By Bart Precourt, D.C.

One of the greatest gifts you can give yourself is the gift of health. There may be no better gift than doing a whole food cleanse. Will it be easy? Maybe, maybe not. Do you need it? Most likely. Do you deserve it? YES!

After facilitating and participating in a Whole Food Cleanse for years, my clinical and personal experience tells me that everyone would benefit from cleansing. This is a quick overview of how to prepare for success.

Set your goals and have a plan
Setting realistic goals is extremely important when making decisions regarding cleansing your body. Often weight loss is a primary goal, yet it needs to be realistic. If you’re doing a 10 day cleanse, don’t expect to lose 20 lbs. Usually men lose weight at a much more rapid pace than women, yet we all will lose weight and get to our ideal size when we sustain healthy eating habits. Typically with the 21-day cleanse we facilitate, men on average lose between 8-15 lbs. and women lose 5-10 lbs.

Sustaining your new health with improved eating habits should be among your goals, with weight loss being a side effect. Other realistic health goals should include reducing inflammation, joint pain, hot flashes, and even improving sleep. All are side effects of ridding our bodies of toxins and restoring our digestive and elimination systems.

Have a plan beyond “I’m going to eat better.”
A good plan includes what will you eat? How often? Real food or packaged? If you’re using supplements, which is often the key to restoring your digestive and eliminative systems, be sure they do not contain any stimulants or appetite suppressants. All your supplements should be “Whole Food” supplements.

Have support and accountability
Being part of a group, or having a coach, nutritionist, or your doctor is a great advantage. Have someone in your corner who can help keep you on track and accountable when things get challenging. Find someone with a good knowledge base and experience. Your surroundings are often a major influence on what you eat and drink. Ideally your spouse or close friends are cleansing with you so you aren’t tempted to stray off track.

I find that most adults have no idea how much power sugar and chemicals have over our bodies until we give them up. Keep in mind that simple carbohydrates like bread, alcohol, muffins, crackers all act just like sugar and will need to be avoided in any successful cleanse.

Understand your symptoms
No one said cleansing your body of toxins is easy. Symptoms are expected and should be welcomed or at least understood. Too often I hear of people bailing out of their plan because they come across some unwanted symptoms. For example, low energy at some point during your cleanse should be expected. When you eliminate simple carbs and sugars from your diet, your body will need to re-learn how to burn fat for fuel. This can take a day or two, sometimes more. During this time, symptoms of lethargy, fatigue, brain fog, and even irritability can be expected. This is your key turning point in making changes! Stay the course and power through it. Having an experienced facilitator and proven program is highly beneficial in these moments.

Knowing what is next
This has two parts. First reflect on what you just experienced. Make note of your emotions, energy, food focuses, mental focus, pain, elimination, etc.

Women who do our 21-day whole food cleanse often eliminate their hot flashes. Some sustain this benefit with good eating habits, like avoiding sugar and processed carbs. Others have their hot flashes return in direct relationship to poor eating and drinking. Second, choose to eliminate one bad habit for good! Think about this from the beginning and commit to it. Your cleanse program, at least the food options, should be sustainable. Moving forward, stick to a whole food clean eating plan and mark your next cleanse on your calendar.

Dr. Bart Precourt and his wife Kelli, opened Balance Health Studio in 2006 to offer health and fitness as a lifestyle to the 30a community and beyond. For more information, please visit www.balance30a.com.

By Stephenie Craig, LCSW

Have you found yourself coming out of a difficult time of crisis wondering “What do I do now?” Maybe you battled the illness and rang the bell. Maybe you moved and found yourself trying to resettle. Maybe you went through a painful loss or ending of a relationship and find yourself trying to pick up the pieces.

Your body and brain are uniquely suited for managing stress and will often automatically go into survival mode when life gets overwhelming. For a time, you can survive on less sleep, less adequate nutrition, and less than ideal coping skills. Your brain moves away from higher level thinking tasks and focuses on the next step you must take to get through the day. Survival mode is a biological gift while you’re in the midst of high stress and emotional turmoil that might otherwise take you down.

When your stress is prolonged and intense, it can be hard to figure out what you’re supposed to do when the stress subsides. It can take your body and brain time to catch up with your circumstances and return to a calmer state. So, how can you intentionally help your body and mind recover from the heightened state of survival mode?

5 Self-Kindness Practices to Promote Survival Mode Recovery:

Create space for backlogged emotions. Often during times of high stress, your brain sorts overwhelming emotions to the side to support your daily functioning. When the crisis ends, you may experience large waves of emotion pertaining to the crisis. Let yourself feel without judgement. Your emotions don’t need to be rational. They simply need pathways to escape your body to complete the release of stress. Let yourself cry, create, be athletic, journal, go to therapy, vent to a friend, punch a punching bag. Releasing emotion provides a pathway for your body to a normal state.

Create space for rest. Often during a crisis, rest falls off the priority list. When the crisis ends, you may find yourself physically and mentally exhausted. You may feel forgetful, confused, fatigued and irritable. Take naps, prioritize healthy sleep patterns, read a book for leisure, take a weekend away.

Return to healthy practices. During crisis, things like taking walks, attending small groups, yoga, deep breathing, and personal growth reading become hard to continue and often disappear entirely. When life calms, remember healthy practices that provided life-giving foundation before the crisis. Try choosing one or two healthy practices and slowly and consistently returning to them.

Be aware of numbing activities. Under intense stress, most people begin unhealthy coping skills to numb and avoid facing difficult emotions. Common numbing activities include substance abuse, eating to medicate feelings, overspending, binging shows, binging social media, engaging in unhealthy relationships. Try not to judge yourself harshly when you identify numbing. Instead show grace to yourself. You’ve been through something hard. Try acknowledging your numbing and intentionally begin substituting healthier practices and coping skills. Ask for help if your numbing has become addictive.

Pursue joy. When you’ve been through something hard, it’s not unusual to notice you’ve begun trying to protect yourself from joy. Joy can be as vulnerable as hurt and sadness, especially when faced with imagined or actual traumatic loss. Your brain might trick you into believing you will experience less pain if you avoid joy. Try telling yourself the truth that experiencing joy is not going to create more pain. In fact, avoiding joy simply robs you of joy. When hard times come, the joy you allow yourself to experience is much more likely to bring comfort than to intensify pain.

As you take steps to move from crisis to normalcy, remember to be kind and patient with yourself. Harsh words and self-criticism are unproductive and feed depression, anxiety, and discontent. With care and intentional practice, your body and mind will sync up with your life circumstances. Know you aren’t alone and survival mode recovery is a natural part of the human experience. Also, be on the lookout for increased insight that comes through suffering that may surface as you recover, as well as, a deeper compassion you may have for others going through what you’ve recently experienced. As you navigate your crisis mode recovery, remember to connect with us at journeybravely.com for support along your journey.