Detoxification: How to Do It Safely and Effectively (for Body, Mind, and Spirit)

Hi and welcome to how humans heal. I'm Dr. Donnie Wilson and today I am excited to cover everything you need to know about detoxification. That includes whether you're considering a physical detoxification, as in your physical body and or a spiritual and emotional detoxification. So we want to go into why you might be thinking about doing a detoxification. What is it? What does that mean? What does it include? Or what might you want to include in your detoxification and what to consider when thinking about doing a detox for your body and your mind and your spirit. So why do people detox in the first place? Uh, so whether we like to admit it or not, it's clear that as human beings we are affected by the stress that we're exposed to, including trauma, even from earlier times in our lives. Those stresses and traumas do affect us on a physical, emotional and spiritual level. Also, toxins from our environment, whether from air, food, water or other toxins like mold toxins affect us as well on all of those levels. And so are we affected by heartbreak and betrayal and also over consumption of various different substances that we might choose. Oftentimes I find that we over consume substances like food or alcohol or sugar or other medications or substances for that matter, when we are needing a detoxification, when actually we've been overstressed and maybe exposed to toxins. And we end up, I think, seeking out something to help us feel better and to kind of numb the discomfort, the emotional and physical pain. And we end up choosing substances that are even more toxic to our bodies. So just keep in mind, there's no judgment here. This is us as humans, a common human experience. We're going to have stress and trauma and toxin exposure and we're going to tend to want to choose something to help us through it. And so sometimes it's when we develop health issues, whether that's fatigue, anxiety, sleep issues, digestive issues, sometimes it's infections, recurrent infections, or chronic infections. A lot of times I'm helping with the virus, HPV in particular, when HPV shows up positive for women on a pap smear. When these things start showing up in your life, weight gain that you can't lose, or skin rashes, or the list goes on autoimmunity, then it tells us that there's unresolved stress, stress, trauma and toxins underlying. And so what I do as a naturopathic doctor who specializes in this area is I help people to bottom of that. Like let's sometimes we realize, hey, I don't Want to just become reliant on more and more medications and substances to deal with what I've been through. I really want to get to the root cause and resolve it so I can get back to feeling good and go on with my life without having to be depending on medications and other substances just to get through the day. Right? And so if you're listening and you're like, yeah, I really want to change things around, I want to effectively address the underlying cause, then this, you're in the perfect place because that's exactly what I love to teach. And what today I'm gonna teach you how detoxification could be a tool for you to consider. So what does that mean, detoxification? So first of all, it can mean literally getting the toxins out of our bodies. And so a lot of times when you hear about a detox, or sometimes it's called a cleanse, you'll see a lot of cleanses out there. A lot of times a detox or cleanse will involve, first of all, avoiding substances that we often over consume. Things like alcohol, caffeine, sometimes it's related to smoking or other things. Again, things that we tend to get into our routine. And yet if we overexpose ourselves to these substances, we know it can have a negative effect on our health. We know that alcohol, too much alcohol, is it really hard on the liver and can have a negative effect on your longevity. So it's like, okay, yeah, a little bit of alcohol, a lot of times it's a little bit of these substances is okay. Our bodies can handle it. But if we are overdoing it, even caffeine, you know, there's studies that show a small amount of, let's say coffee and tea. Expo tea for sure is a good. There's so much research on that. And a small amount of coffee is also good. It's from a plant, it's a plant based substance. It has some healing properties. But if we overdo the caffeine, it can also be too much for our bodies. And that's when it starts to lead to health issues. So it's all about realizing what's too much for you. And what I encourage you to do is ask yourself, am I choosing these even a food? Right? And we choose to eat more refined foods. High sugar, we start finding out we have sugar every day in different forms and in beverages. Too much sugar also disrupts our blood sugar levels, is very hard on our liver, and causes a lot of inflammation and decreased immune function. So we don't, we don't want that, right? We want to be able to say, hey, a little sugar's okay, but we don't. If we overdo it and we're doing it for the reason of trying to help us deal with the stress, how about we just help your body recover from stress? And then you're not choosing sugar for that reason or caffeine for that reason. Maybe you're having coffee because you enjoy it, but it's not something you're reliant on, Right? And so that's how I think about some of these things. But we also want to be thinking, hey, if we've been, we get exposed to pesticides from. If we're eating foods that are non organic, we