Do Detox Diets work and do you need to do one?

The word ‘detox’ seems to cause such a stir in the media and online world.

You have one side making radical claims about their detox curing all sorts of ills and then you have the other side saying that the concept of detox is a load of rubbish and you shouldn’t waste your time and money.

I prefer to use the word ‘cleanse’ for my detox programs because I think it more accurately describes what we are trying to achieve. What we want to do with a detox is give your body a rest from processing anything that places a load on the major organs of elimination (the liver, the kidneys, the gut and the skin) and at the same time use supplements that assist these organs with their function.

As a naturopath, I always find myself frowning when people say that detox doesn’t work.

I just don’t understand this. Its like saying breathing doesn’t work. I think that when people say detox doesn’t work its because they have a skewed concept of what detox is. It feels like everyone these days is looking for a quick fix and an instant cure. Detox is not a miracle cure to all of your health issues.

Detox is a holiday for your body.

You know what it feels like when you’re due for a holiday; you’re exhausted, you might be snappy, emotional, moody, your body aches, you don’t want to get out of bed YOU JUST NEED A BREAK!

This is how I imagine the poor body when it needs a detox. Its screaming at you “come on! Stop putting so much pressure on me! I’m so sick of processing your caffeine, your alcohol, your processed foods, your cosmetics. Man I need a break!”

Four weeks of fresh, nutritious food, minimising exposure to toxins, nourishing the body and assisting elimination with naturopathic herbs and supplements is a pretty decent break for your tired body.

Some people argue that your body is already designed to detox itself. That’s why you’re born with a liver, kidneys, lymphatic system, intestines etc. Yep, that’s true. But I think we all expect more from these organs than they originally signed up for and helping them out with an annual or bi-annual rejuvenation can only help them to perform better.

At the end of my cleanse programs people usually report that they are sleeping better, they wake up in the morning feeling alert, their energy is consistent throughout the day, their skin is improved (I was once told that I was ‘glowing’ when I was midway through a detox), they are not feeling bloated, their bowels are working well and they just generally feel more vibrant.

I try to get my clients to continue using the principles and recipes they have learnt during detox for the rest of their lives. And a lot of them do. Detox is like a restart button, it gets you back into good habits and it reminds you how the body is meant to feel.

So, do you need to detox?

You may not NEED to. But i’m sure your body will thank you for it!

Is Fish Oil Making You Sick?

Don’t be silly Laura.

Fish oil is anti-inflammatory, prevents cardiovascular disease, reduces arthritic pain, improves brain function,  helps improve skin tone and appearance and is just generally good for you!

Well yes, that is all true. If you’re taking the right fish oil.

Do you get fishy burps after taking your fish oil?

If you do, I have two suggestions for you:

1)      Stop taking it with hot drinks and/or hot food

2)      Chuck it in the bin

It may seem a bit dramatic to tell you to throw away your fish oil supplement but sadly, some fish oil supplements sold in stores are doing you more harm than good.

Rancid fish oil causes disease.

If you get fishy burps after you take your fish oil capsules then chances are, the oil is off. Rancid oils are oxidised (opposite to anti-oxidants) and are very harmful for the body.

One of my reps recently encouraged me to chew one of his companies fish oil capsules. I was hesitant. I really didn’t want to be left with a fishy taste in my mouth all day.. And who wants to see a Naturopath with fish breath?!
He saw me turn up my nose and immediately popped a capsule in his mouth and started chewing. Well, I didn’t want to be a wimp, so I copied. To my amazement I could not taste one iota of fish! In fact I quite enjoyed my fish oil capsule, it was kind of like a lolly! And at no point in the rest of the day did I get any hint of fishy after taste.

The reason I could chew this fish oil capsule so easily is because the oil was clean, pure and fresh. During the manufacturing process it had not been left out in the open air being exposed to oxygen and going rancid.

I always tell my clients, “If there is only one supplement you are going to spend more money on it should be fish oil”. This is not a sales pitch. I’m not salesy at all. In fact, I mostly prescribe liquid fish oil because its a lot cheaper than capsules (and easier to take). This advice is simply because I want to help you improve your health, not make you sicker!

The other problem with bargain basement fish oil is Mercury. Cheap fish oil usually comes from large fish. Large fish are known to retain high levels of heavy metals. Hello toxic fish oil! This is particularly concerning when we are feeding nasty fish oil to kids (often in the form of equally worrisome chewy, coloured fishies). I hate to think that we are filling these little people with such toxic substances.

When you are buying fish oil, read the packaging. It should state on there somewhere that it is from a sustainable source and from small fish.

And for the record; Krill oil is not equivalent to 6 fish oil capsules in 1 (cleverly marketed) capsule. Fish oil is fish oil and no other oil, including krill oil, matches its supreme power.

OK, I got a little bit carried away with my creative writing at the end there. But seriously, don’t believe the hype. Krill oil has been proven to be great for cardiovascular disease. But fish oil has been proven to be amazing for so much more!

My Tea Story

With the recent construction of my online tea store, I have spent a lot of time reflecting on my lifelong love affair with tea.

