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Detox for Life

by Dr. Susan Lark

Published 02/04/09

My Daily Love-Your-Liver Detox Program

If you feel nervous about detox programs due to experience with other programs that are harsh and difficult to follow, rest assured, this program is different. Even if you believe that you are healthy to begin with, you’ll see and feel clear evidence of improvement within days to weeks.

With my daily program, you can start slowly and work up, one step at a time, rebuilding and regenerating as you go. That way, you’ll cleanse your liver and secondary detox centers, and strengthen and restore your liver’s functional capacity to protect you, all at the same time, with less risk of reactions, such as unexplained headaches, fatigue, bad breath, rashes, diarrhea, or flu-like symptoms. My daily detox program lets you take it slowly and customize, according to your specific needs.

Drink more pure water. If you haven’t been diligent about drinking lots of water, now is the time to start. As you liberate stored toxins, it will take plenty of water to flush them safely and completely from your system through every possible route of elimination: urine, stool, the moisture in exhaled breath, and sweat.

Drink purified mineral water, a minimum of eight 8-ounce glasses a day, evenly spread out over the day, and increase the amount, as necessary, if you engage in any activity that increases your breathing rate or your sweat production.

Increase your intake of healthy, organic foods. Eat a predominantly vegetarian diet, with emphasis on raw and steamed foods. Let the focus of your diet center on healthy, organic whole foods—salads, steamed vegetables, whole grains, legumes, and lots of fiber to help move toxins through your colon. Include the specific foods listed above, known in traditional Chinese medicine to specifically and gently cleanse and restore liver function. For the animal-based protein, eat eggs prepared without oils (e.g. soft- or hard-boiled), or choose easy-to-digest fish and poultry, such as wild, organic salmon or free-range chicken.

Be sure to make these types of dietary changes gradually and gently. That way, detox will occur gradually and gently, and the improvement in how you feel will help motivate you to make this your new way of eating for life.

Avoid foods that add to your liver’s stress load.

• Red meat, fatty foods, refined white sugar, and white flour, which generate toxic residues that the liver must neutralize. It is virtually impossible to rebuild and restore liver function without eliminating foods high in fat and sugar content.
• Caffeine, which over-stimulates the adrenals and increases already chronic secretion of cortisol. Strive to replace coffee with green tea, Teeccino, and herbal teas such as peppermint, chamomile, and ginger. You can also try an organic detox tea, such as Yogi Tea’s Detox Tea, which contains herbal liver detoxifiers like dandelion root, licorice root, and cinnamon bark.
• Wheat and dairy products—common allergens that can cause chronic inflammation.
• Alcohol.

Don’t eat after 7 PM. Nighttime is your liver’s time to regenerate, not to deal with late night meals or snacks. Eat your heavier meal earlier in the day.

Try a light, modified, 1-day fast once a quarter. If you’re working and active, a true fast can be disruptive. However, once you’ve gotten this far in the program, you may feel up to an intermittent, modified fast, to help boost the clearance of toxins from your liver while maintaining your usual daily routine. Eat two or three light meals a day consisting of fresh organic vegetable juices (celery, carrot, beet, beet greens, parsley, cucumber, spinach, garlic, and/or wheatgrass), low-fat and low-sodium vegetable broths, herbal teas, uncooked or lightly steamed organic vegetables, and thoroughly-cooked organic starches, grains, and legumes.

Take these supplements:

• B-Complex vitamins help deactivate excess estrogen, degrade alcohol to non-toxic components, and protect the integrity of the liver tissue: 25–100 mg vitamin B-complex per day.
• Lecithin is one of the most important nutrients for the liver. Composed of two of the B-complex vitamins, choline and inositol, it comprises 65 percent of the membranes of liver cells, where metabolism of various pollutants, alcohol, viruses, drugs, and other toxins occur. Research has shown that lecithin can also help remove fats from liver tissue. In fact, it’s often prescribed in the treatment of hepatitis, fatty liver disease, and cirrhosis: 2 tablespoons of lecithin granules stirred into 4 ounces of water, once a day.
• N-acetyl cysteine (NAC) boosts detoxification ability: 300–600 mg once or twice a day.
• A healthy balance of omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids is necessary to protect the liver against inflammatory disease. If your liver is functioning adequately, take: 50–100 mg borage seed oil per day, or 2,000 mg of fish oil (as EPA and DHA). If you have poor liver function, don’t start fatty acid therapy until you’ve already been taking lecithin and antioxidants for several months, and then start with 1/4 to 1/3 these doses and increase gradually.
• Silymarin, (milk thistle), is well known for its ability to protect the liver from environmental pollutants, radiation damage, and other toxic insults, and to specifically protect as-yet-undamaged cells, so they can act as regenerative centers: 525 mg of milk thistle (containing 80 percent silymarin) once per day.

Detoxify Your Emotions. Try these important and very helpful suggestions for creating the calm, peaceful, and positive emotions that are so necessary for healthy liver function and detoxification. Over the years, I’ve found these tips to be very helpful in neutralizing my own toxic emotions, as well as those of various family members and friends.

• Limit your exposure to toxic emotions in the environment. Two years ago I made the decision to shut off my television set and limit my consumption of the news. The media—whether it’s television, radio, or newspaper—specializes in presenting the news with violent, fearful, and scary images and stories that contain very little that is inspiring and uplifting.
• Too much of this toxic input from the environment can literally overwhelm your body’s ability to process and detoxify these negative and disturbing images, and can, in turn, significantly undermine your health, energy, and well-being.
• Spend more time appreciating yourself. Women are notoriously hard on themselves. We are constantly criticizing ourselves for not being good enough, smart enough, beautiful enough, or thin enough. My women friends are always jokingly offering to give each other transplants of their most disliked body parts—usually the breasts, behinds, and stomachs—when they feel too large. Send positive messages to your body that reinforce your sense of self worth and self love.

I’m currently re-reading a beautiful little book called The Art of Thank You: Crafting Notes of Gratitude (Beyond Words Publishing, Inc.). This wonderful book suggests sending thank you notes as a way to show generosity, gratitude, and kindness to others. What about show the same consideration to yourself? Why not start the new year spending just a few minutes a day thanking and appreciating your body, including your liver, and the hard work that it does detoxifying every second of the day and night.

Write these positive thank yous and appreciative thoughts to your body as affirmations in your journal, say them out loud in the privacy of your bedroom or office, or even visualize sending loving messages to your body each day. Over time, releasing more and more of your own toxic emotions and replacing them with kind and loving thoughts to yourself will help to diminish the load on your detox system. Then your body will begin to be filled with more light radiance and health.

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