The Truth About Juicing, Cleanses & Bowel Movements

So if you've been living with chronic illness, you've probably tried every detox out there, and sometimes to feel worse, not better. Today I'm joined by Dr. Virginia Marston, a doctor of naturopathy who redefines detox as a whole person process to eliminate toxins, rebuild the immune system, and release blocked emotions through personalized protocols. And this is such an important topic, detox, because so many people love to do a detox, and I'm sure they really don't know what they're doing when they're doing it at home. So why do so many popular detox programs, uh, for like— they jump on it for less bloating, for weight loss, or for maybe for better skin— feel like such temporary fixes? And what can be some of the biggest risks when people are trying them?

Well, probably the most important one is to understand the level of toxicity that a person has. Sometimes when their liver is so toxic, a lot of the ducts get plugged and the patients or the persons will struggle to eliminate the waste. Sometimes the toxicity is so compacted in there that when they start to use different types of juicing, so I mean, sometimes they'll even get in directly into a parasite treatment. They'll start doing different things. With the intentions of releasing toxins. Well, when these pathways of elimination are so blocked, what will end up happening is a lot of the toxins will get released, but a lot of the times they'll just get recycled right back into the system because they don't really understand the level of toxicity that they have. It may work for some people, and some people will get good results, but many of them will not because they truly don't understand the level of toxicity that they're dealing with.

And what these pathways that you talk about that are blocked, what exactly are they? And if they are and someone does do a detox, what can they expect to feel like? What are the symptoms? What are they, what will they experience if they are blocked?

Probably the most common one is when they start drinking juices or pills and so on, they'll start feeling nauseous. Now, nauseousness is one of the most common feelings that you get when you're trying to mobilize something from your gallbladder that's going to try to dump into the duodenum and release toxins. But sometimes the stones are too big or the slush is too thick and it's not able to fit through the duct. And one of the most common reflexes that you get is nauseousness.

So that's why so many people have what they call that Herx reaction. Is that that Herx reaction?

That's exactly right. So now Herx could be more like it could feel nauseousness. They'll, they'll get like flu-like symptoms. They'll get headaches. But again, it's just all these toxins, these toxins being released and not having a way out. And they'll even sometimes break out in a rash because if they can't get rid of the toxins through the bowel movements, they'll tend to have them try to release through the skin.

So what they could be doing is actually exacerbating the symptoms they already have. So if someone has eczema and, and some good friend tells them that someone else got a great result on this particular cleanse for eczema and they do it, they could actually be making their symptoms so much worse or their condition.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Yes. And actually we've seen where they'll get some of the stones released, they'll get stuck in the ducts, and then they get in trouble, end up going to the hospital. They'll end up having vomiting. Having all kinds of symptoms, and then the, the doctors will want to, you know, cut out the gallbladder, you know, surgically remove it. So it kind of does backfire sometimes.

Well, it sounds like a detox isn't really something that you should be doing on your own at home. Don't go jumping on all these trendy sort of detox solutions on social media unsupervised.

The truth of it is, is that some may be able to get away with it because a lot a lot of people just don't understand. So what I always tell the patients when I'm on the phone and I'm not really sure the level— of course I read eyes and that helps me to see the level of toxicity— and then some of them, I'll just have them slide their, their thumb there on the right side down till they hit the edge of the rib cage, and then they press. And if that hurts, you automatically know that you're way too congested and you could experience some difficult challenges when you're going through a detox.

Yeah, there are so many foundational levels. They found the foundation that has to be considered before people actually do this on their own, which makes me think, which chronic conditions do you think would benefit from a detox the best, and which maybe shouldn't be doing a detox, especially on their own?

Everyone, even if they're not sick, should learn how to detox. Because the world that we live in right now is so incredibly toxic that, for example, myself, I've never been sick in my life. Let me knock on wood here. But I do detoxing at least 3 times a year. I cannot afford to get sick. I don't get tired. I don't feel weak. I've got to constantly be running. So I recommend it for everyone. Don't wait till you're too toxic, till you're too Week to be able to do it. But once you're already too tired, you have a lot of symptoms. I really think that they should find someone that specializes in detoxing, someone that could truly help them through that. I mean, because sometimes people, believe it or not, may need a colonic just to get a lot of the the blockages out of the way before your liver could release anything. So again, because we do everything by juicing. We start with juicing and we make sure that the patients have a lot of bowel movements. And then once they're able to have an average of 5 to 8 bowel movements a day, I know it sounds like a lot, but you'd be amazed what that will save you from. And then you can go in, you could start breaking things up in the liver and the gallbladder and the pancreas. You can work with those, that common bile duct, and then you'll be amazed how much you can slowly but surely get rid of. Because a lot of people just right away just start breaking things up and they haven't even been able to have a bowel movement. So you've got to be careful doing that.

