The end of the year is a great time, isn’t it? Holiday parties, extended vacation, and delicious food and treats all over the place. But once it’s time to go back to work – we’re all left feeling a little lethargic. If you’re having trouble motivating over the last few weeks, or your family has been struck with a plague of sudden illness, it might be time to look at what doing a cleanse. Here are 5 signs that that it’s time to do a detox.
Increased Skin Breakouts
Your skin is the body’s largest organ. Skin protects us from microbes, helps to regulate the body temperature and allows us to experience sensations like heat and cold. What many people don’t realize, though, is that our body pushes out toxins through our skin. This can come in the form of hives, acne, boils, eczema, dryness, oiliness, itchiness, psoriasis, rosacea and more. While some of these “skin conditions” can be the result of a food sensitivity or allergy (testing is recommended if your skin systems persist after you’ve cleaned up your lifestyle), many times simply cleaning up your routine and detoxing can help to improve these conditions. One thing to note is that when you detox your body pushes out other toxins, so you may notice the problem get a little worse before it gets better and the process is complete
Extreme Fatigue or Difficulty Focusing
We’re all used to treating fatigue with America’s favorite stimulant – caffeine. But the fact of the matter is that when the body is run down and other factors (like sleep and stress) are not concerns, it’s likely the fuel that you’ve been putting in. Rather than continuing the cycle of treating a toxic, run down body with more toxins – a diet change and colon cleanse can help you feel lighter and more energetic.
Pregnant? Here’s what you need to know about detoxing if you are expecting.
Allergies
When there is excessive inflammation in the body, it reacts more readily to environmental allergens and other toxins. If you’re noticing that you’re more impacted than normal by “seasonal allergies” or products that you’ve been using for quite some time, it’s likely because of inflammation that already exists in the body because of exposure to toxins.
Bloating or Constipation
During the holidays all of the indulgence can have us in a poor eating routine that is causing our body some issues. If you’re unfamiliar with our optimal digestion food chart, you may want to look at how you should be combining foods to ensure that your body can properly digest them and you can avoid issues like gas, bloating and constipation in order to create a more balanced environment. A detox can help to speed the process up and when combined with the food chart, can yield amazing results.
Frequent Colds or Illness
If you find yourself under the weather during “cold and flu” season, it might not be because of the epidemic. If you stop to take notice, most of the time when people are sick it comes after they haven’t been treating their body well. We’ve been lulled into thinking that this season of illness is just a natural consequence of winter, but guess what: When I practiced in Australia, “cold and flu season” was also around the holidays, except it was in the middle of summer! The take-home lesson here is that your expression of health has more to do with your diet and the toxins you’re voluntarily consuming, and less to do with “catching something” from someone is sick. Make sure that when you travel you take the time to make healthy, conscious choices over what you put into your body to give it the best chance to combat anything it comes into contact with. Science has discovered our bodies are completely blanketed in micro-organisms (this is a GOOD thing, they keep us healthy!) and whether or not we give the opportunistic ones a foothold entirely depends on how we treat it.
Around here we like to be proactive. Our patients take the time to be knowledgeable about birth interventions, boost their immune system with chiropractic, take supplements and the last part of that equation is ensuring that we fuel our body well. When you start to feel a little less than optimal, it’s time to consider a detox.
