Can Learning To Detox Your Body Promote Your Health

Looking after mine and my familys health has always been very important to me. I've hardly ever been ill, and can't remember the last time I had a cold or virus of any kind - or certainly not that lasted more than half a day or so. So when I completely lost all my energy and was feeling run down all the time it was quite a shock to my system, and getting out of bed in the morning was becoming quite a chore. I'd visited the doctor several times and had quite a few blood tests, but every one showed nothing wrong.

Fortunately a friend of mine is a dietician and she recommended I should look into doing a detox, and take some time to learn to detox your body and eliminate the build up of toxins in my body. From what people were telling me it was clear that detoxing had a lot to offer, so took it upon myself to learn as much about the process as possible, and try to understand why alternative health therapists say it's so popular and recommend detox diets and suggest getting started with the 7 day detox diet so avidly.

She also hinted to me to try a relaxing foot detox. I now use a foot spa about twice a week, if you don't want to invest in a foot spa, the detox foot patches can be just as good - but doing it this way you miss out on the relaxing foot massage at the same time

This is what I learnt about detoxing your body.

Drink water or herbal teas

Making sure you take in plenty of fluids is very important while you are following a healthy detox diet as it will help your body flush out all the toxins. Drinking plenty of water also has other health benefits like promoting regular bowel movements, helps your internal organs function more efficiently, and hydrates your skin which improves your skin tone. You should aim for about 2 to 3 liters a day, although you will need more in hot weather or on days when you are exercising.

A general pointer is to increase your water intake by about half a liter for each hour of exercise. Choose still mineral water, or tap water that has been filtered, or boiled and then cooled. Try to store your water at room temperature rather than in the fridge. If you don't always fancy water, herbal teas - preferably loose leaf rather than tea bags. Green tea, horsetail, camomile and roibosch (or redbush) in particular are great choices as their additional properties help the detox process. Roibosch and green tea has other health benefits too as it is rich in antioxidants.

Is Organic Better

Buying organic produce where possible is better for your health but not totally necessary, as organic produce is normally higher priced than non organic equivalents, but if you can afford to stretch to buying a few organic products it will be a great help.

If you can't find or afford organic fruits and veggies, it's not a problem. Concentrating on eating fresh (and ideally raw) fruit and veg is the main point - even if they are non-organic - rather than not get enough of them. However, there are some good reasons for going organic on a healthy detox diet.

Organic foods are free from artificial pesticides and sprays, which means they are very low or even free from toxins like man made chemicals and toxins. The practice of organic farming is very contentious due to the fact that there's a lot of evidence that the build up of man made fertilizers and pesticides overtime may cause health problems in the future.

By comparison, organic foods are processed much less than non-organic. The big benefits of this are that they have no genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and free from artificial preservatives. On top of that, organic foods usually taste better too.