Ah, January! Time for the New Year’s Resolutionists to crowd the streets and gyms and for talk of various types of detox diets to dominate the office chatter. We’ve talked a lot of detoxing here in the blog, and here’s a specific explanation of what we mean when we say “detox” and a little detail regarding why you might want to do one, if you’re wondering.
Many people are not in the doing a detox place, but still love the idea of a clean slate, or hitting a restart button if you will. To those people, we want you to know there are many things you can simply incorporate into your daily life to help with that – no special detox plan necessary!
Lemon water – here’s a great way to get those juices flowing, especially first thing in the morning. Drinking a big ol’ glass of warm (even just room temperature) water with lemon squeezed into it (one pint of water with half a lemon in there is great) will help stir those detoxification enzymes into action. Plus, drinking plenty of water can actually trigger the release of excess body fat and it can even make your metabolic rate more effective throughout the day!
Sweat daily – Moving your body enough to cause a light sweat is a great way to help the natural detoxification process. Movement will also help get the lymphatic system on board and that’s key to detoxification because lymph is your body’s garbage man. I wish it would just do its thing without prompting, but it relies on the contractions of your muscles to flow well, so find a fun way for you to get moving!
Shrink your “eating window” – Back in our hunting and gathering days, we became accustomed to long periods of time between meals, and our bodies used those times to do lots of important things, including killing off weak and old cells that put our organs and bodily functions at risk of not working optimally. Turns out those times between meals were pretty important, and these days, sadly, we’re eating almost constantly. The word breakfast means literally that – to break fast, but many of us aren’t in a fasting state by the time we eat our first meal of the day. It takes at least 12 hours of not consuming food to get to that place where the body can start really cleaning house. So, be mindful of how long it’s been since your last meal when you begin thinking about breaking your fast. If you can even just keep the hours during which you are regularly consuming meals down to 12, your doing your body a huge favor when it comes to detoxification.
Simple stuff, right? If you’re not prepared to commit to a formal detox, start here, but when you are looking for a good detox, come see us and we’ll hook you up!