How’s Your Garbage Disposal? Time to Detox!

Hello friends!

It’s Abbey here today, and I’m back to talk to you about one of the more significant processes the body performs for us—detoxing! Now before you roll your eyes and scroll away, I’m not here to sell you some snake oil product that is magically going to make all the toxins you may encounter vanish into thin air. I am not I Dream of Jeannie, after all. What I do want to do is explain how the liver and our other detox organs function, how to know if you are toxic, and what we can do about it. Ready to hit the ground running? Let’s do it.

Let’s quickly define a few things. As I talk about toxins in this post, I am using it as a very general term that means anything your body is done using, can’t use, or that might cause it harm such as environmental toxins, medications, microplastics in our food or water, or cosmetics that enter through the skin.

When I talk about detoxification, I am talking about the biological processes your body performs to move these toxins through and out of its systems. There are three phases to detoxification: unlocking, neutralizing, and eliminating. All three of these processes need to be functioning well for full detoxification to take place. If you think of your liver as a garbage disposal, you can imagine what might happen when it gets overwhelmed and clogged up. Things start backing up, and you feel symptoms like fatigue, anxiety, inflammation, earaches, itchiness, headaches, and any host of other signals that we call toxic overload.

Here’s the geek-out anatomy lesson on how detoxification happens in the body

1. First, the lymphatic system cleans up the excess fluid in your tissues, breaking down germs, old cells, and other cellular waste, before returning the cleaned fluid to the blood to be transported to the kidneys and liver for more cleanup and elimination.
2. When the hepatic portal vein (the massive blood vessel that runs into your liver) receives the blood coming from your digestive tract and spleen (which is part of the lymphatic system!), the liver filters this blood, cleaning out the toxins and breaking them down into their by-products. It puts the by-products into bile, sends the bile to the gallbladder, and the clean blood to your heart.
3. The gallbladder then sends the bile to your small intestines. The by-products make their way through the rest of the digestive tract and are then eliminated through the bowels.
4. Similarly, blood can filter through your kidneys, where waste is converted to urine and exits through the urinary tract.
5. The last exit for toxins is sweat. However, not every toxin comes out in sweat, nor is the percentage nearly as significant as what your liver is accomplishing.

Okay, great. But what if detoxification isn’t happening at the level we want it to because of toxic overload? What are our next steps to support what your body is already doing? First, we want to determine how toxic the body really is. To do that, we use our Toxicity Questionnaire from Standard Process to get a baseline of where we are starting. Depending on how high of a score you get, we can decide what level of intensity seems appropriate.

In general, the things we can do on a regular basis to support our detoxification systems are to get moving, get sweating, stay hydrated, and eat enough fiber. Those simple things push our bodies to circulate what’s in them and clear out the gunk. But if we’ve put our liver in a position where it is completely bogged down, it might need therapeutic level support for a bit.

Here is my recommendation:

Standard Process makes a detox program called SP Detox Balance. There is a 10- or 28-day program, depending on what you need. It includes a shake & a meal prep planning guide to help with whole food choices. The shake is designed to provide your liver with whole food support for all three phases of detoxification, and has every good thing known to man in it. I promise it’s not any worse than any other “healthy” thing you’ve tried. It is fantastic and let me tell you why I know!

At the beginning of July, I was feeling a little crummy, so I took our Toxicity Questionnaire. Score? 102. Oof! Definitely time to get my system a little extra support! After completing the 10-day program at the end of August, my score had dropped to 49. That is a significant decrease. In the two (ish) months since then, I have continued to drink the shake included in the kit a few times a week, and I have continued to see those same initial results. I feel more clear headed, less inflamed, and very inclined to keep the shake as a regular part of my diet to help keep things clearing out, even if it won’t be as intense as the 10-day cycle.

Here’s my final plea for you. We all overwhelm our bodies in one way or another at different points in time, and that means that we are going to need extra support sometimes too. What I ask of you all (and myself), is that we don’t let it go too far. Our bodies send us signals that they need some help—don’t ignore them.

Cheers to health made simple,

Abbey Swaim, BS, CNC

Reprinted with permission by Swaim Chiropractic. 

Abigail Swaim

Abbey is a young healthcare professional digging deeper into the field of nutrition at Swaim Chiropractic in Idaho. She has a BS in biochemistry from Northwest Nazarene University, and is a certified nutrition coach. She’s currently working toward her certification in whole food nutrition from the International Foundation of Health and Nutrition. She loves being outdoors, no matter the season, and is lucky to live in Idaho, which provides outdoor activity all year long. She likes reading in the field of nutrition, and writing to help both herself and others understand and grow towards better, simpler & healthier lives.