Detox Your Body, Lose Weight, and Feel GREAT

The Holidays are over and it’s time to get back on track with your diet and fitness. First order of the day is to get the junk out of your system. A Detox diet will give you immediate results…

flat belly fit girl

So it’s time to get back on track with your diet and your fitness. First order of the day is to get all that junk out of your system.

For those of you who haven’t yet started a detox diet (now is the time to do it, as you will have lots of others to commiserate with), this will really help you get all that sugar, toxins from excessive alcohol, and processed junk out of your system.

I developed my own Detox Diet, and I wanted to share that with you. I have it divided into three phases of three or so days. The first three days are probably the most difficult as you may actually have some withdrawal and detox reactions, but stay with it–it’s well worth it once you get through this part!

I noticed that I lost weight, (ok so I don’t weigh myself) but my pants were all fitting looser after the FIRST THREE DAYS!

I didn’t move on to the next part until my headache had gone away–that’s a detox sign and if you have a headache or other physical complaints, you need to get all of this out of your system first before you move on.

Although I eat a primarily Paleo diet, I removed the meat for the first three days to speed up the detox/elimination part of it. This makes foods move through your system quicker, and the raw vegetables add tons of enzymes and nutrition, while the fiber helps to ‘sweep’ out your digestive system, pulling out toxins, and crud that may be lining your intestines. Yes, over time, crud can actually become plastered to your small and large intestines, blocking nutrient absorption and adding to your toxic load.

The Simple Smart Detox Diet

Phase One (First 3 Days)–

You are eating primarily raw fruits and vegetables. On Day One, stick to only raw fruits and veggies. You can have these in a salad, smoothie, or just eat plain as something to munch on.

On Days Two and Three, you may add in some legumes such as organic lentils or other beans (except soybeans) for added protein. Quinoa is also allowable. Continue on raw foods for breakfast and lunch, but you may have lightly cooked or steamed veggies or soup for dinner. See my recommendations in the meal plan below.

Drink water with lemon, as much as you want throughout the day. You may also drink green tea and if desired, you may sweeten with a small amount of RAW honey.

It’s also ok to add a little extra virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar or lemon juice to your salads.

Avoid:

  • All sugar (except small amounts of honey)
  • All meat, poultry and fish
  • All dairy
  • All grains, including gluten free options, and all processed flours
  • All soy based foods
  • All processed foods–this means ANYTHING that comes in a box, bag or can with more than one ingredient.
  • All preservatives, chemicals, pesticides, hormones, etc.
  • Alcohol
  • Coffee–except 1 cup organic coffee if desired

Phase Two (Second 3 Days–or when your headache and other symptoms go away)

Diet is the same as above, but you can now add in nuts, legumes and some fish or chicken if desired, but only organic/wild caught etc. Eggs are ok if they are organic or free range.

You may add back in healthy fats such as butter, coconut oil, and virgin olive oil. Avoid any processed oils such as cottonseed oil, soybean oil, sunflower oil, safflower oil or corn oil.

Organic potatoes are allowable, but only in the evening and only in small amounts. The bulk of your diet should be raw veggies, a serving of fruit (as in one apple or one banana, a half cup of berries, etc.) Make sure the fruit you eat is in whole form, with no sugar or anything else added.

It’s also allowable to have ONE glass of white wine per day if you’d like. No other alcohol–no beer, red wine or hard liquor.

Phase Three (The last three to four days)

Begin allowing in some red meat, but only if it is organic and/or grass fed meat. Avoid any commercially raised grain fed meats with hormones, antibiotics, etc.

Grains such as quinoa or white or brown rice are allowable for one meal a day.

There you have it!

You should be feeling energetic, clean, and much lighter!

A detox diet is essential to get you on the path to weight loss, back to good health or to address food allergies or sensitivities. Detoxing rids your body of toxic chemicals, digestive ‘sludge’, and inflammation that may build up from eating a conventional diet or a diet that is too heavy in sugars, starches, refined grains or anything else that we know is not good for us.

