17 Ways I'm Detoxing My Body In 2017: A Special Solo Podcast Episode.

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness show, the form of yoga that I'm going to be doing primarily is called Kundalini yoga. And that's excellent for everything from detoxification to lowering cortisol to getting some of this decrease in pro inflammatory cytokines. So the lymphatic system does not have a pump. You know, the circulatory system has a pump. The lymphatic system does not. And so to move lymph through the body, a lot of times you need movement, you need a touch like massage or foam rolling. You also need something like brushing, brushing on the skin.

He's an expert in human performance and nutrition, voted America's top personal trainer and one of the globe's most influential people in health and fitness. His show provides you with everything you need to optimize physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield.

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Welcome to a very special episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Show. They're all special, but this one is super special. Why is this special? Well, for a few reasons. First of all, I am at a random hotel room in Boca Raton, Florida, standing in my Speedo in a makeshift podcast studio that I have created using a pillow, a chair, a coffee table, and the kitchen counter of the small studio suite that I'm in. As a matter of fact, it's such a unique little setup that I will shoot a photograph for you and upload it to today's show notes, which you can access over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com detoxpodcast and yes, I'll just give you a clue as to what this particular podcast is about. Second of all, I'm congested. It's been a long time since I've been congested. Of course, that's tough for me because I'm supposed to be the picture perfect person who is always healthy and never gets sick, right? Otherwise, nothing I say could be true. No, actually, I went spearfishing two days ago and essentially have water, salt water, in just about every pore and crevice of my body, including my nasal cavity. So, no, I do not have the winter flu. I simply have what happens to your body when you're out shooting tasty trigger fish in the ocean. In this case, down in Costa Rica. So anyways, the final reason this podcast is special is because I am about to detox my entire body brain. If you're listening to this podcast when it comes out, I'm going to begin this in just a few weeks, January 9, 2017 for the new year. I am going to detox my body. And I'm not just going to do any old detox like putting cayenne pepper into some nasty concoction or pushing giant grocery shopping carts full of random herbs through whole foods. Because these popular detox can actually release toxins from tissues like fat cells and shove them up into your brain, causing a lot of neurolog. This is actually something that happens quite frequently when people eat boatloads of cilantro or chlorella and then tell themselves they are going to detox their bodies. As a matter of fact, I recorded a podcast several weeks ago with a guy named Dr. Dan Pompa and he went into how he just about destroyed not only his neurological function, but altered his personality by going out and buying a bunch of detox supplements and reading all these different articles on the Internet about how to detox. And essentially he delved into on that show about how he created gradient, a toxic gradient from his body into his brain. Because when you engage in a detoxification protocol and I'll outline exactly what that is and why it's not woo woo in just a moment, you have to go in the correct order. You have to start with your body and then move on to your brain to ensure that you don't have toxins kind of following a gradient up into your brain. And you actually need to start proper detox with what's called a preparatory phase as well. We'll delve into all of that. But the reason I'm telling you all this is because I'm partnering up with Dr. Dan and I'll give you a link to the podcast I did with him. It was called the most effective detox you've never heard of and exactly how to do it. Aren't I a good little headline writer? That's going to be over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com detoxpodcast and Dr. Dan is actually going to walk me through his entire brain and body detox program that he studied and he's perfected for years. It's called the true cellular detox and I'm going to combine this. I'm going to combine his true cellular detox with a few things because I don't want to lose my fitness when I'm detoxing. I don't want to be that person who does a bunch of yoga and winds up walking out of a detox looking like a skinny, emaciated marathoner with rashes from some kind of a Herxheimer reaction to toxins spilling out of fat cells. That's not my idea of a good time. I don't want to come out of my detox having lost a bunch of muscle or having to huff and puff anytime I climb a flight of stairs. So I'm pulling out a lot of fitness tricks and biohacks that allow me to kind of sculpt my body while I detox and not cause adrenal fatigue issues or ruin the detox protocol in the process. And I'm going to delve into what many of those tactics are going to be on today's show. This is going to be the most comprehensive detoxification protocol I have ever seen or designed because it's basically all of Dr. Dan's geeky health info combined with all of my meat heady fitness knowledge. And it's essentially going to be a detox that leaves you both healthy and fit in the process. So before we delve into how this. This detox is going to work, how you can join me, what all is going to be involved with it, the third reason that this is a very special episode is because I don't have a guest. I don't have a guest. Do you know how freaking long it's been since I've podcasted without banter, without someone to interview, without a podcast sidekick to bounce things off of? It's been a long time. But the truth is, I was one of the first people on itunes podcasting. I've been podcasting for nine years, and my first couple years of podcasting, it was literally just me delving into research from things like the National Journal of Strength Conditioning and the Journal, the American Medical association, et cetera. So this is honestly a bit awkward for me to just be standing here in my Speedo, because I literally just went swimming down in the hotel pool talking to you. But I promise I'm going to give you a lot of really interesting information on today's show. And everything that I talk about, you can access over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com detox podcast. So let's start here with what exactly this thing called the true cellular detox is. Because if you're going to join me for the first part of 2017 to do this detox with me, I want you to understand why it's different again than just drinking giant smoothies full of cilantro and chlorella and bone broth and anything else that you've heard is a potent detoxification compound. So the way that this works is you need to think of your body as a bucket and then imagine that the toxins that surround you