Transcript #447 10 Signs Your Liver Needs a Detox with Wendy Myers
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- Find out what’s in store for this Myers Detox Podcast where I talk about the top 10 signs that your liver needs a detox! Not only that, I’m going to share with you the top five superfoods that can help cleanse your liver naturally, and what a liver cleanse looks like. These signs are often overlooked, even by your doctor, so make sure to tune in and prevent yourself from getting a toxic liver!
- Learn about the top signs that your liver needs a detox!
- Find out why a toxic liver is often missed at the doctor’s office.
- Learn how you should test your liver to find out if it is detoxing properly.
- Learn about the top five foods I recommend eating to help your liver detox.
- Learn about liver cleansing, how often you should do it, and why they are essential to do.
- Find out about the many harmful effects of having a congested liver.
- Learn about my 15 Day Detox and Liver Cleanse Guide as well as the 15 Daily Detox Smoothie Recipes that you receive free when you purchase my Daily Detox supplement!
Dr. Wendy Myers: Hey everyone. How are you? I’m Wendy Myers. Thank you so much for joining today. Today we have a really good broadcast for you. We’re going to be talking about the top signs that you need a liver detox. Within that framework, we’re going to be talking about the five superfoods to cleanse your liver naturally. We’re going to talk about the 10 signs that you’re overlooking that are signs of a toxic liver and why a toxic liver is so commonly missed at the doctor’s office.
Dr. Wendy Myers: I know a lot of people go to the doctor presenting with symptoms. Maybe the doctor does a routine test for liver enzymes, why that is not adequate, and what to do instead. We’ll talk about how often you need to do liver cleansing. What does a liver cleanse look like? Also, my top 15 favorite detox smoothie recipes. We’ll talk about that also.
Dr. Wendy Myers: I love talking about the liver because that’s one of the main organs for detoxification and so important to take care of your liver. But a lot of people aren’t aware of the signs that their liver isn’t functioning so well. I’ll tell you what signs to look for.
Dr. Wendy Myers: So, if you’re experiencing three or more of the following things, you might want to be put on alert that you need to be caring for your liver a bit more. So one is itchy skin, random anger, bouts of anger, frequent anger is a common sign of liver toxicity, brown liver spots on your hands and on your body, swollen legs or ankles, or edema. If you have swollen ankles frequently or it’s very pronounced, it’s a sign your liver’s not working so well. Yellowed eyes or skin that’s a sign of a more severe liver issue, but it does happen. Gas or bloating that’s very common. Mysterious pain, recent weight gain, low energy, overly red palms, if the palms of your hands are red all the time, difficulty concentrating or brain fog, poor sleep or night waking at 3:00 AM very consistently, always feeling tired, premature wrinkles, dry eyes, and mouth. Man boobs are one of the signs as well.
Dr. Wendy Myers: So like I mentioned, if you have three or more of these symptoms, chances are your liver needs a little bit of a helping hand. I personally think that most people need to be supporting their liver with supplements, foods, maybe coffee enemas, or other detox protocols to support their liver function because our liver has a very difficult job, and we’ve got dozens of heavy metals and thousands, there’s up to 100,000 chemicals in our environment, and our liver has to touch all of those things.
Dr. Wendy Myers: The body’s going to send all that stuff to the liver to help break it down and neutralize it. The liver has over 500 different processes, including breaking down all the bad industrial seed oils we eat, bad fats, good fats and cholesterol, and all of our sugar. It repairs the body, all the cholesterol, and the liver repairs our body. So just a lot of stress and pressure on our livers today. That’s why liver’s one of my favorite subjects to talk about.
Dr. Wendy Myers: Let’s talk about why a toxic liver so commonly gets missed at the doctor’s office. So number one, the doctor will test for elevated liver enzymes or some enzymes that are too low. Unfortunately, the doctor does a basic liver enzyme test, and this is a very basic screening tool that’s an indirect window into varied aspects of your liver’s functioning. So it doesn’t tell you, this test does not tell you if your liver has good detox ability or is detoxing well. It’s just the liver enzyme test, which I’ll get into in a second, is just a very basic screening tool.
