6 Body Detox And Cleansing Myths And Facts

There are a lot of detoxing diets around as well as items or foods that claim to “detox” the body. Detoxification is designed to rid the body of unnatural chemicals and pollutants that are said to damage the liver, damage the kidneys, and help you lose weight.

Unfortunately, if detoxification were really all that helpful, everyone would be doing it.

Doing detoxification the wrong way can be damaging to your health. Before you get out the juicer and gather a bunch of healthy vegetables to eat at your next meal, you should really think about these myths and facts about body cleansing and body detoxification.

• Detox Myth #1: Detoxification is the quickest way to lose weight. The truth is that while detoxes actually do help you lose the weight very quickly, most of the weight lost is body water and the weight will come right back on as soon as you stop doing it.

 Detox can also help you lose stool through diarrhea and that will cause your weight to drop fast but as soon as you eat, the stool will build up again. You can lose only so much weight when participating in a cleanse diet. It is much better to lose weight the conventional way—through eating a low calorie diet and exercising in order to lose the pounds. It is much easier to stick to a diet this way as well.

• Detox Myth #2: Detox diets are better for you than a diet consisting of exercise and eating a fewer number of calories. While a diet claiming to be a detox diet is able to get rid of a few toxins from the body, it won’t help you lose a lasting amount of weight. It is much safer to eat healthy unprocessed foods and get to the gym for some exercise.

• Detox Myth #3: You don’t have to exercise with a detox diet. While it is possible to lose weight with a detox diet without exercise, you are losing muscle mass by engaging in a detox diet and avoiding exercise. If you want to gain or tone muscles, going to the gym or exercising at home or outdoors is the best way to keep those muscles healthy.

• Detox myth #4: You need to take it many strange juices and avoid eating food when detoxing. There are many healthy foods that will cleanse your system without needing to take in only expensive juices or eating so little food that you quit eating solids. Instead of juicing your way through a detox diet, you should eat a lot of sesame seeds, leafy green vegetables, and lemons (in a recipe or as the juice).

Green tea is another inexpensive thing to add to your diet that will clean your body out without starving yourself; it is a natural detoxification drink for those who really want to detox but don’t want to buy a juicer and juice up veggies and fruits.

• Detox Myth #5: Drinking an excessive amount of water will detoxify the body. This is a myth that has some partial truth to it. Water does help the kidneys and liver function better but if you drink too much of it, it can be dangerous to your body.

Too much water can negatively affect the electrolytes of the body and can cause your kidneys to work overtime trying to get rid of the excessive amount of water you are trying to take in as part of a detox diet. Drink plenty of water while dieting but don’t go overboard.

• Detox myth #6. You only have to go to the sauna to detoxify the body. While saunas are an excellent way to get rid of toxins after working out at the gym, this isn’t a way to have longstanding detoxification. If you spend too much time lounging in a sauna, it is just too easy to become dehydrated. In addition, trying to use sweat to get rid of your toxins, you can block your ability to detoxify your body over a period of time.

While many people take on these types of detox diets with the best of intentions, you need to know that it is possible for them to be dangerous to your body if you don’t do them right.

Start your healthy diet and exercise plan the right way, by lowering your caloric content, continuing to eat healthy foods in moderation, and exercising hard at the gym or in your home (or outside) in order to keep your muscle mass up or to tone your muscles as you help your body lose weight.

Is Juicing Healthy?

In the diet and health world, you’ll find many fads and trends. Juicing has become popular as a way to cleanse the body, lose weight, and greatly increase intake of vitamins and minerals. It’s always valuable to look at the science behind a diet trend, so just how healthy is juicing?
On the one side of the juicing trend, we have a lot of marketing effort. If fruits and vegetables are good for you and your body, then drinking them in one go each day, must surely be of benefit?

However, the science behind it is more complex than the marketing line, and the reality is a tale of both pros and cons that are well worth considering before integrating juicing into a diet regimen.

