Detox Diet
Detox Your Way to a Thinner You
Detox diets are diets that claim to have a sort of cleansing effect on your body. There are dozens of different diets that called themselves the detox diet . And not all of them even follow similar principles, besides the claim that eating according to their plan will cause a sort of detox cleansing of your digestive system, and with it, all your body’s systems.
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A detox diet like that might be called a “fat flush” diet, designed to flush excess fat from your system. Or it could be aimed at cleaning your liver, your skin, or other specific areas of the body. There are detox diets based on the Bible, those based on only fruits or juices and some are based around only raw foods.
A cleansing diet , at its heart, is designed to jump start your body’s system into a “detox” period. This period, usually a timeframe of about 3 to 5 day, starts removing what is believed to be toxins from your body, hence the term “detox.” Some diets forego the 3 to 5 day time period and last 21 days or more, but you should be aware of eating from an extreme type eating plan that either forces any one kind of food or restricts certain healthy foods. For a short period of time, such a diet should be okay, but no detox or crash diet should be followed for an extended period of time.
Raw foods diets, for instance, are vegan diets that only allow raw foods, which pretty much limit you to food that hasn’t been cooked, like fruits, vegetables, sprouts and grains that don’t require cooking (like oatmeal soaked in water). Picture a diet with lots of salads and a lot of healthy fiber , but missing nutrition rich foods like cooked beans, cooked whole grains and low fat dairy products. The lack of meat and less than good nutritional information can also make some raw foods dieters protein deficient, which can causes many health problems.
Many detox diets are liquid diets, either by telling which liquids you can drink in which amounts, or through some sort of prepackaged beverage that you’re to drink while on the diet. Some contain only vegetable soup with very little salt. These liquid diets are not healthy for the long term, but for a few days you should be able to tolerate them all right. Other detox diets might recommend fasting for 1 to 3 days while drinking only water, which is a controversial process.
You need food to survive, and not eating does slow the body’s metabolism. When you take in too few calories or none at all, your body believes that it’s starving, and will slow down its need for fuel to try to preserve itself. Throwing yourself into that starvation mode isn’t healthy at any time. If you want to feel the benefits of a detox diet without throwing your body into starvation or near starvation mode, give exercise a try. Exercise doesn’t just rid your body of fat and calories like a detox diet, but it relieves stress and is healthy.