Absolutely. And I guess that's the risk and the— and what we were talking about, the dangers of actually starting one of these protocols at home by yourself and not understanding where your body and its function is actually at. What level is that? I mean, if I was to do a juice, I don't know if I would've considered how many bowel movements I've had before I actually start drinking that juice. So that's a really, it's an interesting one.

Yeah. And that is probably here. Everyone walks around, okay, how many bowel movements have you had? How many bowel movements have you had? Because that tells us, and because we use special therapies, for example, you could learn how to do liver pumps, massages. You can learn to do things Physical things that could actually help you with it. But always the number one thing is to be able to have at least because if you're going to do let's say a five-day cleanse, you want to make sure that you're having a minimum. I mean maybe three to five bowel movements a day. If you're only having three, you're gonna get yourself in trouble because there's things that you could do. For example, you could take chanca piedra. There's all these different types of Juices that you could have that are very, very specific, such as radish juice, apple juice, all these different types of juices that will tend to, or even take Epsom salt, that'll tend to make your gallbladder want to purge, or we call it, it's like a cough that takes place. But if you're not, if that doesn't have anywhere to go and you haven't moved up your bowels, You're going to get yourself in trouble.

So is jumping to juicing too strong for someone who's only having, say, one bowel movement a day or one bowel movement every 2 days prior to doing a detox? So they have to understand that. So how do they get themselves moving prior to doing the detox?

The reality is, is that you're actually using the juices to detox. So, but, so there's a difference. For example, people will do juicing and then they do like the Epsom salt, the gallbladder flush, you know, with the lemon and olive oil and things like that. You can't go into that section yet. You first just, if you juice until you get your bowels moving, just regular juices, nothing too aggressive. You're not going to use like a beet juice. You're not going to use, I mean, beet juice will just detox you so fast. You will be so— so ill if you start getting into that. So you'll do something like maybe apple juice. We use here fermented vegetable juices with seawater. That will just start breaking things up. You'll have— with fermented vegetable juice and seawater, people could have up to 10 bowel movements a day. And believe it or not, most of our patients have an average of 2 bowel movements a week. We've had people that'll have 2 bowel movements a month. So we deal with very, very severe cases. Now, I will tell you, if a person is having just 2 bowel movements a week or 2, you know, that's, you're getting into a dangerous place there.

Mm-hmm.

That's when they're very impacted and you've gotta be careful. You have to be so careful when you do things because sometimes they have quite severe blockages. And we do a lot of, again, different types of therapies. Like for example, cupping, we use sonic waves. We use all kinds of different frequencies to break these blockages up before the body is able to remove them.

It's not that simplistic, sort of just go on, you know, a supplement protocol or, you know, something like that.

A supplement protocol is honestly almost a joke. Like all these little pills that people take and they're like, this is my daily detox. They'll take 2 little pills. It's not really going to do anything.

Last point on the actual juicing. What about the very popular celery juice that everyone's doing? Is that too dramatic in the beginning, like the beet juice?

You know what? No, not at all. It is, it's not at all. And celery with apple juice and celery with carrots, that's a really good balance there. I will tell you one thing that tends to happen to people when they're juicing. They, depending on the juices, the reason why celery is so good, because it really doesn't give you all the sugar. But you need to have some because people will get really weak while they're on their juices, they're juicing. So you want to create a nice balance of not elevating your blood sugar levels too much or decreasing them too much. So it's a combination that you want to be careful of.

And are people consuming food or is it just juice?

No, actually, again, it depends. Sometimes we'll have people that are so weak that we have to be able to start their day with a protein, For example, like eggs or bone broth and some fruit, because we don't want them to get weak. I mean, some people you can't afford to do that with some people, right? So it just depends on the person, but you always want to have some types of fruit. And I know a lot of people worry about fruit, but once you're even diabetics, let's say we have someone that comes in with numbers of 450. Believe it or not, if you can get their bowels to move with, let's say, fermented vegetable juice that doesn't have any sweetener in it at all and some seawater, you can— within 24 hours, you can get them to have maybe 5, 6, 7 bowel movements. That's a very special formula, I will tell you. But if you can get them— believe it or not, you can give them a quart of apple juice and their blood sugars will not go up. We've done this thousands of times because The apple juice goes in, goes through the system, and it gets released. It's when you're constipated that you have any type of a carbohydrate, you know, even, for example, even wheat. Like, if you have any kind of wheat, it's stuck there. You're going to be constantly elevating your blood sugar levels. It's stuck there. The glucose and the sugar is— it's stuck there and it's not going anywhere. But if you're moving your bowels already and you get some carbohydrates like juices, It goes right through you and doesn't have time to elevate your blood sugar levels.

You're saying that constipation could actually be a contributing factor to your sugar levels reading higher?

Very, very, very much.

You have a completely different kind of approach to the standard person around detoxing, or even, I think, even the standard person, you know, naturopath, because you take a very much a whole person approach. So you also feel that detoxing requires addressing the emotional and spiritual side to create breakthroughs, not just the physical detox?

