Diet & Dieting & Detoxification

Personally, I don’t encourage long term fasting methods as a form of detoxification, including juice fasting or simply fasting and not eating anything at all. Anything too extreme is not going to be sound for our bodies. For me, I have a different understanding of detoxification and dieting. Neither one should mislead you to thinking that stop eating food nor will consume help to eliminate toxins out of your body effectively. Note that your body works in sync with the energy sources that you provide it, in this case, food that we eat. Thus I do not see how extreme fasting can benefit out bodies in any way. What I believe is to eliminate the horrible kinds of food that we are tricked into eating these days and avoid consuming them to reduce contaminations/build ups in our body. And this should be long term, not just a 3 days or week thingy.

Below is a shopping list that I have created, most of the time I do my grocery shopping 2 times a week, and I have cut down on red meat consumption, remembered I refrained from eating red meat for almost 3 months and got back to eating them once in a long while because the more I read, the more I believed that moderation is the key to finding a balance for your diet and health.

• - Peppermint tea; Dandelion roots tea; Green tea
• - Bitter greens
• - Chinese cabbage & lettuce
• - Roots vegetable; beetroot & carrot
• - Grains; brown rice, green & red beans
• - Sea vegetables
• - Fish (sea/river), poultry & red meat (moderately)

Liver & Skin Health

Liver & Skin Health

It is important that you liver is functioning properly in order for yourself to be less prone to occasional breakouts and even help to prevent other health problems later in life.

What I have learnt is that the Liver, being the crucial organ in our body for detoxification, protein synthesis and production of biochemical necessary for digestion also produces bile, an alkaline compound which is important for digestion via the emulsification of lipids. These are all essential for the proper expelling of toxins and waste products that we bring into our body every single day.

Thus, I feel right to say that if our Liver is functioning well, we will experience fewer breakouts, notwithstanding the fact that organs works hand in hand with each other to produce an optimum effect on our skin and health. I shall discuss about other organs in the coming posts. For now, I will focus on Liver first.

On Liver:

• - The liver gets a dual blood supply from the hepatic portal vein and hepatic arteries. Supplying approximately 75% of the liver's blood supply, the hepatic portal vein carries venous blood drained from the spleen, gastrointestinal tract, and its associated organs.
• - Not surprising to learn that liver is actually the second largest organ in the human body, the largest being out skin. Now you should certainly see the co-relations between your skin and your internal health conditions, it just makes sense you know.

As discussed above, you should be able to learn more on Liver elsewhere online or from other much more experienced individuals. What I have put down here are just the basics, all sourced online though. I can’t say for sure if they are with proof or without, for I can only be certain that what I have included up here are things that made sense with me and what I agreed based on my own experience with health and skin matters. Just hope to clarify at some point that all I am hoping for through my blog is to share and interact with other like-minded people and learn things together in a collaboration and fair manner. While I haven’t really got people to discuss with me yet, I hope it’ll happen sometime!

So moving on, to take care of your liver, it is beneficial to learn the below:

• - Red beets; excellent blood purifier. Drink the juice.
• - Dandelion; get dandelion roots and boil as teas, or find packaged good quality dandelion tea. Drink the tea.
• - Warm water with a squeeze of lemon juice. (I use this method myself, you can do this continuously for 3 days every morning before breakfast or 3 hours after your lunch. Be gentle on the lemon juice as too much acid can be hard on your stomach)
• - Bitter greens. (I have personally hear from my aunt, who is a doctor, telling me that vegetables that are bitter in taste are good detoxifier in nature. One example is bitter gourd, however I suggest you to pair it, lightly stir fry with a small quantity of pork or chicken as bitter gourd is known to be a “cooling” food. If you are a vegetarian, lightly fry then with garlic/ginger/onions.)

Or, if you already have fairly good skin and you just hope to take preventive measures to maintain your current skin condition, simply drink plenty (1 L – 2 Ls) of water every day.