The Benefit of Detoxing for Immunity and Overall Health [Episode #567]

Today’s solocast topic is: The Benefit of Detoxing for Immunity and Overall Health

The topic of immunity has been on everyone’s minds for the last few months, so in this solo episode I discuss how detoxification can support our immunity and overall health. I dive into how daily detox practices – physical, mental and emotional – can actually boost our immune systems and make us feel good on so many levels.

I also share some of my favorite methods for ongoing cleansing and detoxification. As we’re in the middle of spring and even preparing for summer, now is the perfect time to focus on detoxing so keep listening to learn more!

Topics Covered In The Benefit of Detoxing for Immunity and Overall Health

#1. How immunity is closely tied to the gut

#2. Why toxins influence our immune systems

#3. How cleansing and detoxification can boost the immune system

#4. Daily detox practices that can benefit wellness and immunity

#5. How emotional detox and stress reduction can protect immunity

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• Additional resources in transcript

Additional Resources:

• Toxins From the Gut
• Fasting triggers stem cell regeneration of damaged, old immune system
• The Alkaline Diet: Another Cancer and Diet Claim
• Stress Weakens the Immune System
• Open Hearts Build Lives: Positive Emotions, Induced Through Loving-Kindness Meditation, Build Consequential Personal Resources

Other Podcasts you may enjoy!:

• Essential Oils for Immunity and Calmness with Charlynn Avery
• Enhancing Health & Immunity with Dr. Jay
• Boosting Your Immunity
• How To Boost Immunity With Constant Weather Changes!

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Transcript:

Note: The following is the output of transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate. This is due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.

Hey Beauties, and welcome back to our Monday Solocast Podcast. Today, our topic is The Benefits of Detoxing for Immunity and Overall Health. I’ve been talking about detox quite a bit over the years. In fact, three of my book titles have the word detox in it: Beauty Detox Solution, The Beauty Detox Foods, and The Beauty Detox Power. But I’m finding that there’s still a lot of misconceptions around detoxing and what it means, and how to really go about it in a sustainable way.

So what we’re going to be talking about today on our show isn’t just doing a water fast here and there, but really detoxing practices that can be done on a daily basis. You’ll see that dialing in a little bit here, a little bit there, taking this small step here, which seems like a small step, one here, one there, it really starts to add up and it will really start to strengthen your immunity, which is really important, of course, for keeping ourselves healthy and strong and fortified and energized. Also, our immunity, our immune system is so closely tied to our nervous system and our endocrine system so when we’re just cleansing our system of entities that don’t serve us anymore, our overall system just functions at a much higher level. There’s a lot more flow.

So think about if you are move a bunch of blocks, let’s say cinder blocks from a river, the river just flows along and has a lot more energy to it without all those obstructions. So it’s the same thing in your body. As we go about removing all these different toxins and all the different forms that they take, which we’ll talk about in our show today, then your body is able to really synergize and all the different systems start to function at an elevated rate. Again, immune system; endocrine system, which includes influencing our hormones; our reproductive system; our nervous system; our circulatory system. So everything really does work hand in hand, and it’s time to pay attention to this topic now, especially because we are in spring. So it’s just a really great time to move these energies forward of cleansing and detoxing.

THE LINK BETWEEN DETOXING AND IMMUNITY

The Principle of Detoxing for Immunity

So let’s get into today, first, some actual information about the link between detoxing and immunity. So we’ve been talking about boosting our immune system. I say we, meaning the collective, the world collective, ever since the pandemic hit over a year ago now. When people think about immunity, they often say, “What can I take or what can I eat? What products can I ingest?” There has been a lot of different products that are floating around, like elderberry, certainly, as added stay in the sun and focus on citrus, which is great and helpful, of course, because of the vitamin C. But beyond what we’re taking, and we know that vitamin C, we know that zinc, we know that there’s certain nutrients that can be very helpful to our immunity, the part that I think gets lost a lot for a lot of people is the focus on elimination.

So, really, we should be asking ourselves, “What can I be removing from my body? What can I work on eliminating?” The reason that this is so important, and this is back to the Beauty Detox Solution 101, is that our bodies are highly intelligent and highly resilient. Often, when we remove the entities, the foods, the chemicals, the toxins that are disrupting that flow, like those cinder blocks in a river, when we start to remove more and more of those different entities, then our bodies start to function higher, and that does include our immunity. So if we’re working on optimizing our immune system, we really want that goes hand in hand with detoxing and cleansing internally on an ongoing basis, not just something that we do for a couple of days once a year, or we go on a few days of a yoga retreat and we eat differently than what we usually do. We want to be focusing on this as part of our own practices day in and day out, week in and week out, month in and month out, and then we start to really notice that the benefits really start to increase. We start to feel lighter, we start to feel more fortified, and we just become healthier and, of course, our immune system also strengthens along the way.