Dr. Wendy Myers: Also, by the time you have elevated liver enzymes, that’s a sign of significant liver damage or liver disease. So we don’t want to wait to get a bad test at the doctor’s for liver enzymes before we’re doing anything to support our liver. You don’t want to wait until you have bad tests. You don’t want to wait until you have a diagnosis. You want to take care of your body before preventing a diagnosis, liver damage, or other health issues. So I can’t stress that enough. So for me, I kind of pretend like I do have a diagnosis and act accordingly.
Dr. Wendy Myers: That’s kind of what drives me to take such good care of myself because I don’t want to wait until I get a diagnosis. I encourage people to be proactive in their health, not reactive in their health.
Dr. Wendy Myers: So, let’s talk about the fact that your doctor and most functional medical practitioners do not have a test that shows how well you are detoxing. So I used to do one with my clients, the lab in Australia, but they stopped making the test. It’s very, very frustrating. So what you want to test for liver detox ability: glutathionylation, glucuronidation, and how well a substance passes through your liver
Dr. Wendy Myers: Usually, what’s used is caffeine or paracetamol, and those kinds of tests, the paracetamol or caffeine tests, are not allowed in the United States. No idea why, but it seems like a pretty benign substance everyone’s guzzling down every day.
Dr. Wendy Myers: But the rate at which you will process or metabolize caffeine is just this one sign of how well your liver detoxes toxic substances like caffeine. So those of you super sensitive to caffeine may have a genetic issue with that, but also a poor functioning liver.
Dr. Wendy Myers: Here’s what the doctor’s tests indicate. If you have any of these enzyme levels that are elevated, you already have significant damage to the liver or liver disease. So we don’t want to wait until these enzymes are elevated before we think about caring for our liver.
Dr. Wendy Myers: So, in general, elevated liver enzymes may indicate inflammation or damage to cells in the liver, and inflamed or injured liver cells leak higher than normal amounts of certain chemicals, including liver enzymes, into the bloodstream, which can result in elevated liver enzymes on the blood test.
Dr. Wendy Myers: So one of the tests is bilirubin, which can indicate liver disease or damage or certain types of anemia if bilirubin is elevated. If it’s super high, you can have jaundice. Albumin is a protein made by the liver. Low albumin levels indicate a problem with your liver or kidneys. Then there’s the GGT enzyme. Higher than normal levels may indicate liver or bile duct damage. ALP can be used to evaluate the bile duct system of the liver, and liver disease is one of the most common reasons for higher than normal levels of ALT. Very high levels of ALT, 10 times more than normal, are usually indicative of acute hepatitis or a viral infection. But like I said, none of these tell you how well your liver is detoxing.
Dr. Wendy Myers: One way to care for your liver is to eat foods that aid in detoxification. So let’s talk about my top five foods to help liver detox. So the top five foods to help liver detox are broccoli sprouts, garlic, onions, egg yolks, and ginger. So I’ll tell you why.
Dr. Wendy Myers: So number one, broccoli sprouts are rich in a compound called sulforaphane. That’s a compound in broccoli that contains sulfur, which is a key ingredient that promotes the elimination of toxins from the liver. This amazing compound has over 600 studies proving they defeat various age and toxicity-related health issues.
Dr. Wendy Myers: Broccoli sprouts also contain really powerful antioxidants and your body’s master antioxidant, glutathione, which supports both phases of liver detox, phase one and two, and sprouts can even have 10 to 100 times the detox power of just broccoli. You know broccoli is healthy for you, but broccoli sprouts are 10 to 100 times healthier than broccoli. So they really pack a nutritional and detox punch.
Dr. Wendy Myers: Then there’s garlic. So garlic is really rich in allicin and selenium, two potent nutrients that help to cleanse and nourish your blood and body. Garlic is also loaded with sulfur, which activates liver enzymes that help flush toxins out of the body. The selenium in garlic is really key for detox. It’s needed to make glutathione, the body’s master antioxidant. Selenium is also an essential micronutrient that has been shown to help boost natural antioxidant enzymes in your liver as well. Selenium you need for thyroid function too.
