Spring is here! Well….Irish Spring. Looking outside the window this morning it’s hard to believe that technically Spring is around the corner! Hopefully, the weather will catch up soon to this idea too. With it, Spring brings a great feeling of renewal and refresh. It’s time to wipe off the cobwebs and reboot your batteries. This post contains some basic but important steps to help reset your body. Read on for simple ways to detox your body.
Simple Ways to Detox your body
Your body is a complex machine – one that requires support and attention. To give you an analogy, you wouldn’t attempt to drive across the country in a car that had four flat tyres, no oil and no fuel? Like anything, we need to put in the effort to help our bodies to repair and recharge. The tips below are designed to help you do just that i.e. simple ways to detox your body. Don’t misinterpret the word ‘detox‘ in this post as the ideas below are aimed at supporting your body to run properly and efficiently.
Focus on sleep
Sleep is the time for your body to renew and detoxify from the day to prepare you to start fresh in the morning. The average adult needs around 7-8.5 hours of sleep and yet the average time spent sleeping today sits around the 6.5 hour mark. This under-sleeping is cutting precious time that is required to recharge your batteries. Check out these other 6 reasons that might be causing your energy dips and also our tips for a better night’s sleep.
Give Make up a Break
The things we put on our skin every day are a big factor too when it comes to supporting detoxification. It takes roughly 30 seconds for a lotion to penetrate your skin. Not only that, the average female uses 12 different products every day on her skin and each of these has 30+ ingredients. It all starts to add up. Some simple steps to start:
- Throw out any/all makeup that’s over 2 years old (most packaging show shelf life)
- Look to buy your daily ‘musts’ from environmentally supportive brands
- Swap what you can or cut completely: shampoo, moisturiser, toners, creams, foundations. Think about which ones you use most and how often.
- Give your skin a break – try to go makeup free! Remove your make-up once you get home and let your skin just breathe.
Get moving
Your cells have certain raw materials to make energy every day in the form of ATP. While diet will help to provide the raw material for this energy cycle i.e. glucose along with the micronutrients that support it, your ability to do this efficiently is enhanced by the amount of muscle on your body and how well you train your bodies energy systems. So quite literally, being fit and having more muscle mass can help you to produce energy more efficiently.
Get more oxygen
If we were to stop breathing, we would quite literally fall over in a matter of minutes. We need oxygen to survive. The oxygen we breathe in is a key ingredient for cellular respiration i.e. energy production. The power of breathing stems beyond just supplying oxygen. In fact, breathing can calm the nervous system, release muscle tension, improve cardiovascular health, strengthen the lymphatic system, and more. The problem is that most of us are shallow breathing due to just habit but also sometimes due to mobility (i.e. our posture, tension suppressing our diaphragmatic movement). Tip: look up deep belly breathing videos to learn the basics. Try to incorporate the 4-7-8 technique daily – breathe in for 4, hold for 7 and deeply exhale for 8 beats. Repeat this cycle for one minute.
Remove energy draining foods
Believe it or not, certain foods can be energy draining. Caffeine, for example, can throw off your natural energy or give you a false sense of energy i.e. tired but wired. Fatty and or highly processed foods can also drain your reserves by being difficult to digest.
High sugar foods can provide you with a large amount of energy in one big go which your body has to then work very hard to get rid of. While sugar does give you a quick hit of energy, the reality is that it also causes you to crash hard, really hard. Over time, this roller coaster can tax the body’s ‘batteries’. The results tend to be energy slumps, cravings and poor concentration as typically reported around 10.30am or 3pm. And finally dehydration – lack of water is one of the most common reasons for feeling fatigued.
Overall, choosing to buy organic produce will reduce the amount of toxins you are taking into your diet. Check out our brain fuel ideas for more.
Cut out Toxic people
Ireland in particular, has one of the highest rates of mental health illness in Europe, costing our economy 8.2 billion per year. There’s a lot of factors at play but one idea to address is the energy you surround yourself with. Ever heard the saying you are the sum of the five people you spend the most time with? We, humans, emit energy, positive and negative. The negative people, these energy suckers, can wreak havoc on your daily balance if you don’t establish effective strategies to deal with them. Remember a negative attitude can be highly contagious, but a positive attitude can be infectious too. We’ve also talked a lot about mindfulness and the many benefits which might be of interest to read about.
