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The Benefits of a Detox for Women

Firstly, what exactly do I mean by a detox?  Detoxification is the process whereby the liver breaks down toxins, chemicals, pollution, your own body waste and excess hormones.  This process has to occur in order to make these garbage compounds into something the body recognizes as garbage so that they can be eliminated.  If waste is not fully broken down, or detoxified, it can linger in your system and accumulate.  The liver has two processes where it breaks these down called phase I and phase II liver detoxification.  Certain vitamins, minerals and other substances from plants help ensure that this process runs smoothly, such as vitamin B6, vitamin B12, active folic acid (5 methyltetrahydrofolate or 5MTHF), indole-3-carbinol, glucarate, sulfur, N acetylcysteine and so on.  If your body doesn’t have enough of these, toxins will get stuck in your system.

Because detoxification is part of the process to break down and excrete excess hormones, doing a detox can help:

  1. Acne
  2. Heavy periods
  3. Painful periods
  4. Infertility
  5. PMS symptoms
  6. Endometriosis
  7. Uterine polyps
  8. Fibroids
  9. Many other hormone related conditions.

Clearing toxins from your system can also reduce risk for hormone sensitive and other cancers.

 

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Signs and Symptoms of Hormone Imbalance

How would you know if you had a hormone imbalance? Most of the women I see already have an inkling that something is out of balance by the symptoms that they are experiencing:

  • Hair loss
  • Acne
  • Irregular periods
  • Night sweats
  • Hot flashes
  • Infertility
  • Heavy periods
  • Painful periods
  • Fibroids
  • Ovarian cysts
  • Uterine polyps
  • Excessive facial or body hair
  • PMS
  • Premenstrual migraines

Most often they have already visited their family doctor who “checked their hormones” and told them “everything is normal” or offered them the birth control pill.

There are three main problems here:

  1. By checked their hormones, most doctors mean they’ve done a very superficial screening of hormones, LH, FSH, maybe estradiol and maybe progesterone, but often not measured on specific dates of the menstrual cycle that make the results clinically meaningful.
  2. When “everything is normal” even though you feel that hormones are imbalanced, it’s because the “normal” ranges for hormones are extremely wide and so even abnormal people fall into the “normal” range.
  3. Birth control pills only mask the existing hormone imbalance, they don’t correct it.

If you feel like you have a hormone imbalance, always ask for a copy of blood work results so that you can see exactly how extensive testing was and exactly where your results fall in the “normal” range (normal is always in quotes because lab ranges rarely refer to what is actually normal, it is more often an average of unhealthy people).  99% of the time you will find that either: a) only a very few hormones have been tested and/or b) one or more of your results were borderline.