Let’s Talk Toxins!

Getting new clients on-boarded into my training program isn’t just about taking them through their new exercise routine. It’s a process of education, of fostering the understanding that will let each person who trusts me with their fitness journey ultimately become successful.

They expect to hear the same old advice about dieting, but I never talk about dieting. Instead, I talk about why fat happens in the body.

Forget everything you know about calories in, and calories out.

Here’s how you know “calories in, calories out” is nonsense. And here’s why it has never worked for anyone ever in the many long years people have been treating it as if it is the gospel truth.

Have you ever met anyone who gained fat because they ate more broccoli than they could exercise off?

How about blueberries? Do you think you’d gain fat if your ate 5000 too many calories worth of blueberries in a week?

Of course not. Instinctively, you know this. You know you can eat powerful, living, natural foods without worrying about caloric value. Calories are a unit of heat, and neither you nor your body cares.

But you can definitely gain fat by eating 5,000 extra calories of pizza, Coke, hamburgers, and candy bars.

Fat has function.

Fat isn’t a punishment. It isn’t a moral failing. It isn’t some unfortunate side-effect. It is a mechanism Divine Presence lovingly installed into this bio-tech called our body to protect the system.

Toxins are all around, so all of us are going to get exposed to some of them. Especially in the modern age. They’re in the air we breathe. Walk into a building where someone’s been using commercial cleaners, and you’ll inhale them. They’re in our carpeting, they’re in the ground.

And when your body is exposed to just a few toxins, it will excrete them out again. You can sweat it out. You can breathe it out. You can pee or poop it out. And your body will maintain the appropriate weight.

But when we start adding more toxins than our body can excrete naturally, it’s got to do something else. It can’t leave those toxins in the bloodstream, where they’ll continue to create problems. It has to put them somewhere else.

And so it makes a little garbage bag called a fat cell. And it shoves the problem stuff inside to be dealt with later.

But in many cases, later never comes.

We continue to pour in toxins like we’re drinking Niagara Falls while our body is only capable of getting rid of it at about the rate ink leaves a fountain pen. All it can really do is get it as far from the core system as possible, dump it in its garbage bags, and get on with trying to deal with the stuff that was already clogging the system.

This is why people say, “You can’t outrun your fork.” Exercise has incredible benefits for helping you live your best life. It can help you sweat out more toxins. It keeps blood flowing to your brain and organs so they function correctly. It keeps you from getting depressed. It strengthens your heart and it builds muscle.

But by itself, it’s never going to address the toxin problem in your body.

Food isn’t even the only source of toxins!

And I’m not even talking about toxins you can’t do anything about. If the air is full of smog, it’s full of smog.  You aren’t responsible for that.

You’re only responsible for what you put in or on your body.

And on can be just as big of a problem as in.

Mainstream, grocery-store style shampoo typically has at least 15 toxic chemicals in it. Every type of makeup you put on your face can have up to 33 toxins in it, per type. That’s toxins in your foundation, toxins in your lipstick, toxins in your eye-shadow, toxins in your blush.

You might bat an eyelash to learn women in the Renaissance era put arsenic all over their faces to appear paler, because pale was beautiful.

But you don’t even realize you’re doing the same thing.

Deodorant? 32 chemicals, including the heavy metals aluminum and zirconium. Many mainstream soaps are laden with toxins too.

So you may be surprised to learn one of the healthy choices you can make to stop filling up those garbage bags in your body, and to give your body a chance to empty out those bags (also known as fat loss) would be to switch to all-natural soaps, shampoos, and other hygiene and beauty products that do not contain chemicals. Turn to Dr. Bronner’s, Burt’s Bees, Honest Company, Jason’s, and other brands.

Chemical-free cosmetics exist too.

These are small, painless things you can change. And while those garbage bags won’t empty overnight, and while focusing on natural, healthy eating and loving movement will lead the charge when it comes to helping you remain fit and fabulous, investing in ways to reduce the amount of toxins flowing through your body will help you shed weight that much faster.