Top Ten Ways to "Detox"

I don't really believe in the commercial description of detoxing. "Take this product, flush all the toxins from your body and lose 51 pounds in 3 days!"

Ew. So wrong. Not good.

These products are things like juice cleanses, pills and really, really restrictive diets. You might lose a few pounds of water weight but here is what really is going to happen:

-You'll feel like crap

-You'll eat too little and starve for a few days

-You'll put all the weight back on right after because it was water weight.

-You might go through caffeine withdrawal, so headaches are common.

-Perhaps a bunch of other symptoms because your body just went "What are you doing?!?"

So why this title then? I mean, don't your liver and kidneys do this anyway? Isn't that what they're there for?

Yup.

So, during a time of "detox", here's how to do it right:

The rationale is that we are going to engage in behaviors that will nourish our systems and allow our liver and kidneys to do their job without further taxing them. Let the organs clean your system unhindered.

Make sense?

I ate a lot of bad food this weekend. I do that on holidays. Life is too short to eat boring food.

(Ooh. I like that. I'm gonna say thay more!)

Anyway, I eat the food on holidays because I know once the leftovers are gone, I'm right back to uber-healthy yummy food, guilt-free.

So this week is detox week. Here is what I'm doing to reset myself:

1. No alcohol.

2. No dessert, except maybe the chocolate chips, but I may forgo that too. I don't feel like it.

3. Upping water intake.

4. Easy exercise. Walking, yoga and slower activity for a few days because YoT has me whooped.

5. Eating more vegetables, fruits and water-based foods. Because I feel very done with heavy food. Ugh.

6. Tracking food.

7. Eating clean. Nothing that wasn't prepared by me.

8. Giving myself a scheduled 15 minutes daily for self-care that isn't yoga.

9. Making sure I'm getting much more sleep than last weekend.

10. Clean something each day. My house is a wreck. No one has been around to tidy things up. So over the next week +, I'm resolving to tidy up something every day. Even if it is literally moving one object back to where it belongs. This is more for a mental cleansing, because if I dwell on this progress even a little, it's improvement in my mind, housecleaning level has gone up a notch, and that thing out of place won't anmoy me when I walk past.

Sounds pretty good, right? Think about this, what if this was how you were daily, and not just for a week or so? That's a pretty happy body.