The Pros of Juicing

Many people juice vegetable and fruits on a daily basis without thinking too much about the pros and cons of the activity. However, it’s always wise to look beyond the marketing lines and examine the nutritional value and science behind it.
In this spirit, here are some of the health benefits of juicing:
• If your daily diet is poor, then juicing even on a semi-regular basis can provide your body some much needed nutrition. The striping away of much of the fiber content in fruits and vegetables by the pulverization process makes it easy for your body to absorb the nutrients faster, thus giving you a high dose of nutrients. These nutrients contribute to your overall health and well-being and boost your immune system.

• The pulverization of much of the fiber also unlocks some of the enzymes found in some fruits and vegetables and makes them available for digestion and absorption.

• If you juice regularly you’re habituating yourself to a dietary activity that is actually of great benefit. You’re thinking of your body, your health and what you’re putting into your body, and developing this habit is of massive psychological benefit, particularly for those who have had previously poor eating habits. This change in habit can lead to other positive life changing activities, including regular exercise and eating more foods of greater nutritional value. Many of us don’t eat enough fruit and vegetables on a daily basis, so drinking even one small cup of freshly juiced vegetables and fruits can help our bodies.

The Cons of Juicing

Despite the strong marketing line, juicing has quite a couple of pitfalls. Much of the nutritional science behind it is still being debated in diet circles, but there are some very specific problems that are slowly becoming more well-known.
Read on to find out some of the cons of juicing to put the debate into a sharp perspective:

• Juicing fruits and vegetables actually strips away most of the insoluble fiber content due to the pulverization process. Eating fiber regularly is essential to a smooth digestive process, and helps us to maintain a healthy weight because it causes us to feel fuller for longer.

• As our bodies absorb a super hit of nutrition due to the stripping away of much of the fiber, we also absorb a lot of natural sugar, this is especially critical when juice blends consist mostly of fruits. This creates an abnormal spike in sugar levels, which is clearly problematic for diabetics and promotes weigh gain. Over time, this excess of fructose sugar will cause us weight problems as they are converted to fats and stored by our bodies. In this way, regular juicing will have the opposite of a beneficial health effect. However, it is important to note that this sugar overload only occurs when fruit is the predominant ingredient, when you juice a ratio of 80% to 20% or 90% to 10% of vegetables to fruits this is not a problem.

• Juicing can be expensive, with a quality machine costing around $150 or more and the cost in produce, where sometimes many vegetables are needed to make just one glass of juice. This will be expensive over time.

Thoughts on the Health Benefits of Juicing

It seems as though juicing is here to stay, at least for the near future, but it’s wise to consider both the pros and cons behind it. To supplement an already poor diet, drinking juice can offer superior nutritional and health benefits.

Click here to discover the 50 Tips to Juice Like a Pro

Green Juice For A Healthy Heart

The term “green juice” can actually refer to a wide range of vegetables processed through a juice or blender to transform the solids into a smoother liquid. Though spinach and kale are among the most common options, it can also include Romaine lettuce, cucumbers, wheat grass broccoli, bitter melon and many others.

The emphasis on green produce comes from the fact that many of these items carry different types of essential nutrients and vitamins than options on the other side of the food color spectrum, such as iron, Vitamin K, and antioxidants.

In addition, greens with a darker color, such as kale, also commonly have higher levels of these nutrients than the lighter green vegetables, such as iceberg lettuce, making them ideal candidates for a healthy diet.

Juicing And Heart Health

Juicing is simply a more convenient way to introduce the foods into your diet, as many juices also include other, more palatable ingredients such as fruits and similar sweeter fare.

The specific benefits of drinking green juice depend on the ingredients. For example, a juice made primarily of kale delivers a high dose of iron, approximately 1mg per cup compared to 0.4mg per cup of cabbage, according to the USDA.

Iron in particular is essential to developing a healthy heart because it is a key element in creating hemoglobin, which is a component found within red blood cells that aids the distribution of oxygen throughout the body. If the body does not have enough iron to properly carry oxygen molecules out of the lungs, it cannot function properly and will eventually start to break down, leaving you feeling fatigued. Overworking your body means overworking your heart, which eventually leads to a weakening of the muscle that can result in heart disease or other ailments.

