Detox Cleanse FAQ

Why do a detox cleanse?

What is a detox cleanse and how can we choose the best kind? There are many to pick from but the raw food detox diet is the safest and quickest way to shed pounds and gain incredible energy, and unlike any other cleanse, it is a diet plan you can stick with long term so that instead of re-toxicifying after all your hard work, you will continue to experience raw food detoxification until the body is in a state of perfect health.

What exactly is the purpose of a detox cleanse? The definition of detoxification according to dictionary.com is the metabolic process by which toxins are changed into less toxic or more readily excretable substances. So what does this garble mean and why do we need a raw food detox in the first place? To understand the importance of a detox cleanse, we first have to understand where toxins come from and why our bodies accumulate them to the point where we are in great need of raw food detoxification.

Many people who partake in a detox cleanse make the assumption that toxins are something we cannot avoid. After all, we breathe them in, we can't always eat organic and everyone has the occasional slip up in their healthy diet. Actually, if this was all we had to be worried about as far as toxins go then the detox cleanse would be very mild.

But the truth is that most people don't eat healthy diets (even those who think they do) and when people start a detox cleanse they typically experience some nasty symptoms. Headaches, nausea, dizziness, exhaustion, excessive phlegm and coating of the tongue are just to name a few. These symptoms are evidence that the body is working on getting rid of some nasty stuff that the body has been storing for probably quite some time.

You immediately ask why your body would be holding onto toxins. Doesn't everything that comes in go back out? To put it bluntly, the answer is no. You see, the human body was never meant to deal with the foods that we have grown accustomed to eating. The elimination systems of the body are just not equipped to handle everything we give it. Human digestion takes about a twenty minutes to a half hour for most raw fruits and vegetables, and a little longer for the fattier kinds such as avocado. Yet, for the standard meals we are used to, the digestive process can take hours and flesh can even take days to eliminate.

Now imagine what happens when we leave food out and let it go bad. Carbohydrates ferment and proteins putrefy and rot, giving off a whole list of health deteriorating toxins (there are ways to prevent this that few people are aware of ). After twenty or more years of subjecting the body to this, many of us are in real need of a good raw food detox.

Why do we store waste?

Let us imagine for a moment that a garbage truck is our body and the garbage men are the little workers in our stomachs. Once a week we put the trash out (aka we eat a meal) and the men come and pick it up and put it in the truck. The truck goes to the landfill and it is emptied out and all is well.

Now let us suppose we decide to be a little more careless about our impact on the environment and we have so much trash ( or so many meals) that the garbage men must come a few times a week now. Okay, so they are working a little harder but it is nothing they can't handle.

But, we are suddenly so gluttonous that the truck is being filled all day long. The garbage men are so busy filling the truck that they simply have no time to empty its contents. So the waste builds and builds and the stench becomes unbearable. Disease grows rampant and the workers are exhausted. We can even think of death as the point in which the trash just overflows and there is a complete failure to thrive.

This scenario is analogous to what we put our bodies through with three meals a day and snacks. As the body is working on digesting one meal of heavy cooked foods, all of the sudden in comes another, and so waste is stored to be taken care of later but for many people the body never sees this "later time". The body is so busy tending to digesting each meal that it can never "take out the trash"...unless you do the raw food detox diet!

How does raw food detoxification work?

So we now understand why we need a detox cleanse, but now we need to know how a raw food detox works and why it far surpasses any of the other cleanses floating around out there. We can make it complicated, but this detox cleanse works its magic in two big ways:

2. Raw fruits and vegetables have live enzymes to aid the digestive process. When we eat cooked foods we continually tax the body of energy that could otherwise be put to good use to aid in detoxification. Not to mention that cooked food takes triple, if not quadruple the time to digest, which is another zap to our precious resource of energy.

If you don't believe cooked food stops a detox cleanse then try this little test: when you wake up in the morning you will undoubtedly have a coated tongue with a white film, which is a symptom of detoxification. Now eat your breakfast of cooked eggs, bacon and toast and then check your tongue. I'll the ruin the surprise by informing you that it will once again be a rosy pink, a sure sign that your body has halted all attempts to continue its detox cleanse in order to digest the heavy meal you just piled in.

