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Detoxing your liver

How well do you take care of your liver? We asked nutritional medicine expert Dr. Cris Beer the best way to keep your liver healthy, so the rest of you can be at your best too.

Your liver is essential. It has over
 500 imperative functions to help keep your body healthy. However, its role in our general wellbeing can easily be overlooked. In order to get well and stay well, liver health needs to be addressed. If your liver is healthy you will:

•Feel energetic
•Have clear eyes with no dark circles under your eyes
•Have clear skin
•Have a normal metabolism and healthy body weight for your frame
•Have normal, healthy cholesterol levels in your blood
•Not have any coating on your tongue
•Have a healthy immune system
•Not bruise easily

Conversely if your liver is not functioning well you will feel:
•Fatigued
•Generally unwell
•Nauseated at random times
•Itchy, especially worse at night
•Not hungry
•Bloated
•Swollen, especially at the ankles
•Abdominal pain under right side of ribcage

Oftentimes in order to improve our liver health we need to undertake a liver detox. Yet “detox” is a buzz-word these days, often attached to marketing a particular product, supplement or diet that claims to clear out the liver and return liver function to normal. But do these detoxes actually work, and what does the word “detox” mean?

Detox often refers to literally de-toxifying the liver by removing any build-up of toxins or substances that can overload it, such as environmental toxins, alcohol and other noxious substances found in our lifestyles.

The issue with relying on one particular product, supplement or strict diet to detoxify the liver is that this creates a reliance on these systems to be able to return your liver to good health. Another problem with relying on a strict diet is that it’s often not sustainable. As soon as you stop following the diet and return to your usual lifestyle you will find the same problems occurring with your liver again.

So to put the record straight, first up I need to say that there is no one “detox diet” that works for everyone. In fact, often the best approach is not extreme but rather involves making some small changes to your overall diet and lifestyle to help your liver to do its job.

The key then to detoxify or cleanse the liver, so to speak, is to reduce exposure of the liver to substances which can overload this vital organ. The good news is that the liver is remarkably efficient at renewing itself, so when given a chance to recover, the cells in the liver can regenerate and work as they should quite quickly.

To help your liver work as it should try the following strategies:

To read more click through to http://ffmag.com/detoxing-diet-isnt-hard-think/

Fitness First Mag - Dr Cris Beer – 24 June, 2016