Why Our Detox Process is Unique

IN ORDER TO LOSE WEIGHT QUICKLY, YOU NEED TO EITHER STARVE YOUR BODY OR BEAT IT TO PULP. BOTH ARE CONSEQUENTIAL AND NONE OF THE TWO ARE SUSTAINABLE. IN FACT, IN MOST CASES YOU’LL GAIN MORE AFTER. THIS IS WHY WE DON’T USE THOSE MEANS.

REASON #1.  Many people state that juice fasting gives them energy. Actually, often it is totally the opposite.

Many regular fasters we worked with suffered from blood deficiency and were quite malnourished (based on their symptoms and our live blood analysis testing). In those cases, fasting will deplete your energy levels and your adrenal glands (=your energy powerhouses) even further – and this is counterproductive to what you are trying to achieve.

According to our test results, 90+ guests arrive with Adrenal Fatigue. Adrenals are a pair of grape-size glands, located on top of your kidneys that is responsible for a coping mechanism called fight-and-flight. When you live under stress most of your life, these glands get exhausted, and you start suffering with low energy = absolutely everything from cleaning your house to your favourite hobby may become like a chore. Your libido is non-existent, you crave salt or sweets, and you feel tired a lot of the time. You want to push to complete a project or task – and you end up not being able to get out of bed, you try to push – and you end up with a cold or flu for the 2^nd or 3^rd time in a row this year, you try harder to push – and you end up being an emotional basket case. At times you may think you are lazy or crazy, while your doc says there is nothing wrong with you. And yet all of it is simply due to you having run too hard on your emergency stress management system (=adrenals). Adrenal exhaustion is typically followed by Nervous System and other Hormonal issues, including thyroid problems, severe menopause symptoms, as well as Sleep Disorders (which often equals Stress Management Disorders).

Putting it in easy terms, virtually everyone who comes to us from the real world is stressed and exhausted. Under such circumstances, your cells need a lot of nourishment. Just think of your adrenal glands as a battery. To detox, you need to use this battery.  What happens if your vehicle sits all winter and you try to boost it? Yes, the battery will die. You will need to recharge your battery first, and only after this you’ll be able to restart your car.

How does this translate into your health? Detoxification is not free; it requires energy. If you do pure juice or water fasting, you put yourself into a very fast pace of detoxification, which will require much more energy than gentler detox methods. And when you are already exhausted, it will be like trying to beat the tired horse, to squeeze more out of her. If you are already low on the “battery (adrenals) and start detoxifying fast, you’ll use the remainder of your battery for this process quickly.

This means, on a practical level, that after juice fasting, you may come home even more tired than before leaving. Since fatigue is one of the reasons you typically are looking into a healthy get-away in the first place, and you may find it frustrating after several grants and spending time, you are back home feeling completely depleted.

While fresh juices have a lot of nutrients that are easily absorbable, they leave your system very quickly and do not provide you with grounding, sustainable energy. We use some juices as part of our program as well, but we found it is not quite enough to nourish the exhausted body. Yes, you can take various shakes every hour or two to keep yourself through the day; they will stabilize you to a point and will help you in many ways, but it is still “powdered” and “isolated food” and does not provide a full spectrum of nutrients and fibre that food does.

This is why the Fresh Start approach is to focus on the nourishment of your adrenals and other organs with healthy, delicious organic foods and to use more gradual cleansing methods. Our meals are specially designed to be cleansing and, at the same time, nourishing. We also include adrenal support supplements, rest periods, moderate number and intensity of activities and hydration. More than anything, you need to slow down and rest, not get on a treadmill.

There are many other very nourishing components in this program, particularly bodywork. Cleansing your body and being supported by nourishment with food and bodywork is much safer and doable for most people, decreases the load on your system, and helps your adrenals do what they need to do. They will still need to do the work, and you may still feel a bit tired in the process and for a few days after, but at least your adrenals will be fed and will not get severely depleted.

This is why the Fresh Start approach is to focus on nourishment of your adrenals and other organs with healthy delicious organic foods, and to use more gradual cleansing methods. Our meals are specially designed to be cleansing and at the same time nourishing. We also include adrenal support supplements, rest periods, moderate number and intensity of activities and hydration. More than anything you need to slow down and simply rest, not to get on a treadmill.

There are many other very nourishing components in this program, particularly, bodywork. When cleansing your body, and being supported by nourishment with food and bodywork, it is much safer and doable for most people, decreases load on your system and helps your adrenals to do what they need to do. They will still need to do the work, and you may still feel a bit tired in the process and for a few days after, but at least your adrenals will be fed and will not get severely depleted.

REASON #2. Having designed and organized various programs for over 2,500 people over the last 18 yrs, we tried every type of detox on Earth. We monitored hundreds of juice fasts and have personally done water fasts. And yet we decided to eliminate them as part of all our programs irrevocably. One of the biggest reasons we did this is that fasting strongly destabilizes many people emotionally and physically.

During fasting you may go through multiple uncomfortable healing symptoms, and while some discomfort is ok to take, when you vomit, your liver goes into spasms, you suffer with severe migraines, you become dizzy and shaky as your blood sugar drops or you become a basket case, it is not a lot of fun, trust us. Because it is not fun for the team either, as someone may either have a lot of physical symptoms, be angry or crying all the time. And what’s most interesting is that even those who think they are healthy, not always realize how much life stuff there is accumulated in them and get quite surprised when it comes to the surface.

