It is now February and after a crazy two months of the festive season, which always seems to drag out into January, the talk about town in the diet world is “detox”. All the trashy magazine’s love this stuff, because either celebrities swear by it or they tag it with dropping kg’s quickly. They frame it with being oh so good for your body after it has just been run through the ringer copping a hiding with toxins. BUT is the whole detox thing really good for you?? Lets have a look.
The theory behind detox is to cleanse your body, including liver, bowels, kidneys of the built up toxins, waste and chemical by-products from cigarettes, alcohol, food pestercides, caffeine etc. all in an effort of improving health and wellbeing. The problem is some of the prescribed detox diets out there end up being quite harmful to not only the body but also the all important metabolism. Cutting calories from 2500 per day down to 1000 may see you jumping for joy on the scales initially, however, long term it will give you no help in speeding up your metabolism, nor will cutting macro-nutrients out of your eating (which alot of detox diets do) which make you lose muscle! All in all these quick fix fad diets look to have you regaining the shortfall in no time.
With your body being one of the best detoxification machines going around, here are some tips to rework your nutritional intake this year.
Tips to clean up your eating and De-Junk it
- Definitely give up the smokes and limit alcohol intake
- Avoid simple sugars
- The devils colour is WHITE (white sugar, white salt, basically foods which colour is white)
- Eat food as close to its natural source as possible – it should have been living before hand.
- Anything ending in ‘-ose’ on the label = SUGAR
- The longer the shelf life – the worse it is for you
- Do what mum nagged you about – eat loads of fruit and vegetables (more colour the better)*
- Drink the clear stuff (WATER that is) – simple equation – Bodyweight x 33.33 = Amount of water in milliliters per day
- Use the 80/20 rule. Live right 80% of the time and the other 20% can be absorbed
- Try to get 8 hours sleep. A lot goes on during this down time and is extremely important in keeping your body running in peak condition!!
*hundreds of studies have shown the correlation with those who have a higher intake of fruit and vegetables are healthier and leaner than those who don’t. UP the intake guys 🙂
