Welcome back, everyone. We are here today with episode 2524 of the Cabral Concept. It's gonna be the truth about detoxes. What exactly is a detox?
How does it differ from a lot of the other, let's say, fads that are going on right now, and why it's something I believe you need to incorporate into your life. Because the effects are felt within just five to seven days. So what I want to do is I want to share all of those details with you today.
We're going to keep it straight to the point. And I think it's going to help you to be able to decide if it's the right fit for you. And also then you'll be able to explain it to family, friends, maybe even clients as to why it might be great for them as well. So I started using functional medicine detoxes about 12 years ago in my private practice.
I originally started to use them for the hardest of the hard cases. Those are typically autoimmune dis-eases of the body, and they're also for what are called idiopathic mystery-based illnesses. If you ever hear the word idiopathic, it's just a big name for saying that modern conventional medicine doesn't know what is going on with that individual's body. That was me, basically, from 17 years old to 19 years old.
Ran my blood work, saw my white blood cells were off, thought I had cancer, thought I had this, thought I had that. But it turned out I didn't have any of those. So they said, oh, we know you're sick, but we don't know why.
So you have an idiopathic disease. And I said, okay, great. What does that mean? They're like, we don't know what exactly you have.
We just know that you're sick. Great. So I go from specialist to specialist to specialist.
Saw over two dozen different practitioners. I mean, the best of the best in Boston, Massachusetts. And they couldn't put me back together, right? So that is when I finally said, is there anything else?
And we started to explore, as they say, alternative medicine. So here's the thing, though. As we know, there's no alternative to alternative medicine because if you want to get to the underlying root cause, you need to actually figure out what the imbalances are inside of your body that leads to dis-ease.
And yes, I later then got diagnosed with Addison's disease, inability to produce cortisol, so adrenal-based issues. I had type 2 diabetes. I had rheumatoid arthritis.
I had POTS. I had mast cell activation syndrome, allergies, borderline asthma. insomnia, all sorts of different issues, right?
I was a mess, an absolute mess. My immune system was basically shut down. I got pneumonia five out of six winters. So it was a disaster.
And so I was the hardest of the hard cases. So somehow you end up attracting those, like if you go into practice, right? Because they go, you've fixed yourself, can you fix me? And so what I try to share with people is that we're not here, as I always say, to provide medical advice, medical diagnosis, medical treatment plans.
What we want to do is actually get to the underlying root causes. So eventually people, as they say, are sick and tired of being sick and tired, and it's time to figure out what is actually going on within the body. But one of the unique things that I found is even if you don't lab test, I definitely recommend, of course, at-home lab testing.
It's what changed my life because then I actually figured out, hey, these are my underlying root causes. Run the Big Five, run the starter kit. These are things that are life-changing. But let's say you can't do that or you don't have an interest. Well, in 2010, I learned about something called a liver detoxification protocol.
And it sounds kind of like scarier than it is. It's not. You're just giving your liver the nutrients that it needs. So I've got my buddy here, if you're watching this on video, and Walter here. And you see this liver under the right side of the rib cage.
Well, it's enormous organ, right? It's very dark red. It's filtering all of your blood, and that's what you need to know. And so what I want to share with you is that it's very, very different than a lot of the fads that you'll hear right now. And that's one of the reasons why Because again, I'm a skeptical mind.
So as I started to use a lot of protocols in my practice, I wanted to learn the why. And the functional medicine detox, well, you know, it just made sense. The reason is that it is actually cleaning the blood. And so if you think about it, all of the blood in your body, that's what's providing every cell.
You've got trillions of cells, 30, 40 trillion cells in your body. And it's providing all of those cells with nutrition, with nutrients. But the blood becomes sticky.
It can become thick. It can have heavy metals in it. It can have viruses in it. It can have bacterial issues. It can have fungal-based issues.
There's so many things that can be in the blood that makes it impure. And then around the cells, all the cells, well, they break down. They create waste themselves.
And that waste needs to be cleaned. And so when you think about it, okay, well, if your blood isn't that clean, then you're not going to feel that great, right? And that was it.
That was a big part of it. Now... Are there underlying root causes to that? Sure, there's intestinal permeability, there's heavy metals, there's pesticides, there's all sorts of different things in the environment.
Yeah, that's making the blood dirtier. But whose job is it to get these things out of your body? Well, it's your livers mainly, then it's your kidneys, then it's your skin, then it's your lungs.
And I'm gonna share that in just a moment. But when you think about it, your skin has to do more work. Your lungs have to do more work and your kidneys have to do more work if your liver isn't functioning.
