Natural Detox

A lot of people want to detox their body.  They might feel slow, sluggish, overweight, or bloated due to an unhealthy diet, or simply because of various chemicals that they are exposed to throughout their day.  They want a way to clean and flush out their system, but they don't want to do it with harsh chemicals.  What is the best solution for a case like this?

Natural body detox

The best way that I have found to detox the body naturally is through fasting.  Now most people immediately throw up their defenses and have some prejudices against fasting.  They probably have never done it before and most people believe it to be unhealthy. 
We have a strong tendency, at least in the western part of the world, to equate a healthy person with a healthy appetite.  When someone is not eating, we get worried and try to force them to eat something.  This as become part of our natural response and part of our culture.  Food has become equated with vitality.  If you take a look at the obesity epidemic in this country, you will see that this attitude might have some flaws. 
The fact of the matter is that fasting is very natural.  You can witness this natural process in action by studying both animals and people.  When animals get sick they naturally fast in order to allow themselves to heal faster.  How does this work?  It works because our bodies use up a tremendous amount of energy digesting solid food.  When we eat solid food, every day, around the clock, it takes about forty percent of all of our energy output just to digest all of that food.  That energy we are using for digestion could be diverted to other purposes in our bodies, such as tissue or cell repair.  That is why animals and humans are hard wired to naturally fast when we become ill.  The lack of food allows us to divert more energy into healing our bodies. 
Now if you just stop eating and continue to drink water, this is a water fast, and it is quite an extreme solution.  I do not necessarily recommend water fasting for a natural detox process, and I do not have any experience with water fasting.  Perhaps some day I will move on to this level of detoxing, but for now I recommend juice fasting.
Juice fasting is really nice because you are not lethargic and worn down like you would feel during a water fast, yet you still get the detoxing benefits of the fast.  In fact, a juice fast provides so much nutrients to your body that you can stay fully active and even do vigorous exercise while doing a juice fast.  In fact, you should try to do so because this is a huge part of the cleansing process.  If you exercise every day during your juice fast, you will drop a lot of weight very quickly and still remain healthy.  This is really the only way to lose a lot of weight in a short amount of time and still be healthy while doing it.  Exercising during a juice fast will accelerate the effects of the fast and cleanse your system on a deeper level.

Details on doing a natural detox process

Here are a couple of guidelines for a natural detox diet with juicing:
1) Do not eat solid food.  Only juice.
2) No pulp allowed.  Pulp is food and your stomach will digest it like food.  If you drink pulp you will experience hunger again.  Keep drinking juice and water and you will feel no hunger.
3) Use at least one live piece of fruit in every glass of juice you drink.  I squeeze a lemon and strain the pulp from it, then add it to cheap store bought juice.  This is not ideal; you actually would want to squeeze all of your juice this way, but it is too expensive. 
4) You can squeeze other fruits and veggies, but concentrate on lemons.  Use lots and lots of lemons.  I recommend about 10 per day.
5) Start with a 3 day juice fast.  Drink as much juice as you want during the 3 days. 
6) Return to solid foods slowly.  Don't eat a huge steak right at the end.  Start with fruit and veggies and go slowly with your return to solid food.
Now if you want to do a natural liver detox, then just make sure you use plenty of lemons every day and also drink lots of water with your juices.  You can also use oranges in your juice, but lemons are really ideal as they provide even more juice per piece of fruit, and have better cleansing properties to them as well. 
If you do a 3 day juice fast as described, you will be amazed at the amount of energy you have while not eating solid food.  This will teach you how little you really need to live on.