Dr. Wendy Myers: Then there are onions. Onions are also rich in allicin, which helps flush the liver and your digestive tract of unwanted chemicals and toxins. Onions are also rich in sulfur and many compounds that aid detox. Regular onion consumption is even helpful in the treatment of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, which millions of Americans have. It’s a very insidious thing that for a long time goes unchecked or undiagnosed for millions of people. So it’s good to have checked at your doctor, especially if you’re overweight, don’t feel well, or have a fairly bad diet or lifestyle habit. It’s good to get checked for non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and help your liver out.
Dr. Wendy Myers: Ginger is also another great compound that contains antioxidants and anti-inflammatory molecules that aid in liver detox. It cleanses the body by stimulating digestion, stimulating circulation, and sweating. Its digestive actions can help cleanse the body of waste and toxins in the colon, liver, and other organs.
Dr. Wendy Myers: Ginger is also very powerful for liver support, and it’s been shown to help relieve some symptoms of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease as well. I love juicing ginger, and then I’ll add that to things that I’m drinking. I’ll add it to carrot juice, and I’ll just drink a shot of it by itself and use ginger in many different foods I’m making. If I make a stir fry or I make a bone broth, I’ll add some ginger to it. So I just try to add ginger as much as I can.
Dr. Wendy Myers: Then a surprising top detox food is egg yolks. Why is that? Seems like a strange food for detox. So the reason is that egg yolks are rich in choline. A lot of people genetically have issues with choline. They have to add choline to their diet and be very cognizant of actively adding this to their diet on a regular basis. Choline is essential for liver function, brain development, your nervous system, and metabolism, and it’s needed for fat transport and metabolism. So it’s essential for making a substance required for removing cholesterol from your liver. Inadequate choline may result in fat and cholesterol buildup in your liver. Broccoli sprouts are another great source of choline.
Dr. Wendy Myers: So choline is something that’s super important. I recommend people eat egg yolks runny, so that’s going to preserve all the amazing nutrients in the yolk, including choline in the yolk. You’re best off not cooking the yolk. Or, if you make a hard-boiled egg, make sure it’s a soft-boiled egg, so the yolk is still somewhat uncooked. I love making eggs, either poached eggs or doing eggs over easy, so the yolk is still runny. That’s the best way to eat the egg yolks.
Dr. Wendy Myers: So those are the top five foods for detox that you can try to incorporate into your diet as much as you can. I love it when clients eat tons of garlic and onions in all the food they’re making. I eat broccoli sprouts every single day. I grow my own sprouts. I actually grow garlic and onions, sprouts also and add those to my diet in various ways. You can put them in wraps, in tacos, and in salads, and there are lots of really delicious ways to incorporate these foods and their sprouts into your diet.
Dr. Wendy Myers: So, let’s talk about liver cleansing. So how often do you need to do a liver cleanse, and why is liver cleansing something you must do regularly on a regular basis? So I won’t bore you with the stats on all the toxins we’re exposed to. You know that, and it’s getting worse no matter how clean your lifestyle is.
Dr. Wendy Myers: The reason that active liver cleansing is so essential is that many toxins that we take in are fat soluble. So these fat-soluble toxins get into the fat cells in our body and have to be processed by the liver and then transported into fat cells.
Dr. Wendy Myers: And so for fatty toxins to be eliminated from the body, they must first be converted into water-soluble waste products by the liver. Once they’re water-soluble, these toxins can be eliminated from the body in watery fluids, such as bile, sweat, saliva, and urine. Toxins that are fat soluble can also be excreted in the sebaceous glands in the sweat glands, as well. That’s done really well in an infrared sauna as well.
Dr. Wendy Myers: But in phase two, liver detox where the phase in the liver, where the liver is trying to attach toxins to glutathione or vitamin C or lipoic acid, there are different mechanisms. Some of them are attached to fat molecules. Some of them are fat soluble, some of these toxins, and some are water-soluble. It just depends, but we want to make sure we’re supporting the liver to be able to break down these toxins and then excrete them from the body.
