Do you suffer from uncontrollable food cravings, fatigue, and brain fog? While wellness culture will convince you that you’re full of toxins and need a detox, I’m going to propose another idea. You’ll have to keep reading to find out!
What’s a Detox?
I use the word detox as a broad term that applies to any kind of food restriction from fasting to I use the word detox as a broad term that applies to any kind of food restriction. Fasting, juicing, cleanses, and elimination diets are all forms of restriction. Detoxes claim to boost immunity, improve digestion, provide energy, and reduce inflammation.
Do you know what’s more powerful at causing inflammation than food? Having anxious, stressful thoughts, feelings, and behaviors around food. Mentally tracking food, compensating for ‘unhealthy’ foods, and distracting from your hunger. Detoxing involves many of these stressful (inflammatory) behaviors.
How Effective is Detoxing?
If psychological distress causes inflammation, is cutting out pleasurable food going to help? Detoxes reduce levels of beneficial bacteria in your gut. Our bodies need variety.
Know that weight loss ‘success stories’ often don’t report what happens beyond the first year. Studies show that 95% of the time within 2-5 years, any weight lost from dietary changes is regained, and then some.
What’s the Risk?
The concept of detoxing is a slippery slope to orthorexia. Orthorexia is the obsession with ‘eating right’ to feel ‘healthy, pure, or natural’. The irony with orthorexia is that it ends up being a source of anxiety and GI distress.
Detox implies that our liver, kidneys, respiratory, lymphatic, and gastrointestinal systems Detox implies that our bodies aren’t capable of keeping us healthy without our intervention. Remember, you have a liver, kidneys, respiratory, lymphatic, and gastrointestinal system. If we’re supposed to give our digestion a ‘break’, shouldn’t we be doing the same for our lungs? Detox also assumes that our health is mostly dependent on the food we eat. It reduces us to a physical body and fails to acknowledge our mental, emotional and spiritual health too. A variety of factors determine our health, food and exercise accounting for only 15%. 85% is individual behavior, social circumstances, genetics, biology, medical care, and your environment.
When we buy into detoxing, we’re learning to distrust our bodies while becoming disconnected from them. Does this not sound like a backward way to pursue health?
One thing to consider when you’re tempted to detox – who are you getting nutrition information from? If they look like me, someone who lives with thin privilege, don’t trust them. It’s either genetic or disordered behavior. What you need to detox from is the idea that your body can’t perform its functions unless you micromanage it.
Foods Demonized by Wellness Culture
Gluten
The worldwide prevalence of celiac is only 1.4%. I would bet you or many people you know think gluten is killing them slowly. In 2013, a study showed that people who believed they were eating gluten, but weren’t, felt badly because they expected such an effect. If a person believes strongly enough that gluten can trigger bloating, brain fog, fatigue, etc, the thought alone is powerful enough to do so. This is the nocebo effect and works the same the other way. People who go on detoxes claim to experience feeling better. Since they believe they’re doing something that requires a lot of effort and is good for their health, they feel better physically; it’s a placebo effect.
Sugar
Wellness culture names not being able to trust yourself around sugar an ‘addiction’. AddiWellness culture names not being able to trust yourself around sugar an ‘addiction’. Addiction is the abuse of a substance not essential to your survival. Sugar is essential to our brain function. ‘Sugar is as addictive as cocaine’? This study, done on rats, fails to mention two very important details:
-The rats had limited access to sugar. Only when deprived did they eat in a way that might look addictive.
-The reward centers of the brain that light up in response to sugar and cocaine do the same to things like music, orgasms, and playing with puppies. But we don’t use ‘addiction’ to describe these things, do we?
If you wholeheartedly believe you struggle with an addiction to sugar, consider looking If you believe you’re addicted to sugar, look beyond the behavior to understand why you’re turning to sugar as a distraction or support. Any substance can be abused to cope with unmet needs. But if sugar were addictive, every human would become an addict. Is it sugar, or thoughts and behaviors about sugar that are the real toxin?
This is one example of flawed nutrition science the general public accepts as fact. The media often sensationalizes studies’ findings to attract attention, and it’s working.
What’s the Motive?
Wellness culture demonizes highly palatable foods. This way, we buy into whatever lifestyle change, cleanse, or detox is trending. People in larger bodies are stigmatized for indulging in these so-called ‘bad’ foods under the guise of concern for their health. This is a huge misunderstanding. Disordered eating, chronic dieting, and weight discrimination are independent factors that create adverse health effects. Yet we attribute poor health to food. How fucked up is that?
A Healthy Alternative
Detoxing is a behavior based in shame and fear. What if instead of being afraid of food, we approached health from a place of love and respect? A 2013 study found that we are more likely to engage in health-promoting activities if we feel good about ourselves. This doesn’t come from achieving perfect health or having a perfect body, it comes from accepting and respecting yourself as you are right now.
That is the essence of my 5 month 1-1 coaching program, The Empowered Mind-Body Confident Project. To learn more, let’s set up a free consultation to see whether coaching would be the right fit for you.
