“A Toxic Body Will Cause You To Gain Fat, While a Cleansed Balanced Body is Slim & Healthy”

We don’t often use the F word at The Body Retreat.  Too often Fat is used as a derogatory term.  It’s a label used to put you in your place.  Fat… its not who you are, it’s what you have.  We all have fat, we are meant to, it is part of the body’s natural defence and survival system.  Problems only start to arise when we have too much fat and it begins to negatively impact our health.

Recently we attended a course with one of the countries most eminent sports coaches, Phil Richards is a world renowned sports coach at the very top of his game, training professional athletes like Amir Khan and Stuart Stokes as well as professional sports teams like  London Harlequins and Leicester Tigers amongst others.  A specialist in strength and conditioning Phil has trained some of the world’s strongest men and women.

On the face of it Phil might seem like an unlikely training partner for The Body Retreat and to be honest when we arrived at the training centre at least one of us felt a fish out of water.  In a room filled with muscular men, buff boys and a smattering of gym bunnies I was a tracksuit and supplement shake bottle short of the dress code not to mention a dress size (or 2) in the opposite direction.

But, at The Body Retreat we pride ourselves with not only working with the best but learning from the best.  Phil is a passionate advocate of detoxification and places this at the heart of all his training and weight loss programmes.  Intrigued to learn why this world class sport coach placed so much emphasis on this natural function we attended his certified course to learn more.

Detoxification, it’s A Natural Process, Right?

We all know that we live in a toxic world, toxins are everywhere, in the air we breathe, the food we eat, the water we drink.  They are in the clothes we wear, the products we wash in even the pans we cook with.  There is no escaping them.  The body has a perfect inbuilt system to cope with toxins and the main organ responsible for ridding the body of the toxins is our liver.

However, over the past 60 years the amount of man-made chemicals introduced to our food and drink has significantly increased and a recent survey by The Centre for Disease Control (CDC) estimates that adults carry around 700 toxic substances in the body that the liver cannot effectively cope with.

A Toxic Body Will Make You Gain Fat

When the liver cannot process these toxins fast enough it becomes overloaded and this can lead to your feeling sluggish, struggling with skin problems, aches and pains, or digestive problems.  But did you know that when the body cannot cope with toxic overload these toxins are stored in the body to be dealt with later… and you’ll never guess where the body stores these toxins….In Your Fat!!

In particular in belly fat.  That’s because the body’s self preservation mechanism kick in to protect you from the harm that storing these toxins may have, so they need to be stored somewhere safe.

How the Body Gets Rid of Toxins

Detoxification is a natural process, it is happening all the time through:

Respiration– Your lungs not only filter the air you breath but provide the essential oxygen that every cell in your body needs.

Perspiration – Your skin is your single largest organ of elimination

Defecation– One or two well-formed bowel movements every day is one of the best ways to get toxins out of your body.

Urination– The kidneys are responsible for flushing waste from the blood.

Boost Your Body’s Detoxification Ability Right Now

Practiced for centuries by cultures all around the world — including Ayurvedic and Chinese medicine systems.  Detoxification is about resting, cleaning and nourishing the body from the inside out. By removing and eliminating toxins, detoxifying can help protect you from disease and renew your ability to achieve and maintain optimum health and help you to lose that toxic fat.

4 Tips to Help to Detoxify

Respiration – Breathing techniques increases your lungs effectiveness to provide more oxygen for our bodies resulting in increased energy levels and a clear state of mind.

Try the 7/11 Breathing Technique.  Sit comfortably with your feet flat on the floor and allow your hands to rest gently in your lap.  Now take a deep breath in for the count of 7, hold it for a moment at 7 and then release the breath counting out to 11.  Now, the first couple of times you do this it may seem impossible to breath out to 11, but that is only a result of habitual shallow breathing and in an indicator that you need to practice this technique daily to increase your lung effectiveness.

Perspiration – Using saunas and steam rooms can help eliminate toxins through perspiration and can help your kidneys to increase their ability to clear the toxic material they have removed form your blood. In an ideal world you would take a sauna daily as part of your detox programme.

Defecation – Fibre helps move waste through the colon because it is indigestible by the human body. In other words, fibre adds ‘bulk’ to the stool. If your bowel movements are too loose, fibre can make them firmer; on the other hand, if your stools are too hard, fibre can make them softer.

Don’t think fibre is only found in cereals, it is in all types of plant-based foods, including fruit and vegetables. So increase the amount of fruit and veg and if I may be indelicate here keep an eye on your poo.. it will tell you when you have the balance right.

Urination – One way to ensure that the kidneys are functioning to their maximum level is to drink around 8-10 glasses of clean, filtered water daily. Its really important that the water is filtered as most water sources contain toxins which can lead to impaired thyroid function which in turn increases weight gain.

Its Hard to lose Toxic Fat

There are lots of other things you can do to help this detoxification process that will not only help you to safely lose toxic body fat, increase your energy levels and solve digestive issues and that is why we created our Detox Retreat.  With an intelligent focus on behaviour, exercise and nutrition as well as some good old fashioned R&R, you’ll emerge cleansed, balanced and an average of 6lbs lighter as an extra confidence boost!

If you would like to discover for yourself how to safely detoxify your system, kick start your metabolism and lose fat join us on our Summer Detox Retreat.

Right now we are offering 25% off Shared Rooms at our next Detox Retreat starting 7th July 2014.  

Contact us now on 0203 7011603 or by email here to secure your place