  

Being English, I feel like I was born with a teacup in my hand.

But I asked my mum, and she said I actually would have started drinking tea when I was five; we’d all sit up in bed on a Sunday morning and have a cup of tea before starting the day.
Mum also told me that when we were little, my sister and I took her and dad a cup of tea one day. We knew we weren’t allowed to use the kettle so we used the water from our hot water bottles! Needless to say they didn’t drink it. I don’t remember doing that, but I do remember the first cup of drinkable tea I ever made. It was for my Grandad and I did it to earn a badge at brownies.

An evolution of tea.

Tea has obviously made a big impact on my life! In the early days my cup of tea was weak with sugar. As I grew older and my tastes changed, I started adding less and less sugar until my favourite brew was a nice rosy colour with just a dash of milk.

Sadly (or in hindsight, gladly!) when I started Naturopathic college I discovered that traditional black tea was the cause of my long struggle with constipation. I had always dabbled in herbal teas but it was after this discovery that I stopped drinking black tea and switched mostly to Dandelion root. The change to my digestive function and overall health was remarkable!

When I was little, lolly shops were my favourite place to spend my pocket money. As an adult, lolly shops were replaced with tea shops (and stationery shops). When my friends come over for dinner, I stand at my tea cupboard and reel off a long list of tea options for them to choose from. The problem is, I don’t really like a lot of the tea blends that are on the market. Or, I get really annoyed when I try a delicious blend at the tea shop but when I read the ingredients, the blend contains sugar or flavouring.

Surely you don’t need to add flavouring to herbal tea?!

One day about a year ago, I had an epiphany!
As a Naturopath, I’m a trained herbalist, my knowledge of medicinal herbs is huge, I love the idea of herbal tea but I don’t like what is currently available… Why don’t I make my own organic herbal teas?
I think this is what is commonly known as a light bulb moment.

I have discovered that blending herbal teas is not as easy as it sounds. You can choose all of these beautiful herbs for their amazing actions but getting the right balance of flavour is not so easy. But, it can be done! Over the past few months I have tasted hundreds of cups of herbal tea and I will not release a blend until I am 100% happy with the flavour. So far I am absolutely addicted to every blend and I am determined to keep up this standard of tea perfection.

The future is looking beau-tea-ful.

My partner and I have become obsessed with thinking up new tea names. Any word that remotely sounds like “tea” will become a potential blend. Jonathan inspired the blend i’m working on at the moment when he looked at me the other day and said “after par-tea” BRILLIANCE!!!

I’m having so much fun with this new part of my business. The online store has been much busier than I ever anticipated and I am full of ideas for the future of Burton Health Tea! You can have a little poke around my store here and make sure you check back often as there will always be new blends being added to the family.

Laura

Why I follow the 80/20 principle

It's time to set the record straight.

Sometimes people say things to me like "Laura! You're a Naturopath, you can't eat/drink/say/do that!" And it always shocks me when they do, because I feel like I'm pretty open about who I am and what I do. I purposely post photos of coffee, wine, chocolate etc on my Instagram and Facebook pages and I don't pretend to be a fanatical Naturopath.

My policy is that I will never ask a client to do something that I wouldn't be willing to do myself.

I think that's pretty fair.

I look after myself very well. My partner and I cook our meals from scratch, I drink at least 2 litres of water a day, I buy as much organic produce as I can, I eat lots of veggies and fruit and I'm very aware of what foods and drinks my body can't tolerate and I avoid them.

But sometimes I just want to eat malteasers! And sometimes I drink one too many wines and sometimes I eat takeaway. Yes, I am human.

Have you heard of the 80/20 principle?

I haven't always been a Naturopath. I was once a child who loved kingston biscuits, musk lifesavers and rainbow paddle pops. I was once a teenager who went to backyard parties and drank waaaay too many alco-pops, and I was once a twenty-something who spent too many nights at cargo bar drinking QF's and cowboys!

Yes, I'm a reformed sugar addict and binge drinker. And my health did suffer for it.

Now I like to do things in moderation (most of the time). And I like to subscribe to the guideline of 80% for the body and 20% for the soul. This means that while I mostly fill my body with nourishing, nurturing food and beverages, sometimes I'll have a treat.

This principle works really well and I know a lot of Naturopaths and health professionals who also follow this, or similar guidelines. And this is what I expect of my patients.

Having a balance of the foods that love your body and the foods that you love helps you to be happy and healthy in the body and the spirit.

Following the 80/20 rule means that you don't need to feel guilty about having a treat. Give it a go and let me know what you think.

And for the record, when people try to chastise me for having a treat, my usual answer is:

“I’m a Naturopath, not a saint.”

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Is Irritable Bowel Syndrome Getting You Down?

One of the main things I treat in my clinic is the gut. Recently I’ve been seeing a lot of people come in with Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) so I thought it was high time I set the record straight about you and that irritable little gut of yours!

Why is your gut so irritated? AKA What is Irritable Bowel Syndrome?