Yes, exactly. And we've seen many times that we could start to detox someone and they're very emotional, they're very upset, or you could tell right away by their— by the way that they're, they're acting, their, their mood. And we'll just like, you know what, okay, just let's take care of this. Let's, let's deal with this. And sometimes we could just do dolls. I, I do a special therapy with dolls. Believe it or not, sometimes we actually have to do a family constellation. We've got to help them disentangle themselves and let go of all of the, of the entanglements that are holding them back. And not only that, but it has so much to do with things that they can't forgive, that they can't let go of. And if they can't do that, then they don't want to let go of the stuff that's stuck inside of them. So sometimes we have to go down that rabbit hole, and then we can detox them. And oh my goodness, it's incredible. That's why when a person first arrives, I could read their eyes, and then I'll be able to say, oh, oh, I know where the root of their problem is. I could see it. It's either— could be a scar, it could be a tooth infection, it could be an emotion. Or all the toxic foods, or, you know, all of the above. To know where they're at when they walk through that door and when you're going to start detoxing, where are— where is this person? And I need to go to their level, and that's where I need to take care of things. So, and it's, it's crazy how, like, for example, if you have infections in your back teeth, your upper and lower back teeth, you're going to have severe digestive problems. And sometimes I can't get the movement of the peristaltic to get stimulated without first— and thank goodness we have a dentist here that can just go in there, clean out the cavitation or the infection, and then wham, there's a release even right after they get out of the dental office. And they'll get a good release, but it just depends on exactly what it is that you're dealing with that keeps the body from letting go.

It is, it is amazing the depth you go to. And would you say that, or believe that, you know, with the mind-body connection, that a lot of times people's— you know, if you have toxic thoughts and negativity and your view on life is a little bit doom and gloom, Yes. that you're perpetuating or creating these toxins in your body, even I've heard some people say that if you even behave a bit like a parasite in life, you will have parasites.

Boy, are you absolutely right. Again, I've been doing this for 36 years and 1,000%, I could tell you I've got more parasite pictures than you can— you've ever seen in your life. And I will tell you, people that act like parasites, They, they are, they're riddled with parasites. And it's incredible when you— and they— you see, when you detox, you have to be mentally prepared. And you don't— people don't just detox. You have to be in a place where you're ready to make a shift, to make a change. It requires more than just, oh, I want to go on a detox. No.

Yeah.

You have to psych yourself up and you have to prepare for what needs to be done to get these releases. And you'd be amazed at— I mean, we'll sometimes get— I dare to say I've gotten like 27 pounds of parasites in 10 days out of like even one person.

Wow.

And it's amazing because once they've made up their mind, because I will talk with them. I mean, it's about so much more. If I could say to them, are you ready for this? Is this something that you've decided you want to do? And I tell them, I don't want to do a kind of halfway job. It's either going to be done all the way with me, or it's going to be— or if it's not going to be done. And once they've surrendered and they've— they're really ready to let go of everything, and I mean everything. I tell people that when you're detoxing, you have to be willing to detox from all the foods. Let them go. You know, let go of the parasites inside. Let go of all the habits, the drinking, the smoking, all the addictions. Let go of them because they're holding you back. And it's so amazing once they have their, their mind wrapped around the idea that, hey, it's part of letting go. I want to clean my body. I love myself. I care enough. I'm willing to discipline myself. I'm like, okay, we're on a roll here.

If someone is— it just came to me that if someone is really, really stubborn to change and let go, you can imagine that That's why their bowels are impacted.

Absolutely.

They can't release the toxins. They can't have bowel movements. You can just see how that mind-body— you don't kind of connect it, do you? Everyone sort of goes, oh, I haven't gone to the toilet. I haven't had enough water or fiber. But they're not going that much deeper to what am I holding on to? What am I not willing to release?

And you're, and you're going to see that patients are people that are stubborn. They'll literally have this self-destructive behavior. Well, they'll just go and get the donuts, and they'll just go drink the coffee. And, well, look at me, I'm okay. I mean, I'm, I'm still alive, and I'm doing things, and I'm okay. But in reality, they're not. They're not. Because you know what? People don't know what it's like to feel good. They have no idea. I mean, I tell them, you know what, when you're 60 years old and you can get up and work 15 to 18 hours a day, and your body can actually have 10, 15 children, and you could keep a full-time job. That's health. That's what I tell people. That is health. People don't know what health is. For example, if a woman has 1 or 2 children, a lot of times, they're like, oh my gosh, I don't know. I just can't do this. This is so much. And, I'm like, oh, okay. Really? Is it? I mean, You know what? It's because people have decided that it's too much. They've decided that they can't. They've just— it's a decision that they've made. And yes, sometimes it is their health, but again, they've decided to make all the poor choices that have got them where they are.