How do other cleanses compare?

There are many other popular detox cleanses out there but none will work long term like the raw food detox diet will. The master cleanse diet has become all the rage as well as others, such as a lemon cleanse. Sure, you will lose a ton of weight because you will be cutting out a substantial amount of calories and consuming only liquid, which is easy on human digestion, but as soon as you start eating a balanced diet again you will regain all your weight back.

Another downside to these fast result cleanses is that you will be seriously hungry and seriously irritable. Why not enjoy food, feel good and still lose weight? If you want a more rigorous detox cleanse then try 30 days of a raw food diet with no overt fats, or you could even try 30 days of a juice fast (but only drink fresh unpasteriuzed juice!). These are healthy alternatives to fad cleanses.

How is a raw food detox done?

You have two choices when doing this detox cleanse:

1. Jump right in and eat a low fat raw food diet while doing brief fasts or

2. Get your toes wet first by making small, gradual changes until you reach your goal.

The goal of the raw food detox diet is to give the body the chance to eliminate poisons and waste and with either of these routes you are going to achieve this, but there a few advantages and disadvantages to each that can only be weighed on an individual basis.

For optimal results, committing to a raw food diet 100% seems like the best way to go but everyone is starting from a different place so not everyone should or can be as strict with their detox cleanse. Only you know what you can handle. There is no point in jumping in full force if you know your cravings will overcome you. Do you have enough will power? Only you know.

Many people do not and this is why it is often best to do option #2, which will allow you to transition more easily into eating raw food. You will still reap all the same benefits. Your detox cleanse will be longer but much less severe. So if you have been diagnosed with a disease you may not want to waste time, but otherwise small changes will help you stay in it for the long haul.

Slow and steady wins this race, so pace yourself and do the best you can. Your body will thank you for taking the first steps in a healthy direction, no matter how small they may seem. I chose to transition gradually to the point where I now eat a vegan low fat raw food diet and juice fast daily until dinner. It took about a year to get to this point and it was a rough journey but entirely worth it.

The raw food diet plan page will help you get started on your detox cleanse but the following is an introduction to some of the basic changes you will be making during your raw food detoxification.

Stop eating too much too often

Above all else, we eat too much cooked, dense food much too often. A breakfast of eggs, bacon and toast, a lunch of bread, lunchmeat and chips and a dinner of pasta, meatballs and a dessert to follow causes more intestinal distress on human digestion than you can possibly imagine. Each of those meals takes hours or more to break down and digest and to add insult to injury they are piled up on top of each other.

The result? Undigested matter that has fermented or rotted remains in the body. It literally lines the walls of the intestines and colon and finds its way into tissue linings.

If I could boil how to have excellent health down to a single sentence I would have to say that it depends almost entirely upon how fast the foods we eat leave the body, and for the majority of us who are doing a detox cleanse to lose weight, remember that your excess weight is your waste. In other words, you are overweight only because waste is trapped in your body.

By eating three meals a day and snacks you ensure that your food is moving at snail pace through the digestive tract. The raw food diet plan will help you gradually work your way down to two meals a day with snacks that won't clog up your system.

Proper food combining

You can still get away with eating cooked foods without your meals rotting and fermenting inside you. The trick is to eat foods in the right combinations and even raw foods need proper food combining. Fruit should always be eaten alone and the reason being is that fruit digests quickly, so other foods that digest more slowly will hold up the fruit and cause it to ferment. Also remember to wait twenty minutes to a half hour after eating fruit before you eat anything else.

Carbohydrates and proteins should never be eaten in one meal. Not surprisingly this is the combo at just about every typical meal. We have spaghetti and meatballs, eggs and toast, peanut butter and jelly, steak and potatoes, grilled cheese and the list goes on. These traditional meals will halt any kind of detox cleanse.