Understanding the Root of Immunity and Toxins

So let’s get into this further, the root of immunity and toxins. So by physically removing toxins from the body, we benefit our overall being. We know that there’s such a connection between the gut health, for instance, our gut health and our mind and our moods. So much of our immunity is tied to the GI tract where a lot of the neurotransmitters are also created. So when we are removing toxins, and I know this firsthand when I was really backed up and really constipated and really bloated, I remember just feeling very moody a lot of the time and extremely anxious. That becomes this circular pattern where we start to feel just clogged and heavy, and then our mindset starts to take a dip, and we feel down on ourselves, we feel depressed, we don’t feel good. That mindset is also a weakened mindset, which is also conducive to sickness. We know that mindset is very powerful, the role of the mind and, of course, the body, so as the body starts to decrease and its vitality, so does the mind, and it goes around and around.

But in contrast, when we really focus on removing this pollution through our bodies, everything starts to clear and everything starts to feel lighter, including our hearts, including our ability to lead with our hearts and to lead with our passions and to lead with our truth. We just start to feel that infinite flow, through the pranic energy, the life force in our body and also through the thousands of little circulation channels and the capillaries that now are able to travel with cleaner blood to get to all the tissues and all the organs, and all of ourselves.

We are exposed to toxins on a daily basis. Let’s face it. Our environment is polluted. We don’t always eat healthily. The containers that our food is in can sometimes be contaminated. There’s cleaning products. We go in public. We go to public bathrooms and you smell in the Febreze. There is synthetic cosmetics. I mean, you name it. We just live in this modern world where a lot has been created and, unfortunately, along with that, there’s been a lot of toxicity that’s been built up.

Over time, this toxicity that we see in products, that we see in the greater world, can really start to build up in our body, and especially in our intestines and our liver. This is very detrimental to our health and very detrimental to our immunity. Our immune system is so closely connected to our gut health. Again, this is something I’ve been talking about now for 10 years. I have a number to put on it because this year, a little bit later in the year, is the 10-year anniversary, you guys, 10 years of The Beauty Detox Solution. So I have been talking about gut health now for 10 years. Our GI tracts, the more time goes on, I’ve honored the GI tract for helping us with bloating and discomfort physically. I talked to, back in the day, also the moodiness, but now the more I’ve gone down this path and with our cornerstones food, body, emotional well-being, and spiritual growth, I have such a focus now on the emotional-spiritual part, because I think that’s where people can really take tremendous leaps that also help their food choices and their body. I can just see that when we, again, rid our body of these physical toxins, we feel lighter and it helps with inducing more peaceful states and it certainly helps with our meditation practice.

So when we have a healthy gut, we feel lighter, we feel more equanimity, and we are able to better absorb nutrients from our foods or able to remove toxic buildup from our bodies. So our guts are super important. They are, of course, internal. Our GI tract is inside of us, but it provides … it’s like layers upon layers … it provides a physical barrier that helps to fight off pathogens that can make you sick. It also contains a healthy mix of good bacteria, which also balance all the different microbes in your body. In fact, about 80% of your body’s health comes from the immune system, comes from the gut, and this is directly dependent on really beneficial flora and finding that perfect mix of bacterium in your body.

So it’s not all the bacterium is bad. There’s certainly good bacterium, and that’s really important to nourish and to foster on a regular, on a daily basis, which we’re going to talk about those specific tips at the end, but I can’t help but say here. That is why even if you are feeling great and you’re going through a period of high energy and no illness, you still want to make sure you’re taking your two SBO Solluna probiotics every day without fail. It’s the one supplement that I have always been really steady with because it’s just something that needs constant fortification because of the stress, because of the pollution, even if you keep your home environment very clean. Just stepping out into the world and the world we live in, in general, it’s going to deplete your gut. So consistency is really, really important.

A 2014 study published in the Integrative Medicine Journal found that the gut was at the root of illness and gut flora imbalance. The study showed that toxins can build up on the intestinal walls, overflowing into the rest of our bodies and keeping us from enjoying vibrant health. So what we want to do is we want to create some tools and some actual lifestyle practices that we do on a day-to-day basis to really strengthen our gut, which is on the inside. It’s tucked away, we can’t see it, but it has such a direct influence on everything external, including the brightness in your eyes, that glow to your skin, walking with a little balance in your step, so to speak.