in daily life are liquid that kind of slowly fills that bucket. And with each toxic exposure, drop by drop, the bucket gets a little bit more full. And a drop here and there isn't that big of a deal because your immune system can handle and your liver and your kidneys can handle a certain degree of toxicity. We have pretty good detoxification systems built up within us. But chronic exposure to an onslaught of chemical and physical stressors can fill up this bucket every day. And at some point it begins to overflow. And that's when things like cellular inflammation get triggered. That's when symptoms arise. That's when disease manifests. That's when healthy people all of a sudden break out with something like cancer or fibromyalgia or thyroid conditions or chronic pain or any other numbers of inflammation driven diseases. So there are a few toxins, first of all, that you should be aware of so that I can give you ex. One would be glyphosate. That's a hard one to get away from even if you're eating healthy. It's a toxin that was introduced back in the mid-1970s. It's an herbicide, pesticide that's pretty ubiquitous now in our soil and our food supply. It's the active ingredient in the product Roundup, which you've probably heard of, and that your neighbor or neighbors all over around you might be spraying on their grass. It might be blowing into your house, it might be blowing into your lawn or into your garden. And the fact is that. But this is something that is one of the. It's one of the toxins that can create essentially holes in the human gut. Because it was designed to break down the exoskeleton of things like bugs, it can shut down your natural detoxification pathways. And it's linked to many diseases like fibromyalgia and cancer and inflammation and diabetes. There's actually a great researcher who I interviewed sometime back on the podcast, MIT researcher named Dr. Stephanie Seneff, who has shown that the chemical effects of glyphosate even lead to things like dementia and Alzheimer's. Now, glyphosate is one example of something that I'm going to be trying to get rid of within my body as I detox my liver and my kidneys and my lymphatic system and my gut, so that my bucket, so to speak, is not overflowing. Another example would be metals. I mean, we've grown up in essentially the lead generation from gasoline to paint. Lead is a huge, huge, huge issue. Now, there are other metals in addition to lead. Mercury is another example. And amalgam fillings have been used for more than 150 years, and they contain 50% mercury, and that vaporizes directly into your brain. Now, vaccinations also contain mercury. We live in a mercury generation as well as a lead generation. And of course, mercury is something you can also get exposed to in everything from household appliances to dental work. When you go to visit the dentist, that's another one to be careful of. So we've got glyphosate, we've got lead, we've got mercury. And trust me, I'm not going to get into every single toxin that exists. But I just want to get your wheels turning. Another one is mold, and I'm not bulletproof. Executive Dave Asprey I don't believe that you necessarily should not ever eat blue cheese or fermented compounds because they have mold in them. But at the same time, I will completely agree with Dave that biotoxins from mold are arguably more toxic than heavy metals. And it's a huge problem not only in construction, but also in food. And yes, it can even appear in things like coffees and teas and just about anything that's packaged. And it's a huge source of biotoxic illness causing things like sudden weight gain, weight loss, resistance, anxiety, sleep issues. Right, like if you have a hard time getting to bed at night or you wake up really early in the morning, morning stiffness, pain, a lot of hormone related issues, those can all arise from molds. So that's another issue. Another source of toxins can be hidden infections. Hidden infections can be things like root canals that harbor what are called anaerobic bacteria that antibiotics and herbal compounds can't reach because they're deep in microtubules in your teeth, cavitations in the jaw left behind from tooth extractions like wisdom teeth, they often leave spaces that breed infection. And this anaerobic bacteria from the infection works its way into the bloodstream. And it causes major immune issues and can trigger issues like autoimmune disease and sudden intolerances to things like wheat and dairy and breakouts in the skin of acne and eczema. Lyme disease is even an issue that can often occur with co infections like mold and like metals and like some of these anaerobic bacteria issues that I just outlined. So hopefully that just gets your wheels turning. There are a ton of other toxins that we could delve into, but the idea is that no matter how clean you're living, you are likely getting exposed to many, many of these toxins, even if you're living on a pristine Himalayan mountaintop. We're now in an era where we're even getting bombarded by the wi fi that Google balloons sent up. And I don't want to sound like somebody wearing a tinfoil aluminum hat, but at the same time, I am seriously interested in getting rid of a lot of these neurotoxins and toxins and mold and metals that build up in the lymph, in the liver and the kidneys and the gut. Gut. And that's where this whole true cellular detox that I podcasted with Dr. Dan a few weeks ago fits in. And this is exactly what I'm going to be doing in a few weeks here in January and towards the end of this episode. I'll give you some information about how you can join me, or you can just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com detoxpodcast if it's something that you just want to jump into right away. But the idea is that Dr. Dan, like I mentioned, he. He messed himself up seriously doing a stereotypical detox. And what he realized is that you have to go in a certain order when you detoxify your body. There's three phases that make up the true cellular detox. So there's the brain phase that clears up the brain and gets rid of toxins in the brain, because neurotoxins can damage nerves and the brain is neural tissue. And many times you get symptoms that come from toxins embedded deep in the nerves and the brain. And so you have to to include a brain detox when you detoxify your body. But you can't start with that. You save the brain for last, so that as you detox the rest of your body, toxins from your body aren't moving from that area of high concentration to low concentration, in this case, your brain. So the true cellular detox is basically three phases. First is a prep phase, and the goal of the prep phase is you prepare your cellular detox pathways without yet upregulating the detox, and you prepare the downstream detox pathways for a successful detox. Next is the body phase, and the goal here is to clear your body first to create a lower concentration of toxins from deeper nerve tissues like the brain, like I was talking about earlier, because toxins move from high concentrations to areas of low concentration that would allow the toxins to more easily be removed from the brain when you detox the body first. And