What is your cumulative body burden?… and what to do about it.
If you’ve been to my office or follow me on INSTAGRAM, you know that I’m always talking about our internal toxicity bucket. It is something we are ALL born with and looks different for everyone.
As we go through life, this toxicity bucket fills up with pesticides from the foods we eat, plastics, molds, viruses, heavy metals, forever chemicals, hormone disruptors from our personal care and cleaning products, air pollution, fire retardants on our furniture, etc. If the body cannot keep up with eliminating these toxins, our bucket gets too full and we begin to have symptoms of “disease” in the body.
This is why I’m always saying, “Drainage is everything.”
Supporting the body’s ability to eliminate waste and toxins is crucial to living a vital, energetic, happy life. It is not longer an option to ignore this if you want to feel your best every day. The world is dirtier than ever before, and we are exposed to THOUSANDS of man-made chemicals EVERY day. I don’t say this to create fear. Knowledge is power, and when we know better, we do better.
I have a personal health journey that has led me to feeling amazing, energetic, and alive again after acknowledging my own personal toxin load (mercury fillings, root canal, mold exposure, toxic exposure from working in a hospital for over a decade, glyphosate exposure from living in wine country, etc.) When I stopped chasing symptoms and started focusing on drainage and elimination, everything changed.
Our bodies have built in detoxification channels to help keep the overall cumulative toxic load down. The 5 elimination pathways in the body are:
- the colon
- the kidneys
- the lungs
- the skin
- the uterus (for women who have their monthly cycles)
Supporting these organs DAILY along with the lymphatic system and the liver, is how we keep our temple clean and functioning properly.
How To Test My Overall Toxic Load
Want to know how your body is doing? One of my mentors has developed a Toxicity Quiz to assess the body’s total toxic load and figure out how full your toxicity bucket really is.
If you want to take the quiz, you can access it HERE.
Once you see your results, you can have a better understanding of how toxins may be affecting your body and your health. This knowledge can motivate you to make the changes needed in order to begin feeling good again. Many of us want to have more energy, want to lose weight, and want to feel alive.
What Can I do About My Total Toxic body Burden?
Once you have your results, don’t stress if your cumulative burden is high. Now you know, and now you can start implementing some simple things into your life to start lowering that burden.
The first step is always to minimize toxic exposures. This means taking a look at your daily life and cleaning up any personal care products or household cleaning products that may be introducing toxins. It also means looking at the foods we put into our body as GMO and non-organic foods are both a source of toxins.
Morning time is the best time to focus on drainage and elimination. While we sleep, the body naturally recharges and detoxes, especially if we maintain a 12 hour overnight fast (6pm to 6am). When the body has no input coming in (food) it can focus on regeneration and cellular clean up.
Ways to promote natural detox in the morning to help eliminate yesterdays’s waste and build up:
- drink water to flush kidneys
- have a big poop
- dry brush to move lymph
- meditate (deep breathing)
- coffee enema for liver/gall bladder cleanse
- morning movement or rebounding to move lymph
- sauna to sweat it out
- eat a light, easy to digest breakfast full of all the vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and amino acids your body needs (digestive fire is strongest mid day so eat biggest meal at lunch
Don’t over-think it. Just realize that toxins and waste accumulate if we do not eliminate daily. You don’t want to carry yesterday’s garbage into today.
Want to go deeper?
While it’s important to incorporate drainage/elimination tools into daily life, taking time a few times a year to do a DEEPER liver detox is the BEST way to reduce your overall toxic load. Detoxing the liver regularly can help you feel SO much better because the liver will function better. The liver is the epicenter of making sure the blood and body stay clean.
The liver has over 500 jobs in the body including:
- removing pathogens from the blood to help fight infections
- removing toxic chemicals from the blood
- storing vitamins, minerals, and sugars
- metabolizes nutrients for energy when needed
- bile production
- protein and cholesterol production
- producing the substances that regulate blood clotting
My preferred way of doing this is through a Functional Medicine Liver Detox which basically helps the liver clean your blood faster. The liver is the epitome of keeping the blood and body clean. It’s the filter of your blood.
A Functional Medicine Liver Detox works by giving the liver all the things it needs for Phase 1 and Phase 2 liver detoxification. This is best done in early Spring and Fall to reduce overall toxic body burden, reduce inflammation, to balance blood sugars, to increase energy, and to assist with weight loss.
After years of experimenting with different ways to cleanse and detox, I have found that this approach gives the best results and is the easiest for my clients to follow and implement. And it really is the best way to lower the overall total toxic body burden.
Stay tuned for more information if this resonates with you or you feel like it is something your body needs.
Be well,
Katja
