A “detox diet” is a bit
of a misnomer.
The body is geared for
detoxification. Organs—the lungs, kidneys, liver, skin, spleen,
lymph nodes—rid the body of unwanted waste, viruses, and
carcinogens.
When we eat to detoxify the
body, it's not the diet doing the detoxification, but the body
detoxifying itself.
Eating the Standard America
Diet (SAD), eating out, eating processed foods, we consume more
carcinogens and create more waste than the body can deal with on its
own. We get backed up, and after years of buildup, we get sick. This
is a very simple way of looking at the process of disease. Disease
occurs when the body breaks down, and the body breaks down because
it's too dirty and clogged to run—much like a car or a toilet.
Enter the “detox diet.”
It's almost ridiculous to call it that, but by eating whole foods, by
no longer consuming the chemicals in processed foods—food from
boxes and from cans—we take the pressure off our organs, allowing
them to gain back the ground they've lost, to catch up on the
continuous task of cleaning us out.
This “diet” is really
the way we humans have always eaten, at least before we began to
heavily process our food, especially before added chemicals. Calling
it a detox diet sounds as if when we're done we'll go back to the way
we've always eaten—burgers and french fries, pizza, milk, and candy.
As if the real, whole foods
that grow in nature are only a medicine.
I don't want a medicine—I
don't want to be sick! I don't want to look at
real food as a stopgap, something to eat for a time when I feel off
or ill, only to fall back into the SAD.
If eating healthy,
naturally, is going to give my body the ability to heal itself
because it's not being overrun by the chemicals I consume when I
eat unhealthy, then as far as I am concerned, eating healthy is my
only option—my only option because I no longer wish to think of what
I buy at McDonald's as food.
But I don't have to single
out McDonald's. Even most “healthy” foods aren't so. The health
claims on cereal boxes, and many other grocery store products, are
grossly misleading, or are flat-out lies. It's often a case of “the
blueberries aren't real.” Piggy-backed health claims: it's easy to slap on a sticker that says a food cuts the risk of disease, and put a minimal amount of that food into the product, selling a sexy version of the same old shit.
As cliché as it sounds,
what we must do is think outside the box—or more accurately, eat
outside the box.
At least most of the time. As much as we can.
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