phase two of our detoxification process, this is where all the binding and removal happens. Phase one prepares the toxins in to a form that can be readily removed, phase two binds to the toxins and moves them into a suitable destination to be excreted. This is one of the reasons an adequate fibre intake is so important – fibre binds to the nasties and keeps them moving through our digestive tract. It is important to note that phase two detoxification tends to get somewhat neglected. Phase one is busy running over time and with phase two being neglected the body has to find somewhere to store the nasties if it can’t release them from the system efficiently – unfortunately our fat cells have been deemed the perfect host.
Often you will hear people following detox programs complaining about how bad they’ve been feeling – suffering with mood swings, feeling tired, wired, headachy, lethargic and nauseous. But this is considered okay because they are dropping weight and apparently their body is detoxifying… well ‘newsflash’ – your typical liquid detox will support phase one detoxification however unfortunately because these programs often remove all meats which contain amino acids and there is limited fiber which are both imperative for phase two detoxification, the liver is processing all of the toxins but there is no binding and removal process going on. The toxins are simply circulating around their system causing all sorts of issues before they are re-absorbed and deposited! As for the weight loss, this is merely just muscle glycogen breakdown from no starchy carbohydrates or solid foods ingested. You are almost making your system more toxic.
Now that is just a very basic run down of how our detoxification processes work, there is very in depth and intricate systems operating inside of us 24 hours a day. Detoxing the body is not something we do for 7 days at a time and then expect everything to be hunky dory… detoxification is a process that we should be nutritionally supporting every minute of every day. The positive effects from this include obtaining a leaner, fitter, faster, much healthier body not to mention leading a far more enriched life!