Another way green juice helps keep your hearth healthy is by introducing antioxidants into the system, which carry a wide range of health benefits overall.

In terms of the heart, antioxidants help to restore damage that comes from daily activity, strengthening the walls of your heart over time and allowing it to function more efficiently.

Many green juices also feature vitamins that help keep the heart pumping properly and strongly. Similarly, the nutrients and minerals in the juices can help improve circulation by expanding the blood vessels and lowering blood pressure, which allows the blood to flow more smoothly throughout your body.

Green juices also help introduce fiber into your diet, which are essential to a healthy heart because they can lower blood cholesterol levels. High cholesterol causes the heart to work harder than it needs to pump blood through your body because it literally blocks the passageways in the circulatory system.

Overworking the heart, combined with the lack of oxygen and buildup of toxins due to poor blood flow, can result in a heart attack or similar issues. The fiber in the green juices helps ensure proper blood flow and thus keeps your heart and body functioning normally. Fiber also helps combat other conditions that can lead to heart disease, such as obesity or diabetes, offering an additional layer of healthfulness.

Green juice is low in calories and makes a great addition to a sensible low calorie diet in support of a healthy weight, which in turn realty benefits heart health as both obesity and overweight are two of the biggest contributors to heart disease, heart attack, and premature death.

Regardless of the types of vegetables, you put in the juice or how often you drink them; they are most effective when combined with regular exercise and an overall balanced diet.

Click here to discover the 50 Tips to Juice Like a Pro

Is Alcohol on Paleo Diets Banned?

When the weekend hits, it’s natural that you’d want to relax and have some fun. For many people, that includes heading to a favorite hangout and having a few drinks. You wouldn’t need to give much thought to what you’re drinking unless you’re on the paleo diet.

On this diet, you’ve noticed that you feel better and look great, but your eating habits have started affecting your ability to eat or drink whatever is offered when you do go out.

So does this mean that if you’re on a paleo diet that you can’t have any alcohol? No, that’s not what it means at all. Being on the paleo diet means you just need to be aware of the choices when you do drink.

Some drink choices are high in sugar content and can also affect your weight loss efforts, your healthy living efforts and even your fat loss. There are many choices that don’t affect a paleo diet and those are the drinks that you’ll want to consume.

What you do need to know is that alcohol is not paleo. The reason that it doesn’t qualify is because the ingredients don’t fit paleo guidelines as well as being unhealthy for your liver.

But that doesn’t mean every kind of alcohol is off limits. With moderation, you can have alcohol while you’re on a paleo diet. If you want a drink, one of the best choices you can pick is to have a glass of wine, but not all wines will be good for a paleo diet.

Wine is recommended by doctors for good health if it’s red wine. This kind of wine offers many health benefits such as helping to protect your heart and bringing down high cholesterol levels.

Out of all the alcohol options you can choose from, red wine is the most widely accepted when you’re on a paleo diet. If you love beer, then you’re going to have to learn to prefer another type of alcohol because beer isn’t compatible with a paleo diet.

It contains grains like barley and hops. Plus, beer is pretty high in sugar even if it’s light beer. If an alcoholic drink is more grain based, then you want to stay away from it. You want to pay attention to preservatives and make sure that the drink has the least amount of sugar possible.

You can have vodka as long as it’s not grain based and you can also have rum and tequila. You’ll want to stay away from bourbon and whiskey. The best way to include alcohol in your paleo diet though, is to drink in moderation. Consuming a lot of alcohol adds extra sugar and empty calories to your diet.

Click here for one of the best current resources about the Paleo Diet

Paleo Diet Eating Out Tips

When you’re eating following a paleo diet, it’s not that difficult when you’re at home. You’re the one who buys the food and prepares it, so you know what’s going into your body.

But when you eat out, you don’t get to control the foods bought, the way it’s prepared or the choices offered to you. That doesn’t mean that you can’t stick with a paleo diet when you’re eating away from home.