then finally there's what's called the brain phase. And the goal there is to clear toxins from brain tissue and from nerve tissue. So fat soluble binders are used in this phase, whereas they're not used in the body phase, so that they cross the blood brain barrier as well as the fatty coating that protects your nerves, something called the myelin sheath. And this phase is the final phase where you actually clear up things like brain fog and sleep issues and insomnia, et cetera. So I'm going to be going into each of those phases as I go through the true cellular detox. I'm not just going to do a bunch of whatever coffee enemas or a bottle of chlorella tablets or a raw juice fast or some kind of a nasty foot bath. Instead, I'm going to follow Dr. Exact step by step protocol so that I remove toxins and metals and glyphosate and mold and all these other things you learned about in the correct order. So the way that the program works, the way that this program that Dr. Dan has designed works is I basically have this online dashboard that I log into and each day it tells me exactly what I need to do, which supplements I need to take. It's got what's called a neurotoxic questionnaire. It has testing instructions for metals and mold. All, all of these tests are included with the true cellular detox. And then there's a huge array of resources, a huge array of PDFs that tell you how to regenerate cell membranes and reduce inflammation and re establish methylation, control blood glucose, a bunch of resources on intermittent fasting, on a form of training that Dr. Dan calls burst training. There is a whole host of resources on sleep and anxiety strategies, on healing leaky gut, There is a 90 day meal plan, a whole bunch of smoothies. It's all kind of a done for you detox program. But like I mentioned, it's not good enough. I'm actually going to throw in a bunch of my own protocols so that again, I'm able to maintain fitness and essentially be able to still come out the other end of a detox and go do like Spartans and tough mudders and races and sprint triathlons and a lot of these things. That I want to do that I don't want to detox, to detract from later on in the year. So that is what I'm going to delve into now. I'm going to fill you in on all the little strategies that I'm going to use during the detox. And again, if you want all the resources as I go into this, just visit BenGreenfieldFitness.com detoxpodcast and I'll fill you in. All right, so we're first going to begin with the exercises that I'm going to do, how my exercise program is going to look as I go through the true cellular detox program. So if you want to take out a pen and write this down, you can. And again, I'm going to be kind of going into full details on this for anybody who joins me in this true cellular detox program. So first of all, Monday, Wednesday and Friday, I'm going to incorporate a certain series of exercises from an excellent book called True to form by Dr. Eric Goodman. This book is an excellent resource for learning how to decompress the spine, how to turn on the butt, which is actually a good thing for the rest of the day, how to activate your glute and hip extensors, reduce low back pain, open up the lungs, etc. It's the perfect way to start the day. Only takes five to 10 minutes, but there's a certain series of exercises that you do Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and a certain series of exercises that you do Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. And during the entire course of this detox protocol, I'm going to be starting each day Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday with the exception of Sunday, which is which is the off day for my butt. With this core foundation training from the book True to form by Dr. Eric Goodman. And I will put resources for everything that I talk about, by the way, over in the show notes@bengreenfieldfitness.com detoxpodcast so the next thing that I'll be doing for an exercise is on Mondays and Fridays as well as on Wednesday. I suppose I should just say Monday, Wednesday, Friday, I'm going to be doing infrared sauna. Now, I've written a ton of articles about the efficacy of far infrared rays for actually causing vibration of cells. You can actually get a lysing of fat cells when you combine infrared therapy with the use of a lot of the supplements that I'm going to be taking during this detox program. Everything from niacin medicine to again, some of these other compounds like chlorella and cilantro, but taken in the correct order, which is very, very important if you're going to do this. So Monday, Wednesday, Friday, I'm going to be doing infrared sauna. And inside the infrared sauna, I'm going to be doing yoga. Why am I going to be doing yoga? It's not just because I want to look like a fancy hippie detoxer. Yoga is really interesting. They've actually done some studies on for example, pro inflammatory cytokines. And in one study they took a yoga group and actually investigated these pro inflammatory cytokines and found that yoga could cause about a 4 to 6% reduction in most of the body's pro inflammatory cytokines. Now of course you get lymph flow, you get increase in blood flow. The other interesting thing is that a great deal of your fat loss occurs from blowing off CO2 too. And with the type of breathing that you do in yoga, basically what's called yogic breathing, this deep breathing from the belly, you actually enhance that fat loss effect as well. And of course there's a drop in cortisol, there's an increase in cerebral blood flow. The form of yoga that I'm going to be doing primarily is called Kundalini Yoga. Kundalini Yoga. And that's excellent for everything from detoxification to lowering cortisol to getting some of this decrease in pro inflammatory cytokines. So that's the reason that I'm including yoga. It's not just because everybody who detoxes does yoga. So it must be good. It's because you actually can impact inflammation. And the title of that study I just alluded to is called Yoga's impact on Inflammation, Mood and Fatigue in Breast Cancer Survivors. A randomized control trial. I thought that was really interesting, how yoga can actually decrease these pro inflammatory cytokines. So that's going to be Monday, Wednesday, Friday, the sauna and the yoga in addition to the core foundation training each morning. Now also Monday, Wednesday, Friday, I'm going to be doing, don't laugh, rebounding. I actually have a mini trampoline that I will be bouncing on for about 10 to 15 minutes per day. They found that these mini trampolines can actually do a really good job at maintaining things like oxygen capacity very similarly to running. But there's also some interesting studies behind the use of trampoline that go above and beyond just increasing maximal oxygen uptake. For example, rebounding causes increased lymph fluid circulation and a greater amount of white blood cell activity. And remember, the Lymphatic system is the part of your circulatory system that transport this clear colorless fluid called lymph that flushes toxins from your body. Now, when you rebound, there's an increase in the circulation of this fluid because the