Some things to keep in mind during your detox:

You will most likely have a dull headache the first few days. If it persists more than the first two or three days, up your water intake, eat a small amount of ‘clean’ protein, and get plenty of rest. And stay on Phase One for another day until your headache goes away. It will–it’s just your body getting rid of built-up ‘CRUD’ and it doesn’t feel good when it starts getting into your system as your body starts to clean house.

Eat raw two meals a day, then you may have lightly cooked veggies and some clean protein for dinner.

Eating a raw, almost vegan style, clean diet during the detox may produce some digestive discomfort. This is your body  adjusting to these foods and taking a digestive enzyme will go a long way towards helping this. However, you may have a little gas or feel bloated as your body tries to get rid of waste material. This is normal.

Because you are eating a very high fiber diet full of enzyme rich veggies, AND because your body is ridding itself of waste materials and detoxing and cleaning house, so to speak, you may be visiting your bathroom more frequently than usual. Just keep this in mind, as you may not want to do this detox diet when you are required to sit through long meetings, or taking a transcontinental flight.

For the full day by day, blow by blow, meal plan, please enter your email address below and I will send the step by step guide with meal plans and recipes.






There is a simple, smart way to achieve effortless weight loss and end your food addictions once and for all. The Simple Smart Detox Plan will be sent immediately to you.

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Let me know how your detox goes! I’d love to hear from you on your symptoms, the process, and how you feel after you do the whole ten days.

cat

DSC_6810Catherine (Cat) Ebeling RN BSN, is a back to basics diet and nutrition specialist. In addition to her advanced degree in nursing from a major medical school, she has spent the last 30 years intensely studying diet, health and nutrition. 

Get the latest Gluten Free, Superfoods Recipe book HERE–The Fat Burning Kitchen Superfoods Recipes. Cat also has a book titled “The Fat Burning Kitchen, Your 24 Hour Diet Transformation” that has sold over 60,000 copies worldwide, and has helped thousands of people transform their lives, lose weight and improve their health.

                           Her mission is to help others prevent disease and live their best life ever.

                                Nutrition made Easy. Simple.Smart.Nutrition.

 

How to Deal with Your Child’s Weight Problem While Maintaining his Self Esteem

Editor's Note:

 

Today's post is from Nicole Harris. She has some great tips on how to help keep your child from becoming an unhappy, overweight adult. Starting with better habits now will go a long way towards helping your child avoid obesity, diabetes and many other chronic diseases. 


 

Fear that you may have to buy plus size costumes for your 6-year old boy this Halloween? You can see that your child is getting overweight but you aren't so good at convincing him to quit the soda and the cookies that he is so fond of.

You may also need to get him off the couch and start exercising.

But what if you point out these things and he doesn’t listen? Or, worse, it brings down his confidence irreparably?

You don't want your child to have self-esteem issues. Then how can you address this issue without any of these negative effects? The only way to tell your child all these things without hurting his self-esteem is by tackling it as a family, and making sure he/she feels loved and accepted the way they are. 

You have to tempt your child with healthy foods that also taste good and find a fun, enjoyable program for him/her. Better yet, maybe you should join in too! It is not only healthy for him but also healthy for you.

You will be surprised at some of the changes in diet that your child is willing to make to lose his weight if you involve him in all the decisions. Remember that children are very sensitive and you must be careful that you don’t damage the child emotionally by pointing out his flaws.

Below are a few tips to help your child lose weight by involving the whole family in this weight loss program:

 

1.         Make the meal attractive – There are a lot of online tools that will help you to plan a healthy meal. Plan a colorful mean that looks attractive. Plan a balanced diet or all parts of a healthy meal and then ask your child to fill in the different colors that appeal to him. Sit down and discuss what healthy foods you can add that will match the color of the diet chart. This exercise involves the child and the entire family in planning a healthy meal.

2.         Add New Foods – You can ask your child to help you select a healthy recipe and then shop together for the recipe. This will be a fun exercise for the family and the child will enjoy it. This also works with snack foods. There are a great many healthier options other than chips or cookies. Try apples and peanut butter, or peanut butter and celery, or some tasty trail mix.

