There’s something rather soothing about January. There’s not much going on, diary-wise, but there’s a pile of books waiting to be read and plenty of great stuff to catch up with on TV. This is a time of rest and some light internal housekeeping. The liver is the place to start.
The liver is a thing of wonder, the multi-tasker par excellence. It creates, destroys, alchemises, cleanses, sifts and filters its way through whatever you throw at it, without ever taking a break.
It rarely makes a fuss, and can put up with a great deal before it starts to rumble. So you may not notice when it is functioning below par, or has started to accumulated fat.
There are two things you need to do to show your liver some love: clear and strengthen your detox pathways, and reduce any fattiness you may have accumulated in that region.
Let’s start with your detoxification pathways.
Clear the way
Until very recently – about a century ago - the work of the liver’s detox department was on the whole fairly manageable: recycle old hormones, process food metabolites, make heavy metals safe, eliminate pollution from smoke… run-of-the-mill stuff for such a powerful organ. Excessive alcohol intake was perhaps the greatest challenge it might encounter. Otherwise, the liver was more than up to the task it was created for.
Then, almost without warning, the 20th century burst through the door, bringing with it hundreds of thousands of synthetic chemicals in the form of food additives, cleaning materials, pesticides, herbicides, drugs, dyes, plastics…. all unnatural substances bearing no resemblance to anything the liver had ever seen before. These new industrial toxins are now routinely consumed, injected, inhaled or rubbed in, before they are dispatched to the liver, which is somehow expected to deal with it all.
There’s only so much a liver can take. Signs of toxic overload include chronic fatigue, frequent infections and immune disorders, mental fog, poor memory, and hormonal imbalances. These signs suggest that the detox pathways need to be decongested and reinforced.
Detoxification occurs in two phases.
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