lymphatic valves are open during the change in gravitational pull. You actually get increased G forces when you rebound that you don't get in many other situations. And this causes a surge of lymphatic drainage, which improves circulation and assists tremendously with detoxification. And of course, there's an increase in balance, there's the maintenance of VO2 max. There's all these other benefits, but in addition to the core foundation training, the sauna, with the yoga, I'll be doing the rebounding, also known as trampolining. But I like rebounding. It sounds cooler. I'll just be using a little mini trampoline for that. And then finally, I will also be doing explosive exercising without any weight, maximizing the actual speed of movement so that I maintain my explosiveness and my athleticism. But it's going to be body weight only, power and strength sessions. Not only have they shown that folks who have increased longevity tend to have small, wiry, explosive muscles versus big, built up, hypertrophied bodybuilding style muscles, but there's also a great crossover to athleticism. You should listen to the recent podcast I did with Nick Kherson, who trains all his MMA fighters, for example, to simply move light weights as quickly as possible. So I'm going to be doing brief but highly intense bodyweight only strength programs on Monday, on Wednesday and on Friday. And it'll come out to a good hour or so of exercise by the time you combine the infrared sauna, the yoga, the rebounding, and these bodyweight only power sessions, plus some of that core foundation training in the morning. But that's essentially how the Monday, Wednesday, Friday routine is going to look. Like I mentioned on Tuesday and Thursday, I am going to be doing this core foundation training, but in addition to that, that I'm going to be working the exact opposite of these explosive muscles and I'm going to do a form of training that greatly assists with maintenance of strength and also a very, very cool effect on peripheral blood pressure. There's a book called Body by Science by author Doug McGuff that goes into this particular training program, but essentially it's super slow training. It's about anywhere from 15 to 20 minutes. That's how long the training session lasts. And it's moving through a repetition, which with an incredible Amount of time under tension, meaning we're talking about over a minute of time under tension. So five reps might take you 90 seconds to do, 30 seconds up and 30 seconds down. So in some cases a set can take a couple of minutes. But the idea behind this is that by moving the weight very slowly, you can increase strength and you can get a big increase in lactic acid and blood pressure in muscle tissue without actually creating increase any potential for impact based injury, as would be if you were doing say an explosive exercise with the same heavy weight. So super slow lifting I'm going to be doing on Tuesday and Thursday, that's in between the bodyweight only explosive days. The other thing I'm going to be doing on Tuesdays and Thursdays is any form of non weight bearing aerobic work, preferably out in the sunshine with exposure to negative ions or in the cold or in the air heat. For me it's going to primarily be swimming. Brief swimming sessions for anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Okay, so we've got explosive training Monday, Wednesday, Friday and super slow training and swimming on Tuesday and Thursday with little movement bites thrown in throughout the Monday, Wednesday, Friday of the rebounding and the core foundation training, the infrared sauna, the yoga. This all might sound like, like it's super complex, but really it's a quite simple calendar once you step back and look at it. And I'm going to be writing all this out for anybody who joins me in the detox program this January so that you can kind of follow along with me. Now this of course leaves the weekend. So how is the weekend going to look? Well, on Saturday I am going to begin a fast at lunchtime. But leading up to that fast on Saturday, before I eat a mash lunch and then quit eating for the next 24 hours so that I actually do a weekly full 24 hour fast, I'm going to simply go on an outdoor adventure. I live close to the base of a mountain. I'm going to go ski or snowboard or skate, ski or hike or do some form of outdoor adventure that allows me to get all the benefits and the negative ion exposure and the grounding and the earthing and all the things that happen when you get out in nature. So Saturday is going to be hiking or skiing or snowboarding or some form of an outdoor adventure. Saturday is also going to be in addition to the day that I begin a 24 hour fast. The day that I'm going to be doing either a full body massage or when I'M in a situation where I'm unable to get a massage. A full body foam rolling session. Now why would this be? Well, the effects of massage on lymphatic drainage, which you just learned about, are profound. It's really interesting. They've actually done biopsies on post massage tissue that have found that there are two intracellular signaling cascades that get activated from the mechanical stimulation and the extracellular chemical signals from massage. It's essentially mechanical deformation of tissue. That's what all the kneading and the pushing and the pressing from a massage does. Now in these biopsies they found biogenesis of new mitochondria, which are the tiny organelles in your cytoplasm that are the cell's powerhouses. Now they found that there is a signal from a protein called P PCG1 alpha that triggers mitochondrial biogenesis as a response to the mechanical deformation. The slight amount of actual injury that occurs when you do like hard foam rolling or a deep tissue massage. So it's an acute inflammation that results in increased mitochondrial biogenesis. So the idea here is that by doing this deep tissue, I'm going to enhance the effects of the massage and I'm going to get a little bit woo woo with my massage. Meaning that I don't know if you heard my interview with Michael Tyrrell and again I'll put links to all this stuff in the show notes, but we talked about whole tones and the fact that you can actually vibrate certain organs by blasting the body with different forms of music as you're getting something like a massage or as you're just sitting at your desk and working. So he has these whole tones CDs which I own. And I'm literally, when I'm foam rolling on a Saturday or getting my massage on a Saturday, I am to going, going to be blasting my body with those sound frequencies. So I'm getting both sound healing along with tissue healing. Now the other interesting thing when we look at massages is essentially toxins can lodge. I don't know why I started that sentence with essentially to make me sound smart, I suppose. But toxins can lodge around joints, they can form crystals. Gout is an example where there's a toxic buildup in the para articular soft tissues like ligaments and tendons and transverse friction movements that you get during a massage can actually get rid of a lot of these buildups. Everything from calcification to toxins. And of course there is the lymphatic