The Beauty Detox Solution (24 page)
Read The Beauty Detox Solution Online
Authors: Kimberly Snyder
Usually when we hear “seaweed” or “sea vegetable,” we think exclusively of Japanese food, but sea vegetables have been consumed for thousands of years all around the world, from Australia to the British Isles. Sea vegetables can easily be added into our everyday diets. They are great in salads, pâtés, on vegetables, and in soups. They are extremely rich in vitamins A, B6, C and E, and contain easily absorbed, densely concentrated minerals, especially iron, potassium, magnesium and iodine. Iodine helps to regulate the metabolism
by supporting the thyroid in metabolizing fats. Sea vegetables are also high in proteins, carotenes and chlorophyll. Another great attribute of sea vegetables is that they can be added to salads and recipes to lend a “salty” flavor without introducing unhealthy sodium , with the added benefit of all the aforementioned nutrients.
When you purchase some sea vegetables, they might come in a hard, dry form. Be sure to rinse them first to wash of any sea salt; then soak them for about ten to fifteen minutes to soften them up. Remember that when rehydrated, dried sea vegetables will expand ten to fifteen times their size. It's a good thing to keep in mind when you are prepping your food!
Best Beauty from the Sea
Arame
Hijiki
Kombu
Wakame
Dulse
Kelp
Nori
Now that you've met all of the fabulous Beauty Foods, you can see for yourself just how many different delicious, mineral-rich foods you can eat while still cleansing for beauty. You will never feel hungry or unsatisfied on this plan. In fact, the more you clean out the toxic sludge and fuel your body with these nutrient-rich foods, the more satisfied you'll feel!
Now you have the fundamentals of the Beauty Detox Solution. In the next part of this book I'll walk you through some basic detoxing principles and the Beauty Detox phases so that you can put these principles into motion in your life!
BEAUTY
DETOX
RECAP
The mineral- and enzyme-rich Beauty Foods discussed in this chapter are the heart of the program and form the basis of the Beauty Foods Circleâeat them to look and feel your best.
Choose plant-based sources of protein and calcium and alkalinizing starches and grains for your Beauty Detox.
Fruit is the most life-enhancing food you can eat when your body is alkaline and cleanâit's also the strongest cleanser.
Enjoy plenty of raw Beauty Greens and Vegetables, and buy organic and local produce whenever possible.
YOUR BEAUTY SOLUTION
DETOXING FOR BEAUTY
Except for accidents, all the repair and regeneration of our body must come from within.
âDr. Norman Walker
Ongoing cleansing is one of the most important ways to reach our highest goals of health and beauty, reverse aging and lose weight. In fact, it might just be
the
most important way. When we hear the word “cleanse,” most of us think of it as a noun, as in we do “a cleanse”âusually some kind of fasting or herbal program for a few days here and there, a few times a year. But we actually need to think of cleansing as a
verb
and accelerate and initiate cleans
ing
on an ongoing basis.
During an
Extra
segment I appeared on in February of 2010, Star Jones asked me if I thought cleanses were effective. I replied, “Does it help to clean your house only once or twice a year?” Sure, in many cases doing one cleanse is probably better than doing
nothing.
But can we really get down to the deep garbage and toxicity that have been piling up for years and decades and root them out in only a
few days?
I think not!
Cleansing is how our body rids itself of waste, toxins and the sludge that is trapped inside and is constantly accumulating. Remember our analogy to the clogged wheel? When we are not cleansing properly, we can drive the toxins deeper into our body, where they continue to weaken us, steal our Beauty Energy, make us look old and tired, and eventually cause disease. We as a society are obsessed with putting things
in,
such as the hottest new weight loss pills or herbs, specific mineral supplements and so on. We need to shift our focus to taking things
out.
By cleansing, we unclog some of the sludge from our wheel and reverse aging.
We cannot rebuild, heal or maintain our weight easily without cleansing. Cleansing rebalances us and cleans out the sludge and mucus in our bodies so we can adequately absorb nutrients. This is also true for those of us that struggle with being underweightâyou will struggle with keeping weight on and getting your body the nutrients it needs until you cleanse out the toxins. If you change your diet but don't cleanse properly on an ongoing basis, you will not get the results you desire, no matter how strictly you adhere to the program.
When you follow the principles outlined in Part 1 of this book, you will begin to kick up toxicity in your system. For this reason it is essential to
cleanse
at the same time. Otherwise, you may feel good for a few months, but if you don't get that newly released toxicity out of the body through these cleansing methods, you will essentially repoison yourself and will feel sick and awful.