get exposed to toxins in the air and sometimes in. If we're in a building that had water damage and mold exposure. So there's a. Or if we're on a lot of flights and we're getting exposed to radiation and toxins by being on airplanes, there's so many ways we can get exposed to toxins. Even on golf courses. There's a lot of toxins to manage a golf course, right? So you start to realize, oh my gosh, I am getting exposed to toxins. Even plastics from plastic water bottles, more so than we realize. So a detoxification can involve avoiding foods and other substances or even toxins in our environment for a period of time to help your body get it out. Because our bodies are built to most of these toxins, our bodies can process and get out. So we want to support that. And so detoxification can be all about helping to stay away from the things that add to our toxin load and helping our bodies process the toxins that are there, get them out. Because a lot of these toxins I just mentioned, once they get into our bodies, they can stay there. Like plastics and mold toxins, they stay in our bodies for decades sometimes. So if we can help move them out of our bodies, that's a better thing, right? So think about it as what can you stop putting in that's toxic and what can you do to help your body move the toxins out? And that's how we generally think of detox on a physical level, including what could we do to help your. We, we have built in detoxification methods in our bodies. Our body detoxifies. Well, think of first, it's through the liver, right? Our liver has these enzymes that metabolize toxins. And so we wanna help make sure the liver is able to detoxify in an effective way. And the Liver actually has two past two main phases of detoxification. So we wanna support both of those phases. It doesn't help to just support one and not the other one. So we wanna make sure we're supporting phase one and phase two of liver detoxification. And then what happens is the toxins go from the liver into our bile, which goes into our intestines. So how do the toxins get out of our body? They have to go out through the stool. So a key piece of a detoxification is going to be making sure that you have a bowel movement, at least one bowel movement every day, sometimes more than one, to help make sure the toxins are going out through the stool. Now, we also let toxins out or release them through our breath. So even doing breath work can help with detoxification, as can sweating. We release toxins through our sweat. So this is where exercise, and also the use of a sauna or heat therapy, where you're creating, making your body sweat for periods of time, can help you get more toxins out. And there's research behind all of this, but I just want you to start to get the hang of it. And also what's really important when you think of detoxification is making sure you get enough water. Really. Our bodies are a high percentage made of water when you think about it. And so we need to make sure we're consuming enough water so that we can also move the toxins out through the processing of water in our body and our cells and our tissues. And then, of course, it goes out through the urine, in the kidneys and the urine. So this is another way, you see. So our bodies, when you think about how our bodies were created and how they function, is to bring in what we need, like food and oxygen and, and light and sound, and to take out what we don't need. Right. So how do we help our bodies do that? First of all, we're going to help to decrease what's coming in that's overwhelming our bodies. And we're going to help get out what should needs to get out. Right. How to help our bodies do that. And part of detoxification involves nutrients, a lot of different nutrients. Actually, what they're doing is helping our liver to detoxify. So if you think about our vitamins, if you think about B vitamins, the B vitamins, they're completely involved in the liver's ability to detoxify. And I covered this in detail in A, is in an episode about methylation and the B vitamins. So Definitely go listen there if you want to learn more about B vitamins and how methylation helps us with detoxification and more also antioxidants. So if you look at a multivitamin, the first thing it has is going to be beta carotene and vitamin C and vitamin E and vitamin D and selenium and zinc. These are antioxidants. Let alone there's so many more antioxidants like CoQ10 and alpha lipoic acid Antioxidant. What does that mean? It means it's antioxidative stress and oxidative stress. I think of it as that's how stress looks inside of our cells. So when stress throws off the balance in our cells, we have a rise in oxidative stress, which causes damage to our cells and damage to our DNA. And we have not enough antioxidants to counteract it. So what do we do about that? Well, we can decrease the oxidative stress by removing the toxins and giving ourself lots of recovery time. And we can also raise the antioxidants by taking them even from a multivitamin or a separate supplement that has antioxidants in it. And then of course, we want to make sure you have enough minerals because that helps with your electrolyte balance. Having not only the water but the electrolytes helps make sure that that electrolytes and other substances can move in and out of your cells and out of your tissue efficiently. If we don't have enough electrolytes, we don't do our detoxification as efficiently. And then the other thing in the in supplements that we can find is amino acids and