If you pick one or the other your food will still take a while to pass through to the other end, but it will not rot along the way. Food only rots or ferments when one food holds up another food in the stomach (the exception can be flesh which can take a long time to be eliminated even by itself). Gas is the surest sign that your dinner has fermented or rotted. Sadly, gas is so common that it is almost accepted as normal.

As far as eating raw food goes, fruits should still be eaten alone. This mean no nuts and seeds with fruit but fruits go well with greens so it is much easier to eat good combinations with raw foods. Many people like to make a green smoothie for a raw food breakfast and have no problem mixing greens with fruit for this.

Heavy foods that are higher in fat take longer to digest so they should be saved for the last meal of the day. You can get technical by only eating certain fruits, such as acid fruits or sub acid fruits with one another, but in the beginning of your detox cleanse you need not be concerned with getting so picky because your body is not clean enough yet to be affected.

Stop eating anti-foods

It is safe to call an apple or an orange a food. Yet, packaged foods that have been processed and contain more additives, preservatives and man made ingredients than they do actual foods, are not technically foods and are a big reason to do a detox cleanse. This is why I call them anit-foods; they are not privileged enough to even be called a food.

If the body cannot recognize what these foods are then it is doubtful it can digest them properly. This is why cutting out packaged processed snacks is the first phase of the raw food detox diet. But don't panic because there are still a lot of great, healthy snacks out there for you to enjoy and the detox recipes are usually very easy since nothing has to be cooked.

Such foods that contain these anti-food ingredients are cheap and meant to keep you addicted and hungry. It is well known now that high fructose corn syrup actually manipulates the appetite to make us hungrier. There are dozens and dozens of food additives but some of the most common and noteworthy ones to avoid are aspartame, calcium benzoate, monosodium glutamate, high fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils and food coloring.

There are also anti-foods on our healthy foods and by this I am referring to pesticides. Although in small amounts they would seem to be the lesser of the evils, these chemicals are definitely something your body would rather have no dosage off, no matter how small.

True, organic produce is more expensive and if you can't afford to buy all organic that's okay. Just try to buy what you eat the most of as organic and the items that are sprayed the heaviest. Organic bananas are fairly inexpensive for the calories they provide and lettuce is heavily sprayed so it is worth paying a little extra for.

The body cannot process chemicals and processed substances. They are highly toxic and the body makes every attempt to keep itself safe from them. Consequently a lot of these additives are stored in the fatty tissues of the body so that the organs are kept safe. This is another reason why weight loss is so difficult for many people. If poisons are being stored in your fat then your body will be much more reluctant to lose weight. This is also why a detox cleanse should not be carried out too rapidly.

Chemicals and processed foods are so detrimental to our health that the first step anyone should take in an effort to eat a healthier diet is to cut these foods out! Even if you only committed to this step you would be doing great things for your body.

What symptoms can you expect?

On a detox cleanse you will suffer from some or all of the following: cravings, nausea, weakness, dizziness, drastic weight loss, coated tongue, sleepiness, runny nose, body odor, rashes, chills and perhaps other symptoms.

When a person misses a meal and they become tired and irritable they blame it on "low blood sugar" or needing food for energy but the truth is that their body is doing a mini detox. When they eat again they feel fine because they have broken the fast.

Doing a detox cleanse is much the same as with drawling from drugs. If you stop taking a drug you feel awful but as soon as you resume the drug you feel fine. Does that mean the drug was healthy? Of course not, and the foods we are accustomed to eating are very much drugs. We are addicted to them and we suffer from withdrawal when we do not have them.

The first time I tried to do a juice fast I felt miserable, my head was pounding and I thought I would faint. Now, a year later, I can do a juice fast for weeks with relatively no symptoms.

A heathy person will not experience any symptoms when they are hungry except hunger. This sounds normal and logical and yet it is the exception and not the norm of what people experience and believe.

What do your symptoms mean?

It helps to know why you are having certain symptoms so that you do not become fearful of what is happening to you. The most common symptoms are needing extra sleep and having cravings, but here is a run down of the rest.

