Dr. Vincent Bellonzi: I want to talk to you about the cleanse. We get a lot of questions about it and I call it the cleanse, there are many different ways to cleanse a body and it's an important thing to do. Now, your body has systems that detoxify, you have many systems in place to get rid of things that got into the body either accidentally or with intend but things that shouldn't be there. There are a lot of substances and organisms that gain entrance to the body that need to be dealt with. If they're not dealt with, and they accumulate then people start having symptoms and they get diseases.
It's a mechanism that's repeated probably for every disease out there. Most of the diseases that we call autoimmune diseases are just the body being misprogrammed and overburdened with the things that we're going to talk about. So, you want to do what you can to support your body's own systems of detoxification. Number one that you can do is eat enough vegetables to get some of the chemical substances your body needs to in a sense deactivate and make things water soluable and fat soluable so they can be eliminated from the body, so you need to get the nutrients and to help your body do that. Processes are there but they need some raw materials.
So, we also talk about doing a cleanse. Now I'm not talking about doing some severe fasting over 40 days or anything like that, a cleanse doesn't have to be severe or damaging to the body. In fact, there are very few times that we use true fasting because it is detrimental. There are some problems with it. We want to give enough calories to the body that can operate, not sacrifice good tissue. When we are talking about cleanse, it simply boils down to not putting anything new into the body, if you can avoid it so we tend to have people follow a certain list of foods. In fact, if you're in my office, you'll have gotten that list and it's just a list of foods that are generally not allergenic that are cleaner and don't contain a lot of chemicals and processed foods, natural, hopefully raw foods, but things that won't add to the burden basically.
And then there are a few products that we like, we want to get the nutrients into your body, so that your detoxification process can work. So often recommend a problem. For you in my office we may use optic cleanse or we may use Dr. Natura there is a number of good quality products out there. But we basically are giving you the raw materials in order for your detoxification system to work better, just make sure you got those. So, we have the supplement. Some of the supplements we use here are a shake or a drink, other supplements are capsules, also things like fibre can be very helpful because fibre in itself helps you to clean things out, it mechanically cleans things out and it collects and absorb things and you can eliminate it. So, in many different routes we are trying to get that elimination to occur, you got your stool, you got sweat, you got many routes breathing that you can eliminate toxins. But in many cases, your body needs the raw materials to do that. So, when we talk about a cleanse, again we're talking about not adding anything new while you spend sometime cleaning up internal and you give your body the support it needs, the raw materials to be able to that job.
So, the cleanse is nothing mystical or maybe a little bit because it does have some good effects, but in the way of cleaning up, if you're in an environment what used to be called the terrain is clean, there is less inference and everything works better and in a lot of cases, you just feel better, your body is functioning better, you have less diseases and less problems, it's a very helpful thing to do. Some people recommend every quarter doing one. If you've got more problems, more symptoms, maybe you need to go more often. If you're pretty healthy and you eat your vegetables and you take care of yourself, you don't have to do it as off. But it's something that's worse doing periodically, even if you just basically clean up your diet. Now, in the cleanse that we do, we usually have people take maybe a serving of a certain product, then they work up to two or three servings, and then in the same time they might decrease the amount of other foods that they're eating as long as we will make sure they're getting their nutrients in and enough calories.
Sometimes we simply do a cleanse with a kind of medical food that's a protein drink with other nutrients, and then they just eat the green vegetable. So there are many different ways to do a cleanse, but I want you to understand how to do it and why you're doing it. So that's the one. Now, how to do it again in our office, we print out a certain sequence that we want you to follow, you can use the cleansing products as a mere replacement in many cases or you can just simply have it along with the meal, again you're just trying to get those nutrients into the body and then the reason for the cleanse again is just do some internal cleanup. Because we find time after time and as I said before maybe in every case that symptoms are the body overburdened.
The body has more it can contain with, so you over-respond. Your allergies get stronger, your headaches get stronger, everything just becomes more and more prominent. Your body may be trying to tell you louder and louder that there is something wrong, so a cleanse can be helpful in reversing this process because if we can't get rid of it, then you will accumulate it, if you constipate you reabsorb things and they will collect in your body. If you are exposed to more things, you're going to accumulate more. So you just try to clean up some of this accumulated stuff. The one thing that I have to give you is a little bit of a warning is even doing a light cleanse, you might get some reactions, you might have symptoms is here what your body did, it couldn't get rid of it so it probably threw it into fat stores or in some cases some other areas, but your body found a place to stuff it away, hide it out. You probably do the same thing some times, I think there is a cover or whatever, your body does that.
While we started cleansing and the body brings that stuff back out so you can eliminate it and you might start reacting to it. It'll be a little head ache, maybe a little nauseous; you could get some skin breakouts, little dermatitis, may be some itching. So, if you find that you have some symptoms and you can contend with them, then do. Try not to drop an aspirin or take a lot of caffeine or do anything to elevate the symptoms because most of those things will add to the problem, your liver is trying to work on getting rid of things and I don't want to working on a medication. You can either ease up on the cleanse, maybe do less of whatever cleansing products you are using or perhaps just do the cleanse a little less intensely, if you need to stop the cleanse and reverse it in smaller amounts. So, you can adjust it, but the problem with taking aspirin or caffeine or medications is now the liver has to work on detoxifying those and you'll tend to ignore what we're trying to do with the cleanse. Make sense.
So, the cleanse is just something that we want you to get done, we use it in many ways in our clinic, its actually part of our weight loss program. And we've had many occasions where we had a whole program laid out for people that they were going to do and our program is a little bit different than others, we really get into lifestyle and there is a system of meals or any like that; our weight loss program is something that we wanted to continue for the rest of your lives, so we are trying to get you to change some habits. But if we can get you to do a cleanse before we do the rest, it makes the whole program more better. And as I was started to mention that we've had a number of people who simply did the cleanse and already met their goal in weight loss and really didn't need to do much more of the program, except perhaps to change a few habits. So, try the cleanse, if you're in our clinic we're going to ask you to do it as part of our program, if you're just listening to this video, look into cleansing.
Again, there are several different cleanses that you can do. I don't want you to do one that's anything extreme. Now, there are herbs and other things that you can take also to make the cleanse a little more advanced or a little more extreme, be careful, if its your first cleanse just do an easy one, just do maybe a simple new replacement product and eat only a green vegetable or do a simpler or less intensive cleanse, and then when you got some experience, may be you can add some of the herbs to make things work a little faster or stronger, but you don't have to go to extremes. Cleansing is something that should be done gently. We are just trying to do a simple clean up. So that's the cleanse, if you have any other problems or questions feel free to ask me in the clinic, if you're not a part of our clinic, if you're not one of our clients, then feel free to contact me. I'm always happy to answer your questions.
Anyway, this is Dr. Vincent Bellonzi, if you have questions and you get hold of me. Remember, you can always find a good professional clinical nutritionist, certified nutritionist, naturopathic doctors; there are medical doctors as well they have some knowledge, but make sure that they do have some expertise behind just conventional medicine because we're trying to get free of the drugs and the things like that.
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