really also from our diet, right? So if you have a diet that has calci B vitamins, antioxidants, minerals, water, and also amino acids. Now, amino acids come from protein. In our diet, when the protein is broken down, it's broken down to amino acids. And the amino acids are key part of the detoxification in the liver. So we want to make sure you're getting adequate protein, adequate amino acids to help with not only detoxification, but so much more. Amino acids and protein are involved with making neurotransmitters and building muscle and so many things in our body. So we need to make sure in your diet that you have a healthy balance of protein, but also carbohydrates and fat, right? That's how our body gets the macronutrients we need from protein, carbohydrates and fat, and then from the vitamins, minerals, antioxidants electrolytes or minerals, all of that together. Our bodies need that in order to do all the stuff our bodies do, like making energy, helping us function, making hormones, detoxification and, you know, ants counteracting oxidative stress. We need all of that, right? But we, in our busy lives, we oftentimes are choosing foods that don't have very much nutrients in them. Or sometimes we're in our best effort, choosing maybe a diet that might not contain adequate nutrients in it for periods of time, or maybe we are not feeling well and we're not able to get all these nutrients, or when we're under stress and toxin exposure, we don't digest our food as well. So now we're not getting adequate nutrients from our food because we have leaky gut. And with leaky gut, we don't, we actually don't absorb our nutrients very well. So now we become, it's like, it's a vicious cycle. It just gets worse and worse. Stress causing leaky gut. We don't get the nutrients, we can't detoxify. We start to get more and more symptoms. And then we're like, what am I going to do now? And I can tell you, this is exactly the scenario that so many people who contact me needing help with their health, they've hit that point where they're like, I don't. Where do I go from here? It has spiraled into such a, a difficult spot. But I want to encourage you that it is possible. I've helped so many people get out of very, very difficult thoughts of their bodies, where we then can help your digestion heal, help leaky gut heal, help you start digesting food again, get your nutrient imbalances corrected, identify the toxins in your body, help you detoxify them, and get things functioning again. Amazing. The, the body has amazing healing capabilities, but it doesn't happen with a medication. So you're not going to hear this at the regular doctor's office. There's not a pharmaceutical for this. This is not part of standard medical care under your health insurance. I just want you to know that because I want you to be ready when you're in this place where you're like, what else can I do? You're at the point of where it's time to think outside the box of standard, standard medical approach and say, I need to take my health into my own hands. The thing is, is that I know a lot of you I hear from as well, who are researching detoxification on the Internet. And you'll find different programs out there. But sometimes if you don't have enough of a practitioner helping you, you could get yourself into a tight spot. If we make too big a changes too quickly, if we don't take into account everything that we need, and if we don't individualize it, all of this that I'm mentioning is very different for each individual because of your genetics, because of your nutrient status, because of your stress exposure. But you know which toxins you've been exposed to. We have, to me, we need to individualize it. Now, there are some things you can do as a general detoxification, and that's a good starting place. But I just want to let you know that if you've done some general detoxification and you still feel like you need to take the next step, then I definitely encourage you to know that that's a great first step, a general detoxification. And I'm going to share with you more what that should include. But if you're feeling like, oh my gosh, I'm to the point where I need more help, then contact me or meet with a practitioner like me who can help guide you to really individualize your detoxification. We can. For example, there's specialty tests to measure exactly which toxins are in your body. Is it high? Plastics? Is it high? Mold toxins. What, what toxins are high? For me, when I did this for myself years ago, I had high flame retardant levels from a mattress that had flame retardants in it. And so then once I know what kind of toxin you have, even if it's a metal, then I can guide you through the specific substances that help you detoxify efficiently without making anything worse. To me, that's the key, right? We should be able to help you detoxify carefully and efficiently without making anything else worse. So many people come to me after they've tried detoxification and felt worse. And that just says to me that we didn't have enough information and we weren't individualizing it to you. Different toxins require different kind of support to move them out. Some of them move out better through sweating and sauna. Others require glutathione. Some glutathione may be part of it, but it's not going to make the biggest difference. A lot of people will use binders, for example, which is binding toxins in the digestive tract to pull it out through the stool. For some toxins, binders are great. Different kinds of clay and.

