Episode 39: Should You Go On a Cleanse?

Trainer Tips

Feb 20

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Hey there! 👋 I'm Jayd Harrison (Jaydigains), personal trainer and host of the Coaching Corner podcast. In this episode, I talk about whether or not going on a cleanse or detox might be right for your body.

To burn fat and get healthy, the most important thing to do is to nourish your body through consistent, healthy eating habits. Short term extreme diets often lead to temporary weight loss due to water loss and dehydration, which can ultimately harm your metabolism and overall health. Instead of taking drastic measures like not eating for a week, I advocate for making gradual, sustainable changes to daily food choices to support long-term fat loss and health goals. The key is to balance enjoyable foods within a generally healthy diet, avoiding the mentality of deprivation.

For additional support, consider joining the Gains Club membership on my website! I post new content every week for improving your health and fitness--including meal plans, workout routines, fat loss tips, recipes, and more. Check out jaydigains.com to sign up.

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Jayd (00:00):
We're going to learn how to actually nourish our bodies in a way that we're not going to be focusing on depriving ourselves or starving ourselves. We're going to learn how to nourish ourselves. And when you learn how to nourish yourself, you will reach your goals. Recently I heard a community member talking about how they were going on a cleanse, and I was asking them, why are you going on a cleanse? And they're like, oh, I just need to clear out my system. And you dig a little deeper and it basically comes down to fat loss. And it's like my brother in Christ going on a cleanse is not going to solve your fat loss problem. You want to burn fat. If you're really unhappy with your body and you feel like you have more body fat than you would like a cleanse, a detox, even like an extreme diet is not going to solve that problem.
(00:59)
What's going to solve the problem is getting into a consistent routine where you are consistently eating the way that your body needs to support the body fat percentage that you want to see cleansing. Going on a juice cleanse where you don't eat and you just drink juice for a week. It's going to give you the illusion of having lost weight or burned fat because you're going to be probably dehydrated. You're not going to have the bulk of the food in your belly, and you're also going to probably not be as bloated, but it doesn't necessarily mean that you're actually burning fat. You'll probably lose a lot of water weight, but you're not necessarily going to lose fat when you go on a cleanse or a detox. If you really want to get a jumpstart on your fat loss, the best thing that you can do is start making little changes to the food choices that you make every day.
(01:55)
Because here's the thing, a lot of times people will go on these cleanses, they'll go on these detoxes, they'll feel like, I mean, the scale will show, oh, I lost 15 pounds in a week or two weeks, or whatever. So they get this illusion that they've burned fat because their body weighs less. But really what that is, is their body has released a lot of water weight because they're not eating the sodium rich foods that they normally do. Their body's probably way less because they don't have the actual bulk of the food in them. It doesn't mean that they've actually burned much fat at all. And what often happens is when they go off of their cleanse and they go right back to their normal eating pattern, all of that weight comes right back, or worse, it comes back and then some. So what a lot of times people get into is this horrible cycle where they go on and off, on and off, detoxes, cleanses, fad diets are super low calorie restriction and they get this illusion that it's working and then all of the weight comes back and they're like, oh, I need to do that again.
(02:56)
And so they do it again. And so what this does over time is it just wrecks your metabolism because you're not giving your body a consistent amount of energy in a consistent amount of food. And so your body is like, this is an unpredictable environment. Slow everything down. We're not going to burn as many calories. And so a lot of times people just end up where after they've gone on a cleanse and their body has adapted to this very low amount of calories, when they go back to eating how they normally do, their body's like, oh shit, let's use all that and store it. And well, let's put that away because we don't know when the next time this person's going to not give us food again for a week. And so that's how you end up accumulating fat as a result of going on and off cleanses on and off fat diets or extreme diets. So it's going to hurt you in the long run. And if you have been going on and off cleanses or detoxes or diets and you've struggled with your weight or you've struggled and your weight seems to be like, now I can't eat anything or I'll start gaining fat. That's why. Okay? So you have to break that cycle.
(04:07)
It's not going to be healthy in the long run for you either. Starvation is not necessary. It's not necessary for you to go without eating food for a week and only having juices. That is not what your body needs in order for you to achieve the body that you want. It's also probably going to fuck up your stomach. Let's be honest, people who go on juice cleanses, they got the shits, they got the runs for most of the time it's miserable. And again, because you've got the runs, you're dehydrated a lot of the time. And so it also can kind of give you sort of this perception. You look like you've burned fat. It's just because you're dehydrated, your body's dried out, so you're going to feel like you look thinner or leaner, but it's an illusion. It's not real. It's not the actual result that you're after.
(04:55)
So if you do want to burn fat and you're serious about it, then what you need to think about doing is giving your body or giving your diet like what you eat every day, a makeover. You need to think about little bit by little bit changing your food habits to support your goals, knowing in the back of your mind that your body fat is stored energy. When you take in more energy than what your body spends, your body is going to store that as fat. For the most part. That's what's going to happen when you eat what energy, more calories than what your body spends. So generally, the recommendations for burning fat one is you got to get your body to a place where it can in a healthy way, burn fat. You got to get your body to a place where you can get into that calorie deficit where you're eating less calories than what your body spends in a way that's healthy.
(05:43)