You can still follow this healthy way of eating whether you’re eating at a restaurant near your home or travelling on the road. It can help to plan ahead. If you know where you’re going and what food options will be available to you, then you can know ahead of time what you’re going to be able to order.

Learn what ingredients come with the meal you’re going to order and plan around the ones that aren’t paleo friendly. Don’t set yourself up for discouragement by expecting that you’re going to be able to find 100% perfection with paleo eating every single time you dine out.

Instead, opt to make the best possible choices based on what you’re faced with. When you’re at the restaurant, choose the meals that offer you the best paleo friendly choice. Some of the meals you’ll find will have side items that aren’t healthy and aren’t on a paleo diet.

This is when you can simply ask if you can exchange one side item for one that is paleo friendly such as choosing to have a vegetable instead of potatoes covered in some kind of sauce.

If at all possible, make sure you’re not too hungry when you go to a restaurant. This can make it too easy for you to forget what you should eat and order anything so that you take care of those hunger pangs.

So either have a light snack before you leave the house or eat a paleo friendly snack in the car while you’re travelling before you stop to eat the meal. Many gluten free meals are often paleo friendly.

So if in doubt, order gluten free. Also, look for meals that say they’re an organic choice. Most organic meals are also paleo friendly. If your only option to eating out as you travel is a burger joint, order a burger but take off the bread and just have the meat, lettuce and tomato.

Or, add a side salad and have that without dressing and eat it with the meat. Since some restaurant salads can contain ingredients that aren’t paleo friendly, you can always build your own salad.

Also, if you are travelling and don’t see a healthy option, some grocery stores have a deli and sandwich section. You can ask for individual bags of the vegetables that are put on the sandwiches and top it with some roasted chicken.

Click here for one of the best current Paleo Diet resources

Does the Paleo Diet Help You Lose Weight?

Going on a paleo diet offers you a lot of benefits. You can stave off certain diseases, stop inflammation and lose weight. It’s because of these benefits that many people choose this diet over other ones.

One thing you’ll hear over and again about this diet is that you don’t have to count calories. This might shock you, but you don’t. However, that doesn’t mean that you can eat everything you want and consider it free foods that won’t count.

Even though the foods on the paleo diet are healthier, better for disease fighting and lower in calories, these calories can still add up. Because the paleo diet focuses on more natural foods and a more natural way of looking at the food, you will lose weight.

Like all diets, though, you can’t expect to lose weight overnight. You will lose it but it’s not going to be in the blink of an eye. So you need to determine up front that you’re aiming to change your lifestyle and focus on losing weight and keeping it off rather than quickly dumping weight.

You lose weight on the diet because the foods that you can eat are more nutrient rich than calorie rich. You should avoid grains and sugar. You also need to stay away from dairy and certain types of oils.

What you can have are fish, meat, vegetables, fruits and foods that are good for you. These foods, when combined with eating when you’re hungry and stopping when you’re not, work together to eliminate excess weight.

What you have to remember when it comes to eating on the paleo diet is to focus on foods that are real. If the food comes in a jar, box, can or bag, look closely at it for ingredients that are unhealthy and can sabotage your weight loss efforts.

One thing that might surprise you about eating on a paleo diet is that while you can still have plenty of different types of fruit, you want to be careful not to overdo your fruit consumption.

Fruit can be high in natural sugar which can quickly lead to you getting more sugar in your diet than is healthy. Natural sugar spikes your glucose often higher and faster than processed sugars do.

Make the main focus of your diet one that’s rich with plenty of protein and vegetables. You can have carbs when you’re on this diet, but the amount of carbs that you eat should be considered in proportion to your lifestyle.

If you’re sedentary, then you should pay more attention to your carb intake. Remember to choose the foods that offer you the most nutrients for what you’re eating. And watch your hunger cues carefully to see if you’re eating out of habit or true hunger.