system drainage that I just talked to you about. That's caused by the mechanical pressure from massage. You can actually push lymph through the gaps between the endothelial cells of lymph vessels when you force a hand against them or when you force a foam roller against them. You also raise the temperature of the skin and that forces more of the junctions between the endothelial cells to open. And both of these increase the drainage effect of massage or foam rolling on your lymph. You also, and they've done some interesting studies on massage, you get an improvement in kidney function. And the nephrons of your kidneys are the physiological filters that remove toxins from your blood. Things like uric acid and nucleic acid and benzoic acid, which is a toxic substance you find in fruits and vegetables. And massage, especially around the kidney area, increases circulation to and from the kidney, thereby improving the filtration elimination process of the kidneys. The liver, a major function of the liver, it's a detox organ, right? It destroys worn out blood cells and bacteria and toxic substances. It removes drugs like penicillin and ampicillin and birth control pills and sulfonamides and all these things we get exposed to on a daily basis from water and air and chemicals and food. Anyways, it's a semi solid organ, it's encased by a fibrous capsule and it's protected by the rib cage. But it's influenced by external pressures like those exerted by the diaphragm from above when you do like deep belly breathing, such as you would do during yoga, and also by squeezing massage movements around that right side of your body where the liver is located. So you can assist portal circulation through the liver, through the hepatic portal vein. You can increase oxygenated blood supply to the liver. You can increase bile secretion, you can increase circulation on the lobes of the liver like the central and hepatic veins and what's called the superior vena cava. And this is all something you can accomplish by simply including the massage therapy around the torso region, especially over and above where the liver is located. And then of course, with massage, the skin is a major organ of elimination. And when you get a massage, especially like an effleurage massage or dry skin brushing, which I'll get into in a moment, this also involves a compression and an upward stretch of the skin and the subcutaneous, what's called the subcutaneous fascia, and that can increase circulation to the skin, open up the pores and allow for the skin to eliminate toxins quite readily as well. Now this gets me into Something else that I will be doing, and that's dry skin brushing. Now, we'll jump into Sunday in just a second, but since I'm talking, talking to you about massage, I want to make sure that I highlight the effects of dry skin brushing. Because every day when I do that sauna that I talked about, or at least Monday through Friday, as I'm doing the infrared sauna, I'm going to finish up with this little brush that I have in my sauna. It came with my sauna. It's called a dry skin brush. And dry brushing is actually effective at exfoliating and opening up the pores in the skin for detoxification in the way that I just described. But it also supplies the lymphatic system, that network of tubes that runs through the body. So you can think of your blood as responsible for delivering oxygen and nutrients and white blood cells to your cells, but your blood capillaries leak out oxygen and nutrients and immune cells, and lymph fluid is what catches those and transfers them into the cells. So the lymphatic system does not have a pump. You know, the circulatory system has a pump. The lymphatic system does not. And, and so to move lymph through the body, a lot of times you need movement, you need touch, like massage or foam rolling. You also need something like brushing, brushing on the skin. And dry skin brushing is basically just what it sounds like. You take this brush and it's very similar to what's called lymphatic drainage massage, which is a very light form of massage performed in certain areas of the body, usually in people who have lymph flow problems for people who are sick. But dry skin brushing gets lymph fluid floating because about three quarters of the lymph capillaries are located near the surface of the skin. Now, it also helps with skin appearance. It causes a slight decrease in cortisol. There's a lot of interesting effects that they found with dry skin brushing. It can even assist with cellulite. But the idea is you get one of these fancy dry brushes or just a cheap ass dry brush off of Amazon. But for anywhere from two to 10 minutes, you just brush each part of the body. And your skin's supposed to be kind of nice and pink after dry brushing, not red and irritated. We're not talking about, like scraping the skin, just a light dry brush. And it works really well if you're in the sauna, for example, because your pores are already open. And when you combine that with some of These other things like the rebounding and the massage and some of the other elements I'll get into, it's a really, really good way to accelerate the effects of a detox. So dry skin brushing, in addition to this weekly Saturday massage is something else that I'll be doing. And again, if you can't afford a massage and want a massage, you can also do the foam rolling. I like the rumble roller for foam rolling because it has all these ridges on it that really do a good job digging into tissue. Okay, so next, I left off on Sunday, so I'm going to begin that 24 hour fast on Saturday, which means I'll have a full 24 hours where it's just water, electrolyte lights, teas are fine, I'll get into teas in a moment, but basically I'll begin that 24 hour fast. And so Sunday's not a very active day. Sunday is basically going to be a meditation day and that's going to be the day in which I detox my brain. This is more of an emotional detox. Meditation is hard. Going out in nature and doing a sit spot for 30 minutes where all you're doing is looking and smelling and tasting the air and watching things grow and just basically having that one spot that you go to for a certain period of time each week. That's one form of meditation I'll be doing. Simply doing box breathing. Four count in, four count held, four count out, four count hold. Kundalini meditation or Kundalini yoga as a form of meditation, transcendental as a form of meditation, simply going on a walk and doing deep nasal breathing. All of these count. I'm not going to do one single form of meditation during my entire Sunday protocol. But I am going to going to have Sunday be the meditation day. And my goal is to achieve about 30 to 60 minutes in that fasted state of meditation. Now the other thing that I'm going to be doing on Sunday, prepare to squirm, is my weekly coffee enema. Yes, I'm going to, during the course of this detox, do once a week a coffee enema. And before you start thinking this sounds completely crazy, you need to consider the fact that various types of natural detox treatments, including enemies enemas, have been used for thousands of years. There are ancient historical scripts like the Dead