Dr. Wendy Myers: So the big problem comes when your liver is not able to perform this detoxification of these fatty toxins efficiently because these toxins will be deposited into fatty tissue and adipose cells or fat cells in the body. And so, for many people that have trouble losing weight or that have resistant weight loss, it’s because their fat cells act as a storage receptacle. They’re acting as a trash bin for toxins. And it’s a protective mechanism for your body to not allow you to release this weight because there is a reason the body is holding onto this fat. And so, it’s a protective mechanism.
Dr. Wendy Myers: So while it’s frustrating for you, and for me as well, their body is very, very innately intelligent. And so, if you’re having trouble shedding that last 10 or 15 pounds, you want to be adding detox. You want to add liver support to facilitate shedding that last bit of fat that you have, that no matter what you do, it won’t go away.
Dr. Wendy Myers: So it’s not that your metabolism is failing. It’s not that you’re getting older. There are a lot of different reasons, and toxins are a huge contributor to your resistant weight loss. And so also, if you have a fatty liver, fat-soluble toxins will be deposited inside the fatty liver cells, making your liver more toxic, and there they stagnate and further compromise the processes of your body’s liver cells.
Dr. Wendy Myers: The fatty toxins will also be drawn to other fatty areas of the body, such as the brain, the hormonal glands, the fat deposits in the buttocks and the abdomen, and your thighs. And it’s this vicious cycle that leads to more and more toxicity and weight gain. And it keeps going.
Dr. Wendy Myers: So no matter how good your diet and lifestyle habits are, if your liver is not functioning well, if it needs support, you’re going to have issues with weight gain and building up of toxins, because your liver is backed up. Your liver is the bottleneck, and if it’s overwhelmed, it’s going to be this vicious cycle. It’s going to be kind of stuck in this vicious cycle where you can’t detox as effectively as you could be detoxing.
Dr. Wendy Myers: A congested liver also speeds up the aging process because all these toxins in our body cause oxidative stress, skin aging, and other problems that use up your energy when your body’s trying to deal with this stuff.
Dr. Wendy Myers: A congested liver is also more likely to give you brown liver spots on your face and wrinkles, especially underneath your eyes or dark circles underneath your eyes. So with sluggish liver function, you not only get early signs of aging and weight gain, but your digestion is also compromised because your liver is tasked with making bile to digest fats, making digestive enzymes, and sending enzymes to the small intestine for digestion, for breaking down fat, for breaking down sugars, et cetera.
Dr. Wendy Myers: So this leads to reduced nutrient absorption and low production of key antioxidants like glutathione. And if you’re not producing enough glutathione, for example, you will not be detoxifying adequately. You might be able to break down the toxins your liver encounters but not take them out of your body in phase two of liver detox without glutathione. So this cycle keeps getting worse and worse.
Dr. Wendy Myers: And so for all these reasons and above, I wanted to create a really simple 15-Day Detox and Liver Cleanse Guide because I keep getting a lot of requests for this. And so finally, I created this liver and detox guide that’s free. So check this out. So it is free with a purchase of my daily detox supplement. You can get my free 15-day liver cleanse guide when you get a bottle of Daily detox, and we have a really good deal for two and three bottles. So you can save up to 34% off if you get three bottles of the Daily Detox, but this tastes absolutely delicious.
Dr. Wendy Myers: I formulated it with about 8% fermented broccoli sprouts. And so, for a lot of people, they don’t really want to grow broccoli sprouts, or they don’t have access to them, but it’s one of the number one detox foods that people need to be eating on a daily basis.
Dr. Wendy Myers: So if you aren’t able to grow them as I do, or you don’t have them at your local grocery store, or they’re not fresh if you do have them, but they’re not fresh, you can take my Daily Detox supplement, and it has tons of ingredients for liver support and other things in it.
Dr. Wendy Myers: So that’s why I created it to support everyone’s livers that desperately need support in our toxic world. So back to my talk about liver cleansing. So this guide helps provide much needed relief to your liver. So I want to tell you what I’m doing for a liver cleanse. And so I created this little guide for you to do what I’m doing, what I’ve kind of developed over the years. This is what works really well.