If you have wrecked your metabolism to the point where you can barely eat more than a thousand calories a day without your body starting to take on fat, you're in a pretty seriously bad place. If you're eating 1200 calories and you are a five, seven, dude, 220 pounds or something like that, and all you can need is 1200 calories and you're exercising as well, that's a good sign that your metabolism is fucked. Now, that's not permanent. It can be fixed, but you need to address that first. You need to get your metabolism up. You need to get your daily calorie intake increased before you cut calories again to put your body in a calorie deficit. So for that, I would recommend the process of going on a reverse diet. What you need to do is slowly increase your calories over the course of several weeks, if not a month or more, and get yourself to the point where you can eat a number of calories that's closer to what someone of your size should be eating by standard recommendations just for maintenance.
(06:42)
And by maintenance we mean that your body's not storing fat or burning fat, it's just staying the same. Once you gradually increase your daily calories and you're able to eat that suggested maintenance level of calories, then we can go on a calorie deficit or go on a cut, go on a diet, but it's not going to be something super extreme where you're only drinking juice for a week. In order to get your body to burn half a pound of fat a week, you just need to be in a 500 calorie deficit a day. Okay? If you look at a frigging granola bar, okay, a granola bar is 250 calories in general. So you could just not eat a granola bar. And then what's something else that's like 250 calories? Oh, you just like if you have olive oil or use oil in your cooking or butter, just use one less tablespoon right of oil, one less tablespoon of oil or butter in your cooking.
(07:43)
There you go. Don't eat that granola bar and reduce your olive oil or your butter by one tablespoon or two tablespoons. Use less easy way to reduce those calories. And now you put yourself in a calorie deficit. If what you normally do is you have that tablespoon of olive oil, just omit it, do something else, or spritz, just spritz with a spritzer. It doesn't take you sacrificing food altogether to get your body into a place where it's burning fat effectively. It's not healthy. These cleansers are not healthy. They mess up your stomach and you don't need to deprive yourself in order to reach your goals. And I think that's another huge misconception, and I think that that's why the cleanses and the detoxes, they are so popular. People have this idea that in order to reach their goal, they have to really deprive themselves. And this idea is probably why these things don't work and why people have trouble sticking to a diet because they're so focused on deprivation. I can't have this, I can't have that, I can't have this, I can't have that. And that type of mentality really just makes you want the thing more.
(08:55)
If you say, I'm not going to eat carbs, I'm not going to eat any sugar, I think that that's a really good challenge to do on the short term, but as a lifestyle saying, I'm never going to eat sugar again. I'm never going to eat carbs again, that usually just makes you want to eat them more, right? And then also when you do break down and you do decide to have a cookie, there's so much shame that comes with that. For a lot of people, they end up on this shame spiral. They end up just burning out or just throwing the whole thing away. You don't have to do it that way. It can be so much easier. I promise you, it does not have to be that hard. Diet culture is the bane of my existence, right? Diet culture is, I mean, there's all kinds of things that go into diet culture, but basically like detoxes and cleanses, they're just repackaged extreme diets, which have been around forever, and an extreme diet is one that has you really forcing yourself to consume a very small amount of calories or forcing you to cut out a huge chunk of what you normally would eat.
(10:08)
And you don't have to do that. You don't have to do that. And actually, my clients have found so much more success in the approach that I use in Healthy Diet Makeover where we don't necessarily think about, let's deprive ourselves, let's cut this out, cut that out. I actually focus my clients on Let's eat more of this thing that's good for you. Let's add more of these low calorie foods. Let's replace Or sometimes give yourself a substitution instead. You can still eat sweetss, you can still treat yourself. You can still enjoy the foods that you love and reach your fat loss goals. It's not an all or nothing kind of thing. You can have both. It's just a matter of learning how to balance. It is the key. Learning how to balance those, treat foods within the context of a generally healthy diet that generally gives you the amount of calories that you need to support the body weight that you want to be, or the body fat percentage that you want to be.
(11:12)
Remember, our bodies reflect what we do most of the time. So if we can establish good, healthy habits where most of the time we're eating the right foods that have the right amount of calories, you can still enjoy foods that you love to eat, you can still treat yourself. It doesn't have to be this all or nothing like, I'm going to never eat sugar again, or I'm going to stop eating food altogether and just do a juice cleanse. You don't have to do that. It doesn't have to be that hard. If you have gone on and off those cleanses, on and off, those detoxes, it's okay. I don't judge you. I'm not annoyed with you. I'm annoyed at the industry for pushing that on you and making you feel like that's the only answer. I'm sad for you that you've suffered because detoxes are hard.
(12:05)
They're really hard on your body, they're hard on your mental health, and it doesn't have to be that way. It hurts me that you felt like you had to resort to that, and you don't know any better. We were not our generation. I'm a millennial. We were not raised with the best education on food. We were not raised with a good, solid understanding of how to eat in a healthy way. If you're my age, you were probably raised with the food guide pyramid and the original food guide pyramid of 1992. The bottom of the pyramid was like six to 12 servings of a grain product like pasta, bread, rice, okay? They were recommending six to 12 servings of that per day. That was the food guide pyramid in the us. And lo and behold, 10 to 15 years of teaching that to little elementary school and middle school students, high school students, as the healthy way to eat.
(13:01)
Now we have a massive problem where people over consume grains products or high carb foods, and we have a diabetes epidemic. We have a heart disease epidemic. We've not been taught how to eat healthy, and I think that that is, it's tragic, but thank God for the internet. We're here. If you're listening to this or if you're watching this, you're in a good place. We're going to learn how to actually nourish our bodies in a way that we're not going to be focusing on depriving ourselves or starving ourselves. We're going to learn how to nourish ourselves. And when you learn how to nourish yourself, you will reach your goals because the food that your body needs is in general about the amount of calories that it needs to support the weight that you want to be. So it's not too late. You can totally do this. It's just a matter of getting educated. Let's learn how to eat right.