That's going to hit hard for a few people, isn't it? That definitely is. I mean, it comes down to the choices that we make, or the choices we have made, are where we are now. And hopefully, like with your programs, etc., we can make different choices. So you actually help people with not only the physical, but you actually have protocols to help people move through their emotional issues as well?

That is correct.

What I've read about you is that you're programs are very personalized to the person. You don't just give a general sort of detox protocol or eat raw salads or whatever. So how, how do you tailor a detox for someone who, you know, so it truly meets their needs? And especially if someone was to come to you who has got a chronic health condition. How do you find that this person needs this and this person needs that?

Yes. Well, number one, we do get very severe cases. It's so rare to find anyone that's even a little bit severe. But here's the thing is that we do what is called ART. It's called an autonomic response testing. It's muscle testing. And there's not one thing that we give a patient unless we know that their body is ready for it and that they want it. And then so every morning when the patients come into the office, we muscle test them and like, okay, today your body does not want that. It wants this. And because remember, so we're not just giving them juices or giving them things to help break things up in their digestive tract. Most people come for a month or 2, and what they're doing is that we're detoxing them on a cellular level too. with chelations, with things. So, so we'll always ask the body, okay, and we— and this we could say because we've seen it thousands of times, right? Where we'll try to do and give them an IV, let's say a chelation, EDTA, you know, DMPS, or, or different things like that. And their body's like, no, no, no. But then we give them the juices, then they start having bowel movements, then we start moving things through their digestion, then their body will say, oh, I could have ozone today. Oh, I could even have vitamin C. So a lot of these different IVs, I mean, a lot of doctors don't understand. If you give these patients— a lot of people just, they'll eat a crappy diet, go sit down in a doctor's office, get these wonderful IVs, and feel like crap. Why? Because they mobilize something and it couldn't get released, and because that's not what the body needs at that time. So we muscle test. We ask the body where they are that day. What do you need today to help you eliminate waste? And we muscle test all the organs. And then as we're testing, we could see what organ needs more support. Let's say someone's kidneys will test. So then we'll do— we could do like cupping on them. We could do neural therapy. We can use ozone. We can actually inject ozone, and we could do all kinds of different therapies to support that organ to help them.

That is an incredible thing because you're using the body's intelligence to guide you. So, you know, I do find people struggle to believe that the body, through muscle testing or kinesiology, um, has the ability to guide someone or has the ability to then express that its intelligence To know what it truly needs, but it is so powerful. Like you say, you can really get down to the very nitty gritty. And it's interesting you say that about IV because I remember going to a functional doctor and he always liked to start every session with an IV of vitamin C, which I always did quite well with. And this particular time he said at the end, he goes, "Go have an IV of magnesium," etc. Oh my God! The reaction. I actually thought about an hour later, I actually thought I was gonna have a heart attack. You know, oh, I was pumping. It was the nervous system was gone. It was such a terrible reaction that I actually rang him and I said, I'm experiencing all this. And he said, you know, just let it ride out for a little while. But that's what you're saying. Obviously my body wasn't ready for such an intense dose of IV magnesium.

Yeah. And, I will tell you, I learned because again, I've been doing this for going on 37 years. I learned doing this. And, I mean, I used to work with a very amazing doctor where we used to use what is called the PK protocol. This is an amazing way to repair the nervous system, the brain. But, oh my goodness, we thought we could just, oh, no problem here. You have problems with your hormones? Here, we'll give you phosphatidylcholine. choline IV and no worries, we'll do. And you know what? We got in so much trouble so many times. And I thought, oh, what are we doing? What's going on? And then we, we had to connect the dots and, and start thinking like, okay, we can get ourselves in trouble doing this. So we finally realized, no, we've got to prepare the body for these things. And then you get amazing results. And I will tell you, I am used to— I believe in miracles and I see them very often.

I bet you do. I mean, your work just sounds incredible. The depth that you go to, you know, it's just not a simple in and out, you know, in and out kind of process, you know. Like, you know, some people relate detox a bit like, you know, they think weight loss, you know, what you put in and then what you expend out, you know. It's not a matter of just put a juice in and, you know, I'm going to get a great result. From what you're saying Too many people are focusing just on the liver. The medical establishment believes that detoxing isn't a real thing, that it's not needed because that's what the liver and the gallbladder are for. So everyone seems to focus just on the liver as you know the central role to detoxing. But when the liver is so overburdened, how does somebody apart? I know you said you put the finger down and it doesn't. I mean, it can hurt for people with chronic illness if they've got fibromyalgia. It's sort of hard to tell. So how would someone know that their liver is overburdened and it is time to seek out help?

