82: Detox Isn't What You Think—Why Most People Get It Wrong

Detox has become one of the most talked-about topics in natural health—but it's also one of the most misunderstood.

In this episode, Josh Dech explains why detox isn't simply about taking supplements, drinking detox teas, or spending hours in the sauna. Instead, successful detoxification depends on whether your body has the capacity to safely eliminate toxins after they're mobilized.

Whether you're dealing with Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis, chronic inflammation, mold illness, or simply looking to improve your overall gut health, this episode provides a root-cause framework for supporting the body's natural detoxification systems safely and effectively.

TOPICS DISCUSSED:

• Drainage pathways and detox foundations
• Why detox can make people feel worse
• Environmental toxin exposure in modern life
• Cellular and mitochondrial health
• Immune system stabilization before detox
• Safe detox sequencing/framework

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Transcript

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(Transcribed by TurboScribe. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) Detoxing has become a regular part of modern life for many different reasons and is being promoted everywhere, especially for those who are sick, dealing with any kind of illness or disease, or chronic disease. But there's a lot of misconceptions around what detoxing actually is and even if you need to do it at all. That's a big point of contention because, well, your liver and your kidney detox for you, I get it. But in this episode, you're going to learn what methods I actually use in helping my clients detox because it is something many people need support with and we'll talk about how we can ensure that you're doing it safely. Contrary to what your doctors told you, Crohn's and Colitis are reversible. Now, I've helped hundreds of people reverse their bowel disease and I'm here to help you do it too because inflammation always has a root cause. We just have to find it. This is the Reversing Crohn's and Colitis Naturally podcast. Now, I do these live trainings in my Facebook group every single week and put the audios here for you to listen to. If you want to watch the video versions of these episodes, just click the link in the show notes to get access to our Facebook group and YouTube channel. And for weekly updates, information, tips and tricks, you can sign up for our email list by clicking the link in the show notes below. Now, if we haven't met yet, my name is Josh Dech. I'm an IBD specialist, a physician's consultant and researcher and I'm here to help you learn how to heal yourself naturally. First things first, let's talk about detoxing. The big point of contention is, well, do I need to detox at all? My liver and my kidney detox, I have detox organs. Well, in that case, yeah, you technically wouldn't need to detox. But here's the thing, there's different opinions around this, but I can speak to the severe disease states of bowel disease, Crohn's, Colitis. When we see somebody who is highly inflamed and their immune system is really, let's say, overburdened, they need detox support. Because the detox organs that we have, the ones we were given, liver, kidneys, lymph, skin, etc, these were meant for a world that no longer exists. That is to say that our modern world is no longer compatible with our biology. We have man-made toxins, hundreds of thousands of different chemicals, we have 20 plus thousand different types of pesticides, herbicides, fungicides alone spread on our food every year. On top of that, we've got countless new diseases, autoimmune conditions. The USA is less than 5% of the globe, but they use up to 50% of the world's glyphosate. It's crazy how much chemicals and junk we use. So we don't need to detox because, yes, our livers and our kidneys and other organs do it. Unfortunately, our world doesn't allow for us to detox appropriately because it's modern, it's chemical, it's artificial, and our natural organs can't keep up with artificial. And so when you go to Amazon and you'll pick up any kind of detox, right? You'll pick up like a detox drink, a detox powder, a detox pill, a detox whatever is being promoted, you'll get some supplements. Maybe you'll jump into the sauna. Maybe you're going to do your lymphatic massage, whatever form of detox that you're trying to do. When we detox, what happens is we mobilize toxins. What does that mean? Well, if you have toxins that are being stored in fat cells, when you sweat, when you pull them, they move from your fat cells into other things, such as your bloodstream. Now, if they're not excreting, what's happening is they're mobilizing, they're moving into your blood. If they don't get off this ride somewhere, you're getting sick. This whole detox and getting off the ride kind of reminds me of Crush from Finding Nemo. Right on, dude. They jump on the EAC and they get through and they got to jump out at the right time. Your toxins got to do that, right? So your toxins, I'm going to make a little sea turtle here. Yay. All right. So there's your sea turtle. Anyway, so you're going to jump across the East Australian Current. And what happens is those toxins, if