Sea Scrolls that describe how a lot of prophets and old leaders, they used to do these various types of enemas to restore gut health, to improve bio flow. The idea is that you can remove toxins accumulated in the Liver, you can remove free radicals from the bloodstream with not just the caffeine in the coffee enema, but a lot of the polyphenols and the antioxidants that you find in coffee. It's better than water. It's better than a lot of these other things you could stick up your butt. So coffee beans contain natural antioxidants. They've got cafestol, they got kawaiiol, they got theobromine, they got theophylline, all sorts of things that can have positive effects on inflammation levels. And the digestive system and regular bowel movements are really crucial for carrying waste and toxins out of the body. So as I do all these special things to detox, I want to make sure that I am taking advantage of the fact that the bowel is a really powerful detoxification organ. And they found some really interesting, interesting things that occur with coffee enemas. For example, at University of Minnesota, they did a research study on this, and they found that coffee enemas can stimulate the production of an enzyme in the liver called glutathione, S transferase. That's basically, it's a natural antioxidant, it's an anti inflammatory, it's a natural blood cleanser. They've found that coffee enemas can help to improve blood circulation, improve bile flow, relieve digestive issues like constipation, bloating and cramping and nausea. They can help with cellular regeneration. There's a lot of really, really, really good effects that occur when you do something like a coffee enema. Now, primarily when it comes to detoxification, think of it as a form of dialysis for the blood. So dialysis is a forced or artificial method to enhance detoxification. And that's what coffee enemas do. They mechanically wash out the colon, removing, like, parasites and bacteria and yeast and metals. And they act like a natural astringent, meaning they help the top layer of the skin or the mucous membranes within the digestive tract peel off and rejuvenate. And there are some researchers that believe that the top layer of mucus within the gut lining might hold a high level of toxins. And so helping the body shed this lining speeds up the cleansing process. And aside from the coffee itself, there's also the therapeutic effect of water used in coffee enemas. And there's this form of therapy called water therapy, also known as hydrotherapy, that helps the body heal by flushing the colon and the rectum and speeding up transit time of the stool. Performing a coffee Enema is very simple. I have a whole article about how to do it that I'll link to in the show notes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com detoxpodcast but Sundays are going to be my special coffee enema day. That'll be in the morning, likely before the meditation. And then I end my 24 hour weekly fast on Sunday with lunch. And so pretty simple weekend really, right? An adventure on Saturday, a full body massage, a 24 hour fast, and then a bit of meditation and sticking coffee up my butt. Shooting coffee up my butt on a Sunday. So that is how I'm going to tackle things from a movement and an exercise standpoint. Now, I also want to get into a few of the things that I'm going to be doing from a nutrient standpoint, things I'm going to stick into my mouth, not my butt. So there are a few elements of detoxification that I'm also going to include. The first is pretty straightforward. It's a ketogenic diet. So I'm not going to be eating a lot of grains, a lot of starches, even a lot of things like sweet potatoes and yams and root based starches during this detox protocol. Now granted, if you were listening carefully, you know that I'm not doing a lot of intensive endurance work. Aside from that Saturday adventure, which might be 90 minutes to two hours, most of the stuff is very short body weight, explosive sessions, jumping up and down on a trampoline, doing some yoga in the sauna, things along those lines. And so ketosis is going to be able to be something that I can handle. Not cyclic ketosis where you're having carbs at the end of the day, but really strict ketosis. So if you've never tried ketosis and you want to know how to do it and never experimented with it, this is a perfect chance to combine it with activity levels that allow you to be in ketosis without doing things like downregulating thyroid thyroid or draining all of the body's glycogen stores. And when you go into a state of ketosis, there are a host of benefits. We could podcast for hours on the benefits of ketosis when it comes to everything from healing fatty liver disease to fixing migraines to providing mood stabilization, to assisting with your ability to be able to stick to a fast Parkinson's disease to Alzheimer's to cancer. I mean, there's tons and tons of benefits to ketosis. And basically all I'm going to be doing during the course of this protocol is I'm going to be avoiding carbohydrate laden foods, fruit laden foods, you know, fruit smoothies. A lot of things that people do during a detox I'm not going to be doing, but I'm also going to be including lots of MCT oils and coconut oils because that allows you to get into ketosis very quickly. You don't have to go out and buy the $30,000 bottle of liquid, liquid ketones. You just need some good coconut oil around and some good things like MCT oil around to assist with this ketosis. So the entire detox is going to involve a ketogenic diet. And should you be afraid that it's going to ruin your hormones or something like that, again, know that we're not combining this with huge amounts of physical activity, which is how people can kind of eff themselves up during ketosis, is they combine it with too much activity. We're going to be combining ketosis with sane amounts of physical activity. So if you're training for an ironman, for example, you'll be able to jump back into ironman training after the detox and you're going to maintain your fitness levels, but you're not going to be doing five hour bike rides that require gels and sports drinks and goos during the course of this detox. Now, speaking of coconut oil, I am also going to be taking care of my mouth, detoxifying my mouth each morning during this detox by doing something called coconut oil oil pulling. And again, I want this to be doable for everybody. It's not a full 15 to 20 minutes of swishing coconut oil back and forth in your mouth. I'm just going to be doing five minutes of coconut oil pulling each morning. Now this is an ayurvedic practice. A lot of folks who are into help from India will do this and they've shown that coconut oil pulling can allow things like removal of heavy metals, removal of toxins, removal of bacteria, cleansing of dental issues from the mouth. And, and it really is exactly what it sounds like. You get extra virgin coconut oil and you swish it around in your mouth for five minutes, pushing and pulling it through your teeth, et cetera, and then you don't swallow it, you spit it. Now this is important because many toxins are absorbed sublingually through the capillaries