Well, again, you have a lot of the symptoms that you have, physical symptoms. For example, again, the nauseousness, your digestion, you're always bloated, you're always burping, you just feel miserable. But another way that I— that what we do is, if you stop and think about it, every single organ in your body, when it is inflamed and it is toxic, it literally starts pulling all the vertebrae out of place. People don't understand that if your organs are inflamed, you're going to have problems. And you can— if there's people that go to a chiropractor, they'll go like every 2 weeks, you know, for years, and they have— and everything goes back out of place. Do you know that if we— when we clean up a patient, when they're detoxed, their organs are soft, you should be able to put this, your fingers in between your liver and your ribs. There's a space there. When the liver is not inflamed, there's space there. But sometimes you can put your hand right under the liver here and the liver actually is beyond the rib cage. That's a very inflamed liver, and that's going— that's how you know that that person's not doing well. And again, believe it or not, when you have high cholesterol, high cholesterol really just means that your liver isn't processing things. It's too congested. You've got to clean it out, and you'd be amazed what happens with— you won't need any nice statins. And again, when you think about like even diabetes, I will tell you, like 95% of all of our diabetic patients, they come in and their gallbladder and their pancreatic duct are completely blocked. Within 5 to 7 days, again, depending how severe they are, we clean that out and their numbers go completely normal. And they stay normal because we teach them how to eat and how to discipline themselves. And you would be amazed, high blood pressure goes away. Because when you have your liver and your gallbladder and your pancreas and they're congested, It's kind of like when you have a hose of water and then you step on it, and what does it do? It creates pressure, right?

Mm-hmm.

Congestion of your liver, what does it do? It slows down the circulation and your heart has to beat harder and harder to create the movement, right? But so you take all of that toxicity out of the way and you'd be amazed at the flow that you get with the blood pressure, with blood sugar levels, with brain fog. But again, there's different stages. I always tell people, yes, detoxing is amazing, but just because you're detoxing, it doesn't mean that you're better, because sometimes you're so full of parasites. And, and I want to emphasize, when I say the word parasite, look it up in a dictionary, and the word parasite means a pathogen that lives off of a host. How many things live inside of us? We have mold, we have fungus, we have Candida, we have what people call parasites. You know, we have spirochetes, we have cancer. All this is living inside of our body. How would you ever get rid of anything if you don't get rid of all of these bugs? But again, the most important thing is, why are they there? They're there because the environment is appropriate for their existence. You take all those toxins out of their— out of their life. or out of your body. And guess what? You can go in for the kill, and I'm telling you, within 2 weeks you can get half a bucket. I mean, I'm telling you, the things that we have seen are amazing. And we can call them serpents, snakes, because we actually see 4, you know, 5-footers that are, that are thicker than my thumb, you know. And, and we see it every single day.

God.

It's not once in a while. Because every person is toxic and everyone has parasites. And again, parasites can be bacteria, yeast, Candida. And once you could get your mind to understand that, that why do you have Candida, why do you have brain fog, and what are you doing to feed those pathogens inside of you? And it really makes— once you start feeling good and you get your brain back, you're like Oh, hell no, I never wanna feel like that again. And you start like, yeah, maybe I don't wanna eat this stuff anymore.

For somebody who's, say for example, they, um, can't get to you and they wanna start, they know they feel like this and they feel like, yes, their liver is congested. What is a simple thing that they can do at home that's not going to be too harmful or too intense so that at least they can start You know, I look at their diet, but what can they do for their liver? And I guess they do have to look at their emotions.

Be conscious of the emotional aspect of it, you know. And I will tell you, there's— there is so much more, like scar tissues. There's a lot more to look at. But in reality, the most important part really is to cut out all the processed foods, cut out all the sugars, coffee, sodas, alcohol. all these things, all they're doing. And I tell people, before you put something in your mouth, you need to think about, is this going to feed me or is it going to feed the bugs inside of me?

Mm.

And, and be conscious of these things. And believe it or not, that by itself will make such a big difference. Cut out all these refined carbohydrates and GMO foods and so on. And, and that all by itself will kind of keep you to a place to where you'll start having some stability. And then, for example, I make sure that— again, I have seawater, so I'm fortunate— but lemon water, you know, just having lemon water. People that have heartburn, they could have the tablespoon, 2 tablespoons of apple cider, organic apple cider vinegar. Basic things. Do the juicing. The juicing is good for you. Yeah, don't go gung-ho on, on On things. Celery is great. Apples, you know, if you've got a garden, a greenhouse, put all— we have greenhouses here. We have— we feed all the patients organic food. We have everything that we need on the property. We have our goats, our chickens, our ducks, our— so we don't— we have as much as we can available. But try to create an environment where you have healthy foods and you have foods that actually help you have bowel movements again. The key to everything is a bowel movement, because if you're not moving your bowels— so if you eat once a day, have one bowel movement. If you're eating twice a day, have 2 bowel movements. If it's 3 times a day, 3 bowel movements. I know that that sounds hard, but it is possible. And if you're not doing that, the food that's stuck in your colon is just going to start bleeding, eroding the lining of your intestines. You'll start getting leaky gut syndrome. And one thing leads to another. So make those changes, clean up your diet, and yes, eat foods that, that are easy to digest. I always tell everyone bone broth really is a must to have in your diet. That will help heal the leaky gut syndrome. It helps with your digestion. It gets you the protein, the nitrogen that you need. And eggs are really easy to digest. So if your digestion isn't working good, don't go and have something that's hard to digest. You know, keep that out of your diet and start focusing on things that are easy to digest. And that all by itself is going to start moving your bowels, and you'll slowly, slowly start detoxing. There are some people that they really are going to need some very advanced help, but that's going to get them started, and it's going to help them.

