Why we all need to detox – Part i

Running retreats here in SW France since 2006, meeting and detoxing 100’s of women, I have learnt so much about how the body actually works and especially what works and what does not and why that body despite diets and regimes still does not release the weight.

Here is the first part of an in-depth article I wrote and had published in several magazines from Natural Health to Happinezz, Choice and so many more fine publications about health and wellness.

– Fiona Robertson explains why the best health and weight loss results come from a life-long commitment to cleansing and taking care of your emotional needs.

What I can uncover for you here is to open your eyes and mind to the fact that the traditional approach to losing weight and gaining more energy is doomed to failure because it is ineffective and built on false principles.

Most would agree if I said that smoking, drinking and eating junk food were the unhealthiest long term activity’s. However, consider the cellular damage of being at war with your body over a long period of time. Now that is an extremely unhealthy activity. Meaning that the head wants one thing and that the emotions want another.  Your head wants a healthy body and more energy and has an image of this to work towards. But your emotions are calling out for comfort and not some future hypothetical image of yourself. They don’t want to sweat it off and starve to get to this new healthy goal. So the battle between the mind and body is real and can be a long term and potentially a damaging practice.

Research has now shown that eating less calories and burning more calories are not enough on their own. 97% of people who go on a diet regain their weight within a year, the body wins every time. It basically comes down to two factors that can really help the weight to fall off.

No 1 is stress, Stress leads to a depletion of all the necessary elements needed for health. The essential enzymes are burnt out and this adds to the body’s acidity. When the body is acidic it will naturally keep some fat to store the harmful acid that may cause some serious damage to your organs. Like burning holes in the stomach or ……… The body’s no one goal is to stay alive. The root cause is the stress and what is called for here is to allow your body and mind to relax and download all the junk and have some major time out. When you give your body a complete and utter holiday the energy that is required to heal itself is available to get rid of the acidity (and therefore the fat). A period spent in detox when you abstain form strenuous activity and cleanse your digestive system will naturally help your body re gain alkalinity and therefore allow the fat to melt away as well as regain vital energy.

No 2 is toxicity, this is where we have consumed and are exposed to substances that are not able to be processed by the body especially by the liver and so these substances such as caffeine, alcohol, drugs, chemicals, junk foods, E-numbers are stored in fat cells.

When we start to abstain from our normal levels of toxin intake and start to take exercise we will very often begin to feel dreadful. Your body starts to break down the fat cells, which is after all what you need, however all those toxins are now free in the blood and will make you feel terrible. The eliminative organs are overworked and have a backlog to deal with which is potentially dangerous so the body kicks in and remember that the body’s No one goal to stay alive, It kicks in and we find we have eaten something sweet or heavy and the symptoms stop.

This is what can happen if your diet or detox program is not designed to help with the excess toxins in your blood steam.  A detox and cleanse program will enable your body to eliminate as many toxins in a week as your body can manage and will teach you ways to overcome the detox symptoms and not feel hungry. A detox and rebuild program will teach you how to strengthen and tone your organs so they can absorb all the vital nutrients the body needs for optimum health and sustainable energy and continue to help you slim down to your sexiest weight ever.

What lies deeper as we cleanse and detox our bodies.

If you have been following a healthy lifestyle for several years and have even done a couple of herbal cleanses or a juice fast or two you may well assume you are now as healthy as you can get or even consider yourself “detoxed”. I’m here to tell you that you are almost certainly not! There is more, so much more. How do I know that? Because I’m willing to bet you grew up on the standard, “socially accepted” fare and ate this diet throughout your teens, most probably your 20s, 30s and maybe even your 40s too, and quite probably even longer. This socially accepted fare would consist of microwave meals, highly processed food, meat, cakes and biscuits, fizzy drinks, packaged snacks and standard beverages such as coffee, tea and chocolate.  With not many raw fruit and vegetables added to it if at all.

If this is you, make no mistake: you could benefit from at least two “hard-core” detoxes a year, and a colonic every week for the rest of your life. Why? Because those years of toxic eating caused a massive accumulation of waste to be stored deep in your tissues, and that waste can only be released very gradually – as and when the colon is clear enough to take out more of it.

