Detoxification: How Your Body Heals

aka, how to not get fooled by looks.

One of the most fascinating parts about improving and changing your nutritional intake is that your body will often use that change as an opportunity to flush out its 100 trillion cells. This phenomenon is called a cleansing reaction, or detoxification. The following statement cannot be said enough: Misinterpreting the changes that occur when you replace your regular food for cleansing food, is, bar none, the most common mistake made, and why some will not complete a cleansing program. This will start to make more sense once you fully appreciate the powerful hold our current health paradigm has on our thinking. Educating yourself to get beyond the "chasing symptoms" approach will be a key factor in your success in healing and staying healthy.

Have you ever known someone who stopped smoking? Chances are they will tell you stories of coughing fits, expelling foul mucous from the lungs, aches and pains in their muscles, black circles appearing under their eyes, all sorts of symptoms that show up in those first few weeks after quitting.

Ever know anyone who stopped drinking coffee? They will tell you stories of pounding headaches, joint pain, feeling like their kidneys were going to fall out of their back, constipation, extreme fatigue, dehydration, etc. What is happening to these people? If stopping these things is supposed to be so good for you, why are they having these symptoms that appear once they stop the assumed toxin? It's called cleansing. Their body is cleaning itself out. Given the first opportunity to incorporate and remake itself with higher-quality nutrients, a body will dump the old material into any channel that it has available—the blood, the lymph system, the tissues, the excretory organs, the skin, the lungs— in order to make room for the new. This process is the heart of all regeneration. It is why you and I can heal, and why we can improve our health. This cellular regeneration is happening in our bodies all the time, whether you're doing a cleansing program as outlined throughout How Health Works, or not.

We have been "cleansing" from the moment of conception all the way to this minute right here, right now. Most of the time, though, this exchanging of "old for new" isn't noticed, or more accurately, it's noticed only through what we view as the normal channels of cleansing (over 30% of the every bowel movement is in fact dead cells). This all happens at a rate that is comfortable, and through normal metabolic processes, because you're using the same fuel that you've used for years.

Change that fuel, though, to a much cleaner, more nutrient-dense fuel— like the fuel you'll be feeding yourself during your cleansing periods—and you may well feel and see this "sped-up metabolism" taking place.

The Symptom List

"You are experiencing detoxification. Your cells are cleansing, so that's why you're seeing those symptoms... blah, blah, blah..."

If you looked through the number of times the above statement is said over the years by teachers and people who understand and occasionally do cleansing practices, the average reader would think this is nothing but an overly simplistic, broken record of a response. I have no question that it looks like a completely idiotic answer to those that have never experienced how cleansing works, and who have not seen the "anatomy" of how cleansing works in layers (like peeling an onion). I know it looks idiotic to them, because I receive the emails and letters and phone calls from those that think that.

Yet it is simply true. There are many, many ways detoxification will show up in and on your body when metabolic waste starts leaving the cells. The unfortunate crime is that every single one of these symptoms are normally translated in our culture as "Wow, I am getting sick, I am getting worse, and I need drugs to stop this symptom from occurring." The list is long, but here are a few signs to be aware of:

• Headaches
• Colds/Flu symptoms
• Fever/ Chills
• Joint pains
• Coughing
• Gas and Bloating
• Fatigue
• Hives
• Increased menstruation
• Decreased menstruation
• Cramps
• Rashes
• Bad Breath
• Dandruff
• Excess ear wax
• Excess nose gunk
• Excess throat sludge
• Constipation
• Diarrhea
• Wheezing
• Tight/stiff neck
• Acne
• Backaches
• Itchy skin
• Red skin
• Sleep interruption
• Dizziness
• Moods/irritation

You get the idea. Instead of memorizing the list, the key is to realize that we experience these symptoms as a result of our body burning off metabolic waste. This is a good thing. The alternative is to keep that waste in us, in our cells. Once you complete a cleansing program, you will start to detect, visually, how a majority of people walk around with their cells filled with this old, necrotic material; the connections between a diseased state and that necrotic metabolic overflow will become more and more apparent. For now, though, it's just important that you view this detoxification process as the road to a higher level of health.

How To Ease Through Detox

Fortunately, there are several powerful methods built into the the basic HHW 28-Day Initial Regeneration Program cleanse that ease the body through nutritional cleansing.

The first is water. Lots of it. You want to be urinating every 60-120 minutes. Imagine, for a moment, a clean flowing stream running through your front yard of your mountain cabin. One day your neighbors upstream decide to do a yard "cleanse" and dumps huge amounts of dirt, old leaves, and debris into the stream. Within a short period of time, your clean water has become clogged with debris, and starts running very slowly. The best way get things cleared up is to first slow down the Toxic Load, by having the neighbor stop putting that much waste into the stream at one time. The other, though, is by increasing the water flow. This holds true in your body as well. If you know ahead of time that a large majority of your 100 trillion cells are all about to dump their old ingredients into your "river," it behooves you to radically increase the amount of water and liquids that we are drinking, to keep the flow going.

The second method of easing cleansing symptoms is enzymes. Encapsulated enzymes is one of the most powerful ways of speeding up metabolic detox I have ever seen. This makes sense: digestive enzymes are now known to be able to pass through the intestinal wall and go directly into our bloodstream and tissues, where they can break down undigested proteins, and other matter, commonly referred to as systemic foreign antigens. Let's speak frankly here: what do you think a "systemic foreign antigen" is? It's not a whole lot different from the material that we refer to as our bowel movement. In other words, our poop is leaking into the tissues of our body. Knowing that makes it easier to understand the role this stuff plays in Leaky Gut Syndrome, Fibromyalgia, and Chronic Pain, three oftentimes related symptoms that are currently among the biggest health complaints in the United States. For this reason alone, encapsulated enzymes are part of the superfoods we recommend.

Another way to ease metabolic detox is through the use of foods high in chlorophyll, a well known blood purifier. We'll do this through daily consumption of leafy greens, wild blue green algae, green drinks and wheatgrass. You can get these at any local health food store, or check the Supplies section on the How Health Works site for places online.

A fourth, and very important one: sweating. I am a big fan of saunas, so much so that I wrote a section on it in Cellular Cleansing Made Easy. Reread that part. Get into a sauna as often as possible, especially during the times of strong detoxification. It will vastly speed up your healing. If you are not someone who exercises regularly, you need to sauna regularly.

The last group of tricks for both easing up, and speeding up, the detoxification process is those Seven Physical Transformers, outlined in your third CD. Listen to that CD a few times. Apply a variety of them throughout your cleansing period.