in your mouth, directly into your bloodstream. So we have exotoxins, toxins excreted by living bacteria released upon the death of bacteria. And because you have a lot of bacteria in your mouth, you can Get a lot of this toxic, toxic excretion in your mouth. You also get endotoxins, which are structural molecules of bacterium usually found in the outer membrane. And this would be things like lipopolysaccharides. And these can trigger the immune system to release pro inflammatory markers that can lead to endotoxemia and inflammation. And many of these harmful bacteria live in your mouth. So your mouth can be churning out toxins, the bacteria in your mouth can be churning out toxins. And coconut oil pulling is a great way to keep those at bay. They found it to help with polymer plaque with gingivitis, with streptococcus, with dental caries, you can even reverse cavities and remineralize teeth with something as simple as coconut oil pulling. You want to use an oil like coconut oil, of course, that has antibacterial properties and you just swish in and out vigorously for about five minutes. As a matter of fact, the most recent research on coconut oil pulling shows that when you do coconut oil pulling for the 15 and 20 minutes that a lot of people do it, you can actually absorb a lot of these toxins in your blood. But you. But if you just do the five minutes, that's kind of a perfect period of time for coconut oil pulling. So that's another strategy that I'm going to be using during this detox is daily coconut oil pulling. Yes, I'm still going to brush my teeth, but I'm also going to be doing the coconut oil pulling. Okay, next is going to be high consumption of fermented foods. Now, of course, you probably know about all the probiotic benefits of fermented foods, but. But in particular, there's some very interesting research that shows that there are bacteria, a whole host of bacteria, including insecticides, that we get from things like produce that can be degraded far more rapidly when exposed to fermented products, such as we would find in things like kimchi and sauerkraut. These fermented foods actually help to break down pesticides. There's a really interesting study in the journal Journal of Agricultural Food Chemistry that showed that the organophosphate insecticide chloropyrithose degraded rapidly during kimchi fermentation. And considering that pesticides are a pervasive toxin found in food and drinking water, a natural method like this, the consumption of fermented foods that allow you to knock out neurotoxins that can bioaccumulate in your body. This is a pretty cool little thing to include in a detox product protocol. This use of things like kimchi and sauerkraut and kefir and some of these other forms of non carbohydrate intensive fermented products. Because again, we want ketosis. So we don't want to be doing a lot of say, like blueberry yogurt or sourdough bread, which are two examples of fermented foods. Instead, we're going to be doing a lot of fermented vegetables primarily to knock out pesticides and insecticides. A lot of people don't know about that little hidden benefit of fermented foods, but I'm going to be doing a lot of ferments during this particular detox protocol. I mean, you can get good non heat pasteurized fermented foods that still have a lot of their live probiotics present places like Whole Foods or your local hippie grocery store. You don't have to learn how to ferment, even though it's a cool art to know. But fermentation is another thing that I will be including. Okay, a few other strategies in addition to the fermented foods and the coconut oil pulling. One is I'm going to be doing a daily cup of bone broth. And it's really interesting. Bone broth contains potassium and glycine and those support cellular and liver detoxification. Bone broth actually is a pretty powerful detoxification agent because it helps the digestive system expel waste and promotes your liver's ability to remove toxins. And so some of the ways that it does, does this is it supplies sulfur, especially when you add things like veggies and garlic and herbs to your broth. And glutathione, which is a phase two detoxification agent that lowers oxidative stress. Stanford University's Medicine Preventative Research center has found that the glutathione, the type of glutathione you're going to find in bone broth, helps with elimination of fat soluble compounds like heavy metals such as mercury and lead, along with the absorption of various, various nutrients that you're going to be consuming during the course of this program. And bone broth also increases your intake of minerals, which can act like chelators to remove toxins by stopping heavy metals from attaching to mineral receptor sites. So bone broth is something that I'm going to do one cup of per day during the course of this program. Now I'm also, in addition to drinking bone broth, I'm going to do tea. I'm not just going to do any old tea. I have A few teas that I've chosen that are really some of the most potent and efficacious when it comes to detoxification. One is an Ayurvedic tea and it is within the pages, can be found within the pages of a new book called Eat Wheat. Yes, it's called Eat Wheat by a guy named Dr. John Duyard. And I'm going to interview him on the show. But he goes in to this really interesting detoxification tea in that book. It's got milk thistle and a whole host of other detoxification type of ingredients in it. I'll put a link to that book in the show. Notes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com detoxpodcast but it's milk thistle and burdock and red clover and garlic and some of these things that naturally detoxify the body, coat the lining of the stomach, assist with gut healing, et cetera. So I'm going to be doing one to two cups of that particular tea each day. And I'm also going to be doing one to two cups of this type of tea called Pau d' Arco bark tea. And Pau d' Arco contains beta lapachone, which upregulates nad, and that's an important electron transfer mechanism and mitochondrial signaling molecule. Nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide is what it's called. And I'm going to be blending to improve the bioavailability of the nad. Going to be blending basically sunflower lecithin, which is a good source of phosphatidylcholine, a little bit of ghee, a little bit of stevia, and to assist with ketosis, a little bit of MCT oil into that tea. So I'm going to be doing one to two cups of the tea from Dr. John Douillard's book, one cup of this Pau d' Arca bark tea and then one to two cups of bone broth. Perfect day. So a lot of liquids, but a lot of really healing liquids. Chock full of a lot of things that the body relies upon for detoxification. So that's what I'm going to be drinking, the strange substances that I'll be drinking during this detox. Okay, so stepping back and looking at this big picture, we've got daily use of oil, pulling fermented foods, ketosis, intermittent fasting, fasting, a full fast each weekend, and then these teas and the bone broths. Core foundation training Monday through Friday or Monday through Saturday, rather dry skin brushing Monday through Friday, infrared