Detox Fasting Promotes Your Best Performance
Even cynics and skeptics grudgingly agree that most American adults would benefit from some kind of well-managed detox fasting program. Especially in America’s major cities, Earth’s fundamental elements—air, soil, and water—do as much to poison unwary citizens as to sustain them, so that the average hard-working city-dweller and her suburban commuter friend in the next cubicle both stand in need of serious detoxification. Polluting the environment, we have polluted our bodies, too.
Drinking unfiltered tap water alone gives ample grounds for health- and safety-conscious detox fasting: Ralph Nader’s Public Interest Research Group has found that the water supplies in America’s twenty largest cities contain, on average, more than 1000 known carcinogens, and they have measurable concentrations of prescription medications, including psycho-active drugs and antibiotics. Food additives provide similar incentive for well-managed detox fasting: most “factory-grown” farm animals ingest antibacterial medications and growth hormones along with their grain, so that grocery store meats have measurable amounts of chemical contaminants. And recent research has shown that high-fructose corn syrup, relatively harmless in small doses, is so widely used and abused that most Americans consume five-times the safe amount each day. Even the most hide-bound traditional nutritionists find themselves recommending, “Get thee to a detox fasting program.”
Economic and social circumstances also prompt serious consideration of detox fasting’s physiological and psychological benefits. Coping with the consequences of the greatest economic crisis since America’s “Great Depression,” average Americans have grown so preoccupied with protecting their jobs and preserving their families’ finances that they have abandoned almost all concern for their health. Although they have cut-back sharply on dining out and their consumption of fast foods, ordinary Americans generally have substituted easy-to-prepare processed foods for their customary drive-thru fare, and they have sustained their dependence on highly caffeinated, heavily sugared sodas energy drinks. Although they are safeguarding their family budgets, Americans continue collecting fats, toxins, free radicals, carcinogens, and other hazardous food additives at an alarming rate. Rates of obesity and adult-onset diabetes continue to soar, and average Americans persist in destroying their bodies in order to save their wallets. The more trying the times, the more average Americans need a well-regulated regime of detox fasting.
Taking aggressive measures to rid your body of toxins, pathogens, metabolic wastes, free radicals and a host of other contaminants, you are not agreeing to self-imposed torture and almost unbearable deprivation. Although you are giving-up solid food for about ten days, substituting one of several carefully formulated cleansing beverages, you are not going without nutrients; and, because your detox fast will require extra attention to hydrating, you certainly are not exacerbating your chronic thirst. Carefully following a naturopath’s or homeopath’s well-researched and time-tested instructions, you are filling your damaged system with antioxidants, fiber, herbal and plant remedies to promote expulsion of all the contaminants running through your system. Paying attention to every detail in your instructions for healthy detoxification, you also are taking-in lots of vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients to boost your immune system and promote optimal operation of your body’s own healing mechanisms.
Desperation and disgust may drive you to detox fasting, but only genuine commitment and initiative will help you sustain your cleansing fast to its completion. Most genuinely effective cleansing beverages taste worse than terrible, so that many would-be fasters quit after their first sip of the ostensibly innocent “lemonade”—easier to cope with the consequences of obesity and faulty biochemistry than tolerate that terrible taste, the faint-of-palette convince themselves. For the people who go the distance, though, the benefits become increasingly clear: they feel more energetic, their sleep improves, they watch excess weight melt away, and they concentrate better.
Detox fasting will not cure all that ails you and your world, but it does rid your body of all the chemical and bacterial impediments to your success in a frequently hostile, threatening, menacing, and generally dangerous world.