Because liver is, your liver is the number one organ for your overall, overall health of the body. Now, of course, you can make an argument for the heart, the kidney, like you can make an argument for all of them. But your liver is cleaning poisons from your body all day long. That's the truth. Like that is the truth.
And it's also one of the sites for the manufacturing of a lot of these vitamins and minerals in your body. People are like, oh, again, if you tune back to my vitamin D show, you need the liver in order to actually conjugate or form or actually have usable vitamin D. So all of these things are very important and they go on in the liver. So when you look at why then the people I work with autoimmune issues did so well on this is that we emptied that proverbial rain barrel.
So we dramatically cleaned a lot of those toxins out of their blood. Again. Think about it. There's over 100,000 man-made chemicals in the environment.
People hear about the mercury, the aluminum, the lead, the cadmium, the arsenic. Yeah, they hear about those. They hear about pesticides and herbicides and fungicides on food. So we know those things, right?
But there's so many more, right? There's the chlorine, there's the fluoride, there's all the things in the water. And then there's, oh, I named only like eight, right? Well, think about it.
There's 100 plus thousand. Okay. So we get exposed to a couple hundred of those a day.
Then we might also have gut issues. We might have hormone issues, et cetera. And the liver is dealing with all of those things.
So if you can give the liver help, right? Because it's doing its job, right? It's detoxifying every second of the day, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.
Yes, of course it is, but it's not getting everything. That's why we can run an environmental test. We can run some of these labs and we can actually see the toxins still in the body. Why? Because it doesn't mean that the liver doing its best job can get all of them.
And then what does it do if it can't do its job? Well, where does it store them? Fat tissue.
So it can make your adipose tissue, your fat cells swell, or it can go to your brain. And these things, a lot of these metals too, can pass the blood-brain barrier, which is why you can find aluminum and other metals in people's brain, which is said to create oxidation, which is then said to potentially lead to Alzheimer's as well. It's one of the reasons. So again, this is extremely important.
So if you can empty that rain barrel faster, You can get rid of symptoms, and then you can start to work on the underlying root cause very, very quickly. But it's also why that it's dramatically different than a lot of the fads out there. So if we talk about like, oh, and again, like, I shouldn't call them fads. Let me step back.
I don't want to call them fads. There are some fads. There's like the, I don't want to use brand names, but like the teas out there that are like, oh, this is going to cure everything by drinking this tea.
It's not going to happen. A lot of teas can act as diuretics, so they make you urinate more. Some do actually help like a milk thistle, right? Like can help with some detoxification, but it's one, right?
Silmarin, it's one herb, not everything your liver needs. So I think that's important to look at as well. But some are actually beneficial.
So there's nothing wrong with green juices, right? There's nothing wrong with that. Cilantro, if it has that in it, most just have like, again, like fillers in it.
It can be very... Very beneficial. But it's basically like digestive rest.
And you get some nutrients in with all of those vegetables. No doubt about it. I don't disagree with that. But it is not giving your liver everything that it needs to be able to repair and detox.
So what it's really doing is digestive rest. And that can be great. So nothing wrong with that.
Then there is an intestinal cleanse. Nothing wrong with intestinal cleanse either. We use it in our practice all the time.
We use it when someone's doing a parasite-based protocol. We use it. When someone's doing a heavy metal protocol, when someone's using a mold protocol or the CBO protocol for yeast and bacteria. So we do those, right?
And what's a cleanse though, an intestinal cleanse? Well, it's pulling everything out of the bowels, which is important because you want to get that stuff out of your bowels, all right? But it's not supporting the other organs of the body. I think that's important to look at that, right? So that matters.
And then what about, oh, I'm going to do a long fast. All right, nothing wrong with that. I've done long fasts myself as well.
The difference is though, if you are breaking down fat tissue, and all these things are coming into your blood, and you're not taking in any nutrients, you're now subjecting your liver and kidneys and brain and everything else to much higher levels of toxicity. Because the adipose tissue, the fat, which gets broken down when you're not eating, contains oftentimes 300 times more toxicity than the blood itself. Because again, it's storing it away. Because if you store things in the fat tissue, it keeps it outside of the blood and outside the cells, which is a good thing, right? But eventually, you need to get it out of the body.
I think that's really important. It's why some people don't feel well when they're losing a lot of weight or don't feel well on a longer fast. So these are some things to think about. Again, we use all of them.
I have no problem with them. I have no problem with the green juice or even specific types of teas. I don't have an issue with that at all or intestinal cleanse or fasting, of course. We use that. But what I recommend is this.
This is different. It's not a medical protocol, but you could... You could see how it could be used in some programs as such. Because if you're able to basically wring out the liver and be able to take in more toxins and then excrete them, you're going to be feeling a whole lot better.
