A Beginner's Guide to Detoxification
Have you ever tried a detox?
Even if you think you haven’t, you probably have. Even giving up one type of synthetic food is considered a detox. A detox doesn’t have to be a short-term, 3-10 day experience, it can also be any positive dietary lifestyle change you implement. If you were to stop consuming Tim Hortons, or Starbucks, and switched to at-home coffee with filtered water, you would be undergoing a valuable detox. And even that small change would make a difference in your life, but you can take it much further.
In my own detox journey, for a long time I would yo-yo between a terrible diet and periods of “hardcore” dieting. I started with green juices – packing kale, celery, apples, ginger, and lemons into a juicer and drinking one a day. I’ve gone from drinking fresh squeezed lemonade with cayenne and maple syrup for 7 days, to binging on an XL Papa John’s cheese pizza on day 8. Thousands of dollars have been spent on detox kits, packages, supplements, herbs, and machinery. I hurt my body at times by rookie mistakes, went into immense gastric pain where I thought my appendix was exploding, lost a tooth, tossed and turned on sleepless nights with acid boiling in my brain during water fasts, and lost a lot of friends who think I’m a fucking weirdo. But at the end of the day, I regret nothing because I’ve learned a great secret: that detoxification is the golden key to revitalising health. It has ripped me from the hell of depression, vaporized my chronic fatigue, strengthened my internal discipline, helped to easily lose dozens of pounds, enhanced my spirituality, and taught me many truths about true, natural health. Some say it can heal the body of anything.
Sound too good to be true? It would be, except that most people can’t do it. Is the knowledge mostly hidden? Yes – but that’s partially because a human who encounters a difficult truth is still likely to reject it. It is not for the faint of heart or spirit. It requires intelligence, discipline, and a willingness to sacrifice in pursuit of whole-body regeneration. And be warned! Those who enter this deeper realm of understanding about health can never turn back to the world they knew, for once you see behind the curtain of worldly toxins, corporate greed, and inhumane practices that are widespread and effervescent within our society, you will never think the same again. You will become a sceptic and seeker of truth, and truth spreads like a wildfire to all faucets of life once it catches.
In this post I’ll break down the various types and levels of detoxification, the good and the bad, herbs and supplements to use, the organs and glands involved in detox, and pass you the tips I wish I had known a decade ago.
Disclaimer: The information provided on this blog is for informational and educational purposes only and is not intended as medical advice. No claims are being made to heal or cure “diseases.” The philosophy of Plato’s Garden is that through proper nutrition, herbal medicine, spiritual and emotional cleansing, and other holistic means, the body can heal itself, restore balance, and return to a state of cellular vitality. By using this blog, you acknowledge and agree that you are responsible for your own health decisions and that I am not liable for any outcomes related to your use of the information presented here. There is no love for Rockefeller in these virtual halls, but rather a sole admiration and love for the profound healing power of Nature.
These are photos of me during a 365 day fruit detox (2023-2024). It took around 20 attempts over the course of a decade to successfully accomplish an imperfect 365 day detox. I made many mistakes on this year long journey and leading up to it, but overall it enhanced my health tremendously.
Levels of Detox
Level 1: Elimination of Processed Foods
This level is the easiest to accomplish with the fewest results, but make no mistake that every rung of the 7-level detox pyramid is a detox. Even the lowest – eliminating processed foods – is an incredibly difficult and powerful achievement for the average person. Just by eliminating processed foods, you would be eliminating thousands of toxins and abominable synthetic chemicals which are present and being introduced into the food system at an ever-increasing rate. No person in their right mind (except the US government, which subsidises their production) would question the benefit of eliminating such foods in place of natural ones. I have noticed that this level alone will have a great effect on getting rid of and keeping off a “beer belly”, even if you continue drinking beer.
You can still eat breads, cheeses, and cooked foods on this diet. What you remove are overly processed foods like factory-made chips, crackers, sauces, etc. If the label of the food has 3+ synthetic ingredients (e.g. MSG, seed oil, whey, natural flavor, maltodextrin, dextrose, etc.), that is what I consider a Processed food. Anything you can buy in a 7/11 would be a good description of a processed food.
Level 2: Natural & Humane Diet
The next level is “natural and humane”. In this detox, we are not only eliminating processed foods, we are bringing it a step further and rejecting factory farmed animal products including cheeses and meats. By doing so, not only will you become healthier by having greatly superior cheese and meat, you will also begin to pay back your karmic debt accrued from your engagement in the torture of animals.
