Traditional Detox
Last time you detoxed, what did you do? Chances are you will have cut out all toxin-forming foods, living on just fruit and vegetables for a few days, or perhaps you went on a juice fast. Doing this actually works against the way your body detoxes naturally. Common forms of detox may reduce the toxins that we take in, but they are also very low in calories. Also, when we fast in this way, the metabolic rate (the speed at which our body works) slows down by at least 10 per cent, and by even more as the fast continues. It only takes two days for this to happen, and it affects every process within the body, including that of waste removal - this is one of the processes that you want to make sure works thoroughly and effectively in order to get rid of the toxins in your body.
Therefore, on traditional detox plans, you could actually be eliminating toxins at a slower rate than normal. This slowing of the metabolism through such a detox will also lower your body temperature and, as it happens, reduce the amount you sweat -thereby cutting off another one of your major detox routes. To make things even worse, if you went on a juice diet you probably took all the fibre out of the healthy fruits and vegetables you were eating as you juiced them (unless you used a masticating juicer).
This is a major problem, since the presence of fibre in the bowel stimulates it to work; if there's no fibre, you're more likely to be constipated. During such a diet, the truth may be that you were actually plugging up another major elimination route.
Can traditional detox actually harm?
The scariest fact about strict detoxes comes from some Canadian research. Most of us carry out detox procedures because we're trying to tackle those mini-toxins that we inflict on our body every day - things like alcohol, red meat and caffeine - but by starving our bodies we may be releasing real toxins into the body. The reason for this is that starvation changes the way that we can produce energy.
Normally we use carbohydrates that are stored in the blood or muscles to give us our energy. However, after fasting for a day or so these stores are exhausted, so you're forced to get energy from your fat stores. Now, as explained earlier, if the body can't handle a toxin, it pushes it into the fat stores where it's safe - that is until those stores get broken down and the toxins are released into the bloodstream. While this may seem to prove the whole detox theory, what the Canadian researchers (from Quebec's Laval University) found was that once the chemicals they were investigating were released they didn't disappear. In fact, levels of them rose as the diets went on - it was as if the body simply didn't know how to handle them.