Have you wondered what all the hype around doing a detox is? Do you wonder if a detox is right for you?
Let’s face it, we live in a world where we are surrounded by toxins in the air we breathe, the food we eat, the water we drink, and even in the skincare products and makeup we put on our skin.
Given these facts alone, you could say a detox is right for everybody.
Detox Is Necessary
The process of detoxing your body isn’t something that happens overnight. It takes a while to fully rid your body of pollutants. And there’s a learning curve as you begin to uncover all of the various toxic elements in your world.
Adopting a detox lifestyle can help improve your health and decrease your risk of developing disease.
So let’s take a look at some of the potential toxins in your life.
1. Recognize What You Are Breathing In
All through the night, and as soon as you open your eyes in the morning, your lungs are filling with the air around you. You can’t see it, but there may or may not be chemicals and pollutants flooding into your body through your airways.
In order to analyze your air, you have to inspect the place where you live, work, and frequent. Is your town or city heavily industrialized? Do you see factories spewing chemicals into the air or a foggy haze over the city as you drive to work or home each day?
Sometimes, you think you’re safe in your car driving to work, but on the way there, you can smell exhaust fumes from other cars. Or if you’re at a stoplight, you might smell cigarette smoke from someone smoking in the car in front of you.
It’s best to avoid heavily trafficked areas where you’re prone to breathing in pollutants whenever possible. You breathe in a lot of toxins with car exhaust, including nitrogen dioxide, which is harmful to your lungs.
Even in your home, you want to have a safety net available. Sometimes, you’ll be breathing toxins in your home for different reasons, such as getting your carpet cleaned, deep cleaning your house, and repainting the walls.
Stop using toxic cleaners, candles, and air fresheners that don’t do anything more than mask the toxins with a specific scent. You want to look for organic, healthy cleaners to use around your house.
You can also buy standalone air filtering systems for your home. Make sure they’re HEPA (high-efficiency particulate air) quality. You also want to manually dust your home’s surfaces yourself.
2. Eliminate Toxins From Your Food
Some of the best-tasting foods that you’re addicted to are filled with dangerous toxins.
But the great news is, your taste buds can develop a craving for natural, whole organic foods once you go through the detox process to rid your body of its dependence on processed foods and sugars.
Many plant-based foods are covered in fertilizer and pesticides. It is important to wash our food and choose organic whenever possible.
Once food is processed and packaged it poses another problem for you. Processing strips foods of many of their nutrients and injects a bunch of unwanted ingredients, such as:
- Sugar substitutes (like aspartame)
- High-fructose corn syrup
- Sodium benzoate
- Food dyes
- Butylated hydroxytoluene (BHT)
- Monosodium glutamate (MSG)
All of these harm your body in some way, shape, or form, and all should be avoided as much as possible.
What’s worse is, when some toxins are put together in one product, they become even more harmful. Many foods are also genetically modified.
This is done before a food is grown, and while scientists could surely use their knowledge to provide better nutrition, it’s all about the money — modifying foods to produce more, so they earn more.
Many countries have actually banned genetically modified foods in the interest of protecting their citizens.
3. Stop Using And Consuming Toxic Water
Your city should provide you with an annual water-quality report. This helps you identify potential toxins in your water.
It’s alarming that many people make the water toxic by flushing their prescription pills down the drain, into the water supply. Please don’t do this. You’ll find that some water supplies may be contaminated with:
- Fertilizer
- Sewage
- Discharge from electronics
- Discharge from drug factories
- Discharge from electronics petroleum refineries
- Erosion of natural deposits
The government will have a certain limit of allowable toxins in your water supply. So you could be getting all of the above — bathing in it, cooking in it, and drinking it, and it would be under the guise of you getting “safe” water.
Drinking filtered water is one step you can take to improve the safety of your drinking water.
4. Beware Of Toxins In Unsuspected Places
Recently, we have all heard about lead in drinking water. Lead can also be found in paint in older homes. Lead poisoning can affect your brain and nervous system, and it’s more toxic to children than it is to adults.
Do you remember the days when moms and dads were petrified of a thermometer breaking — or a lightbulb? It was a fear of exposing you to mercury. But you might already have mercury in your dental fillings!
Look to see if you have silver fillings. These are often half mercury, and many people are contacting dentists to have them removed and replaced with safer fillings that are now the norm in dentistry.
Fluorescent lightbulbs still contain mercury, and most families have moved on to better, safer options. But there’s mercury found in other places, too — like canned tuna fish and even high-fructose corn syrup.
Sometimes, even the things we do to improve our health can be toxic. If you see what’s in medicines and vaccines, it’s scary — but you have to weigh the pros against the cons. The disease you get from not taking it might be far worse than your risk of exposure to the toxin.
All of these toxins are floating around you every day. If you become paranoid about them, you’ll never get through a single day without stress hormones — another toxin to your body that’s naturally produced inside of you.
The best you can do is become aware and take steps to reduce and limit your exposure. You’ve probably already endured some damage from these toxins at a cellular level.
So What Can You Do?
- Awareness of your environment is step number one.
- Next look at what you are eating. Start by eliminating processed foods and sugars from your diet. Then switch to organic whole foods.
- Strive to drink up to half your weight in water daily.
- Get rid of skincare products and makeup with hidden toxins and hormone-disrupting ingredients. Opt instead for a safer, non-toxic alternative.
- Start using natural cleaning products in your home.
By implementing some or all of these steps, you will be well on your way to reducing your toxic exposure and improve your health while you are at it.