This garbage needs to be released, and we want to help your body to go through this process in the most balanced and pleasant way possible.

REASON #3 Juicing and most herbal cleanses do not help cleanse your colon. This may sound like a surprise to some people, but let me explain.

We’ve had guests who are experienced fasters and yet came with massive constipation issues (some of them even had colonics when fasting). When they started our program, Juice Fasting was the only thing that they believed was going to help them. We had to use very strong laxatives and other extraordinary approaches to get their colon moving, and when they finally did start removing the accumulations, those were rock-hard and really old feces that were stuck in their colons, probably, for half of a century. Do you wonder why?

Juice is a wonderful detoxifier on a cellular level, but it does not have fibre. When it enters your cells and extracellular fluids, juice acts as a dissolver. It basically dilutes the toxins. However, it does not have a substance to move them out of your body fluids. This is why many people who start juice fasting without a component of colon cleansing start experiencing massive headaches.

We had a guest who did a well-known herbal home cleanse and after 10 days ended with inflammation of the liver, gall bladder and spleen all at the same time. Some of the most important reasons: are lack of hydration and of a proper colon cleanse.

There is so much more that needs to be done to remove the toxins rapidly and safely. Bodywork, colonics, digestive flushes and, most importantly, emotional release are all essential components of proper toxins removal. Segmented cleanse does not work and may be quite dangerous.

This is why we use a complex approach, juices are one of them, but not an all-in-1 solution. In fact, fibre in foods, especially raw foods, in most cases, helps much more effectively in cleanse than pure juices.

REASON #4. Fasting disrupts the work of the digestive tract, and it takes some time to restore it.

Your body operates differently when fasting, and the transition time to “normalcy” is much longer than if you continue eating some light foods. Most people who have done juice or water fasting know that one of the challenges is the possibility of constipation. Your bowels work much better if you continuously provide them with fibre that is present in whole foods (drinks and juices don’t contain any fibre). Because you want to feel better when you come home, not worse, and to be back to your meals and life routine fast, we include meals.

Just because we use gentle and tasty ways to detox, does not mean that we would agree to compromise results. Because we use a combination of flushing and cleansing drinks, toxins-binding drinks and foods, and colonics, we can achieve wonderful whole-body detoxification results without fasting. You get a thorough cleanse, but typically without a massive destabilization. Fast removal of toxins from your system, minimizes your detox symptoms. This is why colonics are a must for you and are a mandatory part of this program. Your detox would not be optimum, and you may get strong detox symptoms and much smaller results without it.

REASON #5 The fifth reason we do not use the fasting model is that there are not too many people who are tough cookies and tolerate discomfort or hunger well. Juice and water fast methods may work well somewhere in Eastern Europe or China, where people are used to hard-core methods.

On the other hand, people here, in North America, are real tough cookies… After our guests leave their rooms, we find more than one dry pizza in the chest of drawers, more than one package of store-bought food left in the garbage cans… We even had to drive to the store once to buy Cheerios to save the life of a guest who became suicidal due to not being able to eat her usual foods.

The most courageous guests have victoriously shared with us about their during and post-program night outings for “ribs”, after which they hurt and farted for multiple days but were fully satisfied and comforted by their favourite goodies. And we felt privileged to wave to a few of our especially “dedicated” program participants pulling up to the Drive-Through in the nearby town…

This may sound funny, but it is not a joke. All of this happened while having three times a day aesthetically prepared gourmet, hand-crafted food. And now the interesting thing to find out would be how many people on juice or water fast could not resist the temptation to cheat and binge after it is over? And how many of the fasters were truly able to smoothly and quickly get back into their real world and routines?

After observing enough pictures similar to the described above back in the good old fart days… sorry, fast days, we realized that we needed to start making changes and adapt our methods to the real life. No matter how great detox or juice fast benefits, we had to face the reality that food plays much more important role in our lives than just nutrition. If food only did play that role, most people would eat healthy every day. However, in the times of stress, food provides us a sense of safety, comfort, brings back positive childhood memories of belonging and being nurtured. On a physical level it gives us familiarity of food ingredients. These accumulate into the feeling of physical and emotional comfort (even if only the short term, it is still a fact).

Understanding this, we decided to part with fasting methods in our programs forever.

Summary:  The 7-Day Detox and Recharge program is a baby of our 18+ yrs. of guiding various groups through a detoxification process, having tested juice fasting, water fasting, working with very healthy people and with palliative care cases. We learned 5 main reasons why juice fasting is not an optimum method of detoxification: 1) adrenal burnout, 2) the fairly low health level of modern people leading to emotional and physical destabilization during the fast;  3) juice fasting is a segmented cleanse and without other components may be dangerous; 4) fasting destabilizes digestive system and requires long reintegration time and proper refeeding, and 5) majority of us have a strong attachment to familiar foods and low discomfort tolerance level. Due to the reasons above, we use juices only as a component in our detox programs, but not the only ingredient. the 7-day Detox and Recharge program was designed as the most balanced detoxification program that does not create a cathartic healing experience, is non-taxing for the liver, kidneys and adrenals and allows for easy integration when back home.