they do not jump out at the right time to get out through your kidneys, out through your liver, out through your bowels, wherever they got to go, they're just going to get into your blood. They're going to stay there. They're going to recirculate and they're going to go attach somewhere else, such as your brain, maybe your neurological tissue, depending on what kind of toxins they are. Like heavy metals love neurological tissue. So they're going to move around, mobilize and reattach elsewhere. And so just detoxing isn't always great. If your exit doors, this exit ramp off the EAC, so to speak, is not ready. All right. So we got to make sure that Marlon and Dory have an exit path. So here's the thing. Some people do this detoxing and it's good and they're doing great. Other people that do it, it's very, very bad. And so if you're somebody who doesn't have this exit door to get off this ride of the circulating, mobilizing, detoxing, you're not detoxing safely. You're going to end up with headaches, nausea, anxiety, skin issues, joint pain, gut issues, whatever it might be. If you've got bowel disease, you're going to go into a flare. If you've got MS, you might notice your symptoms ramping up, right? Something is going to get worse, especially if it's already bad because you're mobilizing, not exiting. So in order to detox safely, you need good drainage, number one. So this exit door or this exit path, there's many of them we'll talk about. That's called drainage. And I've talked about drainage extensively in other conversations. So if you're on the podcast, YouTube or on Facebook live, wherever you are right now, you can go through the platform and see where I've talked about this further in great detail. So I'm going to skim drainage a bit today. We'll get into it a little bit, but I'm not going to spend too much time. We need good drainage health. In order to detox, we need good cellular health. And in order to detox inside of those cells, we need healthy mitochondria. In order to detox safely, you need good drainage, healthy cells, and healthy mitochondria. On top of that, if you're somebody with a chronic condition, inflammatory or immune based condition, you also have to have, I would argue, a stable immune system. There's a lot of ways to deal with that, but that's a conversation we can get into here. So detoxing is collecting your trash. That's what your body's doing. We're collecting, mobilizing, ready to get it out. We've took all the garbage from the house, we put it in a bag, like, all right, I'm walking towards the door. In order to get that thing out the door now, now you need your drainage, your exit doors. That's how things leave. So drainage, we have to have these open. Your drainage is going to consist of a few different things. You're going to have your liver and your bile. Those are huge for drainage. Good liver and good bile, especially in bowel disease, you have to have these open. Other drainage pathways, you're looking at your limbs, your skin. My marker is crap. I'm going to grab a new one. I'm burning through these things. I wonder if it's just me, probably pressing down on like a fifth grader, honestly. Anyway, so liver, bile, limbs, skin. We're also, oh, that's a good one. Yeah, we're also going to have your bowels and your kidneys. These are how things are leaving. You could also put in here sinuses. That's why we get drippy runny nose. So detoxing packs everything up and says, all right, you're going to exit through one of these seven main doors. Sinuses, liver, bile, limbs, skin, bowels, or kidneys. That's how your junk is getting out. If this isn't supported, if these pathways aren't open, you're mobilizing, you're getting sick all over again. So detoxing without drainage is the problem. You take your garbage from one room and you just put it into another room. That's a big problem. Okay? So I'm telling you right now, I've had clients who've gone through, one of the primary phases we work with people is drainage. We support whatever they need uniquely for them. But largely speaking, 50 to 70% of a first phase is typically similar to somebody else. If you're on the same first week of my program, for example, because we have to do drainage. Everyone's going to need drainage. The difference is, is what your body needs to support that properly. So I've had people coming in, for example, who try to go through and do drainage and they're successful, but their symptoms are still there. I've had people go through and do drainage and within two weeks, their 20 bowel movements a day are cut down to half. Or their one bowel movement every three days is now twice a day because we simply unburden that immune system. Right? We took the load of all the junk inside your body. We finally got rid of it. And now your body's like, I can breathe. That's exactly what it is. I'm sure you've cleaned up your house, right? You've gone through, did a spring clean. It's like there's more air in your house. It just feels clean. Your body does the same thing. We get rid of all this junk. So I've had some people though, come through my program and guess what? We did drainage. In theory, that's great. They should be ready to go. The problem is they did the drainage, but their cup was already overflowing. It was so