Click here for one of the best current resources about the Paleo Diet

Benefits of the Anti Inflammatory Paleo Diet

Dealing with inflammatory issues is never fun. You can often develop inflammatory health problems because your body’s response system begins to attack the body. In many cases, you won’t even know what’s going on until you start to develop symptoms.

Inflammatory problems are on the rise and much of this can be traced back to the foods what we consume. You might not know that there are foods that can cause an immediate inflammatory response within your body, but there are.

What you eat or don’t eat can make a big difference in your symptoms and in the way that you feel. There are multiple benefits to changing your lifestyle to include an anti inflammatory paleo diet.

You can benefit from improvements in any of the glands that often struggle due to inflammatory responses. This would be things like the thyroid, adrenal glands, the digestive track and more.

Regardless of whatever inflammatory problem you have going on in your body, this diet can help. When you eat this type of paleo diet, it directly targets the problems that cause the inflammation within the body.

When you follow an anti inflammatory paleo diet, it gets to work relieving the symptoms associated with the inflammation in your digest track because you’re no longer putting foods into your body that can trigger a flare up.

The diet soothes the inflammation from head to toe. This process of elimination and addition of foods that work to restore your body’s health can prevent many inflammatory issues from recurring.

You’ll have to let some foods go when you follow this type of diet because they contribute greatly to inflammation. Even having small portions of the foods that trigger the response can cause problems.

When you change your eating habits, you can enjoy better health. While many inflammatory conditions never completely go away, they can be successfully managed by using a lifestyle change with the paleo diet.

You’ll want to avoid foods that are processed like meats. These are packed with preservatives, colors and are often full of sodium. The chemicals in the process used to help the meat stay fresh longer can cause inflammatory reactions.

You can have meats like chicken, beef, turkey or pork as long as it’s not processed. In fact, there are a lot of meats as well as seafood that you can have on this diet. You can also have plenty of fruits and vegetables that have antioxidants that help to fight inflammation.

Stay away from sugars in things like sodas and syrupy fruit drinks. Avoid things like energy drinks because they’re also full of additives the body doesn’t need. Focus on what all you can add, rather than what you have to give up and you’ll feel relief from inflammation quickly.

Click here for one of the best current resources about the Paleo Diet

Basic Paleo Diet Rules

A paleo diet refers to the way that cavemen once ate. It’s a healthier, more natural way of eating than what most people do today. There are a few rules, but they’re simple and pretty easy to follow, which is one of the reasons the diet is so popular.

Plus, it eliminates the harried calorie counting, which is the basis of most diets that fail. Instead of focusing on the food itself, what the paleo diet does is it focuses on the person and the person’s natural drive to eat – or not.

The foods you should eat on this diet are in a healthier form, less processed – so you end up gaining more vitamins and nutrients, which helps your body fight inflammation and diseases.

The first rule is to eat when your body tells you it needs to eat. Don’t just eat because it’s a certain time of day. Listen to your body. It will let you know when it’s hungry. You need to eat protein in its natural state rather than processed meats.

It’s best to choose grass fed meats whenever possible. Eat what you need to eat to feel full and don’t fret over the size of the meat, how much of it you eat or how little you eat. Just consume the food until your body has had enough.

That means no longer hungry, not full or stuffed. You have to eat slower to give your brain time to catch up with your stomach. This way of eating frees you from constantly counting calories or measuring out portions.

On the paleo diet, it’s okay to eat the fattier types of meats in your meals. In caveman times, the people didn’t worry about the fats in their meats. Make sure that you eat carbohydrates as well as fats like olive oil.

You can learn to adjust your tastes to having natural oils on your foods and on things like salads versus having preservative heavy salad dressings. Fruits and vegetables are part of the paleo diet, but you’ll want to avoid buying the ones in the cans because there are unnatural additives with foods in cans.

Remember that on this diet, you’ll want to consume food in as close to its natural state as possible. You can have these foods in their fresh state or you can cook them. You can have nuts on the paleo diet, especially ones that contain plenty of the omegas.

But if you’re following the anti inflammatory paleo diet, you’ll want to either limit the consumption of nuts or remove them from your diet altogether since nuts can sometimes trigger an immune reaction that can cause inflammations.

