Anthony Hartcher 0:00
Welcome to another episode of me&my health up. I'm Anthony Hartcher, clinical nutritionist and lifestyle medicine specialist. This featured episode is on, ask your nutritionist and this month I've been asked many times, how do I detox I've had a summer were drunken and a lot of eaten a lot of unhealthy foods, and I really want to get started with a detox. So here's a short version of how you can go about doing a nice detox.
Essentially, we want to support our detoxification organs, and that being our liver, our kidneys, and our lungs. So let's start with the liver. So with the liver, we certainly want to limit the amount of toxins it needs to process. So we want to cut down on the toxins that we're introducing through food, the airway, breathing, and water. So I really suggest you eat cleans.
What is clean eating? It is eating whole foods, eating seasonal foods, and ideally foods that aren't sprayed or do have pesticides on them. So organic is best. So when you're looking at what's sort of selection of Whole Foods, you want to go for the colour of the rainbow. So lots of you know reds and yellows, and orange and purple. So get all the colours in there. So that real rainbow-looking stir fries, that rainbow-looking salad with the liver, you want to support certain pathways in terms of detoxification. Some of these pathways are supported by having sulphur rich vegetables. These incorporate the brassica family, the brassica family.
That is your broccoli, your cabbage and so those sorts of leafy greens, you want to be having them and making sure you're having berries, berries are packed in antioxidants, so your fruits, providing lots of antioxidants because as the liver starts its processing and breaking down the toxins, it starts to produce some, I guess semi metabolites or metabolites of those toxins, and they can be quite toxic. So the antioxidants can really counter that toxicity.
Having anti-oxidant-rich foods such as I mentioned, you know, the fruits of berries are also like green tea is a fantastic tea to be had whilst you're detoxifying. Yes, it does contain caffeine, not large amounts of caffeine, there is some caffeine so certainly reducing caffeine is advantageous. So stopping coffee, yes is a must, stopping alcohol and must, stopping drugs. recreational drugs, obviously continue with your medications as prescribed by your doctor. So that's really going to support liver detoxification. That being lots of colour in your fruit and vegetables. A diet that's rich and fruit and vegetables.
Yes, you still need protein to help with detoxification, but you don't want large amounts of protein. So you want to give the digestive system a bit of a break, and the protein provides a load on the digestive system. So reducing your protein also helps although in saying that have protein, keep it to plant based protein. So what are plant based proteins, they're your nuts, seeds, legumes, and grains. Yes, they contain some carbohydrates, but the carbohydrates nourish the gut and we do want to support the gut we want to make sure the guts healed so we don't have some of these toxins that are meant to be going out of our system recirculating back in the system because we have a gut that is not sealed. It's a bit leaky so to speak. So that's really you know, really advantageous there to support the liver.
I mentioned the foods so fresh whole foods, lots of colours, and yeah, variety, produce protein and keeping it to plant based proteins. Now how do we support the kidneys we want to make sure we drink water? Yes, we want to you know help flush the toxins from the kidneys helped take the toxins out of our body and yes, we need to be drinking adequate amounts of water. So make sure you get into your water you really enjoy your water. You can have a squeeze a lemon that really helps the digestive system supports detoxification so have a squeeze a lemon in your water, not too much lemon water because that takes the enamel of your teeth and your dentist won't like that.
What else can you do to support the kidneys? Lots of minerals. So the minerals that we see, you know, certainly I see, you know, that are generally absent or low in people diets, foods such as or minerals such as magnesium. Magnesium is found in your dark leafy greens, fruits, I mean, yeah, nice dark leafy greens, your nuts, and your seeds. Yeah, consume them, they're good for the liver, good for the kidneys because they contain magnesium and as well as calcium in what I just mentioned, dark leafy greens, nuts, and seeds.
What else you want to have other minerals that are really supportive such as potassium, which is in your fruit vegetables, so you know, you're supporting that your liver health, you also support your kidney health by getting a good balance of potassium, there's generally a lot of diet, I mean, a lot of salt in our diet, so we don't need to focus too much on sodium. They're probably the key minerals. Yes, Calcium is a mineral. Generally, we do get a lot of calcium into our diet. But you know, as I said, if you get the dark leafy greens, nuts, and seeds, your cover calcium as well as magnesium.
Now, the other detoxification organ, which you're probably not aware of, is the lungs. So yes, we excrete carbon dioxide, which is part of the metabolic process, or a by-product of the metabolic process where we extract energy, we produce waste products, which is carbon dioxide, as one of those parts of metabolism. So we excrete carbon dioxide through our lungs, and so therefore if we're breathing well, and you know, deep breathing, I'm talking, you know, expanding that diaphragm, so really breathing through the nose out through the mouth, and really making an effort to do this deep breathing on a regular basis throughout the day.
Get into a habit during your detox phase. Now, you're probably thinking, How long should I do this detox phase? How long should I eat clean? Well, I suggest you wait clean forever, but you know, if you're looking for a period of time, where you want to have a good clean, and you want to be clean for a period of time, probably a good week up to, you know, you could do a week to 10 days, or seven to 10 days of this clean eating and not having alcohol, caffeine, or recreational drugs.
So that would be really supportive, reduce what's going in terms of toxins and help bring out what's in your body. Now, exercise is important, so need to exercise, exercise helps our lymphatic system. So lymphatic is one way in which we can, you know, take out toxins through goes through the lymphatic system, and then into the bloodstream, the bloodstream and you know, filters through the liver up.
So that's really important that we're moving during this detoxification phase, we need to be moving our bodies. So just like light exercise, so you don't want to be doing anything heavy, keeping it light. Exercise like yoga, where you're breathing Tai Chi, where you're breathing, and you're moving, walking, breathing, moving, swimming, not the high intensity stuff. You want to go easy on the exercise fronts, you don't want to push yourself, you don't want to create too much stress hormones, because that's just a load on the kidneys. So light to moderate exercise and I mentioned the breathing. So yeah, sneaking in that breathing throughout the day, deep breathing through the nose out through the mouth, doing that for a number of cycles, and for a few minutes every day.
And I think that's really the other thing I really want to cover is sleep. So making sure you're getting a good night's sleep and what's a good night's sleep, that's eight hours per night, making sure you're getting to bed around 10 ish. You know, wake up six 7 am. So that's, you know, eight to nine hours. That's the ideal range for detox. You don't want to be shortchanging your sleep because shortchanging your sleep only going to create more stress hormones, which is more load on your kidneys and liver.
So let's do all that. So what is it it's clean eating, eliminating toxins. It's exercising, moving the body light and moderate, it's sleep, getting eight hours and it's breathing every day regularly and you want to be breathing for a number of cycles through the nose out through the mouth.
That's it for me. Hope you enjoy this episode. If you have a question for Ask your nutritionist please, please put it through and I'll have my email in the show notes so you can log some questions.
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