Does Detox Help With Weight loss?

Here is what you don't know about detox diets. These trendy diets are fast, supposedly effective and potentially dangerous. Do you know what happens to your body when you limit your essential nutrient intake? Read on to find out.

Are you thinking about doing a detox based weight loss diet? One which will limit your nutritional intake exclusively to fruit juices? Perhaps before blindly launching yourself down that path, it will interest you to know how precisely your body will react after an extended period of time in which you deprive it of proteins, carbohydrates, and fats, and consume less than a thousand calories a day.

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After the first sip, the hunger signals that the brain sends down to your body are answered with a wave of sugars extracted from the fruits and vegetables that your detox juice is madefrom. This reaction immediately forces the pancreas to secrete insulin, which is the hormone responsible for sugar transport to all the cells throughout your body.

After thirty minutes, while your cells are busy absorbing the sugar derived glucose; your blood sugar levels precipitously drop. At this point, you will most likely feel dizzy or nauseated. Meanwhile, due to an increasing caloric deprivation, your body begins to feel the first signs of lacking in the all-important glycogen, which is an indispensable source of cellular and metabolic energy that is typically stored in muscle tissue and the liver.

After a couple of days of this routine, every single time you drink from your detox juices, your blood insulin levels skyrocket only to then plummet vertiginously. At this point, your body's glycogen reserves have all but expired leaving you with an empty tank and an overall hard to pin point weakness. As soon you cut down your caloric intake by a significant portion and thus your real energy stores, your body starts to increasingly rely on two alternative sources of energy to be able to keep up proper functions. Triglycerides which are stored as fats and proteins used up directly from your muscle tissue. It is at this point that your body starts consuming its own muscle mass to keep going. No matter how much exercise or resistance training you are doing at this point, you will not increment your muscle mass one bit.

After the third day, your brain and cognitive function start to take a hit. Your body is basically starving at this point due to the caloric deprivation you have been submitting it to. Once your body goes into the full starvation mode, it begins to gobble up the ketones stored in your body for energy. Ketones will provide your body with some approximation of fuel but think of it as low-quality fuel since that is not their primary function. It is now that you begin to lose focus and become increasingly irritable. Lack of amino acids begins to take its toll as they are essential for the proper synthesis of neurotransmitters; the lack of which leaves you feeling awful. If you are prone to depression, at this point you will feel that way. The proteins in your muscles continue a downward spiral as they are continuously consumed, and ammonium and uric acid begin to accumulate in your tissues; both of which have adverse effects once they reach high enough concentrations. Your kidneys are going to have to work overtime just to compensate all the damage being done and quickly eliminate all these newly created toxins. As such your detox is only compounding a toxin build up in your body. It is very common at this point in your diet to begin suffering from diarrhea.

After four days of this, without solid and nutritious foods to digest your intestines start to pay the price. The small finger-like projections that extend into the lumen of the small intestine which is in charge of nutrient absorption begin to atrophy. Diarrhea will most likely worsen at this stage getting you ever closer to dehydration.

It has been about a week since you began this misguided journey and now you can finally go back to eating solid foods. But the damage has been done. You have lost considerable muscle mass. Even if you recover all your regular eating habits, you now possess much less muscle tissue to burn up those calories, and they will most likely convert to fat. And so you stumble upon the feared yo-yo effect. Strict diets that deprive your body of the three macronutrients create a significant imbalance between fat and muscle mass which adversely affects your metabolism and in fact, makes it considerably harder for you to lose weight, which was the whole point of the diet, to begin with.

So the answer to the question of whether a detox diet helps with weight loss is simply no. There is no single food that can aptly provide all the vital nutrients that are needed for a healthy metabolism, as well as other bodily functions. When we deprive our organism of adequate caloric intake for prolonged periods of time all we are doing is ensuring the formation of behaviors and chemical processes which push the body to consume itself as it demands the nutrients we deny it. The only way to adequately lose weight and keep it off is to adjust your lifestyle and commit to a balanced diet with enough carbs, proteins, and fats to provide all the required nutrients that your body needs to function correctly. Frequent exercise is also a must so that you can force your body to consume more calories than you ingest as this is the only process through which you can safely lose weight. Going hungry is ironically counterproductive to weight loss. Eat the right foods in modest amounts. Make sure your micronutrient intake is up to par; this you can achieve with a balanced diet or through nutritional supplementation. Make sure to work out regularly. That is all you need to reach your goals. It is hard work, but nothing worthwhile comes easy.

References:

1. Klein, A. V., and H2 Kiat. "Detox diets for toxin elimination and weight management: a critical review of the evidence." Journal of human nutrition and dietetics 28.6 (2015): 675-686.
    
2. Clemens, Roger, and Peter Pressman. "Food, Medicine, & Health-Detox Diets Provide Empty Promises." Food Technology-Chicago 59.5 (2005): 18-19.
    
3. Crowe, Tim. "Are fad diets worth their weight?." Australasian Science 35.1 (2014): 18.