full of all kinds of junk. There was so much overflow down here that yes, we drained, we emptied their cup a little bit, but there's still so much mess and so much excess overflow that they still can't handle a true detox. We go and capture mold toxins. We go and empty their cells. Empty their cells, I use that term loosely, but you get the idea. So we go to actually clean them out. They flare up. Why? Because they have unstable cellular health. I was just bragging how great this marker is. Suddenly it stopped working. Anyway, they have good cellular health or poor mitochondrial health or they have an unstable immune system. If your immune system is unstable and volatile, if it's highly reactive, especially those with mold who might be SERS or chronic inflammatory response syndrome, they're very sensitive. They're histamine sensitive or an MCAS. We try to get rid of some of these things. They're going to have symptoms. So we have to actually control those things first. We need to stabilize your immune system. If you've done drainage, I'm going to repeat that. You've done drainage already. You say, okay, I'm going to start detoxing. You're going to grab on or bind some of these toxins. You're trying to sweat. You're trying to get things out now, but you're overreactive. You need cellular and mitochondrial improvement. You need to stabilize your immune system. This can look like a lot of things. It can look like earthing, barefoot in the grass, infrared lights and red light therapy. It's amazing. Sound therapy with a rife machine. There's lots of combinations of things, but it is going to mean changing your environment. If you're actively living in a moldy environment, even if I had a client who had a moldy couch, the couch was known to have mold. It's like, well, I don't really sit on it. I'm like, yeah, but it's in your house. The thing is, if you have a moldy piece of furniture sitting in the room and you walk past that, you open a window in the room next door, that's enough air to mobilize those toxins. It's so fine. I don't know if you can see this cabinet I've got down here, but these little cracks in here in between the doors, there's enough air gap in there for me walk past that was moldy, it would stir up mold toxins. They're that tiny and that sensitive. So, immobilizing toxins, you're getting sick, or you're living in a moldy environment, you're living in the environment that's toxic, you're drinking the tap water, or you're drinking the well water that's got glyphosate runoff if you're on a farm, or you're drinking the tap water that's got whatever kind of heavy metals in it. These things, you can't outrun them. You have to clean them from your environment first. Stop filling your own cup. Have to stabilize your system. And a lot of times, you can stabilize an unstable immune system. Someone who's very reactive, a lot of histamine issues and bowel disease. So, if you're highly reactive and it's volatile, then herbs and vitamins can help. But if those don't work, then we start to look at peptides. If those don't work, I'm big on pharmaceuticals. There's a great mast cell stabilizer called ketotepin, very high safety profile, really great to actually work inside of the gut to stabilize things like ulcerative colitis related immune responses or histamine related immune responses. So, we need to stabilize first. And if you delay, delay, delay, it just takes up more time. And so, your body like, well, I've been detoxing for a long time. Why aren't I getting ready to go? Because you're missing steps and just we need to intervene here, right? So, something also very important to note, if you are detoxing, let's go back to this. Let's say you've done your drainage, you stabilized your immune system, your cells, your mitochondria, everything's happy and healthy. That can be done with a lot of things. Again, we just talked about earthing, grounding, red light, sound therapy. You can use certain vitamins, CoQ10, PQQ from mitochondria. You can use things like, I'm a big fan of methylene blue. You can use all kinds of stuff. Again, earthing, whatever else for mitochondrial health. There's tons of things out there. However, we say, okay, I've done the drainage, right? I know I'm stable and my cells are healthy. So, now I've collected my trash. I prepared my body. I'm now ready to take things out to the curb. This is that now detox we just talked about, right? The exit doors, getting things to mobilize, to pull, to remove. You're like, yeah, now I'm going to start capturing. I'm going to start removing things. I'm going to take sauna sessions to detox things out through my cells, out through my skin. Perfect. However, if you're somebody in a toxic environment, heavy metals, mold, pesticides, environmental chemicals, which most bowel diseases, for example, are environmental anyway, we're going to detox them. I always recommend we work this with a binder. Now, what is a binder? A binder is something that physically captures those toxins. Activated charcoal, great for binding toxins. I've got these in the hospitals all the time for overdoses, et cetera. These are for dogs who swallow things they shouldn't. Different binders work for different things. Activated charcoal is kind of the general universal binder, but it's not