Everyone deserves a holiday - even your belly! So we talked to one of our resident nutrition experts Rebecca (currently moonlights as Customer Service Manager on a daily basis) and got some interesting new insights in a really simple detox with considerable benefits.

Hi Rebecca! So when & why did you start doing these detoxes?

I started doing them when I started studying nutrition and found out that it was a good idea to take the load off the digestive system a couple of times a year. If you think about the digestive system, it works every day of its life with everything that we throw at it. If you then take out the substances in our body that place quite a large toxic load on the body, you actually relieve the digestive process and basically the body actually has time to cleanse all the organs, get back to base one, and off you go! Over time, you actually find that you get sick less often from doing that. I mean, it doesn’t mean that I don’t get sick at all, but I have noticed a difference.

So you were a nutritionist prior to your life at Loving Earth?

“I studied between 2002 and 2006 and I worked in a complimentary medicine system ever since until I started this job last year. The is the first job I’ve had that I haven’t really been using nutrition in, but elements of it I do. I was never in private practice, but I was working for a nutrition company, I worked for a wholesale naturopathic distributor and I managed healthfood stores.”

So the kind of detox you do, is it based on a particular system or is it something you developed yourself?

“It’s one I developed myself, that suits me. Probably the very first detox that I did, even before I studied now that I think about it, was in 1998. It was just a generic book that I read from a woman called Sandra Cabot, she’s kind of out there in retail land a lot, and her thing is just about no dairy, no wheat, no caffeine, no alcohol, no red meat, no chicken. At the time when I did it I was vegetarian anyway, but now when I do detoxes I eat fish and I eat eggs. So, all the foods in the diet that take a lot more to digest: remove them from the diet for a while and go from there!"

"I’ve tried lots of different detoxes over the years, fasting and green juicing and all that kind of stuff, and I just find that coming back to that one works best for me. I’m quite sensitive to low blood sugar, so I find if I fast a lot I get quite jittery and a bit spacey and I can’t really work, so this is quite simple and easy to do."

What does Week 1 of your detox look like?

To be honest with you I don’t change a huge amount because I eat pretty well most of the time anyway, I just remove all of those things, increase the vegetables I’m eating.

Start cold turkey and go the same all the way through to Week 4?

Well the one thing I cut back on is caffeine, I continue to drink black tea with milk for the first couple of days and just cut that back, because I normally do drink three teas a day, so today is the first day I’ve had no black tea, I’ve been drinking green tea. There is still caffeine in green tea, but there’s lots of benefits to it too, so I keep going with that!”

Are you still getting headaches?

Today, no! I had a bad headache yesterday but I had a good sleep last night and it’s fine today!

And then yesterday was how many days in?

Yesterday was…Wednesday, so three days in. So today’s day four. I normally do a minimum of two weeks and I know from experience that at the end of two weeks I feel really good, and by the end of three weeks I really want a glass of red wine!

We’ll check back in a week or so then! READ ABOUT WEEK TWO HERE