Your liver is working harder for you than you probably can imagine and it’s time to start treating liver overload if we want it to keep doing it’s job. The question is will you work a bit harder to help it do its job? If so, you’re going to feel healthy in many different ways because the liver is a magician of health when treated well.
Most people think liver issues are only due to a high intake of alcohol. Not so.
Every day we are bombarded with toxins in our environment. Our liver has to process everything including alcohol consumption, antibiotics and other pharmaceuticals, home cleaning chemicals, chemicals in our foods, caffeine, sprays, gasoline and scented candles to name a few—and our liver’s been soaking up these toxins for years.
Even if you’ve had chronic strep throat as a kid. You don’t necessarily get rid of all that strep. It stays within your system laying dormant, and it gets stored into the liver. Over time the liver gets overloaded and it becomes sluggish or, we have all heard of a fatty liver, and most often you don’t even realize it’s brewing beneath the surface.
The tipping point
When your liver gets overloaded it hits that tipping point—that’s when things start to shift. A lot of times people put on excess weight usually around the midsection, and they don’t even understand why. It’s because the liver is at its tipping point.
Another symptom is people can’t take smells, toxic smells; I’ll ask my patients “Are you sensitive to chemicals and smells?” If they answer “yes” it’s usually either a sensitive central nervous system, or their liver is also overloaded. And oftentimes it’s from these long over-time viruses or bacteria that we have picked up along the way that find their way and bury into the liver.
The liver can show its overload in other ways besides weight gain; it can be dry cracked skin, high cholesterol, anxiety or depression, rashes, even cracks in your tongue and eye symptoms resulting in foggy vision and other eye changes. The liver can wreak havoc on your whole body.
Treating liver overload
If you’ve read many of my other blogs, you know that I’m a huge believer in the power of food as medicine. And in the case of treating liver overload, food is no exception to this rule.
But here’s the catch…most fruits and vegetables are so much more toxic than they’ve ever been. They are sprayed with chemicals, pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides. So organic is the way to go as much as you can!
But how do you know what you are being served in a restaurant? Many restaurants are following the farm-to-table trend so you know what you’re ordering is a better choice, but most times it’s best to ask the server, or avoid the restaurant altogether (thanks for making that happen Covid!). It’s disheartening to order a salad and think you are doing good for your body, and realize you’re just adding more toxic waste to yourself instead. But we can do our best here and sometimes we just can’t be perfect and that is just perfect. There are ways to combat these effects too.
One of the key things to support your liver, is to begin lowering your fats. When you lower the fats, you give the liver a break, and our diets are super high fat. High protein and high fat go hand in hand. And most people don’t even think that until I have them log their diet and begin the discussion of food. Once they realize how much fat they are eating and they cut back they really start to let the liver cleanse and the body will cleanse at the same time.
Another way to clean up and heal your liver is to drink celery juice, 16 oz if you can on an empty stomach….as tempted as you may be to add something else to this herbal elixir, don’t – it works it’s magic all alone. Also start each day with a fresh glass of lemon water, this flushes your liver and hydrates you from the detoxing your body did overnight. There are also herbs that you take that are supportive of a healthy liver. Try a cup of dandelion root tea, burdock root tea, or hibiscus tea.
The good news is, you don’t have to officially go on a cleanse to be cleansing. The minute you change your diet, your liver will thank you and you will notice the difference in your entire body, mind and spirit.
