A short YouTube talk by Dr. Tabatha Barber explaining how the body removes toxins (primarily via stool, urine, sweat, and lymph) and offering practical advice: maintain daily bowel movements (dietary magnesium, MCT oil, fiber), promote sweating (exercise or saunas), use dry brushing and manual therapies to move lymph, and reduce household exposures (off-gassing clothes/furniture, avoid Teflon/nonstick cookware).
We need to think about how our body detoxifies. So our body detoxifies a few different ways. The biggest, most common way we know of is through pooping, right? When you get rid of that stool, you are getting rid of toxins from your body, because whatever your body's trying to get rid of, it will remove through your skin, through sweating, through your bowels, through your urine. So get pooping every day. If that's an issue issue for you, then you need to come see me or get that taken care of. You know, sometimes we just need some more magnesium in our diet or some MCT oil or more fiber. There's all kinds of reasons that you might need help getting your bowels moving every single day. Sweating is a great way to eliminate your toxins, so your body naturally sweats as a detox mechanism. Try to figure out a way to get sweat sweating. Get your heart rate up 30 minutes every day. It's really good for your detoxification processes. For some people, if getting your heart rate up to the point of sweating is too difficult or contraindicated, then try something like a dry heat sauna or an infrared sauna. These will also help detoxify at the cellular level. Dry brushing is a really awesome technique. You can get a natural Dr. Brush most places, and that gets your lymph flowing. So your lymphatic system, it actually follows your cardiovascular system, your blood. So wherever you have blood vessels, you kind of have lymph vessels. And those lymph vessels and lymph nodes are taking the waste products that your blood is done using and transporting it and trying to get rid of it. So that's why sometimes you'll get a swollen lymph node if you're sick or something, because they're like a trash can. They're trying to get rid of that virus or bacteria, but it also does that with toxins. So you want your lymphatics moving. And it doesn't have a pump the way our cardiovascular system does. You know, our blood vessels, they squeeze and they pump, especially with our muscles, they move them. So our lymphatics don't have those pumps. They completely rely on us physically moving our bodies to get our lymph moving. And so dry brushing is a great technique to help move that lymphatic stuff to get some better drainage. You can also, you know, just do regular exercise. You can get massage, you can go get osteopathic manipulation. But these will all help your lymphatics move those toxicants out and then off. Gassing is another thing like I think of sometimes I have to get my clothes dry cleaned which I don't love but you want all those chemicals that they used to off gas and not bring them into your house. So I literally leave my dry cleaning clothes in the garage for about two weeks before I bring them into the house because I want those chemicals to off gas and not be anywhere near me. I don't want to breathe all of them in. And like I mentioned that's really common with new furniture, renovations, flooring, carpets like open those windows, get that off gassing out of there. The other big ones are what we're cooking with. So if you're cooking with non stick pots and pans those chemicals actually especially Teflon get absorbed into our food every time we cook. So I would say try to swap those out with stainless steel, lead free ceramic, anything that doesn't have that Teflon coating because that stuff is really toxic.
