A New You for the New Year: Benefits of a Detox

The new year is just around the corner – time to sweep out the old and bring in the new.  Whether the goal is to lose some unwanted fat and excess weight or simply to look and feel better, it may be a good time to look at how you can do a detox. But before you jump into it, here are some tips to help you do it in a safe and effective way. Here we take a look at the good, the bad and right way to detox.

Why is regular detoxification important for our wellbeing? Our gut is known as our second brain for good reason. If our gut is not working well, we cannot assimilate the nutrients we need for our bodies to function well. And if we don’t have the necessary nutrients, we will age faster, fall sick more often, and feel tired all the time.

A regular detox will help to clean out your gut, and of course, followed by healthy eating to supply good nutrients to your cells. Cleaning out the gut is then followed with cleaning out the “storage bins” a.k.a. stored fat, the organs, the blood and the lymph.


This involves flushing out debris while at the same time, giving the body maximum nutrition that does not require the digestive system to do a lot of work.

Next question is: how do we do that? One way is to fast.  That simply means abstaining from all food and drink except for water for a short period of time. Sounds tough? Not really, says Benjamin D. Horne, PhD, MD, author of a Utah study and director of cardiovascular and genetic epidemiology at Intermountain Medical Center in Salt Lake City. Thanks to our history as hunter-gatherers, human bodies are equipped to handle periods of not eating, and since the ancestors who made it through those lean times are the ones who survived, Horne suggests that our DNA may actually be coded to receive a benefit from fasting.

The study was conducted in Salt Lake City, where two-thirds of the residents are Mormons who fast once a month for 24 hours for religious purposes. Occasional water-only fasts may lower your risk of heart disease and diabetes, according to research presented at the annual scientific sessions of the American College of Cardiology in New Orleans.

When you fast and eliminate intake of solid food completely, it’s like clicking the reboot button for your body. Your digestive system takes a break, and your liver gets a chance to take a quick power nap. Your stomach shrinks inside, and a little on the outside too, so you feel full on a lot less food.

When you go on a fast, the supply of glucose in your blood drops. After your cells use up the sugar that is in your bloodstream from your last meal or beverage, your body has to find another source of energy for your cells. The first place that it turns to is your liver, to make use of the stored glycogen for energy.

During a water-only fast, your glycogen stores are depleted within about 24 hours. Once the glycogen in the liver is used up, your body begins to burn fat and muscle stores to make its own glucose to fuel your cells.

Since the bulk of the toxins in your body are stored in your fat reserves, the longer you fast on water only, the more fat you'll burn and the more toxins you'll eliminate from your system. Your body begins to eliminate large quantities of toxins only after it begins to burn your fat reserves at a rapid rate.

As your internal cleansing takes place, all the stored up toxins start making their way out of your body. You may feel tired and sluggish during the first one or two days of fasting, with a whole array of unpleasant symptoms, from unpleasant body odors to aches and pains all over the body as a result of sugar or caffeine withdrawal. Be patient, this crappy feeling is usually followed by increased clarity and energy.

If you have not prepared your body prior to the fast or if you are not already eating a healthy diet, or if you've got liver or kidney problems, any kind of compromised immune system functioning, or are on medication - even Tylenol, it can be quite a shock to the body to be thrown into detox mode. You could experience some very unpleasant symptoms as these myriad toxins rear their ugly heads and course through your bloodstream without food or other nutrients to dilute them. The excessive load can overwork and cause damage to your liver and kidney. This is why I would not recommend total water fasting without medical supervision.

Look out for my next article on a gentler alternative next week.

Have a great week ahead!

For those who are in Singapore, I will be doing a free health talk on "Diets Don't Work; Eat, Enjoy & Lose Weight" on Thursday 2 Nov 2017. Email me if you wish to attend!