“I need to gain some weight!”

I have been studying a massive amount of information in the past few months about over 80,000 toxic chemicals and metals in our environment. Where they come from, what they do to us, how to avoid them, and how to get rid of them. Food (especially meat/dairy and processed foods), cosmetics, clothes, furniture and paint and carpet, water, air, dental and medical procedures, and more.

I’m doing this for a few reasons. First, I just finished an 8-page paper on the effects on your health of far infrared sauna treatment. I’ve been using mine every day, plus taking fulvic acid, to bring metals and chemicals out. I want them gone, and in my hyper-focus on toxicity lately, I find myself undertaking new, good habits to get as clean as possible. I need my energy and health so I can take my mission further, harder. I go 100 miles an hour and I don’t want to slow down!

I keep encountering more information about how chemical toxicity in our cells impedes weight loss. I can’t imagine that it doesn’t cut both ways, impeding your ability to arrive at your optimal weight, whatever direction that needs to go, up or down.

Second, I’ve developed a detox program. I joined Tera in hers last year, but I concluded that I wanted a harder-hitting, information-dense, educational cleanse that would educate you while giving you measurable results. (If you’re going to suppress calories, might as well be getting healthier at the same time that you’re getting thinner!)

Much like I did with 12 Steps to Whole Foods, I’m synthesizing all the best texts and best practices in detoxification and disease risk minimization. All boiled down into one 21-day program. It’s a food-elimination program to test your food sensitivities/allergies. It’s a kidney cleanse. It’s a colon cleanse. And it’s a liver and gall bladder flush as well. You can do it with us once, or join for life and do it twice a year. We have expert phone calls every night with fabulous content, you’ll be assigned a “detox buddy” to be accountable to, if you don’t bring your own, and you’ll know exactly what to do and eat every day. And we have a private Facebook group where you can get support from other detoxers, as well as our expert coaches! I pop in there, too, a few times a week.

The manual holds your hand, answers common questions, educates you in the briefest way about what products you’re using that are toxic and what the alternatives are. It gives you recipes to get through an effective cleanse, using food, either at a newbie’s pace, or a more advanced one for those already “initiated” who eat pretty clean and have detoxed before. You’ll know exactly why you’re doing each part of the detox.

My point is, purging fat cells (and organs) of the chemicals they’ve been storing for years is something that cannot be neglected in any effort to change your weight–up or down. Did you know that thin people can be fat inside? That’s right—a study I read about three years ago found that many people who are normal weight have organs marbled with fat, which is far more dangerous than fat held in adipose tissue under the skin, the kind we can see. People who work out regularly, who are visibly overweight, have much lower morbidity, that normal-weight people who don’t exercise and are internally “fat.”

So fat can’t necessarily be thin……but thin can be fat!

And no matter how much whole plant foods some people eat, and no matter how many chemicals they eliminate, those who have a damaged gastrointestinal tract can’t fully utilize nutrition. Another element that absolutely must be addressed is healing the gut. Because of many years of a wretched diet, you might have an inflamed digestive system in serious need of some rehab. Many underweight people fall in this category.

That rehab is done by eliminating dairy and gluten for a time and learning to eat probiotic-rich foods to build up an army of healthy microorganisms to protect and defend the lining of the stomach, intestines, and colon.

Gain weight the right way….I hate when a young mom tells me her pediatrician told her to feed her underweight baby lots of candy, ice cream, butter, and fried food. So then you’ll have a baby with more body fat who is ill and damaged in many ways, with tastes set to junk food. How is that useful? Take the time to find ways to get higher-calorie WHOLE PLANT FOODS in your diet if you are truly malnourished. The plant kingdom is VAST. With a little creativity and dedication, it can provide weight loss, weight gain, whatever you need.

Posted in: Detox, Healthy Weight, Whole Food