What Is a Detox and Why Raw Food?

How a detox works and why we use raw foods and juices is simple to understand when we think about the process of digestion and the role of enzymes. Enzymes are found in raw food, but are destroyed in cooking. Cooked food therefore requires the body’s enzymes to digest it, which can take up to 70% of our energy. Going raw means the enzymes which are both the life force and the digestive power are still in the food and can assist in digestion. This makes much more energy available to the body for other process such as living, cleansing and repair. A raw diet is a healthy low calorie diet so a healthy way to lose excess weight.

Detoxification or Cleansing

Understanding how the body detoxifies and why we drink juices to detoxify the body is simple. Since digestion can take up to 70% of the body’s energy (explains needing a nap after a big meal), the way we eat in our modern society means most of the time the body is ‘digesting’ food. It only gets to do real cleansing and healing when we stop eating, namely at night!

It's All About Enzymes

It’s all about Enzymes, which are a component of raw foods. They are the energy, the life force of the food, which is also destroyed in cooking. The enzymes actually digest the food you eat. Eg. A raw apple eventually digests itself, ie the enzymes break it down. A cooked apple, with no enzymes, is broken down and digested by the body’s digestive enzymes. So eating a cooked diet all the time, means we are using our body’s resources to digest the food. This is fine, but i’s at the expense of our energy and a weakening over time in our digestive power as we have a finite amount of digestive enzymes. This also explains why when you are older, you can’t eat all the complex food combinations that you used to eat when you were young.

Why Raw?

When you eat raw food, the enzymes in the food help the digestive process, therefore not depleting the body’s resources as much. This explains why you can eat a huge salad meal, be really full, and still have all your energy for life.

Now when you eat or drink juice, well, there isn’t even a digestive breakdown process left to do. The juicer did all the breaking down the fibre, separating out the juice and we have pure liquid nutrition which is into the blood stream in 20 minutes with NO drain on the body’s resources at all. This means energy is available now for cleansing and repair.

This means the body gets to do much more cleansing repair and regeneration while you are living on juices alone….and you can feel this happening  in the first few days of the detox, ‘the healing crisis’ or ‘detox symptoms’ especially if you go straight into it without a gentle transition.

Increasing difficulty of digestion and decreasing speed of digestion :

• water
• raw juice
• raw foods
• cooked vegetables
• vegetable oils
• cooked starches, eg bread, pasta, rice
• animal protein eg fish, chicken, meat, eggs
• animal fats
• combinations eg starch and animal protein and fats

You can see that on a raw food and juice diet, digestion is light and we have more body energy available to cleanse.

Furthermore, we have more micronutrients available for repair.

We need more than just proteins, carbohydrates and fast to build our body. We need micronutrients. The micronutrients found in whole fresh unprocessed natural foods are like the cement between the bricks. Having a diet missing its micronutrients, is like asking a builder to build a house with only the bricks and no mortar.

Raw food is high quality nutrition and raw juice is also high quantity of nutrition

So a juice diet is a great way to get a high quantity and high quality of great nutrition into the bloodstream fast. I mean, think about it. How many carrots does it take to make a glass of juice? About 4-6. You will drink that, but will you actually munch your way through 6 raw carrots? I don’t think so. So juicing is concentrated fast nutrition.

So without any digestion work to do, the body gets on with the big house cleaning and repair job that’s been building up over the years.

Understanding the principles also leads you to now understand why, during a detox, you may want to conserve your physical energy a bit. So instead of rushing off to the gym and running miles, take afew walks, swim or bounce on your trampoline if you have one, but don’t overdo it until you are feeling much greater energy becoming available.

God's Pharmacy and the Healing Power of Nature

And let us not for get or under-estimate the inherent healing power of nature as illustrated by this amazing video.