Give your back a pat on the back. The body is a workhouse, cleaning your insides with more elbow grease than Mr. Clean on his strongest day.
Guess what?
If you’re reasonably healthy, there are no toxins floating around your body – and there never will be.
Assuming you don’t smoke cigarettes, consume excess alcohol and processed food, huff exhaust fumes all day along the roadside, or feel like that guy from Office Space in search of his stapler – you’re pretty much free of unwanted chemicals in your body.
The liver, in combination with the sweat glands and digestive processes is a finely tuned machine that chemically clears the insides every day.
Don’t believe the hype of people trying to sell you detox solutions. All you need is a clear headspace and a decent physical routine to live free of environmental toxins.
But maintaining a tranquil mindstate can seem impossible. And healthy habits are harder to practice than to wish for.
Can you do things to accelerate and amplify your natural detoxification processes?
Yes.
This post is going to give you the low-down on how to filter toxic thoughts and chemicals out of your body and out of your mind. You’ll be living easier and feeling flawless in no time.
1️⃣ Start Fasting
Your body and mind function at a higher level without food in your stomach. The longer you go without food, the more refined your bodily processes become.
Why?
Fasting boosts neuronal autophagy, the process in which cells recycle the waste material.
This burns through all remaining nutrients and cleans the body out, emptying the energy stores and completing the detox process.
Does fasting do other amazing things too?
Yes.
As energy stores deplete, your body thinks it needs to hunt for food. So it turns on the brain juice to help you become a food-finding machine.
During a fast, the brain releases more BDNF, or brain-derived neurotrophic factor. This neurotransmitter triggers brain actions responsible for learning, higher cognitive function, creating synaptic pathways, and regulating memory.
Not only do you get smarter, but you get fitter and tougher.
The “fasted state” that arrives after the postabsorptive state has been documented to both burn fat at higher rates (the backbone behind intermittent fasting) and give your body a much needed rest. After all, your organs don’t have to process all that food. If you’re eating processed food regularly this is majorly important.
Give your insides a rest. Fast for a day.
Or just micro-fast – cut down to 500 calories one day a week. National Public Radio has repeatedly reported upon the significant results of this practice, popularized by The 5:2 Diet.
Micro-fasting has been shown to improve weight loss, boost insulin resistance and make practitioners more productive and focused.
All this while improving the hardiness of cells and increasing resistance to illness and diseases.
Mark Mattson, who performs research for the National Institute of Aging, says that when we go without food, fat is allowed to convert to compounds called ketones “Which have beneficial effects in making neurons more resistant to injury and disease.”
So you more powerful at fighting off toxic disease agents in the future.
Fasting for the win!
2️⃣ Meditate
OK, I lied. Some things in your daily life are truly toxic and can’t be handled by your liver, your sweat glands or your skin. I’m talking about stress.
The mind body are connected. Both suffer from excesses of stress, a byproduct of daily life which will damage your body and mind if not handled properly.
Maybe you’re zen-like already. Or maybe you light a stress candles in your car during the morning commute.
Odds are, you feel needlessly stressed by trivial matters every day. What’s worse, it’s the same, ahem, stuff but on a different day.
If you never get a chance to relax, the mind gets muddied by loops of negative ideas. It’s comparable to wiping a clean surface with a dirty towel. Meditation gently soaks and wrings out the mind, cleaning away unpleasant thoughts and squeezing out dirty feelings. A clearer state of mind is both more enjoyable and more productive.
To meditate, think about nothing. Just like fasting removes the physical strain upon the body created by processing food (digestion creates cortisol and acid), meditation removes the strain of thinking from the mind.
The result is a feeling of peace, wellness and stress-free life.
By doing nothing. Exactly nothing. Well, breathe deeply and sit up straight. But that’s it.
Watch your thoughts like they’re on TV. Like you’re counting sheep. Don’t judge or react – just observe. Liberating your monkey mind from the need to assign meaning to ideas, to feel one way or another about events is what creates the instantaneous benefits of meditation.
The benefits of mental peace are as integrally important as physical cleanliness.
Your body will benefit from reduced levels of toxic cortisol – the killer stress hormone – which causes cancer, inflammatory diseases, chronic unhappiness, anxiety and depression.
To start today, sit for 10 minutes by yourself and decompress. You’ll sleep better and feel better tomorrow all day.
Lather, rinse, and repeat.
For a better life.
3️⃣ Go Do Some Yoga
Have you ever seen a stressed-out yogi?
Have you ever seen an unhealthy and overweight yogi that looked full of toxins?
Didn’t think so.
As a form of moving meditation, yoga is a way to unite the peace of mind with solidarity of the body. A yoga practice has been shown to immediately reduce stress levels and give practitioners a more peaceful, detoxed life.
Yoga has been practiced for thousands of years and it’s detoxifying benefits are beyond a doubt. Visit the oldest civilizations in the world and you’ll see yoga at work.
Good yoga classes are designed in a sequence to provide a multitude of physical benefits to the body and mind:
- Contortion postures wring out the organs, massaging the toxins from your insides using the body itself
- Blood flow increases and breaks apart scar tissue, restoring movement and activity to areas that have been shut down (thanks to the processes of vasoconstriction and vasodilation)
- Durations of deep breathing calm and focus the mind and relax the body, which increases levels of serotonin, dopamine and other positive-affect neurotransmitters
- Hormone levels from the endocrine system become balanced, which helps regulate mood, growth and development, tissues function, metabolism, and sexual function
Yoga is your best long-term practice to remain 100% detoxed.
