I hope everyone had a fun filled long weekend. Now that we are back to a “normal week”, we need a little detox after all of those fun festivities. Here are a couple of tips, not only for Tuesday, but for after your long weekend that include some friendly tips for Detoxing your system. It’s not a quick fix to truly clear your body of toxins. Instead think of ways you can be toxin free, long term.
Cut the coffee
Joel Fuhrman, M.D., author of Eat to Live: The Revolutionary Formula for Fast and Sustained Weight Loss (Little, Brown and Co., 2003), says one sign that a food is “toxic” is that you feel bad for a short time when you give it up; in the case of caffeine that typically means killer headaches. “You don’t go through withdrawal when you stop eating broccoli,” Fuhrman says.
Like many aspects of detoxification, the wisdom of forgoing coffee is hotly debated. Many doctors believe that drinking one or two cups a day won’t harm most people, though pregnant women and those with hypertension are well-advised to avoid the stuff. Others point out that in addition to disrupting sleep when drunk too close to bedtime, coffee causes the jitters and often travels with other less-than-healthy foods–namely sugar, fatty cream and gooey pastries.
Coffee detox tips: Whether you go cold turkey or reduce gradually is a matter of preference. If you drink, say, five cups of coffee a day, you might cut down every two to three days from five cups to four and so on to minimize withdrawal symptoms. Another choice is to reduce the strength of your coffee by filling your cup with more decaf and less regular every couple of days. Some people just want a warm drink in the morning and feel satisfied sipping a cup of hot water with lemon; try it.
Take a break from booze
Going the teetotaler route can improve digestion and sleep, boost energy and sexual function and lessen muscle pain. The effect that alcohol has on weight gain is complex and controversial, in part because researchers are unclear as to whether alcohol calories count as much as food because of how they’re metabolized. But if you’re drinking, say, five or six glasses of dry white wine (at 70 calories a glass) each week, you can figure that giving those up could lead to a loss of about half a pound a month. Another benefit of abstaining: Research clearly shows that drinking spurs appetite.
And even moderate amounts of alcohol may increase the risk of breast cancer. A recent article in the journal Public Health Nutrition found that women who average more than four alcoholic beverages a week increase their breast cancer risk by 7 percent for every drink.
If you’re a social drinker and just want to detox from alcohol, Hyman suggests taking a booze break. “If you can give alcohol up for several weeks, but don’t notice much of a change and you really miss a glass now and then, go back to drinking,” he says. Hyman recommends limiting yourself to no more than five glasses a week. Red wine, he notes, appears to provide the best health benefits since it contains flavonoids, antioxidants that may prevent heart disease. Alcohol detox tips: Some people prefer to ease their way off the fermented grapes and grains, while others switch from hard-liquor drinks like martinis to wine. But for social drinkers doing a short-term detox, most doctors recommend going cold turkey.
Kiss the sweet stuff goodbye
We’re genetically wired to love sugar. In fact, eating sugar and fat seems to stimulate the same brain receptors as morphine. The fix isn’t free, though: Sugar uses up precious antioxidants, substances that help remove natural byproducts caused by oxidation, which play a role in heart damage, cancer and other problems. Sugar is also associated with high-fat, high-calorie foods that cause weight gain, diabetes and heart disease, though the only proven downside of sugar consumption itself is dental cavities.
The first step to kicking the white stuff is to avoid hidden, or added, sugars that manufacturers load into all sorts of prepared foods, including bread, pasta, ketchup and salad dressing. Finding these requires a bit of detective work, since sugar is often indicated on food labels under other names, like fructose, sucrose, dextrin, dextrose, corn syrup and malts. (Turn to page 188 for more on the four things you should read on every food label.) “If you simply avoid hidden sugars, you stop feeding the addiction and soon reset the sensitivity threshold of the nerves that are hooked up to taste buds,” explains David Katz, M.D., director of the Yale Prevention Research Center in Derby, Conn., and author of The Way to Eat (Sourcebooks, 2002). “Your sweet tooth will be satisfied with lesser amounts.”
Sugar detox tips: Use spices such as cinnamon and flavorings like almond and vanilla extracts to add a sweet taste to foods. To ease particularly severe cravings, nutritionist MaryBeth Augustine recommends one cup of a bitter tea, such as chicory root or burdock root, at each meal. If you have a pang for something sweet, enjoy a piece of whole fruit; the skins of apples, pears and other fruits are rich in fiber, which slows the rate at which carbohydrates break down into sugar in the body. After a sugar fast, try to stick to the World Health Organization’s guideline of keeping sugar intake under 10 percent of calories, or about 50 grams (12 teaspoons) for a 2,000-calorie-a-day diet.
Excerpt from Shape, June, 2004 by Joe Mullich
