We are writing this article as a love offering to all the people we have known and will know (including ourselves) who have wanted to feel better and, let’s be honest, look better, and have struggled with feeling disgust, anger and confusion towards their body. See if any of this sounds familiar.
So, a very common scenario we see is a client comes to us saying something along the lines of…
“I’m fat. Can you put me on a cleanse or something? I need to lose weight fast.”
Or, “I’ve been really stresed at work so I’ve been eating out almost every meal and drinking more than usual to decompress. Is there some kind of fast I can do to feel better, like one where I don’t eat for a week?”
Then, there are the cleanse and fast fixated folks who are perpetually detoxing and retoxing, trying this cleanse and that, never really feeling “clean” enough (or thin enough). We know a beautiful ex-model who was never our client, but who kept fasting to lose weight (we didn’t think she needed to). It worked at first, but then she would go back to eating her regular haphazardly healthy diet (sometimes it was very balanced, and often it was not). After a while, she started gaining weight the more she fasted. And the more she gained, the more she felt disgust with her body, so the more she fasted. It felt as though she was trying to beat her metaboliosm into submisison. It wasn’t working. Can you see why?
Metabolisms don’t respond well to beating, but they do respond quite nicely to self love.
Self love sounds nice and all, but what if your daily perception is that you feel too… something (tired, foggy, achey, fat, skinny, ugly, wrinkly, old, saggy) and not enough of something else… (energetic, sharp, pain-free, thin, muscular, beautiful, flawless, youthful, toned). Where’s the love in that?
While we will be addressing negative self-talk and distorted self-image perceptions in other blog posts, we want to validate that many of us struggle with not feeling and looking our best. These signals from your body are literally in-built indicators that something is out of whack. In many cases it is that our toxic burden is too high. This affects what we call physical and emotional health, which are one in the same.
Your day-to-day thoughts and emotions are actually a reflection of your overall health, and the reverse is true. What you think and how you feel shapes your health, down to the cellular and molecular levels. Yes, you are made of cells and molecules and they respond to your thoughts. Let that sink in real deep. Think what more loving thoughts would do for your health. That’s the first step of cleansing.
So, what does it actually mean to be toxic?
Toxins are either artificial substances that, as foreign molecules, can disrupt and damage our bodies. They are also biological waste that our body doesn’t need anymore and must be eliminated for us to be healthy (cellular waste becomes your poop and it has to get out). Stress in its many forms, including fearful and self-depracating thoughts are all toxic to the body. We like to use the term “toxic stress” to summarize them all.
We are designed to handle toxic stress in moderation, and even need some exposure to keep our immune system on its toes, but when we have too much toxic burden, we are robbed of optimal health. Even more toxic load, and we get really really sick. At first we chronically feel bad more and more of the time (that’s your wake up call), but we can go to doctors and get tests done only to find out we don’t qualify for an official medical diagnosis…yet. If we don’t change our ways, then an official disease manifests, maybe not just one, but many as multiple body systems start to shut down. This whole process feels bad and continues to get worse if we don’t heed our body’s warnings and change our daily thoughts and behaviors.
Most of us are aware to some extent how toxic our environment and food has become. Studies show that each of us has thousands of toxic industrial chemicals in our bodies. Even babies and fetuses have these chemicals inside their brand new little bodies. These chemicals aren’t just in the air, water, building supplies, cleaners, adhesives, etc, but we are eating them through our skin and mouths.
We are also becoming increasingly aware that many foods we enjoy for a moment on the lips don’t exactly do us a lifetime of favors on the hips or anywhere else. In fact, many substances we nowadays refer to as “food” are addictive, artificial and wouldn’t even be recognized as edible by our ancestors, not to mention all the agricultural and livestock chemicals that aren’t found on labels.
Why do we feel dirty? Toxins make us feel bad and affect our appearance
Toxic stress damages our organs and glands that metabolize hormones and neurotransmitters, thus how we think and feel. This is connected to the root of our health, our digestive system, including our liver. Toxic stress affects our digestion, nutrient absorption (think not having enoug building blocks) and the microbes that are the foundation for your immune system, known as your microbiome. This means, that the more toxic we are, the more we get sick, both contagious and degenerative diseases. Since body composition is a hormonal (not strictly caloric) issue, toxic stress can cause weight gain and make it challenging to gain muscle.
Toxins can cause bags under our eyes, skin problems, hair to dull or fall out, nails to be brittle, cellulite to increase, collagen to collapse and belly fat to bloom (man boobs, too). Then there, is the zapping of libido, sexual function, energy and cognitive functions, so we don’t think too sharp and feel like we’ve lost our mojo. The stress we are under makes it easy to take everything personally and feel like the whole world is against you. It’s easy to feel disgust and anger. It’s easy to feel unlovable, no matter how much some part of us knows that true love is unconditional.
Then we hear that detoxing, even doing cleanses and fasts (not necessarily the same thing) can reverse a lot of this. And, the truth is, if done correctly, they can because our body has this amazing ability to heal and detoxify itself. Is it any wonder that cleanses and detoxes are so popular?