So no matter how long you’ve been on your junk-free diet, nor how many cleansing program’s you’ve done, there is much to gain from committing to at least two week-long detoxes a year. I guarantee you will still be releasing deep stores of old toxins from your tissues. That is why when we cleanse we can feel so uplifted.

We start life with a clean internal system. It is interesting to note that babies, birds and animals evacuate within 15 to 18 hours of every meal. This, however, is not the case for most of us, for numerous reasons. The human bowel is naturally meant to eliminate yesterday’s waste – not that from years or decades ago.

Even if you eliminate several times a day, every day of your life, and think your bowels are working efficiently, I doubt that you are getting out anywhere near as much as you have put in. Don’t agree with me? Here is a simple test you can do to find out. First thing in the morning, while still lying in bed, suck in your stomach as much as you can. If your mid section – the area from under your rib cage to your hip bones – goes concave, then you are empty. This is the area that houses your intestines and colon, and chances are you have enough old waste matter lurking there that your stomach will look more convex than concave.

Accumulated waste in the colon can affect any of our organs at any time. Organ tissues are only as healthy as the blood that feeds them and the blood is only as clean as the bowel from which our nutrients are supplied. So when we routinely take in more than the body has the capacity to process (and/or substances the body can’t easily process) this excess will start to build up not only on the walls of the colon, but eventually in cells and tissues throughout the body.

Most of our aches, pains, sicknesses and infections can be traced back to the health of our body’s “waste disposal unit”.The colon health expert Dr. Bernard Jensen identified and mapped the colon into 72 reflex areas that each correspond to specific organs and body parts – for example, the kidneys, liver or spleen and the neck, arms or legs. He theorized that old waste that has become toxic in the colon will affect the tissue of the corresponding organ or body part. Symptoms can include headaches, backache, mental fog, depression, swelling and inflammation.

What’s the matter?

What you ingested over the last four to five days that has not yet managed to leave you is known as normal waste matter. The matter that goes back a month or three, and which will have begun to embed itself in the intestines, is called putrefactive matter. This matter is still moist and it is really stinky stuff, as you can imagine. Slow cooking at 98.6 degrees for weeks on end will do that.

Then there is the even older waste, which has been polluting your insides for years. This is post-putrefactive matter. It is completely dry and tends to be black, dark brown, grey or white, hard like plastic or rubber, and it normally comes out in long strips. Juice fasting can eventually remove some of this, but more effective is a regular regime of psyllium and bentonite clay mixed with herbs, enzymes and a daily enema done for a week twice a year. This combination softens this old matter and sweeps it out of its hiding places.

Psyllium is the seed from the plantago plant. It can absorb ten times its weight in water, and as it expands in the body, it brushes and sweeps along the intestinal walls, taking old impacted matter with it. Bentonite is a volcanic clay that will draw toxins to it in huge quantities.

For optimal health, I recommend a week-long colon cleanse using psyllium and bentonite twice a year – preferably in the spring and autumn, when you will ideally be changing your diet to the new foods that grow in your locality. You will achieve the best results on a detox like this when you have been cleansing, eating raw and drinking juices for a while.

My eyes have changed colour since I started to regularly detox. I used to have dark brown eyes and now they have turned three-quarters green as the acidity and areas of toxicity in my tissues and cells reduces (and many who have undertaken a long-term cleansing regime report similar results). This has taken years and will continue to change, I am sure, as I keep to a pure diet consisting of fruit and vegetable Juices as well as a varied Raw menu of vegetables, salads, energy soups and plenty of fruits and a keep doing my deep tissue detox twice a year.

I still see old post–putrefactive matter leave me each time I cleanse, which is remarkable.

            Or is it – remembering I only started to cleanse in my late 30s?

Fiona Robertson

runs a detox retreat in Biarritz, South West France, where she guides clients through a week of purification and relaxation. Fiona is also the brains behind “The Home Detox Box”, a seven-day total body detox you can do in the comfort of your own home ***(https://fionarobertson.co/product/detox-diet-cleanse/ *** For more information see retreatbiarritz.com and homedetoxbox.com.