Zeolite, and there's a ton of different binders you could choose from. But it's important to know not all binders work for all toxins. So I feel like it's important to know what you're trying to detoxify and then choose the correct binder. And I could go into this in more detail if you'd like. I could go into which binder to choose based on which toxin you're trying to get out. So this is to give you a sense of it. So this, you know, it's like, okay, there's a lot here, there's a lot we can cover and there's a lot to consider when you're thinking about a detoxification. And at the same time I think there's ways I don't want it to be overwhelming. I think there's ways you can start in a gentle way and at least get you headed in the direction of detoxification without feeling like you have to be in a, in deep trying to learn all this stuff and navigate it on your own. So what would we be thinking about to include even in a starting detoxification? Even if you're just like, okay, I'm, I'm partway through the year, I feel like I need to help my body reset. I'd like to start to explore this, this concept of detoxification. What should I do? I. Right. So, and this is something that I'm been doing for many years and also am designing as a 14 day detoxification that you can follow with me. So you're going to be able to see that as an example. But first let me talk you through how I think about what to include in the 14 day detox. Okay, so I'm going to use my first of all my CARE acronym because CARE can do can help us in so many ways. It's a structure, an acronym that helps us to just all the time, what should we be including every day? Right. So C is for clean eating. So whenever you're gonna do a detox or get a reset, think, come back to your diet. How can you shift toward what would be considered more clean eating? That might mean avoiding or at least decreasing your alcohol intake for a period of time, decrease or avoid caffeine. Uh, could also sugar, which we as I talked about is, is one of the things we get exposed to that's very inflammatory. Uh, also very common now is to avoid gluten and dairy, which are two of the most inflammatory foods. So I agree with that. I think that if you're gonna start somewhere and you've had a lot of gluten and dairy in your diet. That's a good place to start, is to say, let me eliminate the two most inflammatory foods, gluten and dairy, which is from cow milk. Anything from cow's milk. There's something called an elimination diet, which is when we guide through, usually it's even in a medical setting we're having you avoid the, maybe the most, the top five to eight inflammatory foods. So in addition to avoiding gluten and dairy, this might also include avoiding eggs and nuts and soy and you know, then like sugar and alcohol. Right. So it's like, it's a, it's an, called an elimination diet because you're removing the inflammatory foods for usually at least three weeks and then you're reintroducing them one by one to see how you feel as you reintroduce them. So that's another way to think about this that you'll see is as an elimination diet. But then also you would want to try to, as best as possible choose organic foods. So you're avoiding toxins. You would be, um, probably mostly drinking water or herbal tea. And then we want to think about the fasting piece of this because some detoxification also includes fasting. So this could be intermittent fasting, which, intermittent fasting means your overnight fast. How long between your last meal of the prior day and your first meal of the next day. And for a lot of people that's very easily 10 to 12 hours. Right between your dinner and your, your, your last meal last night and your first meal today is if you figure it out, you might be like, oh yeah, I ate last at 7pm and I ate again at 7am That's 12 hours. That's an intermittent fast. Sometimes when we're trying to do more cleansing and reset, we might try to extend that to 14 hours or even 15 hours. Again, just like everything else. I want to caution you because if we, there's such a thing as too much of a good thing. Even if it's fasting, if we overdo the fasting, it can become a stress. So you always, with all of this, you want to be listening to your body. And if you feel worse at any point, my rule is if you feel worse, you need to step back and evaluate and decide what needs to change because you should not have to feel worse in order for a detox to work. We can also think about something called fasting mimicking diet where you, you can still eat, but you, it's a lower, lower calorie diet and it, it creates a fasting effect in your body because yes, there are fasts where you completely are just having water for several days. But again, to me that could be too extreme, that could be disrupting your hydration and your cortisol levels. And, and oftentimes that extreme of a fast is too much. So if we can do a fasting mimicking where we still have some consumption, usually it's a little bit higher carbohydrate.