Take grains out of your food intake, especially ones like wheat, barley and oats. Don’t consume products that are laden with sugar. If the food has been processed in any way, don’t have it.

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Withdrawal Symptoms

Have you decided to finally get rid of that addiction? If so than you might be interested by this article which was just published on the Healthy Living section of the Huffingtonpost blog:

Let’s face it: Any way you look at it, detoxing is not an easy thing to do. Whether you’re coming off cigarettes, sugar, alcohol or crack, who wants to do go through the intense cravings, the sweaty nights of lying awake, chills or the flu-like symptoms that can make you want to crawl up in a hole and die? I have experienced all of the above, and believe me I never want to go through that pain again.

In the early ’90s when I got clean and sober, after having used for years, it took a while for the fog to lift. However, when it finally did, I had a profound realization that was crystal clear: I wanted to help other addicts and alcoholics get clean as well. After taking a series of required courses I got a job as a counselor in a local detox center at Brotman Hospital.

While working there over the course of five years, I met many clients whose lives had been downsized to a pill, a crack pipe or a bottle of Jack Daniels. Others who laid in the fetal position in their beds, swearing they would never drink again. There were our frequent flyers and some we’d never see again.

We averaged about one death a month and those were just the ones we knew about. Others would simply go MIA, and when an addict goes missing, it’s usually not a good thing.

During that time one of the most common questions I was asked was, “What can I expect from my withdrawal?”

Here’s what the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) says about it:

Read on

Detoxing With Smoothies: The Way To A Healthier You

Have you been thinking about starting a natural body detox? If you feel fatigued day and night, sluggish or worn out and tired all the time, you might want to consider getting a natural body cleanser. A lot of folks, do experience these problems and just accept them as common everyday living, they don’t realize that these sensations are not normal in healthy individuals. It may be that your body is just trying to tell you something is not quite right. By using a natural body cleansing strategies, you are helping your body to purge the accumulated toxins and kickstart your natural digestive process.

What Are Smoothies?

Detox smoothies are the nutritious and delicious way of detoxing your body. Among all the detox drinks, they are one of the most preferred as they contain vitamins and minerals to function at its best.

fresh green smoothie with ingredients

Making Detox Smoothies

When you have the right ingredients, smoothies are easy to make. In this present times, it Is not only easy to discover the recipes that are required for good health, but also reasonable. The best thing about these ingredients can be found in powder form. These powders are easy to work with since they have all of the nutrients in the product and are not difficult to combine for the drink that tastes so good.

Power Foods For Detox

 All-About-the-Berries Smoothie: When it comes to detoxing, berries are your good friend because they all have the fiber and antioxidants. To purge toxins, and replenish your body, detox berries through a smoothie is just the thing your body needs. Blueberries, raspberries, and blackberries have a lot of vitamins.

Ginger Spice Smoothie: If you are trying to detox your body, Ginger root is a great way to keep you around. As far as flavor is concerned, ginger wakes up the taste buds and offers a power that are refreshing. Mixing it with cinnamon makes the detox smoothie a generous drink that gives anti-inflammatory benefits. It also kicks up the spiciness of the drink.

Green and Clean Smoothie: Smoothies of this kind is straightforward. The word green means the drink is incorporated with green fruits and some vegetable. Open your fridge and use anything that is green.

Extreme Detox Smoothie: Extreme is an intense word to use in a smoothie. This smoothie is labeled as a “kitchen sink” as it adds you in whatever you in your hand. Some of the foods that are presumed to work best in detox do not work well in a smoothie since most of them contains minerals and vitamins that support a healthy lifestyle.

Smoothie Detox has the power to cleanse the body of dietary and environmental toxins accumulated to lose weight or improve health. A detox diet minimizes the necessary intake of chemicals and emphasizes the foods that are high in minerals, vitamins and antioxidants. Additionally, smoothie detox emphasizes the foods that promote the elimination of toxins via excretion such as water and high fiber food.