We can tell when someone feels more alive. Often, if you were to take that aliveness and correlate it to their gut health, to their lifestyle practices, to their meditation practice, you would see that there really is a direct link. So, so much of this is in our hands. It’s not that some people put so much in genetics, and that’s important too. Some people may be born naturally more energetic, but there is so much we can influence and we can do with our choices day-to-day. Like I said earlier, small little steps really do add up in a big way and so we want to just be consistent with these small little steps and keep it moving forward.

Physical Detoxing for Immunity

So I want to call out this other study from 2019, which is published in the Cell Journal, which found that fasting lowers white blood cell count, which results in stronger immune system. So I want to bring this up because you don’t necessarily have to fast every day for cleansing and detoxing to work, but this idea of giving your body a break to really help strengthen the cells and help them revitalize, there’s also this element of autophagy, which is your body goes in and recycles and cleans up protein, can be really beneficial. Simply by following our Solluna Morning Program, which is resting your body, there’s no concentrated heavy fat and protein that your body has to contend with digesting first thing, there is this element of intermittent fasting to an extent.

So our morning program is hot water with lemon, taking two SBO Probiotics, drinking your Glowing Green Smoothie® when you feel hungry, and also meditation and journaling. So this is a way to really just prepare the body for the day energetically and, again, just to rest the organs. It’s very different if you were to start the day with a couple of eggs and bacon or a bunch of, like a ton of peanut butter or something like that. So there’s a time and a place if you want to have some of that nut butter later or whatever. But first thing in the morning is when we want to just stay lighter. If you’re really hungry, as I often am by mid morning or a few hours later after you wake up, that’s when I usually have a wrap, a big wrap with avocado and sprouts and tomato and hummus or different things. Sometimes I like olives. Sometimes I like sliced carrots, whatever it is, but I have that a couple hours later.

I think that’s important to remember that we can incorporate this resting of our digestive system just by keeping the few hours that we wake up in the morning really light. So that’s my first tip here about really making detoxing a way of life for your health and for your immune system is really stick to that morning routine. Again, should you get hungrier in a bit, you give yourself that food a few hours after you wake up, but it’s beneficial not to try to eat heavy first thing, first thing in the morning.

#1: Avoiding unnecessary ingredients.

The next tip I have for you is avoiding unnecessary ingredients. This is obvious, especially for those of us sisters and brothers in our community, but I just want to bring it up again as we … There’s just a different energy now. Things are starting to open back up. We’re in springtime. You may be out and about. So it’s a good thing to plan ahead for you and your family to carry your own snacks because we know that processed foods are full of additives and dyes and preservatives and toxins. Over time, this really is cumulative, it can wreak havoc in your gut and compromise your immune system. So a good rule of thumb is to check out the food labels, look at what is in the food that you’re eating, and if you can’t pronounce an ingredient, if you’re not really sure what you’re eating, it’s a better thing just to avoid it altogether.

In our home and I think that you can’t control what your kids do at other people’s homes, of course, or when they’re out and about out of your direct care, but right now, I don’t know about you guys, but my kids are certainly home most all of the time. Bubby’s now in a nature program that’s outdoors a couple of days a week. But anyways, I just think it’s important what we do with Bubby, no matter where we go, we always have our snack bag. He loves very simple, just those cuties, those little oranges, apples, carrots, and celery. Those are our four main snacks and he’s really happy with those things. Sometimes if he’s in the mood to have something crunchy, he goes for those veggies. If he’s in the mood for something a little bit sweeter, he’ll go for the orange.

But I just think keeping things really, really simple is the way to go. If you feel like, “Oh, well, I’m listening to this and my kids are 12 and 14,” where it’s not so simple, just try to bring it back in. I think that if you start having cut fruit and veggies around and you can start incorporating it, and next time you go shopping just start to wean out some of the foods that you wish maybe weren’t around, you can go in stages. You can start to reintroduce the healthy foods and start to cut out the other ones. That’s a really powerful way to go about things and just keep it real simple and just keep all those junky, processed, bagged foods away as much as possible.

#2: Limiting Coffee and Alcohol.

The next tip I have for you in detoxing on a daily basis is limiting coffee and alcohol. So we know the most number one drug in the whole world is caffeine and the majority of people get it from coffee. So coffee isn’t necessarily toxic, but it can be in the way that there is a tremendous amount of pesticides that are sprayed on coffee beans, and also it’s very acidic. So cancer and all diseases thrive in acidic environments, according to the American Institute for Cancer Research. So in order to alkalize your system, you guessed it, you want to lay off this coffee and all alcohol, which, of course, is loaded with just acids, empty calories, highly acidic, and not great: not great for your liver, not great for your gut. It can really do a doozy on the healthy bacteria in your system.

