How To: Cleansing Foods

How To: Cleansing Foods

Hello I'm Yvonne Bishop-Weston from a nutritionist from Foods For Life. And I'm going to help you get the most out of your diet. I'm going to talk about cleansing foods.

We spend lots of our time getting our body toxic, and then spending certain times of the year often in January detoxing our bodies. Obviously ideally through out the year we wouldn't become quite so toxic so we don't have to do quite so much time detoxing. If it feels like your body is ready for a cleanse, the best way to start, the only really healthy way to start is by looking at your bowel health first.

The bowel is one of the major detoxification organs of the body and if that isn't cleansing properly so if you're not having a proper bowel movement everyday then you shouldn't really be supporting the liver to cleanse and detox the body because otherwise you'll be releasing toxins that are safely stored breaking them up and sending them in a more dangerous form down into the gut where the body isn't excreting them they can get reabsorbed and you can really feel quite unwell. So when we're talking about supporting bowel health, go for the whole grain foods. Now on a cleanse, we generally prefer to avoid wheat, even if it was whole grain bread and pasta and rice.

Go much more for other varieties of whole grains so go for kuwae go for brown rice go for buck wheat but avoiding any refined carbohydrates and also for the period of the cleanse avoiding wheat products which we generally have more of than we need. Wheat tends to be an insoluble fiber and what we're looking more at is having soluble fiber such as oats and some of the other grains I've been talking about. If we have quite a lot of insoluble fiber such as wheat bran then it does clean our digestive system but it does that by speeding the transit time, speeding how quickly your waste will get excreted.

It's a bit like the scratchy side of a cleaning pad, a bit like the brillo pad. It just pushes everything through but not very gently. If you go more for the soluble fibers in for instance oat bran, then it's more like a sponge, it will get down into the gut it will soak up fluids and toxins and you will do a bowel movement that is much more cleansing.

An essential part of any cleanse is having plenty of fruits and vegetables. Go for a whole rainbow of different colours. The vegetables contain fiber which is going to help the digestive system have it's daily bowel movement and its daily cleanse.

An essential part of any cleanse is having plenty of fruits and vegetables. Really go for eight portions a day. A portion would be roughly about the size of an apple, it would be a hand full or if it was something leafy it would be about three hand fulls because of the water content.

So include all of the different colours especially the red, and the purple and the blue and the orange. Those are going to give you the antioxidants to support your body's health and go for the green because they're going to give you the minerals to help you to remineralize you on your cleanse. There are of course a few things to avoid in your cleanse.

We've spoken about avoiding wheat also avoid the caffeine, alcohol and any processed foods in there as well. Make as many of the meals yourself as you can, or if you're buying ready prepared food buy food which you can see the ingredients of. Alkalizing the body is really important for a cleanse and a really easy way to help alkalize your body is by having water which is not only filtered but also remineralized.

So it does help to keep the body's p.h at a really nice even alkaline level. Once you've taken all of those pieces of advise on board then you can really start to be a little bit more supportive of your liver, again not in an aggressive way but starting gently to avoid having negative symptoms such as headaches, dizziness and nausea and all the symptoms that can come with too fast a detox.

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