Again, while working on the underlying root cause. So how does that work? Well, the liver basically takes all of its toxins and moves them into the intestines to get rid of those through a bowel movement.
Okay? After the liver's done its job, there might still be excess in the kidneys. That's why if you don't work on your liver, your kidneys have a larger load that they have to handle of toxicity and bacteria and proteins, etc. Okay, well, the livers excrete then as urine. Okay, we'll talk about the full protocol in just a second, how to amp it up.
You've got your lungs here, and your lungs are going to huff these off with CO2 to get it out of your body, and there'll be some toxins with those. And then the skin, the largest excretory organ of the body. will sweat it out.
That is, if you actually are sweating, right? If you're doing something to sweat. So, but again, if you can get first pass, the liver always gets first pass, means it gets first shot at everything, then you're gonna have less to push out, less skin issues, less potentially migraines, headaches, brain fog, et cetera.
So that's how we do this again in a functional medicine or integrative health-based practice. But now what do you need? Okay, well, a functional medicine detox, because again, you can use any protocol or program in the world. You know that I use the Equal Life functional medicine detox. the 7, 14, or 21 days, and we'll get to which one to use in a moment.
But you can use any one that you feel comfortable with. I mean, that's the truth. So if you're working with a naturopathic doctor, great. They're going to give you a recommendation. If you're working with an integrative health practitioner, they'll give you a recommendation, okay?
So that's totally fine. But it should contain basically what are called phase one nutrients and phase two nutrients and antioxidants. So let's explain. So phase one are going to be a lot of vitamins and minerals.
So you're going to need your zincs and your seleniums. You're going to need all your B vitamins. Now, there are some more B vitamins more important than others. You don't need to worry about those because you simply want a methylated B vitamin.
Okay, so our daily nutritional support has all of those methylated B vitamins. It's got your vitamin C in there. It's got your selenium. It's got your zinc.
It's got molybdenum. It's got all your great nutrients, manganese, et cetera. All right, so we've got phase one taken care of. Most people are taking care of that.
You're no... daily activated multivitamin, daily nutritional support, something with vitamins and minerals. That's going to get you started, right? So that's called phase one. It's the first part to detox.
Then everything gets moved over to what's called an intermediary metabolite. This is where you need antioxidants, okay? Because this is basically creating oxidative stress in the body.
Even breathing creates oxidative stress. Eating creates oxidative stress. So we need antioxidants, right?
That's where a lot of people go wrong with just like a meat-only diet. Like where are your antioxidants? You need antioxidants.
Very, very important. Okay, so. We're getting antioxidants, of course, from a good whole food diet, seven to nine servings of fruit and vegetables every day, predominantly vegetables if you're looking more to lose weight. You can add more fruit, add more root-based vegetable starches if you need to gain weight or whatever it takes for you to maintain.
That's a topic for a different day. Okay, so we've got antioxidants, but also the vitamin A from beta-carotene and the daily nutritional support or daily activated multi. You've got your vitamin C, you've got vitamin E. All those are going to be very powerful antioxidants. in there.
Okay. So you'll look for that in your products. Now you're good to go, but now there's something called phase two detox. I don't want to get too deep in the weeds here, but what it means is that you're taking a fat soluble toxin, right?
So it's very hard to break down. Your liver though, breaks it down to something water soluble. Okay. Now, you know, it can be removed in the stool. It can be removed from your urine.
It can be removed from your sweat or from water vapor, right? So now it's water soluble. It can easily get it out of your body.
So you can't miss that, right? Your teas. even your juices and an intestinal cleanse do not give you that.
They don't. So you're going to get that from garlic and from cruciferous vegetables. Those things that have sulfur are going to help you break those things down.
So N-acetylcysteine, taurine, methionine, all these things, sulforaphane are going to help break those down, lead to more production of glutathione, right? So really, really important. So now this makes it very easy to get out of your body. Right?
So your body's like, oh, now it's water soluble. We can easily remove this and it's harmless, right? So that's where we want to get to.
Only a functional medicine detox does that. And it's not magic. This is literally understanding human physiology, how the body works, saying all we're going to do is we're not telling the liver what to do. We're like, we don't know the miracles that go on within the body.
Yeah, sure. We know basic understanding of the body. Do we know everything?
Absolutely not. Like not by any stretch of the imagination. But we know enough to say this is what the body needs to properly function. So a true doctor or integrative health practitioner, their job is to give the body the raw material that it needs and get out of the way. the body will begin to heal itself.
That is the truth. So what else can you do, though, with this functional medicine detox, even more to ramp up your results? Well, if you heard, the kidneys and the stool and the sweat and the lung vapor all need water, right?
So we need that. So about half your body weight in water per day. So that's in pounds, then you take that down into ounces. If you weigh 160 pounds, you need 80 ounces of water per day.