perfect for everything. Some molds respond better to a bentonite clay or a zeolite or a Saccharomyces boulardii, which is a yeast-based probiotic. They might respond better to okra powder or chitosan or something else. There's a really great broad binder. It's got modified citrus pectin and all the things I just listed, chlorella, you name it. It's called UltraBinder, and it's from a company called Quicksilver Scientific. It's a very broad, multi-binder. It's probably the broadest one on the market right now. You get what you pay for. It's more expensive. But having some kind of binder as you're mobilizing toxins can help. If I'm detoxing mold, I'm going into a sauna session. Yeah, I'm bringing water, but I'm going to take some binders before and after my session. So as things get mobilized, they dump into my gut, for example, to get out. I'm capturing them in my gut. They're less likely to reabsorb. Now, if you are going through a detox process, you go, okay, I've done my drainage. I've stabilized my cells and my immune system. I'm mitochondria supported. I'm good. I'm now detoxing and I'm taking binders. And you're going, Josh, I did all those things. I'm still having a reaction. Two things to ask. Number one, did you not do enough drainage or are your cells and your immune system not stable enough? If not, go back and do that. But if you did all that, you're confident it's been done properly, now you're detoxing and binding, you're trying to get the stuff out of your system, but you're still reactive, you might need to slow down. Think about it this way. If you are, you and a family member, right? You're packing up your garbage, you're taking it out to the curb. So my wife comes up, she's like, yep, spring cleaning. We're going to take these clothes donation. We got this garbage that we piled up. We got whatever we're doing. She goes, here's one garbage bag. I'm like, great. My capacity is one garbage bag. I'm going to take this out to the curb and we're good. I go back. She says, yep, here's one garbage bag. I say, great. I'm running back out to the curb one at a time. If suddenly she says, hey, I got one and then two and three, and I'm trying to juggle, I'm trying to get them outside. And on the way out, she throws a fourth at me and I drop everything. Your body's going through a similar process. If you're stable and your drainage is good, you're detoxing. You might be going too quickly, pushing too much, too fast, pulling too much, too fast, detoxing too heavily, doing too many things. You went, well, I'm doing the lymphatic massage. I'm doing a sound therapy. I'm doing a sauna session in the same day. I'm doing an HBOT or a whole cat machine. I'm doing whatever you're doing, right? Hyperbaric oxygen therapy is the HBOT. So you're doing all these different things. It could just be too much. I went for a hydro colonic as well. Too much, man. Slow it down. Your body can only handle so much. Remember, everyone has a different size cup that fills up with water. So some people in the same environment, one will get sick faster than another because they have a smaller cup. Now, on the bottom of that cup, there is a drain. Some people will drain faster than others. Some people have a wide drainage net. They can handle a lot going through that exit door. Other people cannot. And that just depends on genetics, environmental factors, and a lot of different things. So if you're getting a negative response, slow it down. That's the simplest I can put it for today. Now, if you want to go back and check out some things, of course, like I mentioned, I have a drainage episode. I have a couple of them I've done on both my podcast, ReversABLE, and the Reversing Crohn's Colitis Naturally podcast, all out there already. So make sure when you're going into this stuff and you're checking out like what I want to do, what is drainage? What does the process look like? What are the supplements for liver and bile? It's all in there. I'm not going to hammer it today because that's a two-episode thing and I got dinner to get to. However, they are there available for you. They're on YouTube, they're on the podcast, and they're inside the Facebook group. So all I got to do is look. That's it. All I got for you for today, guys. That wasn't even a sentence, was it? I think I'm hungry. Anyway, that's all we got for you for today. Thanks so much for being here. We're going to see you next time. One of my favorite things to hear as an IBD specialist is something along the lines of I learned more from you in 15 minutes than from my doctor in 15 years. And if this, for the first time, is really starting to click, and it's starting to make sense, you're going, wait a minute, this might be reversible. I think there's more that I can do. This condition came out of nowhere. It happened to me out of the blue. I was healthy for 10, 20, 30, 40 years, and suddenly I wasn't, and you're telling me there's no cause. If you're understanding, finally, that there is a cause, that something is driving this, I want to invite you to check the link in the show notes below. Send me an email. Ask a question. See if a program is the right fit for you. Because I promise you, this doesn't have to be a lifelong sentence. You're not doomed to this. And IBD can be reversed.