How to Detox your body?

We generally hear people talking about how having green tea, black coffee or various smoothies detoxify your body or remove toxins from your body. Detoxing is nothing but cleaning your body of toxins & unhealthy things from your body that helps to lose weight, prevent bloating, boosts metabolism etc.

So what is the general assumption when you talk of detoxing? People would adopt calorie restriction strategy & generally consume healthy & nutrient dense foods.

What are toxins?

There are toxins in air, your purse, car, gym & even in your office. You come across various inedible products, chemicals, pesticides etc in your daily life. Some of these make way to your body. However, our body is very complex & is equipped to keep bad things out. Anything that passes through your stomach & intestine or harmful particles that have been broken down that sneak past your blood have to deal with strong defense– liver. Liver is well equipped to handle more than alcohol. It filters all the blood before it is circulated to the rest of the organs & body parts. It breaks down drugs & detoxify chemicals.

How does detoxing helps you maintain a fitness discipline?

Calorie restriction & intermittent fasting are effective ways of detoxing. Losing weight is a way of detoxing since burning fats results in fat soluble toxins making its way out of the body into the blood. Once it reaches blood the same is filtered by the liver to detoxify & remove from the body. While adopting calorie restriction & intermittent fasting, you should consider the following:

1. Calorie restriction should not lead to malnutrition & not deprive you of essential nutrients.
2. Focus on getting essential nutrients from food & not relying on supplements.
3. To ensure that you get all vital nutrients through calorie restriction, reduction in calories should not exceed 10%. Ideally, you should create calorie deficit through rigorous workout.
4. Intermittent fasting helps in changing the eating time to benefit from the body’s natural fasting  state

A blend of fruits & vegetables is low in calorie & provide host of antioxidants, minerals, vitamins & fibre. These macronutrients help in regulating enzymes in the liver that further assists in detoxification. 

Drinking more water ( more than recommended 9 to 12 glasses of water per day) helps in digesting & clearing waste & is said to have additional health benefits.

Commercial detoxify diet sometimes do help in weight loss through calorie restriction & intermittent fasting. However such crash diets are short term in nature & after some time you body gets used to burning less calories & resort to normal eating habits. This ends up you gaining weight. Such diets can be unsafe for pregnant women.