Just to go slow. Don't, don't jump in gung-ho. And what do you think about people who, uh, profess a very high fiber diet in the beginning? Can that be too harsh?

Um, it, it depends what you mean by fiber. Now, if people are using— I will tell you, because we work with some pretty advanced cases, especially people that have a lot of diverticuli— you use fiber, for example, some people will use different things like psyllium. They'll use a lot of fiber. And believe it or not, the fiber gets stuck in the diverticuli and it makes the diverticuli grow. And what does that do? That will create an environment— and parasites love, they love this, these areas where there's fiber that's stuck. So I'm really, really careful with, with some of these things because I've had— I've seen too many really, really negative things And yet again, you're going to get your fruits and your vegetables. Stick to the basics. You don't need to go buy all this fancy stuff. Stick to basic foods, your salads, stick to your vegetables. I really try to keep people away from grains anymore. Grains are not what they used to be. Things have changed so very much. And I even tell patients, patients like, oh no, don't worry, this is organic wheat. And, you know, I sourdough it. How many bowel movements are you having a day? Oh, well, I'll have one every other day. I don't know if you notice, but that's the first thing that wheat does. Dairy. I mean, if you— it's like, why go there? Why not just find something amazing? For example, here in our clinic, we make bread on a daily basis. We make pancakes, waffles, muffins, but they're all made out of seeds and nuts. And we pass out, we give to all of our patients cookbooks, recipes. It's like, here, go and learn how to cook. Go learn what real food is. Because people, as soon as you say bread, they're like, oh, wheat, white flour. That's the first thing they think of. I'm like, no, no, no, no, it doesn't have to be made out of that. You can change the ingredients. Use ingredients that your body can digest. We have patients that come in and we tend to like to use pecans. We have the largest pecan orchard in the world here. So, we have a lot of organic pecans. But sometimes they can't handle very much of that, so we'll give them sunflower seeds or pumpkin seeds, and then we'll make their own mixture, and we'll make a loaf of bread for them. And it's very easy. It takes an average of 5 to 7 minutes to make 2 loaves of bread in the blender, and then you just put it in the oven, and it does take about 50 minutes to an hour.

But, There are a lot of recipes online that people can look at. So, you know, information is available. And if someone's thinking, oh, well, that's fine, you know, you muscle test your patients, you find out what they need, how would I know? Well, would you say that your body's gonna tell you whether you can digest? Like, if you've got digestive problems and you go and eat a steak and it sits there for— feels like it's sitting there for 3 days, well, maybe you're not ready for a steak.

Exactly.

You might look at a light white fish or something like that. Like, listen, I think we need to get back in tune with our body. We're so removed from our bodies and nature, and then when something goes wrong, it's like we spearhead towards a supplement or something like that as the fix, whereas really listening to ourselves is the fix. And that kind of brings me to just like my last question is around, you know, which I find really interesting because I, I would never have thought that, you know, you talk about the nervous system inflammation, past injuries, especially head and scar tissue, and that has a big effect on your ability to detox. So how do you help When you have clients like that, like, first, how do these influence detox, and how do you work through these hidden barriers that people don't even know are interrupting their detoxing?

So in many cases, when I read their eyes, I can see right away that they've had head injuries, and I could tell what side of the, the body, of the head it's on. And I will tell you, when you have a head injury That affects the way the atlas and axis, this area in the cervical area.

At the back of the neck for the people who are wondering.

Yes. Yes. So in the back of the neck, believe it or not, if you have like a whiplash, you have what is called the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve stems from the back of your neck all the way down. It ends in the anus area. If you have an injury, if you have fascia, so imagine you get hit, the tissues, everything gets tight and your fascia gets tightened and it'll stay that way sometimes the rest of your life. So that affects the way that the vagus nerve is the most important nerve in your entire body because it controls so much of your systems. And so once you can understand how that's affecting your digestion, your heart rhythm, and so on, You could do all types of therapy here to release the fascia. And believe it or not, that in itself will help just regulate your bowels. If you have, let's say, scar tissue— women have a lot of C-sections. A lot of women that have had C-sections, they start suffering of constipation. And they don't know why. They don't connect the dots. But if you look at all the meridian points that are there in the pelvic area, and how that affects the circulation in your digestion, specifically the sigmoid, and how it dumps out. If you have scar tissue, a lot of times— and again, I've worked in hospitals for years and I've seen how doctors, they just go in there and they make this really beautiful line on the top, and then they go in and they just tear the inside open and take the baby out really quick. And they're not cautious because nobody's going to see the inside. And then they sew up and leave these huge scars and horrible adhesions. Inside, and then they put this beautiful little line there. Well, what we do is we find out deep inside where those lesions are, where those scar tissues are, and then we break that up. And wow, you open up the energy in the sigmoid. And then, because that paralyzes the peristaltic movement in the sigmoid, which is the part where you're gonna have your bowel movement and release your toxins.