It was wrong to watch an elephant in a circus, or an orca in an aquarium for our entertainment, but factory farms are spiritually even more dire. Factory farms are one of, if not the most, horrendous acts we collectively engage in in North America. I won’t go into the details of how the animals are treated, you’ve likely witnessed glimpses of it and tried to forget about it, but the average person is suspended from the reality of what they are consuming by neatly packaged products in a clean and well-lit grocery store. There is nothing more important for spiritual development and regeneration than removing these types of foods from our diet. Just by reaching this second tier of the detoxification pyramid, you will have acquired a top 95% health diet in NA because very few do it. And for those of you saying, “But it’s so expensive and impractical to eat humane grass-fed meats and cheeses” – I can almost guarantee you that you’ll save money. You cannot eat out in this society without encountering factory farmed products. Almost every restaurant on Door Dash, every fast food franchise, pizza shop, etc. uses inhumane meats and cheeses. You’ll save money because pretty much 100% of what you’ll be eating will be cooked from scratch. Potatoes and bananas are almost free, a humanely raised chicken costs $30 from a farmers market, the same price as one takeout meal. Even if it were more expensive, it would still be worth it because there’s nothing more valuable than your karma.
As these levels go higher, it becomes more difficult to convince the average person the truth of them. But even if you don’t agree with the following information, you will still do incredibly well on the first 2 tiers of the pyramid, and they’re actually what I recommend for my herbal patients and clients on the Detox Odyssey program offered by Plato’s Garden (accessible across NA). On that program we slowly make our way to more intense levels of detox, but truly even Level 2 is incredible. But if you wish to go more hardcore and really dive deep into cellular regeneration, we can go into more challenging detox territory.
Level 3: Raw Diet
Raw means eating foods only in an uncooked, raw form. It means giving up cooked meat and cheese, breads, pasteurised milk, etc. and primarily permits fruits, vegetables, nuts, and seeds. Believe it or not, Homo sapiens do very well on this diet. There are a lot of Harvard professors going around saying cooked foods are superior, we evolved due to cooking our foods, cooking was the beginning of culture, you need amino acids a-z only from a specific type of New Zealand shellfish, etc. It’s all… a bunch of… bull. No animal, except humans, eat their food cooked, and none of them have the epidemic of health problems that we are experiencing. Actually there are a few – our pets, dogs and cats. But interestingly if you put your dog on a raw food diet all of his illnesses seem to start disappearing rather rapidly to the amazement of your vet (switching to a raw diet healed my 3-year old black lab’s chronic hip dysplasia in 6 months. 8 years later and he still has no joint problems).
Eating a raw diet will make you detox. You will lose weight rapidly, your energy will fluctuate as you learn how much you have to consume, your pH balance will go back towards alkaline, your mind will calm, and after a few weeks and months you’ll start forgetting those aches and pains that used to bother you. The problem with this diet in terms of detoxification is the nuts, which will slow down your detox due to their inert, heavy, and dehydrated nature, but which you’ll likely want to binge on.
Level 4: Juice Diet/Cleanse
A lot of people have gone the road of the 3-7 day juice cleanse to lose a few pounds and bring a glow back to the skin, and it’s a great option. Ways to elevate this diet are to extend it for a longer period, drink primarily fruit juices, and simplify the blends! If you ever see a juice blend tutorial or recipe online, chances are there are 5+ ingredients of varying food types. It’ll be something like: Kale, celery, apple, lemon, ginger, chia seeds, sunflower seeds, and maybe a variety of powders. My advice is to dump the seeds and powders, and keep the recipes simpler. The recipes being touted are the conglomeration of a nutritive theory which is erroneous because it does not understand this simple concept: “the whole is not the sum of its parts“. You cannot extract 30 minerals and nutrients into supplemental powders, then put them all back together again in a liquid slush and expect the result to be equivalent to the complex and synergistic chemistry of a plant in its whole form. You also cannot expect your digestive system to easily handle complex food combinations such as “proteins” (seeds) with “carbohydrates” (fruits) simultaneously; there are different biological processes for digesting different types of foods (e.g. varying amounts of hydrochloric acid). For the same reason you should never eat fruit on a stomach full of slower-digesting foods, because the fruit will ferment on top of it. Once again, try training your mind to look to nature, and ask: how would the chimps and orangutans, our closest relatives, do it? They eat one type of food at a time (also in season and fresh off the vine, hard to get to that level for us). For a juice detox, consume fruit-only smoothies/juices in the morning and afternoon, and at night drink vegetable juices if you so choose. Ideally just stick to fruit juices, as fruit is a much more powerful cleansing and energising food for humans. The reason a fruit juice diet is beneath the power and intensity of an only fruit diet (next level), is because juicing subtracts fibre, some phytonutrients, caloric density, and the digestive element of enzymatic chewing. It’s less natural, and therefore less effective, but still extremely powerful and in some cases easier to do.