The same is true anytime you shift your dietâfrom omnivore to vegetarian, or vegetarian to vegan, or from vegan to raw foodist. If we don't cleanse properly, the toxicity we kick up through the change in diet will make us feel sick. We then blame it on “not getting enough nutrients” or “being protein deficient,” but that is not what is really happening. The reason we are not feeling well is not from a lack in the diet (assuming we are eating the Beauty Detox Solution way, which is a diet packed with whole foods and plant foods!), but because we are being overloaded by newly awakened poisons.
Think of cleansing as reorganizing your entire office. Your files are disorganized and misplaced, every single drawer in your desk is crammed with office supplies and old bills, and there are carefully stacked boxes filled with miscellaneous paperwork. Out of sight, out of mind, right? The week you decide to reorganize your office, at first things look
worse.
You have to take everything out of the drawers and boxes and spread it across the floor to see all the stuff you can
throw away.
No one is denying it can temporarily be somewhat of a painful process and takes some work, and some time. But when you finish, all the boxes are gone, because you got rid of so much junk, and there was enough space in the file cabinets and drawers to put everything away properly! Pounds of garbage have been thrown out, and everything is much, much better. Cleansing the body follows the same principle.
We can also think of detoxification as a similar experience to what a drug addict would experience during withdrawal. When you first take the drug away from the addict, he goes through withdrawal, and symptoms might include fatigue, headaches, diarrhea, constipation, etc. If we give the addict the drug again, he will immediately feel better and his symptoms
will disappear, as he has
stopped
cleansing. And so it is with us. If we avoid or greatly slow down the detoxification process and its symptoms by going back to eating heavy foods all the time, like pizza, we will stop the ill feelings because we have also stopped cleansing. But we will never really heal! That is why the person on a transition diet who is going through somewhat of a painful detox phase starts to eat chicken again and magically starts to feel better. The discomfort wasn't caused by a protein deficiency, but by loosening up the toxins in the body, and eating the chicken stopped the cleansing process. Don't worry. The cleansing symptoms won't last forever. In fact, most detox symptoms, if they do arise, generally subside within a few weeks.
BEAUTY TIP
Cleansing and Looking More Toned
Exercise is important for all of us. I personally love yoga, which teaches us to breathe really deeply and properly, promoting the distribution of oxygen all through the body. Yoga also helps to holistically balance the emotional, mental, spiritual and physical aspects of our being.
When we cleanse, we naturally create more space in our body as waste and trapped gas (generated from fermentation, which can put pressure on our veins and arteries) leave, and there is more room for oxygen to circulate. Oxygen gets more easily to our muscles as our tissues become cleaner.
In my early twenties, I counted each calorie I ate, and I also counted each calorie I burned at the gym on exercise machines. I ran almost every day, and I lifted weights three times a week. Ironically, now I look much more toned across my stomach, arms and legs, even though I have not run or worked out at a gym for years. What a relief! While I still practice yoga and stay active, I don't have to slave away at the gym all the time to look the way I want to. The ongoing cleansing methods I put into practice made, and continue to make, an
enormous
difference. They will be a huge help to you also!
We all need exercise to stay healthy. But we don't have to obsess anymore over excessive exercise routines, because when we put effort into cleansing, we will naturally start to look more toned and lean.
Toxicity, or sludge, becomes lodged throughout our cells and tissues from years of improper digestion, preservatives in our food and skin-care products, pollution, stress and other factors. We would all be shocked at how much waste is present in the body!
Our eliminative organs, which include the lungs, liver, kidneys, colon and skin, become overwhelmed and are unable to root out all this poison. The body attempts to detoxify in
some
form when its eliminative organs are overwhelmed. These detoxing forms reveal themselves in unwanted acne
or skin eruptions, rashes, colds and flus. So then what? We take medication to suppress the symptoms. The problem is that these drugs do not help with the root cause of the issueâthe sludge and toxicity in the body, which have arisen to dangerously high levels. These drugs mask what really needs to happen: cleansing and detoxification.
The Roots of Western Medicine
Western medicine largely adheres to the doctrines of the French scientist Louis Pasteur, who lived from 1822 to 1895. Pasteur's theories were based on the theory of “germ warfare,” which basically hypothesizes that the germs from the outside are what make us sick and create disease. Based on this idea, pretty much all beverages and many foods sold in grocery stores today have been
pasteurized,
or heated to very high temperatures to destroy any potential harmful germs.