3.         Kitchen Time With Your Child – Your child loves cooking with you and this should not surprise you. Give him tasks that are appropriate for his age. He will love helping you in the kitchen and meal times will be looked forward as fun time. You can ask him to pack his lunch and your lunch too. Make him feel that he has chosen the lunch for both of you. He will eat all the healthy foods that he is given and has helped to cook.

4.         Avoid Second Helpings – Don’t set the pot on the dining table. Instead, serve single helpings on the plates and carry them to your dining table. Make sure that everyone has only one serving.

5.         Exercise Together – Exercising can just as much fun as choosing healthy food and recipes is. There are so many things that you can do together. Go for walks or jog together or you can play tennis. Another good option is to join a gym. You may even get a discount when the whole family joins it. This will also limit time before the computer or the Television.

 

Children today are aware of health issues and the dangers of obesity. All they need is some understanding and a gentle push in the right direction. Support them by being a part of their endeavors and your child will soon be happy and fit like you always wanted.

 

Nicole C Harris is a personal fitness trainer and a freelance writer. In her free time, Harris loves partying with her friends and recommends that you should buy themed birthday party supplies online to get great discounts. 

America’s Feedlot?

 

Have you ever stopped to think that America is turning into one big gigantic feedlot–but WE are the cattle?

The American public is now living on a diet that consists mostly of corn, wheat, and soy products, very very similar to commercially raised cattle, chickens, and fish.

These industrialized big business agricultural products have been pushed into our food supply in thousands of insidious ways.

Starting with the thousands of packaged, processed items available at the grocery store, all the way back to the feed for commercially raised meats–it seems that corn, wheat and soy are on the ingredient list in some form if you look long enough.

Our diet is way out of whack.

It's far too heavily weighted with grain, and grain-based food products  and grain-fed meat, poultry, dairy, fish and eggs as well.

At least a third or more of your local supermarket’s 45,000 or so ingredients have corn, wheat or soy products or their derivatives in them.

The tricky part is the derivatives do not always say they come from corn, wheat or soy.

The biggest offender is corn. 

Corn is THE most abundant grain produced in America by far!

There is the ever-present high fructose corn syrup, cornstarch, corn flour, corn bran, dextrose, and much less obvious– leavenings and lecithin, mono-, di-, and triglycerides, the golden coloring added to foods, and even citric acid can all be derived from corn and corn bi-products.

Corn is milled, refined and restructured, and can become an amazing number of things, from ethanol for the gas tank to dozens of edible and not-so-edible food products.

Consider the thickeners in milkshakes, hydrogenated oil in margarine, modified cornstarch that binds the unrecognizeable meat in a chicken McNugget.

And then there is the unavoidable sweetener, high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS).

This sneaky sweetener has invaded every nook and cranny of the food system.

Sadly, the commercial food industry has done a great job convincing the public that those 45,000 different items in the grocery store are real variety in food instead of clever rearrangements of the same basic ingredients with come chemical flavorings and food coloring to make it all different.

We have unknowingly become trapped in our own feedlots, and now are becoming a country of obese, sick  and apathetic people who care nothing about nutritional quality and the source of our food—simply because, “It tastes good.”

Unfortunately this very dysfunctional food system has also supersized appetites and created food addictions for the sweet and starchy artificially flavored 'food' creating big dollars for food companies in spite of the serious cost to our health and well-being.

And in America, most all conventionally raised meat can be traced back to corn: turkeys, chickens, pigs, and even cows (which would be far healthier and happier eating grass) are forced into eating corn.

Even our farmed fish supply is now becoming corn-fed, like the carnivorous salmon.

All of these grain raised meat then lose their natural nutrition and become full  of unhealthy, disease-causing fats.

There is a way to see exactly how much of your diet is from corn:

Corn has a very specific carbon structure which can be traced in any animal that consumes it.