Level 5: Fruit Diet
This is the level where miracles can happen. Fruit are the superior food for humans for a multitude of reasons: they are a living food, high water content, in their whole unadulterated intelligent form, full of natural sugar (our cells are fuelled by sugar), and, believe it or not, they are designed for our species. I could write a whole blog on why Homo sapiens are designed to eat fruit, but for the sake of brevity just consider this simple question: what species found in Nature are we closest in likeness, physiology, and behaviour to? The answer using common sense and taxonomy is: apes like chimpanzees and orangutans. That’s because we are also apes. Apes prefer fruit over vegetables 99/100 times, and they consume a very small percentage of insects, nuts, and occasionally meat in certain groups. Primarily they eat and thrive on fruit in the wild. The same is true for us. Though the corn manufacturers and religions would have you believe you are the anointed, special ape with different rules for diet despite almost identical anatomy to those lesser “animal” apes, the simple truth is we’re designed the same. And you’ll realise it when you go on a long fruit diet.
If you can muster the discipline to consume only fruit, then no matter how you do it you’ll detox at a high level. Ideally consume a mono diet of fruits, meaning only one type of fruit at a time (ideally the one most in season or highest quality in your region). You won’t want to eat much, and you’ll lose on average a pound a day, but it’s a rookie mistake to eat very little because you’ll break and yoyo to junk food, and you’ll be low energy for awhile. My recommendation is to try and eat around the amount of 10-20 medium-large sized oranges a day when you’re first starting out. There are a lot of other rookie mistakes, too many to go into here, but you’ll want to get an herbalist who understands detox if you ever consider doing a fruit diet. You could do it without herbs, but it’s so challenging, so difficult, and the craving for foods will be so strong, that I personally would never do it again without an herbal regiment. Herbs make the detox road smooth, curb cravings, help with constipation and/or diarrhea, turn your nervous system on, nourish your detoxifying organs/glands (e.g kidneys, bowels, adrenals, liver, thyroid, spleen, pancreas, gallbladder, pituitary, etc.), and bring the detox to a whole other level. You can hurt yourself with this diet by going from fruit to junk or heavy-protein foods rapidly, so be very careful; but if you want massive results in your health, this is the path of cellular regeneration.
I strongly recommend hiring an herbalist if you want to try a fruit detox. In Plato’s Garden Detox Odyssey program, we do one 28-day fruit detox at some point during a 6-month period of Natural & Humane detox levels. During the 28-day lunar cycle, you’ll take a variety of detoxification herbs from our Sun Box while eating only fruit. If you can achieve the detox and the rest of the easier part of the 6-month program, you move up a tier in the program which progressively gets a bit harder in sync with fibonacci sequencing. Check it out here.
Level 6: Water Fast
Level 7: Dry Fast
Supplements & Herbs for Detoxification
If we made the analogy that detoxification is like a war, then in the analogy you would have your army, and that would be the diet you choose. If you choose a fruit diet, then you have a very large and powerful army. But you also need generals and special operations in war, and in this analogy those would be the herbal regiment. A military that has a decent army, but a very good general and special ops, can potentially do better than a big army with no generals/special operations. Ideally you have both. Herbs suit this analogy because their unique chemical characters target individual organs and glands intelligently. They amplify the detox by doing things that diet alone cannot do.
The fundamental reason that supplements are mostly useless in detoxification, and herbs are incredibly useful, comes down to what it is we are trying to accomplish in detox. What we are trying to accomplish is cleaning our body of wastes. In order to cleanse the body of wastes, we require our organs/glands to be functioning properly, particularly the kidneys, adrenal glands, liver, digestive tract, and lymphatic system. Nothing we consume, no medical intervention, no breakthrough scientific measure, will ever do the job of the kidneys for us at the same level of intelligence and efficacy as the kidneys themselves. So what we must do is assist the body to regenerate the kidneys. A supplement lacks so much comparatively to an herb, because it is extracted chemistry, a single powerful molecule refined and multiplied to unnatural ratios; whereas an herb, like a ground up dandelion capsule, tea, or tincture, has an intact chemical makeup. This intact chemical makeup gives the herb a certain intelligence that is impossible to express or totally comprehend. Supplements cannot compete with a natural intelligent design – they can have powerful effects, but there are always side effects, even from something as inert as a Vitamin D supplement.