The great carb debacle: a precursor to toxic guilt
Bear with us as we go on a little side road here. Trust us. It’s relevant to know that the stress of feeling guilt and disgust is toxic as is even too much of a good thing. We really see these two things come together for people around the question of carbohydrates. Yes, too many can be toxic, especially where blood sugar balance, and thus insulin levels are concerned. Insulin is a fat storing hormone and chronic high insulin is linked to anything from belly fat to degenerative diseases like diabetes, heart disease, cancer and many many more.
Even in the realm of “real” and organic foods, we have access to more carbohydrates, both simple sugars and complex, than ever in the history of humans. Not only do pathogens, like yeasts and bacterias stoke our sugar cravings, but our evolutionary biology is not used to having such abundant access to sugars and carbs. Our bodies drive us to stockpile things that turn to sugar in case we won’t have access to any more for a while (weeks or months, not minutes).
One of our frustrations as coaches is that when we educate people on the issues brought about by too many carbs or eating junk carbs, all people’s brains seem to hear is “CARBS ARE BAD,” which then translates to “I SHOULDN’T EAT THEM.” People hear this even though we tell people that too few carbs for longer than a short term metabolic reset (or anti-cancer protocol) can be very imbalancing. We even give it to them in writing. Yet, we find out years after we have met with people that they are still on ultra low carb diets. This makes us wish we had been much more adamant (and that we had emphasized the importance of follow-ups).
So, please hear us when we say, it’s not that carbs are bad. It’s just that we don’t need as many as we are eating or the poor quality processed kind. Just enough nutrient dense, chemical free carbohydrates is necessary for optimum health and going too low carb can heal only for a window of time before it becomes a stressor on our body and may damage our health.
Too many, on the other hand, and we’re in even bigger trouble, barrelling our way to chronic diesease. Striking a balance can be very confusing and make us feel guilty about the tension between our natural inborn cravings for carbohydrates and feeling like crap when we eat too many too often, or misread our instincts and feed ourselves toxic, processed carbs.
So, in a nutshell, too many carbs can be toxic and require a temporary break in a metabolic reset cleanse to rebalance, but demonizing carbs and feeling guilty about eating even reasonable amounts of healthy ones is another form of toxic stress.
Why do we feel dirty? Shame and punishment
Before you decide to do a cleanse, either your first or your hundreth one, it is crucial to address your motivation behind wanting to cleanse. Again, so often we see people seeking cleansing as redemption for poor eating habits and self-destructive lifestyle choices. From that place it can be used as a form of self punishment for all the bad choices that have led to a feeling of toxicity and imbalance. Sometimes people think that by doing something extreme, like a fast, they are absolving themselves of their sins. Unfortunately, this way of approaching the cleansing process comes from fear, anger and judgement, not nurturing self love.
So often people say, “I’m so bad.” It’s up to you if you want to believe in original sin and that you are inherently “less than,” but in our experience, it doesn’t encourage long-term success. It makes people sicker and sicker. Also, we don’t think it’s true. In our expereince, we are only as limited as we think we are. We just need to shift our awareness to a more loving, compassionate outlook.
Cleansing as a gift
It’s important to understand that, quite literally, taking emotional and mental stress off of the body is also a way of cleansing. In fact, despite all its biological intricacies, we can boil cleansing down to:
Cleansing = taking away toxic stress and adding loving support
So instead of beating yourself up and, even subconsciously, thinking you deserve a punishment (taking privileges away), see the process as a gift. Focus on using a cleanse as a way of doing something loving for yourself, honoring the amazing ability your body has to find balance and health. See it as a way to get back on track with your higher intentions. This approach encourages you to continue supporting your health long after the cleanse.
In Cleansing Part 2 you will learn:
- the ins and outs of effective cleansing (in other words, how exactly does the body detoxify and what nutrients support it)
- the limits of certain popular cleanses you should know about so you can make informed decisions or modifications
- the advantages and disadvantages of fasting
- why your smart, caring doctor does not, and possibly cannot, offer cleansing protocols (and is not the enemy of natural medicine)
- ways of keeping your body in cleansing mode so you can stay “on top of things” as a joyful part of your everyday life
- how a targeted cleansing protocol can be a pleasurable act of self love where you don’t have to starve yourself to see astonishing results in just a few days
If you know you could feel a whole heck of a lot better and are interested in a doable, highly effective and affordable cleanse, here is one of our favorites.
It’s a hybrid inspired by some of our favorite functional medicine practitioners with a hint of Ayurveda. We actually didn’t originally plan to sell a cleanse as part of our online offerings, but so many people effusively love it and have requested it. So, we are offering it online as a matter of both pragmatics and feeling like we can’t not offer it. Why? Because it’s so effective at giving people a quick, direct experience of the power of food as medicine and their own innate potential to heal.
It’s also included as a free gift in our Closing Your Nurture Gap 12 week group and personalized programs.