The Importance of Cleansing

Incorporate a few more high fiber choices into your diet, try an herbal tea helper or tailored herbal capsule, and give your digestive system a break from harder to digest foods once a week, to get a great “house cleaning” routine going…


A Spring Cleaning for one’s home is an important thing to do. Washing down the walls, the windows, and cleaning out the cobwebs, unuseful debris and rubbish is integral to making one’s self feel good about one’s environment.

It makes just as much sense, if not more, to clean out our temple, our body, sweeping out toxins and fat deposits. It’s the best way to start a diet and it just happens spring is the best time of the year for renewal and refreshment. A Spring Cleanse revitalizes the digestive system and can flush the liver, and sweep the intestines, brushing away unmentionables that are clinging to the walls. It is a fact that at any given time there can be up to 2 and a half kilos of refuse clinging to your intestinal walls. Gross, eh?

If you are up to it, a cleanse can also eliminate parasites of various types, the deeper reach creates a more intense reaction; headaches, flu like symptoms, at times, even a skin eruption of pimples or blisters, but it can be worth the trouble when one faces genetic predisposition to cancers, diabetes, heart disease, or other chronic conditions that prey upon general lack of health.

Cleansing can also have beneficial effects for women during menopause and premenstrual cycles, lessening the difficult symptoms associated with them such as hot flashes, cramps, and bloating.

All in all, a cleanse has so many benefits that you would be silly not to employ it in your battle for health, weight management, and longevity.

There are many types of cleanses that can be used, yearly, quarterly (my preference) monthly, or even weekly. I advocate a multifaceted gentle cleansing, to broaden the impact without the intensity of a deep tissue cleanse; something that is easy to incorporate into your routine.

Herbals are an amazing tool in cleansing. I employ several different herbs for a wholistic effect. The Blue Butterfly offers a comprehensive blend in an easy & tasty tea, consisting of dandelion root, red clover, burdock, nettle, rose hips, licorice root, and either a pinch of cayenne or ginger, depending on blood type. The effect of the tea is a full body cleanse with a focus on the hepatic and digestive systems, where many chronic problems begin. Drinking two cups of this tea, daily, over a period of ten days is a highly effective way of invigorating your liver, pancreas, stomach, blood, kidneys, and small intestine.

If you aren’t a fan of teas, capsules filled with an army of herbal cleansers can be easily employed, as well. With capsules, taste is not a factor, and a heavier arsenal can be used; among them black walnut, and garlic, two of my favorite heavy weights for expelling polluting toxins. The Blue Butterfly prepares tailored herbal capsules at very reasonable rates. A two week supply of cleansing capsules costs only $20. Compare that to the trendy, highly overpriced Herbal Magic plan or other trendy cleansers that are giving you a lot of cheap fillers for comparative prices.(these fillers are typically fiber that can actually cause serious damage if taken incorrectly)

Drinking a cleansing specific tea or taking a comprehensively prepared herbal capsule, regularly, is a very good start to keeping things fresh. Eliminating meat!! One must always be aware of replacing meat proteins with plant proteins, in order to keep your body at it’s optimum. Eat beans with long grain or brown rice and corn to get a full protein spectrum. We crave when we don’t get what we need, sometimes leading to over compensation with excessive eating and the beginning of a vicious cycle that is hard to break.

A cleanse would not be complete without the intestinal sweep with fiber. It is proven that the largest single change to the diet that delivers the highest impact on health is the addition of adequate amounts of fiber. I used to advise my friends to use psyllium for a good two week period to get a good fiber sweep, but have since been illuminate to the fact that many people are unaware that they must take their fiber with adequate amounts of water or they will suffer horribly with constipation, the side effects of which can be quite painful. Now I advise a more natural way of getting in fiber, through conscious food choices.

It is recommended that we ingest 30-40g of fiber a day. Beans and legumes are our best choices for fiber, also supplying amino acids that help fill the meatless protein requirements for our “veggie days”. Women should reach for the edemame, specifically, as a source of phytoestrogens, and other estrogen stabilizing phytonutrients. Ground flax sprinkled on top of a bowl of fresh fruit and yoghurt in the morning is another fantastic habit to form, delivering a fantastic insoluble fiber that gives us a good sweep. An apple a day is my favorite recommendation to make to my friends with a solid 5g of fiber it is a very easy way to get both soluble and insoluble fiber. I recommend eating apples before a large meal, especially if you are dieting or have Type 2 Diabetes for it’s netting effect on simple sugars, keeping them from passing through the stomach lumen and later being stored as fats.

A few little parting thoughts regarding the cleansing process; cardiovascular workouts are the best way to push out toxins, toxins are typically stored within fat tissue, eliminating fat helps to eliminate these deep tissue toxins, and last of all…



… changes that are made permanently, if even only small, have much larger effects than an extreme measure taken for a week.