How Toxins Affect Your Health – Puffness

When Ari came to see me, he described some of the side effects of eight years of married life and having small children in the house. His fridge had had a makeover for the worse. Diet Cokes, cupcakes, and choco­lates were there to tempt him, and with more than a few bites here and there his belly was getting a makeover too. He told me, almost laugh­ing, “For the first time I’m feeling like a tired old person—and no one looks at me on the beach anymore.” Though he was resistant to the idea of replacing two meals a day with liquids, he successfully com­pleted the Detoxification program. Several pounds came off over the first two weeks. By the third week he reported something surprising. Not only had the extra eleven pounds he’d been carrying for years slipped off his frame, but his skin looked tighter and firmer. “As I was shaving, I real­ized the face in the mirror looking back at me was different. It looked ten years younger,” he said.

Most Eastern forms of medicine talk about mucus as toxic waste in our body. It is a very different understanding than we have here, which has mostly to do with runny noses. When I first heard a doc­tor of Chinese medicine talk about mucus being present in the entire system, it sounded laughable to me. I remember thinking, “What is he talking about?” So I asked him, “Where is this ‘mucus’?” Dr. William So, a Korean acupuncturist from a multigenerational family of healers who has since taught me a tremendous amount about Chinese medi­cine, replied calmly, “Everywhere. It’s in the cells, around the cells, in your blood, in your guts. It’s even in your thoughts.”

India’s Ayurvedic tradition calls this heavy, toxic substance that accumulates in the body amma and doesn’t distinguish whether the source is physical or mental. It says that all stressors on the system, from toxic foods to toxic thoughts, manifest as a mucusy heaviness in the body, which is the first stage of disease. When you are trained to see it, you can detect its presence right away. The clinical sign of it is what I call “puffiness.” It’s a symptom that Western medicine doesn’t even have a name for and is largely overlooked, even when we’re staring right at it. (This is one of the limitations of the Western model of medi­cine: if a condition doesn’t have a name, doctors don’t even see it.)

But just look around, and it’s evident that almost everybody living a modern life is “puffed up” to some extent:

The skin might be a little saggy, instead of being taut and firm. There may be dark circles under the eyes on waking up.There is bloating around the body, and sometimes there are extra pounds that won’t budge, even if the person counts calories and exercises. Clothes feel tighter, or the belly is puffed, even on a thin person. Often there’s a turgid state especially in the bowels; move­ment gets stuck and constipation results.In the morning, the tongue might have a white film on the back part of it. If it’s there, it should be scraped off with a tongue scraper. (A significant amount may indicate that you have been eating and drinking late at night when the digestive system should be resting.)There may be a heaviness or torpor in the system, which is some­times also felt as a lack of clarity or joy.

Even people who consider themselves healthy and fit are familiar with this puffy state—maybe on some days more than others, depending on how well they’ve been eating and drinking.

Mucus is a natural defense response against irritation. If you inhale some cayenne pepper while cooking, your nose runs because it’s try­ing to get that irritant out. The mucus is the gel that first surrounds the pepper particle so it can’t burn the sensitive nose lining and then facili­tates sliding the irritant out.

Too much of the wrong food or other toxins from the environment cause irritation also. But this time it’s inside, where you don’t see or feel it happening. The toxins irritate the sensitive wall of the intestines. When the cells there get irritated, just like in the nose, they defend themselves by creating a protective buffer of sticky mucus to separate themselves from the toxic particles. This can be the beginning of a con­stipated state, something that is typically made worse by the degraded state of the intestinal flora.

Next, the irritants slip through the lining of the intestines and into the blood vessels on the other side, irritating them as well. As the toxins are carried around in the bloodstream, they trigger irritation everywhere they go, which generates mucus in and around the cells of the muscles and tissues. This mucus is acidic, so it adds to the already overly acidified state of the body. And because it’s like a sponge, suck­ing up water, mucus swells the cells and “puffs you up”—you look and feel bloated and dulled.

When your nose makes mucus, it comes out easily. You blow your nose to help it move and then it’s gone. When mucus is being made deeper inside the body, it gets stuck. Of course, there is a pathway for it to get out—the mucus needs to be pulled back out of the cells, car­ried back in the blood to the intestinal wall, and then moved back across the wall into the lumen, where it can get eliminated. But this requires resources, and if the volume of inbound toxins is high, the body’s economy of energy is tilted toward containing the attack. It is so busy surrounding the irritants that it can’t get to the job of carrying them out. It’s as if all the garbage handlers in the city are bagging the trash and none of them are left to drive it to the dump. Add to this the fact that digestion and the metabolism of food also take energy, and there’s little left for full detoxification. The more we eat and snack, the less energy is left over for throwing out the trash. The mucus builds up and doesn’t leave. Stubborn weight lingers on the body, the puffiness in the face won’t go down even after a diet, and things don’t change until a concentrated period of detoxification starts.

Fortunately, the opposite also proves true. When you eat sparingly, take in nutrients that promote detoxification, and start exercising, you “de-puff.” You may experience this after a few days of cutting out bad foods on your own. After several days on an effective detoxification program or cleanse, the effects are much deeper. As mucus is released from its sites all around the body, toxins are stripped of their mucus coating and make their way back into bloodstream for eventual neu­tralization and elimination. In a kind of natural “shedding,” excess weight caused by the water and mucus begins to melt away. Often, as with Ari, the person loses some significant extra pounds of weight—the body self-corrects. Eyes get much whiter and brighter, and skin firms up so much that women patients often say their friends ask if they got a facelift.

Not surprisingly, a sense of clarity and lightness return to body and mind after a cleanse. Western medicine has historically separated body and mind, but Eastern medicine never has divided them. They are two aspects of the whole. Amma therefore refers to both the congesting mucus created by toxicity and the heavy, dulled thoughts and emo­tions that keep you “stuck” in a negative mind-set. Both are considered to have a dense nature and therefore to attract each other. Vital, fresh foods and inspired, uplifting thoughts also attract each other and go together. Too many negative emotions or thoughts will make you crave the foods that end up generating the production of mucus and will cause you to fall into lazy lifestyle patterns (like not exercising) that help it accumulate. Similarly, it can happen the other way around: the formation of excess mucus from poor foods, irritation, and stagnancy in the body makes the appearance of negative emotions and thoughts much more likely. It’s another way of saying, “We eat what we are.”

Your face is the part of you that you probably look at most. It’s also where signs of toxicity are most evident if you know how to spot them. Taut skin that pops back into place immediately when you pull it is healthy; the less elastic it is, the more “puffy” or mucusy you are. The sagging of skin that we consider a “normal, natural” sign of aging isn’t necessarily so. Many elders in communities that eat clean, traditional diets have taut skin, uplifted around the bone structure, until the end of their lives. Pimples and dark circles under the eyes are also a clue to toxic buildup. Look at your skin with a magnifying mirror. Can you see pores all over? If you see little depressions in the surface, like the skin of an orange, there is mucus and water accumulation in the skin, which has caused the areas around the pores to swell or puff up, making the pores more pronounced.