So if you’re listening to this, you’re like, “Oh my God, I can’t live without coffee,” I suggest trying to limit it to one cup. Maybe that sounds like such a gap from where you are, or two cups, and making sure that your coffee is organic, if possible, and try maybe transitioning to tea. There’s a decent amount of caffeine in green tea and I have at least a cup now every day. Not great sleep I’m getting over here between my three boys, Bobby is in our bed in the very early mornings. So is Mosey, who is actually in a crib now, not co-sleeping, but still it’s pretty gnarly with his sleep right now. Then my third boy is Papa, my husband, who sometimes, we just have our time at night but sometimes he wants more time. Sometimes he wants me to just hang out and I get it because we’re busy during the day, but anyways, I need coffee. I need caffeine sometimes too to just feel like I get that little boost. So I have oolong tea, I get some organic tea, or if I feel like making something like a latte, I have some organic matcha powder. So I do that as well.

#3: Taking Detoxy

So next thing is we definitely, big one, big one, big one is to take Detoxy. Detoxy is one of our supplements. If you’re not familiar from Solluna, it’s this magical supplement that’s made of nascent oxygen and some magnesium and vitamin C, a very stable form called ASC2P, and it is incredible for continuously cleansing. I have some here on my desk right now. I’m looking at it. I have it next to my bedside table. I have it in my bathroom. My husband takes it with me now. All my clients take it. I take it now almost every day, just because in between the seasons, I feel like my lymphatic system and my digestive system just slows down a bit.

It just will change your life. It just helps you eliminate more without being laxative. It cleans out waste. It cleans out heavy metals and toxins. It’s extremely anti-aging because the combination of vitamin C and oxygen has been shown in clinical research to help stop fraying of the telomeres of your DNA, which is the precursor to continual chromosomal damage, which results in things like wrinkles. So I highly recommend checking out Detoxy. I do not sell you, guys, anything that I don’t take or use myself and love. So this is a really big one besides the SBO Probiotics. I wholeheartedly recommend Detoxy.

#4: Fiber and Eating Light to Heavy

My next tip is eating lots and lots of fiber. So fiber is naturally cleansing. Fiber helps to really cleanse your system of old waste and it helps to just make sure that things in your body are moving through in a really efficient way. Only plant foods have fiber, so you want to make sure that you’re eating a plant-based diet or a largely, largely plant-based diet, which is really, really important. Yeah, it’s so important and it goes with our next tip, which is water. When you start to increase the fiber intake in your body, you want to also increase the water because fiber takes quite a bit of water to metabolize and digest. Some people say, “Oh, I just switched to a plant-based diet. I’m so bloated all the time.” You need to remove the waste, keep it going. There’s probably a lot of buildup in your system as there is for most all of us. So I highly recommend drinking a ton of water as you transition and taking Detoxy.

#5: Water

For all of us, transitioning or not though, water is extremely important to detox. If your body isn’t adequately hydrated, your body isn’t able to adequately detoxify. We have all these natural detoxification organs in our system that are part of our system including our lungs, our liver, our kidneys, our colon. Again, all these organs function optimally when our body is really, really hydrated. So a good rule of thumb number is about half your body weight in ounces of water. If you weigh 150 pounds or 160 pounds, really dividing that in half and say, “Oh, okay, I need to drink about 80 ounces of water that day.” Just having more water and cleansing out your system is going to do wonders for your immune system, but also for your skin, you guys. Just bright, beautiful, clear skin, better sleep and more energy.

How emotional detox and stress reduction can protect immunity

So let’s talk about stress detox and emotional detox. Here, our whole program, our whole philosophy, is based on our cornerstones, which are food, body, emotional well-being, and spiritual growth. So it’s important to focus on our foods, but there’s so many other ways and energies that we need to detox, especially the role of the mind and emotions. We know that stress, for instance, can create acids and disrupt your immune system, just like having sugar. So it’s really, really important that we see the unseen parts of us, that we pay attention to the parts that aren’t necessarily physical, but that are huge energies. Again, our emotions, our feelings, our mental health, stress levels and our spirituality, which is our ability to tap into our true nature inside.