What's a way that people can have that scar tissue broken up?

So if they know of anyone that does neural therapy, they use neural therapy and they, they put ice on the scar tissue. It'll completely numb it within 7 minutes, and it gets injected all the way through, and even in the deep levels. And probably within like the first one, they'll notice a difference already. But once they get into the deep tissues, you'll be amazed because these scars, they actually cause all kinds of varicose veins, all kinds of problems with the knees and the ankles. Why? Because there's not enough circulation moving through there because it's been severed there. So if you want— if you have issues with your legs and circulation issues there, then you always need to make sure that you're taking care of the scars there. Or if you have lower back injuries, you take care of that. If not, women will start having horrible symptoms with their cycles. And when they go into menopause, they end up losing their uterus. And then you get one scar that leads to another scar, and then they cut this out. out and they cut that out, and it just becomes this cascade of surgeries. And it— all it really was is that there's certain therapies, like for example acupuncture, there's cupping, there's neural therapy, there's sonic waves, there's different types of frequencies that help release and minimize that scar tissue to allow the circulation to move. But there's different modalities that you could use to open up the circulation back into the digestion, into the uterus, and into So interesting.

And does it matter if the scar is 1 year old or 20 years old? It's still— these therapies are still effective?

Very, very effective. And you see, what happens is sometimes when we're young, we have a lot of things going, our health, and we have a lot of things going for us. But with time, the body is always trying to compensate for the lack of energy and circulation in that area. So it compensates by forming scar tissue. compensates and compensates until later. And there comes a time where it's like, okay, I'm done. And that's where, even if it's 20 years later, you go in there, you inject the scars, you work on that, and you get the nerves and the energy moving through there. And yeah, and one thing to always remember, like, if you've had any kind of surgeries and it feels numb, just know that if it's numb, it's blocking circulation, it's damaging nerves. that are connected to other systems. And if you see like a scar that's like purple or red for many years and isn't healing and it's thick, that's blocking meridians. And it could be causing all kinds of other issues with your kidneys. It can cause issues with your digestion, with your legs, your reproductive area. So all these things are connected. There's nothing you could do. And that's part of being able to detox the right way is knowing where the root of your problem— where is it really coming from and how to go and break that up and loosen that up wherever it is. And then you go through the process of detoxing.

You've worked with many people with chronic illness. What's one of the most surprising benefits they've experienced through a detox?

The most famous words are, I think I have my life back. I think my brain works again.

Yeah.

And they didn't They almost forgot when it was that they lost their brain because it's been so many years that they've been trying to concentrate, trying to remember. It's like, okay, wait a minute, I know I left my phone here, or I think— and more importantly, I think that what they feel is— the most popular words that I hear is a sense of well-being. Those are the number one words that I get after they've gone— even, even if they're not completely finished with their detox, they'll always say that, you know, I just, I feel like I'm going to be okay, like my body isn't fighting anymore. If your immune system is in charge of cleaning up the terrain and eliminating through the lymphatics, through your urine, through your bowels, think about it. When you have so many toxicities in there, it's like your body is constantly in fight and flight. It's always, I'm going to survive, I'm going to survive this. And, and there comes a time where your body doesn't, doesn't do that anymore. And then you're like, hey, wait a minute, something's different. I don't feel like I have to fight. And another thing that's important is that when you're full of parasites— if anyone gets a chance to study the National Geographic, it says that there's a documentary that says how parasites control your brain. Oh my goodness. You will not believe. It can make you depressed. It can make you suicidal. It can— it's incredible what parasites can do to your life. But when you get rid of those parasites— the first time I did a parasite, I did it for 3 weeks only. I lost 17 pounds. And I thought to myself, wow, you know, I, I mean, I'm— I feel like my brain, it feels good. It doesn't feel stressed out. And we don't even know that it's stressed out until it's not stressed out.

That's what I was going to say. Like you mentioned before, we never know how good we can feel unless we actually do something like this. Like, we just get used to feeling the way we do and think that that's normal. But people just— if you take the plunge, you can actually really feel what it's like to be healthy. When it— just one more point, because I think parasites are a huge part of all this, and I think Parasites contribute to so much ill health, and it's so underrated. Some people say you should do a parasite clean— cleanse twice a year, you know, because they return. You know, where it's parasites everywhere, you know, we just have to touch something, we can pick up a parasite. How many times would you recommend doing a parasite cleanse?

