Disclaimer: I am not a medical professional or licensed dietician. Yes, I do a lot of research and have experienced the good, bad and ugly of detoxes, but this is opinion based on my experience and my research. This is not advice and is based on my body which is relatively healthy.
Personal note: As a recovering OCD sufferer, detoxes, or any restrictive eating, does not bode well for my situation. When I used to do detoxes, I wasn’t aware of the OCD or how the detoxes were akin to playing Russian roulette with my mind and body. This is also a take away for anyone with an eating disorder and/or disorganized eating.
I used to do detoxes every January and sometimes in the summer before or after I would go on vacation. I felt as though it rid my body of all the toxins that had accumulated with months of eating junk and binging on alcohol. It was a bizarre ritual of both punishment and reward that got my eating habits jumbled up into a huge heap of self-destructive, disorganized mess. If you are taking a spiritual journey or trying to introduce a healthier lifestyle then go for it, but only for about 3 days, a week, at most. Those reasons likely won’t give you a disorder, but if you do a detox for too long, you could easily face malnutrition and dehydration or other unpleasant side effects.
Let’s explore the reasons why.
They Really Don’t Work
The kidneys and liver are the body’s toxin bouncers. As long as the kidneys and liver are in good working order, they provide all the detoxification that your body needs. If they didn’t, the bodies they inhabit would die fairly quickly from a buildup of waste and toxins. In other words, anytime you pee or poop, you are ridding toxins and waste from your body. For example, the human body cannot digest corn cellulose (the outer hull of the kernel) so that is why, after you eat corn, you can see it in your poop. Your body doesn’t use it for any purposes, so it eliminates it. Gross, I know, but I had to get my point across.
It is not food or juice’s jobs to detoxify you, nor do they, really. People everywhere tout the benefits of hot water with lemon, but other than hydration and nominal amounts of vitamin C, you aren’t really getting nutrients and, the lemon is acidic enough that just drinking straight lemon juice or lemon juice lightly diluted with just water, is bad for your teeth. (I know coffee isn’t great for your teeth either, so don’t @me. The point is that coffee isn’t pretending to be the answer to all of your needs.) In fact, even though it is obviously important to stay hydrated, water nor lemons kick start metabolism, either. The body needs calories after fasting overnight or for any length of time.
In short, no food or drink can replicate Mother Nature.
Metabolism Suffers
Speaking of metabolism, detoxes are more likely to slow your metabolism than speed it up.
A dietician once explained to me that metabolism is like a fire. To keep it burning, you have to add some sort of fuel. For our bodies, that fuel is food. If you start denying your body food or replace food with a liquid facsimile, metabolism will go dormant.
Also, if you restrict too much, you won’t feel full and could lead to overindulgence. Your metabolism, nor pancreas, enjoys sugar spikes and dips. To avoid these spikes and subsequent dips, one must eat consistently, every 3-4 hours ideally, and eat balanced meals that incorporate carbohydrates paired with fiber, good fats and protein.
Eating is not just about how many calories you consume, it is about the food making up the calories and their nutritional benefits.
For example, you can buy 90 calorie snack packs of almost anything; chips, candy, trail mix, etc. You can also eat an apple that contains the same 90 calories but reap the benefits of its nutrition: vitamins A and C, fiber and antioxidants. If you were to pair the apple with some nut butter and you will even get some protein to go with those carbs and fiber. That would be the kind of sweet snack that wouldn’t cause your blood sugar to spike, then subsequently crash, and would keep you full longer; therefore, less likely to make poor decisions about food.
Easy to Become Malnourished and Dehydrated
You may be saying to yourself, ‘how can I get dehydrated if I am drinking all this juice/hot water with lemon?’
Do you really know what all is in the juice and/or detox supplements that you are taking? A lot of them have a laxative-type effect. This tricks people into thinking that their detox is working but all it is really doing is giving you the shits. When someone gets diarrhea, guess what happens next? Dehydration, that’s what. So, there’s that. There is also malnutrition.
When you restrict yourself to eating only certain types of food, and in the case of most detoxes, just fruits and vegetables, yes, you are getting the benefits from those foods, but you are also missing out on other nutrients that make up the other foods you aren’t eating. You aren’t balancing your macro-nutrients (carbs, protein and fats) and then you start missing out on essential electrolytes, vitamins (especially B12 and D) and minerals such as calcium that your body needs to work properly. It doesn’t take as long as you think for this to occur, either; hence my former recommendation of 3-5 days or no more than a week. It can happen that fast.
Again, this might be okay if you are fasting or detoxing short-term for spiritual purposes, but if you are detoxing for your “health”, you really aren’t doing yourself any favors. People that detox regularly swear that the detoxes work and they feel better, but is it really the detox or just the fact that they are eating less sugar, less fat and less processed foods? It is most likely the latter, as sugar and highly processed foods can lead to blood sugar spikes and crashes, lethargy or low energy.
Mental Health Can Suffer
I don’t think it is a particularly good idea for anyone to do any sort of restrictive diet, but those suffering from any depression or anxiety it is even worse. When individuals undergo weight loss surgeries, such as stomach stapling, they must also undergo psychiatric counseling. As humans, our relationships with food aren’t always clean cut. Some people eat to live, and some live to eat. Some people use food as punishments or rewards (guilty). Some people put certain foods on a pedestal while villainizing others. There are all sorts of relationships with food, and most of them are problematic if we really get down to the reasons why we have that relationship in the first place.
I have an older relative that grew up during the Great Depression. They farmed, so they had slightly more security than their neighbors; therefore, they shared as much as they could, but in order to survive, she and her family had to constantly can, dry, preserve and store food and there was still insecurity. One neighbor told this relative in adulthood that if it hadn’t been for her family, the neighbor and her siblings would’ve starved to death. Because of this insecurity, my relative developed a tendency to overbuy and hoard food and also overeat. She even still felt a compulsion to can food until recently when she became “too old” to do it anymore. Yet, she never passes up a sale and has a pantry and a wall in the garage full of food. She gives away a lot of food and works with several local charities that feed people, but she refuses to let food go to waste and, even after donating, still has a lot of food leftover. No one in or around her house could or would go hungry. I used to gently tease her that she would feed a burglar before he left. She gets offended if you don’t eat at least 3 plates of food at holiday gatherings.
Even after the Great Depression ended, it took her area of the country (Kentucky) a while to recover and there was still a lot of abject poverty surrounding her. It was largely due to those circumstances that she experienced food insecurity as a child and adolescent that the food insecurity never really went away however, and formed her relationship with food that extended even in to adulthood. For years, she had little to no portion control and tended to overeat.
Luckily, our sturdy German/Swedish frames and hearty Scotch Irish genes could handle this lifestyle and she didn’t develop any on-going health problems.
In her “maturity” she has developed a sense of portion control as of late, but ya’ll, this relationship with food lasted for decades. This is also just one example of many that I have encountered among friends and family. While I was studying psychology, I also read about people, especially young girls, that were sexually abused and developed eating disorders out of feelings of control or to make themselves less attractive to their predator.
I say all of this to illustrate that detoxes and really restrictive diets can play into our psyche and, our likely already, weak or disorganized relationship with food and our bodies. In my opinion, our goal should be to eat for nutrition and nourishment, to listen to our bodies and their random cravings and imbalances and make it right through the way we eat, live and relate with ourselves.
Anyone swear by detoxes? Anyone choose not to do them anymore? Comment below.
