Cleansing in Style - Your personal path to a happy, healthy and delicious life

Finding your cleansing style, just like finding your Nutritional Style, is a wonderful way to help maintain optimal health and keep your body finely tuned, on point, and brimming with energy.
Why should you think about spending some time on a whole-foods detoxifying diet twice a year? Because living in today’s modern world makes cleansing essential. We take in toxins from our environment through the air we breathe, whatever touches our skin, and the food we eat. Our bodies’ normal detoxifying organs, especially the liver, colon, kidneys, and skin (did you know your skin is your body’s largest organ?) can become overwhelmed by all they have to do. Sometimes they need a break, which is where detoxing comes in.

Even if you eat 100 percent organic food all the time, you’ll still benefit from cleansing—toxins come at us from all directions, not just our food. And a cleanse is a fantastic way to kick off a new lifestyle and way of eating, or to take a break from indulgences that you may have enjoyed a little too often.

A cleanse a good way to spring clean your body after the less active winter months when the weather keeps you indoors and a little too close to the refrigerator. I suggest doing a cleanse early in the spring when the weather begins to warm and the days are getting longer. A second cleanses in the late fall, as the days cool off and get shorter, gets you ready for the long winter ahead.

A Cleanse Is Not a Diet

While weight loss can be one nice side effect of cleansing, it’s not the goal. A cleanse is not a diet. A cleanse the beginning of a new way of thinking and living in this world. Most diets are restrictive and prohibitive, a setup for failure. When you come off your diet, you still don’t know how to eat nutritiously to sustain your weight loss. Diets also can leave you feeling lousy, because most of them don’t promote eating life-enhancing foods. If you go on a diet that insists you buy its diet food meals or food packets to mix with water, or take its powders or pills and follow a rigid set of instructions, you won’t be eating in a sensible, healthy way, much less eating according to your personal Nutritional Style. Most diets—such as those that eliminate or severely restrict carbohydrates—omit vital elements of nutrition. By definition, a diet creates a feeling of missing out or denial. You cause yourself unnecessary anxiety worrying about whether you’re doing the diet “right” or whether you’ll get to enjoy real food again.

The cleanse I offer to my clients adds greater amounts of healthy, life-enhancing foods and removes toxic or potentially toxic foods from your daily consumption.

Toxic foods and substances cause inflammation. Let’s digress a bit and explain what I mean. Imagine you’re in your kitchen slicing up some veggies. The knife slips and you cut your finger. You swear, reach for a paper towel to stop the bleeding, wash off the cut, put on a bandage, maybe look around for some sympathy, and get back to work. Later on, you notice the area is a bit red, a bit swollen, feels a bit warm and hurts. Those are the markers of inflammation—your immune system is releasing all sorts of natural chemicals to heal the damage and kill off any germs that might have entered the area. In a few days, your finger heals up, and the inflammation goes away.

But what if the source of the inflammation never actually goes away? What if your diet is consistently high in inflammatory foods, such as sugar or gluten, or if you’re constantly exposed to toxins, such as pesticides or air pollution? In that case, the inflammation can become chronic. You still have the redness, warmth, and swelling that characterize inflammation, but they’re happening inside your body, where you can’t see or feel them directly. Chronic inflammation works away silently, damaging your blood vessels, your organs, your skin, your brain—every part of your body Inflammation is the cause of most of the major chronic diseases in the United States today. It plays a role in cancer, heart disease, brain deterioration, diabetes, high blood pressure, asthma, sinus infection, and many other diseases of modern society.

If you eat inflammatory foods on a regular basis or are frequently exposed to toxins, such as fumes from the carpeting in your office, your body is continually reacting. If you keep on alert like this, day after day, your immune system may begin to attack healthy cells. This might show up as a rash or achy joints, or possibly as an autoimmune disease such as rheumatoid arthritis, or in the worst case, as cancer, when cells grow rapidly and out of control. Even if you don’t have any visible signs of an immune system running in the red zone, chronic inflammation can make you feel exhausted, foggy, or depressed.

Removing inflammatory foods during the cleanse allows your body to cool down and rest, so your cells can eliminate toxins that have built up over time. This also gives your liver, kidneys, colon, and skin a bit of a break—they don’t have to work so hard detoxifying your body.

More important, a cleanse is a way to get yourself off inflammatory foods for good. In my experience, people who do a cleanse feel so much better afterward that they don’t want to go back to eating the sugary junk foods and other bad stuff. They’d rather stick with the whole foods, juices, and other energizing foods they ate during the cleanse and add in other healthy delights.