The all-natural way to detox your body
If you're looking to reboot your body, extreme cleanses and fad diets are not the best way to go. Instead, there's an all-natural option that only requires a shift in your diet, Samantha Heller, a registered dietitian and exercise physiologist, told "CBS This Morning." Heller lays out the plan in detail in her new book, "The Only Cleanse: A 14-day Natural Detox Plan to Jump-Start a Lifetime of Health."
"The only cleanse you need is the one with which you were born," she said. "So you don't need to fast, or juice or do pills or potions or teas. Your body knows how to detox 24/7. That's it's mission."
That mission, Heller explained, is also to keep you alive. "It needs to fight off pathogens, trap and expel pollutants, keep your body healthy, maintain what we call homeostasis, which is that inner balance in the body, so our job is to support our body's ability to do that," she said. "Not to scare our body by starving it or taking crazy potions and pills."
In her book, Heller advocates for a 14-day diet that's vegan with the addition of yogurt and honey. Foods such as fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts, seeds, and whole grains, she said, are tasty and easy to prepare. They are also much healthier than animal products, which research has shown increases the risk of serious health problems like cancer and heart disease.
Foods that are off the table include meat, fish, poultry, dairy, alcohol, coffee, and artificial sweeteners. People should also eat as little highly processed foods as possible.
However, Heller does allow for some flexibility with this diet. "I had someone who did the plan and she said, 'You know, I can't give up my morning cup of coffee,' and I said, 'That's fine, that's okay,'" Heller said. "So there's a lot of flexibility because it's real life and we want to make healthy changes that we can keep forever."
Finally, Heller said there's a mind-body component to the plan, as well. "You have to have a mind that's healthy and detox our negative thoughts. And breathing and exercise, so it's really a holistic approach to being as healthy as possible," she said.
