Did you know that obesity contributes to over 300,000 deaths per year and that over 60 percent of Americans are overweight?

Weight gain can happen for numerous reasons. Diet, stress levels, emotions, and hormones can all play a part. I am a detox and weight loss coach located in Charlotte, North Carolina and one major weight loss factor that I find many people are unaware of is toxicity. We are exposed to toxins every day no matter how clean we live. Toxins are in the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, the household cleaners we use, and the makeup and clothes we wear. Even the modern house we live in is constantly off gassing toxic fumes for us to breath. The truth is that we have over 80,000 harmful toxins in our environment that our bodies have to deal with.

How does toxicity affect weight? The body views toxins as poisons. The body’s natural response to a toxin is to flush it out through the stool and urine. When the body can’t get a toxin out that way it tries to get rid of it through the skin, breath, and mucous membranes. When the body gets to a point where it can no longer get rid of toxins as fast as they are coming in it has to do something to isolate them in order to keep them from wrecking havoc on the body.

One of the ways the body does this is by grabbing toxins and creating fat cells around them to isolate them. This keeps them from circulating around and harming the rest of the body. The end result is weight gain. Ever notice that often times when people go on conventional diets they lose weight but then start to feel and look sickly? That’s because most conventional diets work by starving the body of nutrition in one form or another. The body breaks up fat cells because it needs the stored energy in those cells but in the process, turns the stored toxins loose to begin circulating through the body again. The body then registers as being starved and poisoned. When the person comes off of the diet the body goes into emergency poison control mode and produces lots of fat cells again to clean up the toxic mess. This results in gaining all the lost weight back plus a few friends. Sound familiar?

So what can we do about the toxicity? We detox by cleansing. Cleansing is using a combination of nutrition, herbs, oils, and other natural substances to support the body’s own ability to process and eliminate stored toxins. Once the toxins are out of the body the body has no further need to make those extra fat cells and lasting weight loss can be achieved.