So the American Psychological Association found, I’m going to link to this in the show notes, research that has repeatedly shown that chronic stress has a direct correlation to a weakened immune system. We know that stress is also correlated with sleep and sleep is also really important for stress and increasing immunity. We need about seven to nine hours of sleep a night. So I would say that making sure that we create an evening practice, because if you’re feeling stressed, if you’re feeling riled up, it’s really hard to switch to sleep. So this goes along with my next study for you. This is a study conducted by psychologists that found that meditation could actually turn you into an optimist by boosting positive feelings and displacing negativity; thereby, detoxing stress from your life.

So I recommend just even if it’s five minutes in the morning, four or five, three, four, five minutes, but just sitting and breathing, trying one of our lead meditations, which are over on our free Solluna app; and in the evening, just taking that time to just really breathe and to get into your body and release and center. It’s going to help with sleep and it’s just going to help that stress or to cleanse out of your body, which is a really, really powerful gift that you can give yourself.

Other Emotional Detox Practices

Now, a couple of things that I also find really helpful when we’re trying to emotionally detox. When I say emotionally detox, I think that just the way that we digest and metabolize food, we really need to digest and metabolize our feelings and our emotions. Otherwise, they become toxins in our body because they stay and they create all sorts of … they’re just like feelings that are not coming off. It builds and builds and resentment can build, and we start to use more energy to help them keep them suppressed and to keep them down. But what happens over time is that we start to see more food cravings, more anxiety, less sleep, just getting sick more often, and it’s because we’re not detoxing that emotional part of ourselves, which is, to me, equally important.

So one thing that I really encourage is journaling. It’s a great tool to get things out on paper so that you don’t feel like things are bottling up. Even if you’re in the stage where you don’t really want to talk to anyone else, or maybe you have talked to someone else, a friend, or a counselor, whatever, but you still have all that in you. Journaling is a way to get it through and journaling, for me, has been so hugely healing over the years. I really can’t say enough about it. Also, just finding ways to really lean into a healthy tribe. It can be text chains. I have several numerous different text chains with different groups of friends and it’s always nice to feel connected. On our Solluna app, we also have our Solluna Circle membership, which is such a beautiful way to feel connected to each other. We meet once a month live on Zoom, but there’s daily tips and daily interactions, and weekly audios, and meditations, and elixir recipes.

So it’s about connection and other people supporting you on your journey. That way, you don’t get into the same patterns and hold onto these same patterns whether it’s beating yourself up or not feeling good enough or feeling overly comparative and jealous, or whatever it is. We all have different ups and downs and so it’s just important that we have community to support us.

I was on a podcast recently and this woman was looking over my stuff and our bio and Solluna. She’s like, “Wow, this is so focused on community,” and I said, “Yeah, it really is.” Because when I started this 10 years ago, I didn’t see what I see today, which is that there’s just such a need for coming together in oneness versus alienation and isolation. It affects our day-to-day health, and it affects our energy, and it affects our ability to be happy. So I’m just a huge fan of community now and tuning in, in a very regular way, the way that you would meditate regularly or put your focus on eating healthy, eating lunch.

The last one thing I want to add here is that a huge amount of stress can be caused by relationships. So it’s important to clear up and digest, detox any lingering feelings. Maybe you need to have some conversations, clean up any messes, apologize, or maybe you’re looking for an apology from a loved one before you can feel complete perhaps, or perhaps it’s time to shift away from different people. We just had a Q&A that I’d love for you to check out about … Oh, no, sorry, it wasn’t a Q&A. It was our interview podcast last week with John Pisani, who’s my business partner and my best friend, about creating healthy relationships. Sorry, healthy boundaries in your relationships. So if you happen to miss that episode, I highly recommend that you check it out. It’s so great and just a wonderful practice so that we can be in the world. We can intermingle with all these different people, and colleagues, and acquaintances, and loved ones, and in-laws, and all sorts of people, but put up those healthy boundaries. So we know our line, we know how much time and energy and attention we give to others. We know what makes us feel good and what makes us feel depleted, and we tune into that.

In Closing

So I hope that you are inspired to try some of these tips perhaps across all of the cornerstones. Let me know how you do. Let me know any other topics or questions you have over at mysolluna.com. There’s a great place in the Podcast section to leave us questions so that I can always continue to support you. Often, our brothers and sisters have the same questions, so that Q&A podcast is really wonderful on Thursdays. I think there’s a lot of synergy on that show. In the meantime, till I see you again, our next show. I am on social media, @_KimberlySnyder. I am on our app, which is probably my favorite thing besides our podcast. I am definitely in there a lot answering questions and just contributing to the content. So take great care of yourself. Sending you a big virtual hug. Lots of love to you and your immune system. I will see you back here in just a few days. Again, so much love.