Healthy Detox Diets - How To Get Started

Posted by Kym on June 17th, 2008 at 06:01pm

Some detox diet programs would have you cutting down overnight to a diet of raw vegetable juices accompanied by their recommended vitamin and herbal supplements. They require you to go cold turkey on caffeine, alcohol, wheat, dairy, salt, sugar, processed foods and many other toxin-laden or difficult-to-digest substances.

It’s plans like these that have given detoxification a bad name in certain medical circles, because they would make you feel very ill if you tried them.

A lifetime’s worth of pesticide residues, drugs and other poisons stored in the fat cells is suddenly broken down and released into the bloodstream, causing all kinds of unpleasant symptoms. These can seriously compromise your immune and nervous systems and interfere with the action of your thyroid gland, and you would have been much better off staying as you were.

A balanced and healthy diet

Another criticism that the medical establishment fires at detox diets is that they are lacking in protein and essential nutrients that the liver requires in order to metabolize food. In another article, we’ll look at how to select your detox drinks and foods to keep your diet balanced.

Quick-fix detox diets, like crash diets, are not successful methods of losing weight, because when your body is deprived of food it goes into starvation mode and will retain all the calories it can to supply energy. When you start eating normally again, your metabolism will still be programmed to retain calories and so you could put on weight very rapidly.

The first step in a gentle and natural detoxification program is to cut out any bad habits, such as smoking, excessive drinking of alcohol or caffeine, use of street drugs or over-the-counter medications, but don’t stop taking any prescription medication without discussing it with your doctor. Then start to look at the foods you eat and how you can start to adopt a healthy detox diet.

Tags: detox diet, detox drinks, healthy detox, natural detoxification, Toxins