A racing heart beat and chest pains:

This is usually from drugs being released into the bloodstream for elimination, whether they are medicinal or not, and the body's attempt to get rid of them. Many medicines and drugs are stored by the body in an attempt to protect the organs and when they are finally released they will produce similar symptoms to those they caused when taken.

Irritability, headaches, aching, emotional instability:

The cause can be from quitting coffee, nicotine and white sugar since these substances damage the nervous and vascular systems. Headaches are a sign that poisons are circulating in the bloodstream and causing irritation to the brain and nerves.

Heavy metal elimination is also a reason. They are difficult to eliminate and may cause a lot of discomfort depending how much of this toxin there is to be released. The body can accumulate heavy metals from auto exhaust, paints and canned foods, which is a good reason not to buy any canned food.

High blood pressure or salty taste in mouth:

Salt deposits are being eliminated through the skin and kidneys. All salt is extremely harmful for the body, even sea salt and other salts praised for being healthy.

Weakness:

The body's energies are redirected toward neutralizing old toxins but once the body becomes more alkaline your strength will return. In the beginning many people eating raw food complain of the need for so much sleep but further down the road these same people are known for only sleeping 5-6 hours a night.

Body odor, hair loss, dark, strong smelling urine:

Acids are leaving the body from a diet high in acidic foods, such as meat.

Onions and garlic also contribute to body odor. I used to have such a strong odor that I would bring deodorant with me in my purse wherever I went, but now I don't use any at all. However, if I get a little rebellious and have some onion or garlic, I notice a body odor on myself for the next day or so.

Constipation:

It may seem strange that a raw food detox so high in fiber would result in constipation but it is actually quite common because the body is getting rid of so much waste. Some people eliminate up to twenty pounds of fecal matter from the colon, so things are bound to get a little backed up, but as time passes this symptom will disappear and never return.

Stomach ache and diarrhea:

These symptoms seem like the flip side of the coin but they are also a result of the body doing some house cleaning. This is your body talking to you and it is saying " I don't need food! I'm busy!" Stop eating until your stomach says otherwise and simply rest.

Weight loss:

This can be the scariest symptom because sometimes it can be drastic. We all want to lose a little weight most likely but when we lose twenty more pounds than we wanted to it can cause some alarm. Do not freak out though, because your weight will stabilize when your body is cleaner and weight may even increase there after.

You must realize that your entire body, down to each cell, is literally made of the food you have been feeding it and when you finally do a detox cleanse and give your body fresh raw foods it is going to replace every last cell with all this new nutrition so that it can add on healthy tissue.

If you were your body would you rather be made out of a hamburger or an apple? Which do you think is going to allow it to work more efficiently? Once your body has recreated itself you will stop losing weight. When you give up salt you can lose up to fifteen pounds just from water weight so don't feel like you are withering away. Your weight loss may continue for up to a year.

Some people claim their muscles are shrinking and a raw food detox must be a diet deficient in protein but most people never realized how little muscle they had before they started the detox cleanse. Water retention makes the body look puffy, giving the illusion of larger muscles. The body will never use its muscle before fat, it is impossible.

Exercise that helps build muscle and fruits high in calories such as bananas and high calcium fruits such as oranges and figs will help maintain a more stable weight.

How do you continue a detox cleanse?

It seems funny to me that people suffer so much doing a juice fast or master cleanse diet just to lose weight and then go right back to their old eating habits and re-toxify.

If continuing a diet of only eating raw food sounds impossible to you don't worry, it just isn't for everyone. First try some good detox recipes and if you are still unsatisfied the best thing you can do in this case is try to eat raw during the day and treat yourself to a cooked meal at night. More of this is explained in the raw food diet plan, but don't feel that this path is an all or nothing approach.

Time to get started!

Now that you understand what a detox cleanse is, how your body will detoxify and some of the changes you will make and experience, it is time to get started on your detox cleanse. Read the raw food diet plan and choose the right pace for you.

The Raw Food Diet Plan

Detox Recipes

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