Diet, then we can get a fasting mimicking effect to happen. And there I can give you an example of a, a product like that that guide you through that. And then also I'll be, I can show you how I implement that in my 14 day detox. So those are some of the dietary things to consider. Um, and then what you want to do also is think about do you want to add some different nutrients or herbs or, you know, antioxidants and liver support to your detox or cleanse? Right. So if you want to be saying, hey, I want to give my liver more help, I'm going to take in some of the B vitamins, antioxidants, amino acids, herbs that help the liver like milk thistle, green tea, curcumin. There's a ton of research on all of those herbs that help with the liver detoxification. Maybe we need to make sure your bowels are moving daily. If that's not the case, how do we make sure you're staying hydrated? Right. So there's things we can add to the detox to make even more of a difference to help move these toxins out. So that's what I have put together in my 14 day detox kit. It's a kit that has a protein powder. There's actually two options on the protein powder. One is plant based, so it's a pea protein powder. The other one is animal based. It's a, essentially a collagen protein powder. And they both have phytonutrients, so from vegetables and fruits in organic as possible form in the protein powder. So you, you could use this as a shake for two of your meals per day during the 14 day detox. So now you're definitely getting to clean eating because now you're getting your protein, fat and carbs from a protein shake that contains the nutrients and detoxification support that you need. And then it also comes with a couple capsules, one that is antioxidants again helping your body to counteract oxidative stress and protect you from toxins. And also an amino acid formula to help your liver to detoxify. So this 14 day detox you can do in combination with the diet changes. And I want to especially cover the. The idea of an emotional and spiritual detox because this shows us where we can bring it all around. Instead of just focusing on the physical, we can also focus on the emotional and spiritual. And so there's different ways that you could do this as well. And I'm happy to guide you more. I have been working with this in different forms and traveling around the world for many years and especially the work that I've done in Peru and working with a shaman and also working with spiritual healing as well in other trainings that I've completed. And so I integrate all of that into the 14 day detox to guide you how you can start to address some of the emotional stresses and how that's affecting your whole body as well as the spiritual level. What does that mean to connect with ourselves in a spiritual way? I mean, a lot of times. And I have other podcasts on spirituality, so I encourage you to go listen to them, to go in more detail about spirituality, but just to say that if you feel like you could use a chance to reconnect with yourself, with your purpose, with your, what you value about yourself and the sense of self love and self connection, then that's where spirituality can really make a difference. And again, sometimes the stresses that we're exposed to in our lives have to do with the emotional and spiritual level and combining that with the stresses on a physical level so we can address all of them at once without it being overwhelming. That's the key to me. I want to help you recover from stress without causing more stress. So I want to come back around to the acronym care. We started with clean eating, then the A is for adequate sleep. So in the anytime you do a detox, I encourage you to really prioritize your sleep. And if you're not sleeping well, let's get to the bottom of that. I have definitely resources. I wrote a book about that as well. And there's actually this book here, the Master Stress Reset your health Book.

Excuse me, The Master Stress Reset your health book is, has all of this in here, by the way. So if any of you have not read the book or listened to the book, I encourage you to do that if you would like to learn more. And you can learn all about what I recommend for care based on your individual body's response to stress and how to help you completely recover from stress. So in the book there's a whole chapter on helping you sleep get better sleep. There's also a whole chapter on helping you with what I call recovery activities. Recovery activities include everything from having some time to yourself in silence to spending time in nature, spending time with animals and loved ones, as well as using music and journaling and many other techniques that have been researched to help with stress recovery, including things that would be helping on the emotional level and the spiritual level, such as, if you're interested, psychedelic medicine and or psychedelic therapy, plant substances that help us as humans to reset physically, emotionally and spiritually. So I have a separate podcast on psychedelics if you'd like to learn more about that. And I definitely cover it in the book master your stress, reset your house. Because I want you to know all your options when it comes to detoxification and recovery from stress, that we can actually integrate that all in. Now how do you do this in your daily life? Right. So you could do well. Before I cover that, I want to finish care. So there was clean eating, adequate sleep, recovery activities and exercise. So we also want to be thinking about how do we help you get the right amount of movement for your body to help you recover when you're detoxifying and recovering from stress. And that's unique to you. Just like all of these things I'm mentioning and the way that I individualize it is by determining your something called your stress type. So I developed the stress type quiz you can find on my website@drdani.com in less than two minutes you can know what your