But Pasteur had a little-known contemporary and intellectual adversary: fellow French scientist Antoine Beauchamp, who lived from 1816 to 1908. Beauchamp believed the exact opposite. His theory was based on the idea that “the terrain is everything.” In other words, it is not just the germs from the outside that cause illness, but a compromised immune system or some predisposing characteristic that allows the germs to flourish in the body and cause illness. For instance, why is it that two people get coughed on directly in the face (gross!) by the same person on the subway, but only one person gets the flu? Dr. Robert Young gives a great analogy to this by pointing out that if you throw seeds on concrete, they cannot grow. But if you throw the seeds on fertile soil, they grow and flourish.
1
And so it is with germs and sickness.
Dr. T. Colin Campbell's findings in
The China Study
support Beauchamp's theories. Campbell discussed how when two experimental groups were exposed to the
same
amount of a carcinogenic substance (such as aflatoxin), the group consuming the higher levels of animal protein and dairy was the one that developed disease (cancer), and the group consuming the lower levels of these foods did not.
2
As Beauchamp theorized, the first group had the right “terrain” for sickness to develop.
Under Beauchamp's theory, we can hypothesize that there really is only
one
disease: an acidic body that releases acidic waste and toxins, compromising immunity. The body then becomes fertile terrain for sickness, disease and harmful bacteria and germs. All the various diseases are symptoms of general toxicity in the body, but not the root cause itself.
This may be why at institutions like the Ann Wigmore Natural Health Institute and the Hippocrates Health Institute, there have been cases where symptoms of diseases such as cancer subside when clients are put on a raw plant diet and cleanse. These institutions do not perform chemotherapy or radiation on specific areas of the body, but rather treat the body holistically and work to raise the alkalinity of the entire body.
Of course, we can see how Pasteur's theory is much more profitable for the pharmaceutical industry, as flu shots, penicillin, other antibiotics and the like make the industry billions of dollars. That is not to say these things don't have an important purposeâclearly they do, and they do save a lot of lives. But if we keep our bodies clean of toxins and excessive waste, balanced at a more alkaline pH and keep our immunity strong, we may need these medicines far less and we ourselves may have much more control over our own health.
Here are some typical temporary clean sing symptoms: headaches, sore throat, exhaustion, skin rashes or eruptions, aches and pains, soreness, moodiness, dizziness and light-headedness. You may even temporarily feel a bit more bloated and a few pounds
heavier,
as acidic sludge starts to surface and your body has to hold on to extra water to try to
neutralize the waste. These symptoms are usually the strongest in the first few weeks as you shift your diet to the Beauty Detox Solutionâif you actually experience them at all. If you stick to the main principles, a large amount of toxins will be flushed out of your body. By the end you will feel and look incredible, and your body will be so much cleaner. Your “office” will have been reorganized.
BEAUTY TIP
Limiting Antibiotics and Other Medications
It used to be that medication and surgery were used primarily for trauma and accidents. In today's world, however, medication is not just readily available, it is very heavily prescribed. In the American culture, we now rely on prescription drugs for pretty much every physical or mental ailment, including sleeping disorders, anxiety, diabetes, depression, heart problems, allergies and acne. And, as Dr. Joel Fuhrman points out in his book
Eat to Live,
these prescription drugs are toxic. He writes, “Doctors learn in their introductory pharmacology course in medical school that all medications are toxic to varying degrees, whether side effects are experienced or not.”
3
Unfortunately, there seem to be a lot of side effects, indeed. An article in
Newsweek
from 1998 entitled “When Drugs Do Harm” explained that “adverse reactions to prescription drugs may rank somewhere between the fourth and sixth leading cause of death in the United Statesâ¦.”
4
Should that surprise us? Medications are manufactured with a cornucopia of chemicals that are toxic to the liver and contribute to acidity, toxemia and overall imbalance in our bodies. They often simply work to just unnaturally suppress the outward symptoms, versus actually correcting the problem itself.
Antibiotics are now casually prescribed for the flu and acne. The major problem with antibiotics is that they kill not only disease-causing bacteria but also our friendly bacteria. As a result, the usually benign yeast
Candida albicans
can multiply, resulting in an overgrowth, which weakens our immune system and disturbs the lining of our intestinal tract.
5
Antibiotics are also commonly fed to factory-farmed animals and get into our body when we consume animal products.
This isn't to say that antibiotics aren't a good thing. Of course there are situations when antibiotics and other medications are lifesavers, but in general we want to reduce and eliminate medications, taking them only when it is absolutely necessary. Our body has incredible power to heal itself if we supply it with the real medicines it needs: a superb diet and ongoing detoxification.