What if you don’t want to follow a hard and fast detoxification diet? Is there any other way to eat and still detoxify? Sure, if you stick to the following rules, you may not feel the need to detoxify at all. And your natural cleansing cycle will be enough to handle the toxic wastes. Here’s the magic diet.
- Eat seasonal fruits and vegetables every day.
- Drink boiled and filtered water and loads of it at least 8-10 glasses a day.
- Include fibre in your food in the form of whole wheat, jowar, bajra, oats; nuts like almonds; pulses like whole green mung, rajhma, channa, whole black udad, etc.
- Eat fish at least twice a week, if you are a non-vegetarian
- Avoid saturated fats like butter, ghee, red meat, pork, beef, high fat dairy products like cheese and paneer. However, you can have paneer made from low-fat cow milk.
- Minimize or avoid coffee, alcohol and nicotine (in tobacco and cigarettes). Two cups of instant coffee daily is considered a low intake. Drinking 120 ml of alcohol per week is considered low intake.
- Minimize or avoid refined foods like pizzas, refined pastas, white bread, corn flour, potatoes, white rice, refined sugar, white sauce, cheese sauce, etc. Make your white sauce in whole-wheat flour and low fat milk instead. If you happen to eat these refined foods, combine them with a whole lot of fresh vegetables either raw or partly cooked. So you can head for Chinese fried rice or noodles but with a significant quantity of vegetables in it. The fibre present in the vegetables makes up for the lack of it in the refined foods and makes such food moderately healthy.
- As far as possible, cook in stainless steel, glass or porcelain cookware, or in iron utensils (like our grandmas did!). Avoid aluminium utensils as they lead to accumulation of toxins in the body (and lead to Alzheimer’s disease).
- Avoid taking too many painkillers, sedatives and antibiotics. Instead, go for natural remedies like body cleansing, exercising, sauna and steam baths, massage and other natural therapies.