stress type likely is. So if you want to do a cortisol adrenaline panel, you could do that for a few hundred dollars. But if you're like, let me just do the free quiz and get a sense of my stress type, then you're which is telling us whether you tend to have high cortisol or low cortisol, high adrenaline or low adrenaline. And once we know that, then we can individualize your detoxification and your stress recovery based on your cortisol and adrenaline. How all the stress that you've been exposed to, including the toxins, where what do they do to your cortisol and adrenaline? It. We sometimes think we could just guess, but it's not worth guessing because then you're. You're unlikely to actually get the results you're going for. To me, it's so much better to know what your cortisol and adrenaline levels are because then we can, I can guide you way more specifically in terms of nutrients, herbs, even your care can be different based on your and your exercise. For Example based on your stress type or your, based on your, where you're starting from with your cortisol and adrenaline level. So definitely check that out. So back to how can you implement this in your day to day life? So with the 14 day detox, it is designed as something you can do while still doing your day to day life, while still working and taking care of children and, and taking care of other tasks. Whatever you need to do. You do not have to completely separate from your life in order to do the 14 day detox. It's designed to be able to be something you can implement in your usual daily schedule. So I want you to know that that's possible, that it's not. You don't have to say to yourself, oh, I can't do this because I don't have time. Actually this is something you can do even if you're short on time. And I, I've done it many times. I, I decided over the years like hey, I feel, I feel it would feel so good when I, you know, when we, we go on vacation and we have some days off or like hey, I, and I would say to myself, well, how do I integrate this into my day to day? I don't want to feel worse while I'm on my usual schedule and only feel better when I'm on vacation. I need to be able to do this in my usual schedule. So that's what I guide you to do in my 7 day stress reset as well as in my 14 day detox. How to do this in your usual life to be able to effectively detoxify and reset your system. So the other thing is you could decide you may want to work up to setting some time aside in your schedule. Maybe you want to set aside three days to be able to just focus on detoxification or maybe you want to set aside two weeks or a month for that matter. Right? So you might then work up to that to be able to communicate with people in your life and schedule it so that you can make that happen. And that's even more powerful, transformative. Right? So you might start to think, hey, let me start with how I can do this in my daily life. Even day by day or two in the 14 day detox, see what you notice and then decide, hey, do I feel like I want to go on a retreat or a diatom? That's what I do with a shaman in, in the Amazon in Peru. So you can think about if you want to take, integrate this into your life more. But you don't have to like, sometimes I think we, we assume that we have to be all in and go to the extreme. And I want to encourage you to know that, that it can start with the simple little steps that you can integrate little by little and that actually can add up to big change in your health, in your life, and be transformative for you. So including being able to fend off a virus like HPV that's been sticking around and you're like, I just want this virus out of my body and out of my life. Doing a detox, even a 14 day detox can help you to do that. Or if you're, if you're like, hey, I am tired of being reliant on medications for pain, emotional pain, physical pain, autoimmunity, digestive issues, you name it, skin issues, you're like, enough already. Then that's when you know it's time to say, I want to do a cleanser, detoxification and reset and help my body recover. But I want to do it with support so that I get the best outcome and the least likelihood of feeling worse. And that's what my goal is for you. And that's what I have in mind. That's my goal and my mission whenever I create programs and whenever, including the 14 day detox. So I'm excited for you to check it out. I'll put a link for you and I'm happy to answer your questions. Um, I also have a masterclass on detox, so I'm. If you would like to learn even more than what we were able to cover here today, then I encourage you to click the link and go listen to the full Detox masterclass and then I can guide you from there. So I mostly want you to know that it possible to help your body to detoxify physically, emotionally, spiritually. I've experienced it myself and I'm passionate about sharing it with you because I know how much it helped me and I know how much it has the potential to help you. But I want to guide you through it. Because if I don't want you feeling like you get stuck partway through and you don't know what to do when you can have someone like me with a doctorate degree and 23 years of experience helping patients and my personal experience, I'm here to help you. So please don't feel like you have to do this on your own, it can make such a difference. It could be priceless to actually have help to do this successfully. So I'm so glad you're listening in. Please do subscribe if you haven't already to this podcast and also to put in a review if this has been happy helpful for you. And also to sign up for my newsletter if you haven't already. Because in the newsletter I will send every week the latest podcast and any other updates that I have for you. So please I I welcome you to join me and stay on this path of learning how to recover from stress and increase your longevity. All right, I'll see you soon.

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