How Toxins Affect Your Health – Constipation

Annabelle, a tall, slender twenty-six-year-old, had an enviably healthy lifestyle. She rarely ate any kind of processed foods; she prepared mostly organic, fresh meals at home. She exercised and didn’t drink or smoke. To her friends she was the poster child for health. But, unknown to them, she had an ongoing battle with her bowels. For years, regular bowel movements were elusive. She used caffeine, herbal laxatives, and sometimes over-the-counter laxatives to try to stimulate elimination.

The condition upset her. She felt bloated much of the time and psycho­logically it was taking far too much of her energy and attention.

During her first Detox program, she removed the primary irritat­ing foods, got on a schedule of not eating after dinner, and built up her intestinal flora. The first two weeks were hard; she still got consti­pated until she started taking a strong herbal laxative. She also got a few colonic treatments. The third week, her body began to kick into action. Relieved of certain foods and caffeine and given some time to restore itself, her bowel function was finding its way back to normal. With astonishment Annabelle reported that her daily bowel move­ments were in excess of anything she’d had before, especially toward the end of the program. I told her that she was shedding some of the toxicity held throughout her body, in her cells and tissues. Her energy levels increased, and she experienced great clarity.

After Detoxification, she reported a different relationship to food; she had a new hunger and enjoyed eating, because meals were no longer some­thing guaranteed to slow her down. Yet her newly improved condi­tion required some maintenance. On adding back ingredients from her old diet, like cheese or pasta, her elimination slowed down again. Annabelle had to learn her triggers and keep a Detoxification diet for her bow­els to work their best.

Constipation is one of the most frequent health complaints in the Western world. Laxatives are big business in the United States, and many people spend a lot of effort, time, and money trying to manage this symptom. Some try natural methods and small dietary changes, like adding more fruit, which may or may not improve the situation. But until they repair and restore intestinal integrity and remove certain foods for good, the solutions are often ineffective. (For example, exces­sive fruit can actually add to the sugar that feeds dysbiosis, the presence of yeast or of harmful intestinal bacteria.) The situation is much worse than we acknowledge, because what most people consider a “normal” state of bowel elimination is actually constipation in the picture of total wellness. An elimination after each meal is closer to what is natu­ral for the body—but it’s not the common experience today.

Not all mucus is bad. There is a thin film of beneficial mucus on the intestinal wall. It is where the intestinal flora lives, it has anti microbial properties for bad bacteria. But eating too many carbohydrates and dairy products, which are all hard to digest, promotes the formation of a stick­ier mucus that buffers irritation. This denser mucus partially blocks food absorption while slowing the bowels. When partially digested food sits in the intestines, yeast and bad bacteria have more time to devour more food. They flourish and emit more of their toxic waste, which numbs nerves and weakens muscle, causing further stagnancy in the colon and therefore delay in the release of feces. When stools sit inside the colon too long, their toxins may get reabsorbed back into the body, which may be experienced as the headaches and body pain that can accompany constipation. If this is a regular state, the constipation becomes chronic, partly because the good bacteria die off as the bad ones flourish—and good bacteria go together with regular bowel movements.

For a detox program to be complete, it must help to correct consti­pation by eliminating the irritating toxins that cause mucus buildup. Different people are affected differently, but the most common mucus-forming foods are wheat, dairy products, refined sugars, and excessive red meat. A complete detox also replenishes the good bacteria while killing the bad. And it begins the process of restoring some of the nutri­ents essential for a healthy bowel, for example, iodine, necessary for proper thyroid function and therefore beneficial for the bowels, and magnesium, needed for the muscular contraction of the bowels. The Detoxification program is complete, since it replenishes nutrients, eliminates toxin exposure, and enhances the neutralization and elimination of damaging molecules and the mucus that was formed to buffer their irritation. Its benefits go deep.

Calming the mind through a daily meditation practice can also have significant benefits on this state. If anger, greed, and other negative emotions are the initial cause of constipation, as older traditions of healing and well-being say, then we need to look beyond the physi­cal realm for clues to this ongoing condition. Off-loading the toxins of stress that congest the body is as important as taking in correct foods. We rarely make the time to disempower the toxic thoughts in our minds as our ancestors did with practices of meditation and contemplation— perhaps if we did, laxatives would not be such top-selling items at the drugstore. Sometimes the root of the problem is not something that can be solved by supplements and diet alone.

There are so many connections between nutrition and intestinal health that it is almost impossible to say in an exact, mathematical way what each person will need. Covering all the possible needs without overloading is the hallmark of a sound detox program like Detox.