Think of eating a fruit: when you eat it in its whole, raw form, the fruit possesses the very digestive enzymes within its skin required for your digestive system to easily digest the apple. That is intact chemistry with intelligence. Herbs are the same, but of an even higher calibre, arguably, and over the last tens of thousands of years our ancestors have discovered the affinity particular herbs have for particular organs and glands. So if you want to enhance the kidneys functioning, you use a kidney herb, like dandelion, nettle, juniper berry, pellitory-of-the-wall, etc. Each herb has an even more subtle functioning upon the kidneys for specific cases, but each ultimately assists in restoring the functioning of the kidneys if used properly. Once the kidneys are functioning at a high level, the metabolic waste from our trillions of cells can be properly eliminated from the body. And once the metabolic waste is flowing out properly, the body can exert its newfound energy, formerly held up attempting to clean daily messes, on cleaning up old waste deposits, degenerated organ tissues, degraded nerves, etc etc. Just as your body is a holistic intelligent life-form, so too are herbs.
Do you see a little how the body can be regenerated? All it takes is an understanding of what organs, glands, and systems are involved in the elimination of waste from the body. Once that is understood, eat a natural diet and take herbs for those specific organs and glands for an extended period of time (“detox”), until the desired functioning of those organs is acquired. You can take your health journey as far as you wish to go.
The reality is that our North American diets are abominable. We consume processed foods, foods in bad combinations, ultra-heated foods, too much food, inhumane foods, and large amounts of macro + micronutrients in unnatural ratios (e.g. large amounts of high fructose corn syrup & seed oils). It’s not our fault exactly, the food processors and their scientists discovered ways to addict us to them. A dog if given the choice between a human diet and its natural diet will choose our human diet as well. But the dogs health will suffer, and so does ours. But you can change the trajectory for your own life by making a few key health decisions.
So What Can We Do?
It requires discipline to break free from the cycle of degeneration most of us are on. How many old folks do you see, who keep eating the same foods for years and years as their closet of supplements and medications gets bigger and bigger, and who slowly degrade, painfully, requiring hip surgeries, losing their cognitive ability, suffering immense arthritic pains in their joints, incontinence, etc. etc. It doesn’t have to be the path you go down. You can be that old man/woman crawling around in the garden at 90 years old and doing yoga on the beach. But you have to give up the foods that are destroying you and incorporate natural foods (+herbs ideally). Choose the level of detoxification you want to undergo from the list above, even Level 1 will have monumental effects, then get on an herbal regiment to suit the intensity of the “detox”.
I’ll give an example of what I recommend for my clients on our Detox Odyssey program.
Included in the program are 7 tiers which progressively require higher levels of discipline to accomplish based on a fibonacci sequencing of growth.
Tier 1 is a 6 month detoxification journey on Level 2 of the detox pyramid (limited processed foods, limited inhumane animal products). Herbal tinctures, capsules, and teas are incorporated for enhanced energy, nervous system strength, endocrine support, and overall health effects. At some point in the 6 month journey, the participant undergoes a 28 days (1 lunar cycle) fruit detox with an even heavier herbal regiment using what we call a “Sun Box”, an herbal kit with specially formulated detoxification herbs. If the participant can complete the 28 day fruit diet and the rest of the 6 month challenge with a 95% accuracy, they move on to Tier 2 of the Detox Odyssey. Plato’s Garden has access to very high quality herbs, and this program is my attempt to ease you into detox and a holistic lifestyle with natural foods plus herbs in the most efficient and successful way at a low cost. If a participant can pass Tier 7, they earn the reward of a one ounce golden coin from Plato’s Garden.
If you want to try formulating herbal formulas for yourself, here’s a basic regiment you can try (this is for a person not on medications or with any health issues (e.g. high blood pressure), if you have any health issues/are on meds you need to hire an herbalist to ensure safety and that nothing conflicts with medications). For the most part stick to teas, as they’re cheaper to buy, you can ensure good quality if you don’t have a good source (observe colour + scent), and are easier to put together overall. If you purchase tinctures or capsules from a health food store they will be pricey and the quality varies.
