What is a Detox Diet?

A detox diet is simply any kind of diet with a restrictive eating schedule that focuses on laxatives, purgatives, colonics or any other type of diet supplement that causes your body to rid itself of liquids and solids. The idea being that you will shed the toxins that are built up in your colon/liver/pancreas/lymph nodes/spleen/whichever other major organ their marketing team sounds most ominous.

Usually this can be done using only products found on the diet’s website, which further occludes the issue.

So Are They Good or Bad?

Different detox diets are meant to do different things, but most of them will promise two main things:

1)     Remove impurities and toxic substances from your body (which you can’t verify on your own)

2)     Help you to lose weight – fast!

While the first is probably true, we can’t tell on our own, and a great deal of the feeling of ‘wellbeing’ that many report after a detox diet may simply be placebo effect.

The second, however, is measurable.  The truth is that you will lose weight on a detox diet, but this isn’t the type of weight that you want to lose – it’s precious proteins and body fluids, not fat that is stored in your adipose tissue.

This is because detox diets are usually very calorie restricted. If you want to reduce calories, you should do so in a healthy way.

Is It Healthy or Not?

The promise of detox diets – to detoxify your body – might have some merit, but do we actually need it?  WebMD.com asked a number of doctors and registered dieticians if we needed to be regularly purging various organs of their built up toxins.  The answer was a resounding ‘no’ from almost all surveyed.

So why is it?  Our body has mechanisms for removing toxins that, if we have a healthy diet, will work perfectly well.  It’s only when we grow very old or eat very unhealthily that these toxins build up and need to be removed using drugs like laxatives and procedures like dialysis.

Along with this, if you flush everything out of your colon, for example, you also flush out a lot of the vital bacteria that live there.  These bacteria, believe it or not, form a large portion of our immune system, and so you might need probiotics when you finish a detox diet to replenish them.