Pre-cleansing Tips: What to do before you detox

From our Joyous Team -- Guest Blogger Kate McDonald Walker

It’s easy to get so excited about a new health and wellness program that you want to leap in headfirst, but it’s a really good idea to lay down some proper foundations before you undergo any detoxification regime. Detoxing and cleansing your body is a lot like cleaning your house, and just like cleaning your house, if you don’t do some basic tidying before you jump in to the deep cleaning, you can end up making the space you’re working on look and feel messier while you’re doing your cleaning. When this happens in the body, we call it a “healing crisis.”

Pre-cleansing is a way of easing yourself into the detoxification process and it will help bypass the healing crisis so that you will have a more pleasant detox experience.

Pre-cleansing also helps open up the channels of elimination, especially the liver and colon. Once the detox process starts, all the nasty toxins in your body get dislodged from the various tissues they’ve been hiding out in, and it becomes especially important for your liver and colon to be ready to eliminate those newly dislodged toxins from the body as efficiently as possible.

Here are some pre-cleansing tips:

Eat organic. Buying organic whenever possible means you’ll avoid a lot toxic pesticides. If you’re worried about the cost of buying exclusively organic, you can consider just making sure that you buy the Dirty Dozen in the organics section.

Ditch caffeine, alcohol and cigarettes. These enemies of detox tax your adrenals and interfere with your liver’s detoxification processes, which actually creates more free radicals that your body’s going to need to take care of later.

Alkalize. Your body is designed to be a little bit on the alkaline side, but the toxins we are exposed to through our diets and environment tend to acidify our bodies. Favouring alkalizing foods while reducing acid-forming foods helps reset the body’s pH back to basic. You can find a full list of acid and alkaline foods here.

Increase fiber intake. Having fiber in your diet encourages bile secretion, which is an important component of the liver’s detoxification processes. It also helps keep things moving through the digestive tract, and being full of crap is not going to help with the detox process, so let’s get it out of there.

Increase water intake. Pure, clean water helps flush toxins out of your system. When you up your fiber intake, you’ve also got to drink more water, since water helps keep that fiber moving.

Check with your healthcare team. If you have a pre-existing medical condition, are pregnant or are taking prescription medications, check with your healthcare practitioner to make sure that the timing and protocol of your chosen detox regime are right for you.