When we say the word “detox” we are not talking about some trendy juice cleanse or starvation diet. Detoxification is an essential function of the body and something that we are doing daily.

How do our bodies accomplish this? We detoxify through our emunctories.

Emunctories are organs or ducts that are involved in draining and removing wastes from the body. We naturally detoxify through our breath, sweat, mucous, stool and urine. Easy ways we can ensure we are detoxing daily include exercising and sweating, following a whole-foods, organic diet and avoiding toxic personal and home-care products.

A nice analogy to understanding this concept is to think of your body as a bucket. Next, it’s important to recognize that your bucket is unique in terms of its size, how it tends or tries to empty itself, etc. We’re constantly filling our buckets with things like chemicals, stress, emotions, metabolic waste (just the byproducts of your cells doing what they need to in order to function), bacteria and viruses, to name a few.

We’re also constantly emptying our bucket through our 5 main routes of elimination: skin through sweat, liver/gut through bowel movements, kidneys through urination, lungs through breathing out CO2 and emotions through appropriate emotional expression.

When one of those main routes of elimination are out of balance (always in chronic illness), another secondary route of elimination has to compensate. That might look like the chronic eczema you’ve been dealing with or that cyst on your ovary.