Why Is Detoxifying Your Liver So Important For Health?
The liver is your main detox organ, it filters out toxins from the blood and when it gets "backed up" EVERYTHING else in your body becomes negatively impacted. When your liver becomes overburdened (when the detox pathways are sluggish), it stops working efficiently and all those toxins accumulating in your body get recirculated instead of eliminated.
Your liver not only filters and processes toxins, chemicals, medications, alcohol, environmental pollutants, it also processes your hormones and produces bile which is essential for proper gut health.
If you are a woman and your liver is impaired you could be experiencing: mood swings, estrogen dominance, acne, weight gain, low libido, heavy periods, irregular cycles and anxiety.
For men and woman alike, a sluggish and overburdened liver will often present symptoms such as:
-Bloating, gas, nausea
-Constipation or pale/greasy stools
-Fatty food intolerance
-Right-side abdominal discomfort (under ribs)
-Chronic fatigue
-Brain fog, poor concentration
-Headaches or migraines
-Irritability or low mood
-Acne (especially jawline), rashes, eczema
-Itchy skin
-Dark under-eye circles
-Chemical or alcohol sensitivity
-Difficulty losing weight
-Blood sugar instability
-Increased inflammation
-Frequent infections
-Poor recovery from illness
-General feeling of “toxicity” or heaviness
-Impaired circulation (cold hands and feet)
-Bad breath or coated tongue
-Sensitivity to smells
-Sleep disturbances (especially waking 1–3 a.m., classic liver/gallbladder time)
What Are Some Of The Best Ways To Support Your Liver?
Upon waking up in the morning having warm spring water with a pinch of mineral rich salt (sea salt, Redmonds real salt, Himalayan salt) and the juice of 1/2 a lemon to a full lemon is a great way to rehydrate your fascia after a night of sleep as well as to help stimulate bile flow/digestion. Along those same lines you can also eat a slice of lime with a slice of ginger and a pinch of sea salt 20 minutes before a meal to massively aid in digestion (naturally increases stomach acid production).
It is important to regularly eat because when you skip meals it tends to slow down bile flow. In Ayurvedic medicine they say when you skip meals you weaken the Agni, which is the fire in the belly that aids digestion. So breakfast is usually a great idea for blood sugar stability, stomach acid regularity, and liver support. Ideally, to cultivate Agni and keep it high, a first breakfast of "Ayurvedic Apples" (Recipe can be found here) by 8am is quite critical. If you are a fan of intermittent fasting, that's absolutely great! You can practice intermittent fasting, but you will want to adjust your last meal to be 12-18 hours from 8am and make sure that you don't eat the apples later than this. Most people don't realize, especially in the West and even more pronounced in 'biohacking crowds', that sunlight and the rising, apex, and setting of the sun are directly related to our digestive strength throughout the day, all of these signals being triggered hormonally through light exposure. Daylight is not something you can easily trick your body with, so living in sync with the rising sun and daylight is absolutely important not just for circadian rhythms, but also for a vast number of chemical signaling in the body.
Ayurvedic Apples are the best food to eat first thing in the morning to break a fast. The fats (from ghee, butter, or coconut oil) nourish and lubricate the body and intestines, the fiber of both the seeds and the fruit also facilitates digestion by aiding the microbiome through the introduction of multiple different types of fibers, and the juiciness of the dish replenishes critical fluids that are central to digestive wellness, but also enhance skin, sleep, other organs, and more. Most people don't realize that unless digestive fire is perfectly maintained, eating anything causes an enormous amount of digestive stress on the rest of the body and will always leave a person deficient in proteins (amino acids and peptides) as well as alkalizing minerals. Furthermore, it stresses out the Intestines and microbiome, the liver, kidneys, and spleen which all have to work infinitely harder to compensate for poor stomach wellness. And so this is why we mention this - your liver can be working fine and you can still have congestion or develop NAFLD and other liver diseases from being overtaxed due to poor stomach wellness, so it's important to take this into account.
Great foods to add to your organic whole food diet would be bitter foods of any sort (all bitter foods stimulate bile flow), beets (for bile flow and methylation support), eggs (choline for fat and toxin transport), garlic/onions (sulfur for detox enzymes), and plenty of lemon water. Some people swear by taking a tablespoon of high quality olive oil in the morning to aid in bile flow production, could be worth trying for yourself. Just realize that some bitter herbs and foods actually extinguish stomach fire, so you need to balance bitter, cooling herbs with warming herbs like ginger, turmeric, and others which support stomach health. In fact, in TCM cooking principles, all greens (which are inherently bitter to some degree) must be lightly sauteed with ginger to help neutralize the overly-cooling effect it would have on stomach fire.
General herbs for liver support are going to be milk thistle, dandelion root, artichoke leaf, and ginger. You can incorporate these herbs into teas throughout the day for added support.
Also an extremely important lifestyle adjustment will be to avoid all food at least 2, preferably 3-4 hours before bed. This allows your organs to full rest while sleeping, providing better natural detoxification. It also gives your stomach full time to rest and go to sleep properly so as not to stress the gastric parietal cells (responsible for secretions of both intrinsic factor and gastric acid), which will help keep stomach fire working properly.
It is important to know that the liver is always attempting to detox on it's own, living a lifestyle that supports ongoing detoxification will be your best long term strategy. Avoiding excessive fatty, fried foods, alcohol, excess tobacco, regular use of recreational drugs (or "medicines"), and all processed foods including RBD seed oils will be one of your best strategies for health in the long run. We at the Research Academy don't stand fully behind the use of intense cleanses like liver flushes and super regular use of coffee enemas for the general public, preferring instead to detox the liver in a more sustainable way that is less taxing on the body and far less harsh.
Remember our motto: "The Slower You Go, the Faster You Get Where You're Going."
Of course here at the Phoenix Aurelius Research Academy, we are partial to our own Spagyric Products as we specifically designed them with decades of research and clinical experience in mind. We find them to be extremely effective for all manner of wellness imbalances and they, along with a few choice supplements and some basic herbal infusions, decoctions, and other preps serve as our ONLY medicinal agents for every condition imaginable. Our newest Spagyric Formulation: De-Liverance, is formulated to help your liver/gallbladder detox naturally and can be used as short term, heavy hitting support, as well as great long term support for detoxification - all of this is controlled just by the dosage size. Read below to learn more about De-Liverance.
The last thing we will mention on this blog post (because we could write a book on this topic) is that we strongly suggest the use of a selective binder because of its affinity to help bind to toxins secreted in bile. This will also help lessen the toxicity load on the liver over time. The binder we recommend to most folks that is safe to take on an ongoing basis is: PectaSol, a modified citrus pectin supplement. Take 1- 2 scoops in 16 ounces of spring water on an empty stomach 1-2 times a day.
You can purchase PectaSol at a 10% discount by visitng our FullScript Store here:
https://us.fullscript.com/welcome/paurelius1740000240/store-start