If you compared a hair sample from an average American and a Mexican who eats a diet high in corn, you would be shocked to learn that the American would have a much larger amount of corn-type carbon in their system.

Todd Dawson, a plant biologist at the University of California-Berkeley says, "We are what we eat with respect to carbon, for sure. So if we eat a particular kind of food, and it has a particular kind of carbon in it, that's recorded in us, in our tissues, in our hair, in our fingernails, in the muscles," Dawson says.

In most Americans, the carbon test shows that about 70% comes from corn!!

“North Americans are like corn chips with legs,” says one of the researchers who conducts such tests.

So exactly what is wrong with eating such a corn-rich diet?

The base of the food pyramid is GRAIN–isn't that what we've been told is healthy? 

We are what we eat, but there is plenty of  evidence that this grain-heavy way of eating not only spreads illness, but waste, and ecological devastation around the world.

The other big problem with corn and a grain based diet, is that the average American diet consists of food products heavy in Omega 6. An average ratio would be about 25:1 of omega 6 to omega 3.

However, nutritional scientists state that mostchronic diseases start occurring and are detectable when the omega 6:3 ratio exceeds 4:1.

And, the optimum ratio, seems to hover around 1:1 which is the ratio found in grass-fed animals. 

Since all grains have high omega 6 to omega 3 ratios, it’s obvious to see that a grain-based food system creates a serious omega 3 deficiency!

All the way back in 70's scientists knew that grain-based foods, and grain-fed livestock products were one of the primary causes many of today's big chronic diseases such as:  Cancer, heart disease, depression, ADD, Alzheimer’s, obesity, allergies, and autoimmune diseases such as lupus and arthritis, diabetes, asthma, and more.

Obviously, to win the battle against all these diseases, we are going to have to make major changes to our diets, and no one food product can solve the problem by itself.

It's a HUGE change.

Primitive man lived on a diet of greens, vegetables, some tart fruits, some nuts, and mostly meat–all grass fed and naturally raised of course. 

That way of eating is often referred to as the Paleo diet, the Hunter Gatherer diet, or the Cavemen diet.

Here is a thought: Corn has the ability to fatten up a beef steer much faster than pasture-grazing does–although it makes the cattle themselves unhealthy and sick as well.

Cattle that have spent four to six months in a feedlot eating grain, have four to six times more fat, twice as much saturated fat, and as little as 1/10 the quantity of omega 3 fatty acids compared to meat from grass-fed cattle.

Of course, this does create big, fat cattle that grow in about half the time as grass fed, the cattle become as sick or sicker than we humans from eating corn and grain.

Corn and grain do not agree with cow's sensitive systems and cattle get GERD, ulcers, and other serious digestive issues. Another big issue with corn is that it is also very low in calcium and can lead to broken bones in the cattle.  Farmers then add soybean meal and it makes the problem worse!  The calves grow way too fast with the extra protein and end up with even weaker bones.

I don't know about you, but I am beginning to draw some parallells here… Is it any wonder that we, as people have so many cases of osteoporosis, GERD, ulcers, and digestive issues?

Do we want to follow in their ‘hoof’ steps?

 

Slowly but surely many of us are. Are we turning into a national feedlot of people?

Let's not be cattle but humans  who can think and who want to be healthy, strong and lean like our primitive ancestors.

 

The combination of a wide variety of grass-fed meats, free-range poultry, wild caught fish, and grass fed dairy products would certainly go a long way to help.

Let's be individuals in our dietary choices and make the decision to not follow the herd. The Fat Burning Kitchen Program will show you how to eat well, avoid grain, have effortless weight loss, and exceptional good health.

 

Till next time, stay healthy and lean!

 

References David Kamp, Deconstructing Dinner, New York Times, April 23, 2006.

Michael Pollan, What’s Eating America, Smithsonian, June 15, 2006

Dr. Sanjay Gupta, If we are what we eat, Americans are corn and soy, CNN 9/22/07

Tim Flannery, We’re Living on Corn!, The New York Review of Book