Dr. Wendy Myers: And one of the problems I found with most liver cleanses is that they either do too little where people just take some milk thistle, they take one supplement for their liver, and milk thistle is great, but alone, it’s not going to do the job that most people are hoping to accomplish with giving their liver support. It’s not enough.
Dr. Wendy Myers: Or they’re too harsh, or it’s just too much like drinking a gallon of olive oil and lemon juice, or it takes a week. A full-blown, properly done liver cleanse, like the Andrea Moritz, takes a whole week of taking certain foods, fasting for a whole day, and then doing lots of enemas and coffee enemas to help the liver process the liver cleanse through.
Dr. Wendy Myers: And it can be a little bit too much for a lot of people, and it can also be dangerous or problematic for some people where they get gallstones stuck in their gallbladder, their bile ducts. So they have to be really careful with some of the more hardcore liver cleanses out there, even though they’re great for a lot of people.
Dr. Wendy Myers: So the optimum approach is somewhere in the middle and exactly what I outlined for you in the pages of my 15-Day Detox and Liver Cleanse Guide. So in this guide, it’s right here, and I’m so proud of it. I spent a lot of time on this 15-Day Daily Detox and Liver Cleanse Guide. So it gives you a proven daily plan and routine for each of the 15 days. There’s no guesswork in this. There’s an in-depth list of healthy liver-approved foods, I named five of them, but there are a bunch of other foods like asparagus and some other ones that are really helpful to support your liver.
Dr. Wendy Myers: And there’s also a list of the best and worst foods for your liver health. So you want to avoid these toxic offenders. There’s a whole list of foods you absolutely want to avoid if you’re doing this liver cleanse, and just in general, they’re good to avoid. And there are also things to remove from your routine, home, or diet while cleansing, and some hidden toxic sources in the guide as well.
Dr. Wendy Myers: And there are also the right exercises to assist your lymph and skin in elimination, which helps your liver as well. Plus, my favorite detox upgrades make this process even more powerful. And there’s an approved foods shopping list as well. So there’s an approved foods list to eat why you’re doing this 15-day daily detox and lots of really good info and tips about your liver and liver function as well.
Dr. Wendy Myers: This is really everything you need to detox your liver without crazy fasting, harsh cleansing, and extreme changes to your diet. It’s just very simple to follow. And so I want you to join me and my entire community in cleaning out your liver and looking and feeling amazing. So when you get the Daily detox, you also get my 15 smoothie recipes as well. So it’s my Daily Detox, 15 smoothie recipes to do during the whole 15-day cleanse as well.
Dr. Wendy Myers: And there are some delicious smoothies here that I know you’ll love. I’ve been making smoothies forever. So I wanted to put my favorite ones in here, from citrus ones to ones with nut milk and chocolate and nut butter. So lots and lots of delicious recipes for everyone.
Dr. Wendy Myers: And cleansing and detoxing are boosted when you have more energy. And so, one of the best ways to give your body more energy is by incorporating delicious blended smoothies into your diet because they’re predigested by a lot of chew. You don’t really have to chew them so much because you’ve blended them up in the blender, releasing a lot of the nutrients in the cell walls of the food. So they’re easier to digest. And this also enables you to get tons of key detox nutrients, feel full and satisfied, and feel energized all day while you detox.
Dr. Wendy Myers: And so this free guide for daily detoxers feature some of my favorite, most delicious cleansing smoothie recipes. They’re super fast, affordable, easy to make, and support your liver and body during this powerfully transformative process during this 15-day cleanse.
Dr. Wendy Myers: So thanks for tuning in every week. And again, if you guys want to do my 15-Day Daily Detox and Liver Cleanse, join me and get your one or two or three jars of Daily Detox to do the liver cleanse. You have all the instructions right here that you need. And so when you buy the Daily Detox, you’ll get this guide free, and you’ll also get my smoothie detox recipes for free, my favorite 15 smoothie recipes, and instructions on how to take the Daily Detox as well.
Dr. Wendy Myers: So, again, thanks for joining me guys. And I will talk to you next week.