About that, right? So you can add a pinch of sea salt if you want. You can add a little lime, a little lemon. The way that we do it on the detox is very simple.
The first two days, you're drinking four of the shakes per day. Each one of those has 20 ounces. There's your 80 ounces for the day. Like we try to make things super simple for people so they can go about their day and they can get the results without even really thinking about it.
But now that water, which is 10 glasses of water right there, is going to allow the person to excrete it through the stool. It's going to get it out through the kidneys. They can sweat it out during this next part that I'll talk about or huff it out. And the way they can sweat it out is simply doing a sauna.
That's it. So doing a dry sauna or even a steam with filtered water, if they want to do that, meaning a filtered system, so they're not breathing in chlorine, is that then they could sweat that out as well. And that's really, really nice.
Because you don't want to overexercise on days one and two. Because you're going to be doing your liquid fast those first two days, which incorporates the intermittent fasting, the increased autophagy, the balanced blood sugar. All of those things are very, very helpful. Day three, you can get back into it when you're doing your whole food nutrition, easy to digest for lunch and dinner, and then your shakes for first thing in the morning and then mid-afternoon. And again, if you're working with a practitioner and they have their own functional medicine detox, fantastic.
I'm teaching you the basic principles. And the reason why I wanted to dedicate a podcast to this, and I typically do it once a year, is that it's life-changing. Honestly, it is life-changing. Yes, I first started using this with people with autoimmune-based issues, but the results were staggering.
And I was like, If people needed to lose 20 pounds or more, they were losing 10 to 15 to 20 pounds in just three weeks because they would do this for 21 days for someone who's never done one before. And the amount of pain that was reduced, and again, I'm not making any medical claims here, and the brain fog being lifted, the improved sleep, the energy, the vitality, the improvement in digestion, it's just tremendous. Like it is absolutely tremendous. And it's one of those things that you just don't believe it until you actually experience it. And again, I'm not doing this saying that you need to use the Equal Life Detox, functional medicine detox.
You can choose any company you want. And most of these companies, if they're good, they're going to guarantee your results. So that's the thing.
You have almost no downside. But the reason why I share this is that I always tell people, if there's only one thing that you can do, if you only choose one thing, if you can't run your at-home labs, if you can't begin a specific protocol for you, and you can only do one thing, you're doing a 21-day functional medicine detox. And the reason is, is that you're going to get like 80% of the benefit that you would get from doing a whole lot of things.
Because it's all combined in there. The intermittent fasting, the meal timing, the specific nutrients. Like you're getting all of that into your body. And the results really can be life-changing.
So I wanted to share that with you. I'm always happy to take questions on this. It's one of my favorite things because, again, I didn't expect it.
So when I started with the autoimmune-based people and the hard-to-really-work-with cases, I started using it with everyone in my practice. And what I found is that when you open up the liver detox pathways, it makes all the other protocols work that much better. So it didn't matter anymore what the person was coming in with.
They began with a 21-day functional medicine detox. Now, if they weren't up for all 21 days, we just started with 7 or 14 days. That's okay as well.
And typically what happened though is the person would do 7 days, they're like, wow, you know, there is a huge difference. I'm going to continue on with at least another week or two. And they can do the two liquid fasting days, or they can choose to just do one the second. two weeks, or maybe they just begin with the days three through seven meal plan for the next two weeks.
And that's okay. Because again, you are working the plan to the best of your ability at this moment in time. So I just share with you, if you have any wellness-based issues, if you're trying to lose weight, transform your body, or really improve overall longevity, I can't recommend enough a 7-14 or 21-day functional medicine detox.
This is how it's different. This is why it works. And this is really the truth behind it. a functional medicine detox versus an intestinal cleanse, green juicing, just fasting, or whatever else it might be.
There's nothing wrong with those. There really isn't. But there's a huge difference between those things and something that's getting to more of the core of what is going on inside of the body. So hopefully this was helpful. Like I said, I'm always happy to take any questions.
Feel free to leave them in the comments. I appreciate you. All the details will be at stephencabral.com forward slash. 25, 24 today, all the takeaways.
Previous podcasts on this topic, I'll link up like three or four other podcasts on how to complete a functional medicine detox. I have a free course, completely free. If you want to get really into the science of functional medicine detoxes, like if you're skeptical as well, good. You can head on over to stephencabral.com forward slash 25, 24. I'll link up the free detox course. I can't link up the detox that we actually use, but you can find that at stephencabral.com forward slash detox, just to check out the ingredients if you'd like as well.
All right, everyone, I appreciate you. I thank you and I'll be back tomorrow. So take care and I'll talk with you soon.