The sweat produced in hot yoga classes is also tremendously helpful with detox process, as it carries chemicals expelled through pores away from the body. Hot yoga also creates a false fever in the body, prompting the body to increase white cell count which mean that your immune system is improved by doing yoga. Increased temperature is one way the body fights off viruses and bacteria.
4️⃣ Sweat More
You may think it’s icky, but you need it to clean yourself from the inside out. Sweating is like showering from the inside out.
Like yoga, the benefits of sweating – from exercise, to a sweat lodge, to a sauna – has long-standing benefits known by countless generations worldwide.
According to research by the journal of Environmental and Public Health:
“Sweating has long been perceived to promote health, not only accompanying exercise but also with heat. Worldwide traditions and customs include Roman baths, Aboriginal sweat lodges, Scandinavian saunas (dry heat; relative humidity from 40% to 60%), and Turkish baths (with steam).”
The same research also finds that toxins such as arsenic, cadmium, lead and mercury are excreted in sweat:
“Sweating is not only observed to enhance excretion of the toxic elements of interest in this paper, but also may increase excretion of diverse toxicants, as observed in New York rescue workers, or in particular persistent flame retardants and bisphenol-A. …Optimizing the potential of sweating as a therapeutic excretory mechanism merits further research.”
Sweating is a sign of a healthy, fit body so don’t feel ashamed to get all shimmery next time you’re in the gym. Ladies, you’ll glisten. Guys…you’ll look like a hard-worker.
5️⃣ Drink Water Now
The solution to pollution is dilution.
If you’re not drinking enough water, you’re effectively detoxifying your body. This is because you’re retaining body waste from cells that would normally be diffused with H2O intake and released through urine.
Every body part in the human anatomy is made of water.
Missing out 8-10 glasses of water a day predicts a reduction in overall body efficiency and a relative increase in carried toxic byproducts.
Rejuvenate your organs (especially the liver and kidney) with water to help them function properly. You will feel the immediate benefits.
6️⃣ Use Coconut Oil
Aside from being a delicious, affordable and versatile dietary staple rich in omega-3 fatty acids, coconut oil helps you stay free of toxins.
Being rich in omega-3 fatty acids, it makes an amazing replacement for corn oil, safflower oil, sunflower oil, and other omega-6-heavy cooking oils that are thought to cause inflammatory diseases. It’s not that these products are themselves dangerous, but when consumed in high amounts proportionate to omega-3s, scientists believe body acidity and disease are the results.
Inflammatory diseases may be the direct result of an imbalanced diet that’s reliant upon processed agricultural oils (used to fry food, create processed foods, cook in restaurants) that were not present in our diets before the industrial revolution.
Rates of inflammatory disease was significantly lower before machinery made gathering and processing large quantities of grain possible. Our nomadic ancestors show zero evidence of suffering from today’s modern ailments – and vegetable oils, and omega-6 imbalances, are thought to be the cause.
Keep the omega-3 intake up. And maybe get a coconut oil massage to relax.
7️⃣ Eat Organic
Today, we spend the least amount of money on our food of any civilization in recent history.
How?
Massive commercial agriculture operations.
These businesses, part of giant food conglomerates like Kroger, don’t just sell the food they grow, but also own the processing plants that create our favorite, low-cost processed foods. These corporations then stock the shelves of your local grocery store.
The grocery stores they own.
Vertically integrated systems like these allows food corporations to deliver cheap, consistent food to consumers. Paying less seems great – until we consider this is made possible.
Toxic chemicals are used to helps plants grow, animals produce more meat and fend off disease to protect supply lines.
Pesticides, herbicides, GMOs, hormones, antibiotics: these additives find their way into your food. And then directly into your body.
Do you want to eat the herbicide used to kill weeds in the corn fields? Or ingest the pesticide poison aimed at protecting against insects? Such chemicals sit on the skin of your produce and fruit in the store for weeks, slowly seeping into the skin you take a bite of.
Do you want to consume the hormones designed to make cows fatten and chickens grow at abnormal rates? How about the antibacterial drugs designed to the kill the bacteria and viruses the livestock carry from as a result of eating GMO food? Do you feel safe eating genetically altered food made by scientists in a lab?
If you answered no to any of these questions, eat 100% certified organic food. 100% organic food is guaranteed-free of all these unwanted chemicals.
It will cost more, yes. But ask yourself: how much do I care about my health? What can be the long-term damage caused to my brody from eating chemicals every single day for my whole life?
Stay detoxed by avoiding toxins in your food. Because you are what you eat.
The Last Word
Detoxing is about mind and body clarity. Keeping your insides clean and healthy is mostly about how healthily you eat and drink. Engaging in healthy practices like fasting and yoga keep the body humming along in an optimal state. Stay free of toxic stress by meditating and getting adequate exercise, allowing your mind to forget the worries of the day. If you practice these detoxifying tips every day, you will feel amazing: guaranteed.
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