Herbal Formula Example specifically for Detox:
General Health Kidney + Lymphatic Tea: Nettle leaf, Juniper berry, Dandelion leaf, Cleavers, Plantain, Peppermint, White Oak bark
Nervous System Tincture: Skullcap, Gotu Kola, Lavender, California Poppy, Rosemary
Endocrine Gland Tincture: Licorice root, Hawthorn berry, Catnip, Milk thistle, Borage, Prickly ash bark
Kidney + Lymphatic Tincture: Parsley root, Burdock root, Licorice root, Red Clover, Corn silk, Cayenne
Digestive System Capsules: Chamomile, Dandelion root, Marshmallow root, Slippery elm bark, Ginger
Skin Tea: Yarrow, Rosemary, Ginger (drink during a steam bath or activity which will cause sweating)
That’s a pretty killer 4 week herbal detoxification regiment, and is similar to what you’d get from a Sun Box. If you can only manage to accumulate one formula, I’d just take the tea 2-3x per day during detox. If you can get the digestive capsules those would be second most important (maybe, hard to decide), but all of the formulas will have an effect. The nervous system tincture will boost your electrical system (nervous), making every organ and gland function better; the endocrine gland tincture will support important glands, particularly the adrenals which directly affect everything else especially the kidneys; the skin tea only needs to be used a few times in combination with a steam bath (you can create one with any shower) to open up the skin a bit; and the additional kidney + lymphatic tincture adds another layer of nourishment and phytochemical support to the kidneys and lymphatic system, which are the two most important organs/system to consider during detoxification (+ cleaning and regulating the bowels, also pretty important).
The Liver & some Ramblings on Allopathic Thinking
If you’re wondering: what about the livers role in all this? Surely it is the most important detoxifying organ, right? The truth is that despite what most nutrition, medical, and even herbal schools will teach you, the liver is not of primary concern in detox. The liver is supported by herbs like Milk Thistle and Burdock root and is considered in formulation, but overall the liver is over-hyped as a detoxification organ. The liver is more of a chemical factory which utilises and transforms molecules from the digestive tract to be used as energy and nourishment by the rest of the body. Does it have a role in detoxification? Yes- it creates bile which is essential in digestive elimination, and theoretically it “sets up” the body to detoxify by modifying certain toxins into more easily extracted forms. It also has a myriad of synergistic roles known and unknown to any living person. But the liver has no method of eliminating to the outside world, its placement in the body is as a hub for supplying the blood with nutrients. Most of the toxins our body eliminates do not go through the liver either, such as the metabolic waste from trillions of cells. No, rather it is the kidneys which eliminate metabolic wastes through the bladder and ureter, the lymphatic system which gathers toxins and brings them to their appropriate organs, the skin which eliminates wastes through its pores, and the digestive system which eliminates the byproducts of food processing through the colon. Detoxification is taking waste from inside the body and moving it outside of the body.
The complex and difficult-to-prove, or visually understand, theories of cytochrome P450 may have some value to an advanced comprehension of the subject, but my guess is that, whether the theory is accurate or mostly false, 99% of the people who have heard of cytochrome P450 or attempted to understand it do not grasp the fundamentals of detoxification explained in the preceding paragraphs of this post, and therefore become lost in the trees with no view of the forest (similarly to the entire medical ideology, actually), believing in the detoxifying power of an abstract, supposed chemical formulation in an organ with no method of eliminating waste to the outside world. By the same processes of over-intellectualization, the theory of “auto-immune diseases” (a made up term) have arisen and are completely mainstream, conditions where your body is supposedly destroying itself due to “random” cell mutation. In a nutshell, their theory is that your body is self-destructive and poorly designed. There are much simpler and less offensive explanations of the symptomology behind “auto-immune “diseases” easily understandable by anyone.
It’s possible that a person must first come to the spiritual realisation that truth is always simple, and untruth complex (and laced with fear), to break free from the mental confines of allopathic thinking.
If you’ve read this entire article, you are privy to a mostly unknown understanding of how the body works and the importance of detoxification in its regeneration. It is a rare understanding because the medical corporations (and other hungry young souls) have monopolised healthcare and loosed their hounds of propaganda all over the place, in part because herbs and natural foods cannot be patented (and for darker reasons still). But if you can put your trust in Nature, and your own reasoning mind, you can escape the cave.
This Post was A Beginner's Guide to Detoxification (101)..