sauna and yoga, some rebounding, the bodyweight only, explosive training along with the super slow training, and then the weekend massage, the weekend meditation, the weekend outdoor adventure, and a little bit of swimming or anaerobic work on Tuesday and Thursday. And of course, our super special coffee enema every Sunday. So that is how I am partnering up with Dr. Dan to take all the brilliant things that he's discovered with regards to detoxification. And then I'm adding in all those biohacks that I just described. You could take everything that I just described to you and probably piece this together on your own and do your own detox. But what I'm doing is partnering up with Dr. Dan to spell all this out for you. So he's got this really slick online dashboard. You can check it out if you go to detoxwithben.com or I'll put a link to it in the show notes that has access. It gives you access to all the videos, all the PDFs, everything that walks you through every component of the program. And in addition, during the entire detox protocol, which is basically going to be January through March, Dr. Dan and I are going to do a monthly call with everybody who's doing the detox. Right now, I think we have about 50 people signed up, up. We're capping it at 100. Considering that about 90,000 people listening to this podcast within a week after it gets released, that doesn't leave you a lot of time to register for the program. But again, if you go to detoxwithben.com or if you just want to access the show notes, you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com detox podcast if you want to get all the information about the true cellular detox program. Now, now, a few quick things that are very important. First of all, I've had a few people who balk at the price of this detox because you're basically getting about $2,000 worth of online training and a whole bunch of extras for free as part of this program, because Dr. Dan's never done something like this before. You're getting all the supplements shipped to you, literally thousands and thousands of dollars worth of supplements. But you're getting all this at an extreme, extremely, extremely low price. If you go to detoxwithben.com, you can see the exact price of the challenge. But Basically, for the $2,000 or for the 2,000, it's not $2,000 for the $2,000 worth of supplements, all the calls with Dr. Dan and I, all the PDFs, that I'm doing for you, the entire detox that includes 90 days of all the specialized supplements that allow you to do the prep phase, the body phase, the brain phase, the on online education portal, the videos, the articles, the downloads, the meal plan, the monthly interaction, the accountability from everybody on the team. It's 9.97 to do the entire detox and you go to detoxwithben.com to do that. So that detox doctor Dan normally sells to his clients for $3,000. So we've basically dropped the price by one third to allow you to do everything that I just described and get walked through through the entire protocol along with me. I've never ever done a detox this comprehensive. I'm 34 years old. I've got 34 years on this planet chock full of all the glyphosates and the molds and the heavy metals and the toxins that I just got done describing earlier. And I think it's high time to push the reset button and to reboot my body and 100 people are going to be able to join me on this thing again. We're about half filled up right now, but there's still room to get in. And remember, most detox programs or cleanses are downstream. They don't support the body at the cellular level and they actually mess up your brain. So you need to proceed with caution if you're going to try to do all this yourself. I'm not just saying that to give you a scare tactic. I mean, I care about my listeners. I don't want you just like taking a bunch of cilantro and bone broth and jumping up and down on the trampoline and coming down with some sort of drop in intellectual function or insomnia that lasts for years because you all of a sudden get a bunch of mercury and lead and glyphosate passing up through your blood brain barrier. That's not the type of things that I want to create. So all of the shownotes, everything that I just talked about and I'll put resources for the things like the coffee enema and the bone broth and the whole tone CDs and Kundalini yoga and all that, I'll put them in the show notes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com detoxpodcast and in addition to that, I'll put a link where you can go and get in on this podcast with Dr. Dan. Or if you want to know more about Dr. Dan, you can listen to the previous podcast that I did with him. I'll put a link to that in the show notes as well. You just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com detoxpodcast you can also leave your comments and your questions over there when you visit. If you're not quite sure if this is something that you want to do, or if you're not quite sure if it's right for you. And then finally I'm going to go put some big boy clothes on. Tear down the I'll put a photo, by the way, like I mentioned, of this this crazy podcast studio. I'm podcasting out of this hotel room in Florida so you can see what my podcast setup looks like. I'll put that in the show notes for you as well. In case you're curious. I will put on clothes before I take that photograph, which is super weird because usually I'm unclothed in my photographs anyways. And yeah, I'm joining on, so I'm going to end this thing. Thanks for listening. And Again, go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com detoxpodcast for all the resources. Or if you just want to jump right in and get on this before it fills up, just go to detoxwithben.com thank you for listening and enjoy the upcoming oh crap, I did just remember one quick thing I want to tell you. If you don't live in the country, you need to get on the bandwagon right away. Because all the things you're going to to need for this detox will take two to three weeks of transit time for any international participants. So if you're listening to this podcast when it comes out, you need to get on the ball right away. So if you're in freaking Turkey or Australia or the UK or something like that, get in soon because it is open to international folks. But you have to get in soon. Soon, like the day or within the week after this podcast comes out to be able to get what you need, like all the supplements and everything that Dr. Dan is going to ship to for you to get what you need in time. So that's really important for if you're international, to register as soon as possible. If you're in the us, I'd highly recommend that you register no later than a couple of days after Christmas if you're going to do this thing. So make sure you get on the ball so that when January 9th rolls around and we're all telling you to do this and do that, you have everything in your pantry that you need to get on this program all right, There we go. Now I really am done. Have a wonderful, wonderful week. I'm Ben Greenfield signing out out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com.

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Sam.