Best Detoxifying Rituals

With each new season comes reflection—including reevaluation of your health and habits. Maybe you’ve thought about improving your overall health by eliminating those toxins accumulated by breathing and eating in an industrialized world. Or maybe you just need to end a weekend of splurging and overeating.

Whatever your motivation, a new routine of daily detoxes is easy to start. So what are the best daily rituals for eliminating the poisonous chemicals stored in your body? For improved health, outlook, and overall well-being, try incorporating these best detoxifying rituals.

Oil Pulling

Before you eat, do an oil pull. Oil is great for extracting toxins from your mouth, especially gums and teeth, and freshens bad breath. You can use coconut, olive, or sesame oil. One wellness site suggests coconut and turmeric for an immunity boost.

Swish about ½ to 1 teaspoon of oil for 30 seconds or more first thing in the morning, though you’ll have to get used to the oily texture in your mouth. Adding ½ teaspoon of turmeric, with its known anti-inflammatory properties, is good for your health in general.

But be sure to rinse on an empty stomach for optimal effect (or in case of gagging) and spit the rinse in the trash as oil can clog your sink.

Warm Water with Lemon

After an oil pull, you’ll want a cleansing drink. About 15 to 30 minutes before breakfast, treat yourself to a healthy start to the day with a cup of warm water and lemon.

Squeeze half a lemon (preferably organic) into two to four cups of simple warm water for a potion that packs a wallop of vitamins and nutrients. Lemon juice detoxes by balancing the acids in your body with alkaline, resulting in amazing benefits. It boosts your vitamin intake, like C and B-complex, and contains important minerals such as iron, calcium, magnesium, and potassium. It’s great for digestion for its fiber and is an overall good bacterial flush to promote immunity and liver health as well as kick-start your digestive enzymes.

Besides being good for your digestion, immunity, and heart, lemon water is also good for skin, reducing baggy eyes and skin tone dullness. But more than just a hydrating and anti-aging agent, it’s also good for your mood, energy, and weight loss. Adding a bit of sea salt and raw, organic apple cider vinegar, also alkaline, intensifies the purge.

Body Brushing

A daily dry body brushing before morning showering (or at night) improves circulation, promotes digestion, reduces cellulite, and massages your lymph nodes for effective detoxification.

Use a soft, natural bristle brush with a long handle (in health food stores or on Amazon) for better reach. Brush in circles, moving from hands and feet inward and upward, ending at the heart. Gently but firmly massage from feet to belly, then hands to shoulders, leaving the heart for last to optimally flush lymphatic toxins. Move counter clockwise on your belly for digestion.

You can also use a hot towel to lovingly scrub your body. It’s just as effective at releasing toxins and massaging the lymph nodes. Simply take a clean cloth and dip it into hot water (not too hot) and gently but firmly scrub your skin as you would with the brush—consciously going over each part of the body. The heat has an added calming effect, especially if you use the sink rather than the shower, where you might not apply meticulous, scrubbing heat on each part of your body.

Tongue Scraping 

Like oil pulling and lemon water, this detoxifying ritual is easy to perform. Add this quick and simple routine to remove bacteria and mucus from your mouth that can lead to poor digestion, cavities, liver sluggishness, and bad breath.

Tongue scrapers come in a variety of forms, but are generally long-handled plastic or metal tools with a u-shaped or v-shaped head. Brush your teeth first, then use the scraper, pulling from far back on the tongue to the front to scrape off all the filmy bacteria.

Chia Seeds

Add these little power houses to your granola or oatmeal in the morning and feel the energy. Like lemon juice, chia seeds help flush your digestive system. They contain enormous health benefits for such a tiny super food: fiber for bowel regularity, anti-oxidants for skin repair and anti-aging, and lots of vitamins and nutrients like vitamin A, zinc, calcium, and potassium for a healthy heart, strong immunie system, and robust skeletal-muscular structure. It’s also a great source of protein and Omega-3 fatty acids that aid in preventing cancerous cell growth

Let the seeds sit for 10 to 15 minutes in liquid, like almond milk or other nut milk to expand. Then pour it over grains or fruit to boost your breakfast's health value.

Cold-Pressed Juice

Cold-pressed juice is jam-packed with vitamins lost in ordinary juices during the heating of pasteurization. If you substitute juice for breakfast foods, you benefit from a good dose of vitamins and nutrients you need while boosting energy.

Blend your juice with fresh, organic vegetables like kale or spinach, and add some ginger for a great detox with an extra dose of those fruits and veggies you need to eat all day. Drink on an empty stomach for quicker nutrient absorption.

Fruits and Veggies

Choose foods to eat throughout the day that aid in cleansing, especially the liver and kidneys, like cruciferous vegetables and sea vegetables (seaweed, nori). Aim for the rainbow in your veggie choices and buy organic to avoid harmful chemicals. Fruits like grapefruit, lemon, and lime are great detoxifiers as are roots like dandelion and licorice.

Hydrate

Drink green tea during the day for added antioxidants to help skin and metabolism.

And don’t forget the water. Drink lots of water throughout the day to flush your system—up to 80 ounces a day. It’s easier to remind yourself if you carry a 16 ounce reusable water bottle with you to fill up four or five times a day. Of course, you’ll need to be near a bathroom all day too!

Probiotics

Probiotics introduce and reinforce healthy bacteria into the gut. They help balance the bacterial growth in your intestines and help remove toxins like heavy metals and free radicals dangerous to the body. To learn more about probiotics and how to include them in your daily detox rituals, find out which probiotic foods you need in your diet.

Activated Charcoal

An ancient Chinese and Ayurvedic remedy, activated charcoal is still used today to soak up body toxins, especially those found in our foods and environment, relieving gas and bloating while promoting heart health and preventing aging. It even gets rid of bad breath.

The charcoal, made from burnt wood or coconut shells, binds or captures heavy metals, chemicals, and gases found in processed foods and even in ordinary household items such as cleaning products and dust.

But you don’t have to burn wood. You can purchase activated coconut charcoal capsules to take daily in between meals. Don’t take them right after taking any other supplements, however, to optimize absorption of supplement nutrients.

Inversions

While most exercise is good, inversions are especially good for detoxification. They move your blood and strengthen your heart, regulate your digestion, and increase energy. Inversions, like shoulder stands, headstands, or handstands, are especially helpful to get the blood, endocrine, and lymphatic system moving by working against gravity.

Yoga includes inversions, but you can simply lie with your legs propped upside a wall.

Detox Bath

Why not end the day once a week with an Epsom salts bath? It’s relaxing and removes toxins through your skin.

Add two cups of Epsom salts to your bath water. Mindbodygreen recommends adding two cups of baking soda for alkalizing, a tablespoon of fresh ginger for sweating, and a few drops of detoxifying essential oils like eucalyptus and juniper berry for total detoxing.

You don’t have to do everything on this list to feel the benefits of the best detoxifying rituals. Start with a few and see how it works into your daily routine. You’ll be much more likely to include health and energy improvements in your day by doing what will seamlessly fold into your daily life.

And don’t forget the basics. Get to bed early and skip the snooze button for a successful start to your day. Those 10 extra minutes may run you late, and trying to catch up all day is stressful. Subjecting yourself to toxins from stress counteracts all the good things you do for your body by following these daily detoxifying rituals.