I will tell you, for the average person, I would do it twice a year. I really, really would. And again, because we're being exposed to so many different things that have created such a perfect environment for their existence that we really do need to stay on top of it. And I always tell people, it just depends on the quality of life. What do you want? Do you want to get up in the morning and have energy and feel good and make plans? I mean, I want to be able to say, hey, you know what, next week I want to plan, I want to go here, I want to do this. I have So many friends— I'm almost 60 years old, and I have so many friends that they'll say, you know what, well, maybe I could do it next year, or, you know, they just don't feel well enough, they don't have the energy. I'm like, no, I'm going to go here, here, here, and do this because I have a lot of energy and I want to. I have a very big family. I mean, I just became a great-grandmother, and I'm so excited. I mean, I'm so in love I have 37 great-grand— I'm sorry, 37 grandchildren, and I want to have energy. I want to enjoy them. I want to visit with them. I want to be at their weddings. I want, you know, it's a totally— I feel like I'm in a different stage of my life to where my children are older and I could now really go out there and enjoy life. I've worked hard to get where I'm at, and I just want to enjoy it. And you can't do that if you're not healthy.

And you don't have energy. Energy is everything. You've got to have the energy in life. For people who are like me, I'm on the other side of the world, you know, I definitely wanna— I'm gonna put it on my bucket list to come and see you, you know, because your center looks just amazing. Do the supplements that they sell on the internet, etc., do they work for a parasite cleanse?

For some people they do very much, yes. For some people, they really do. And again, I recommend that they do it. And if you know that you're actually releasing the parasites, if they're coming out and you're not becoming deathly ill, I would do it. I want to say a little thing about parasites, and this is a real gem here. If you are killing parasites and you're not having at least 3 bowel movements a day, be advised that when those parasites die inside of you, These parasites have gone in and cleaned up so many of the heavy metals and chemicals that we have because that's why they're there. They're completely full of chemicals. If they sit there and they rot and they decay, they're gonna release all the chemicals back into your system and you're gonna be the most miserable human being. So make sure that you know what you're doing and make sure that you're having those bowels, those bowel movements, because it will come back to haunt you if you're not.

So the key is, first step, get your bowels moving several times a day before you take on any kind of cleanse.

That's exactly right.

Excellent. This has been an amazing amount of information. So to kind of distill it for somebody who, uh, may have a chronic condition, you know, maybe they have mold or Lyme or something like that and they're listening to this And they feel like, oh my goodness, I don't know where to start. What could you say to someone today is the simplest thing that they could do at home to start themselves on a healthier path?

Okay, so when you have mold, that's kind of taking it to another level. I mean, mold is a really, it's a tough one. But mold, know this much, when you have Wi-Fi, when you have, your phone, your, your smart televisions. You've got to unplug them because mold multiplies by 600 times just being surrounded, depending on how close you are to the Wi-Fi. Get rid of the Wi-Fi and don't use it unless you absolutely need it. Keep your phone away from you. I know that sounds so crazy, but if people could understand how that's affecting and causing a lot of brain fog. Okay, it gets the Candida and it stirs it up. That's one way. Changing your diet is so, so important. Keep your environment clean, again, by not letting mold and things grow around you. Be careful what you're consuming. There really are a lot of herbs, a lot of vitamins and supplements that are full of heavy metals and chemicals. There's so much going on right now where a lot of the vitamin companies are being bought off, and they have the same name, the same label. But you see, the FDA isn't required to put the, the changes on the label. It's different. They have totally different standards. So you have to be careful what types of vitamins and supplements you're taking. Keep all of that in mind and be aware that, you know what, if your absorption is is not very well, you're going to spend an awful lot of money on vitamins and supplements that you're not going to benefit from. So focus more on your diet. Keep a clean diet. And as I said, foods that are going to help you have bowel movements that are not going to get stuck in your body. Those are the most important things that you could do. And of course, think positive. You know, always think positive. Don't think of yourself as a victim, as, oh, my life is been difficult, somebody did me wrong, and therefore I'm justified to act like a whatever. Get over that stuff, you know, and literally start thinking, okay, how am I going to empower myself? What am I going to do to make myself feel better? What am I going to do to help me fulfill my purpose in life? Yeah, and create a vision. Have a vision, because people that can't see ahead of them, that they're too busy focusing on their past, They're going to be sick, they're going to be tired, and they're not going to be able to detox. They have to create a vision, look forward to things, make plans, set goals, and stick to them. And you're going to be amazed. That in itself, just the thought that you can create a vision, look forward ahead of you, you're going to detox because that in itself is a form of detoxing.

Dr. Virginia Marston, this has been such an incredible, informative episode around, you know, this is taking detox to a whole different level and way out there than what I think anybody has ever really thought about it before. Was definitely people, when they listen to podcasts or read about detoxing, they're not hearing this information. And for everybody who has just loved listening to Dr. Marston and what she has to offer, All her details will be in the show notes. Her website will be there. Do go on and contact her because honestly, what she has to offer is way above everybody else. Thank you.