In my opinion IBS is a shrug the shoulders “I don’t know” condition. This means you’ve had every test under the sun and nothing shows up. You’re not a coeliac, you don’t have crohn’s disease, there’s no diverticulitis, no cancer (thank goodness), nothing showing up in your bloods and nothing that can give you a medically diagnosed condition.

Hurray there’s nothing wrong with you! But something’s still up.
This is when people often receive the “I don’t know” shoulder shrug and “It’s IBS” diagnosis. Which is fine. If we have to put a name on it, Irritable Bowel Syndrome is just as good as any.

What happens next? Are you stuck with IBS for life?

The problem many people encounter once they are told they have IBS is that everything goes quiet. There are no more tests to be done and you’re sent on your merry way with this name for your condition but no solution.

It bothers me that people believe that having IBS is just something they have to live with. “Oh I have IBS which means I get constipated for four days and then have explosive diarrhoea for one day and then I’m normal for a week or two and then I get constipated again.”

Really? You live your life like this and you think it’s normal and OK?

Enter the Naturopath!

Luckily, there are a lot of people who are not willing to settle for a life full of stomach cramps, bloating, running to the toilet and generally feeling crap (pun intended)!
This is when people end up in my clinic saying that I’m their last option and they have heard that a Naturopath had helped a friend of a friend of a friend who had a similar problem. Yep, this is what we do.

How can I help you?

I was explaining what I do to someone the other day and I told them that I think of myself as a “Health Detective”. Pretty corny I know but I actually had to give myself a pat on the back for finally finding the words to explain what I do!

IBS is a condition where the detective work really comes in to play. No two cases are ever the same and it takes a lot of questioning and investigating to get to the bottom of what is causing the problem.

Just as the symptoms can vary dramatically from person to person, so too can the cause. This can range from stress, anxiety and nervousness, to food intolerance’s or an imbalanced diet or it could be that your digestive system isn’t keeping up with its job description and it needs a bit of retraining to remember how to digest and process your food. My job is to work with you to discover what the cause is and then help you to get your body back into balance so that IBS is a distant memory.

What do IBS treatments involve?

Obviously each person will have a different treatment plan based on what is causing their issue. Some of my patients just need to make a small change to their diet and *BOOM* irritable bowel syndrome is a thing of the past. Others need to take herbs to improve their digestive function and others need to start stress management practices like yoga and meditation while I give them herbs to nourish their overactive nervous system.

The key message here is that there is a reason that you have an irritable gut and there is ALWAYS something we can do to calm it down and help it be a bit more friendly and cooperative.

So you have a choice. Live with IBS and deal with the unpleasant symptoms, or join the growing number of enlightened beings and see a Naturopath who can help you on your path to freedom.

Healthy pancakes

I’m pretty excited about this recipe. If you read my breakfast blog you’ll know I have a life long love affair with lemon and sugar crepes. This love was so strong that when asked the “what would you request as your last meal on earth?” question, my reply was always “Crepes with lemon and sugar”.. I never thought that this would change.

But now, I can honestly say it has!

I’ve been making these healthy pancakes for a few months now and every time I am shocked at how brilliantly delicious they are! I even convinced one of my clients who doesn’t like banana to try them and he also thought they were delicious (surprisingly you can’t taste the banana).

And the most shocking thing is that a few weeks ago I had lemon and sugar crepes and while I enjoyed them at the time, afterwards I thought to myself “I really don’t need to eat them ever again”. I felt quite unwell in the hours after eating them due to the ridiculous amounts of processed castor sugar and all I could think is that I wished I had eaten my healthy pancakes instead.

Sometimes I get an image in my head of the former me gaping at myself in wide eyed horror, mouth open, clearly wondering who this new Laura is! That’s the image that flashes through my head when I think about this pancake scenario!

So without further ado here is the most amazing gluten free, dairy free, refined sugar free, totally guilt free

Healthy Pancake Recipe

Ingredients:
– 1 Banana
– 2 eggs
– 2 tablespoons blanched almond meal
– A little bit of coconut oil for cooking

Method:
1. Blend or whisk banana, eggs and almond meal together.
2. Heat a small amount of coconut oil in a frying pan.
3. Cook batter like a normal pancake flipping when the edges start to brown and bubbles appear on top (smaller pancakes are easier to flip).

Serve with coconut yoghurt and berries. (Serves 2)

Yes it’s that easy! Enjoy these for breakfast, dessert, morning tea, dinner, lunch ANY TIME!

Honey Soy Salmon with Vegetable Noodles

Posted on January 17, 2014 by Laura

This is a detox friendly dish for anyone on one of the Burton Health Cleanse programs but is delicious at any time 

Ingredients

• 1 leek sliced
• 1 zucchini
• 1/2 sweet potato
• 2 salmon steaks

Sauce:

• 4 tbs tamari
• 1 tbs honey
• 1/2 teaspoon grated ginger
• 1/4 lemon juice

Method

Place leek in an oven proof dish, lie salmon on top and drizzle sauce over leaving about a tablespoon behind. Cover with foil and bake in oven on 180 for 15mins.

Meanwhile use the Betti Bossy Veggie Twister to make zucchini and sweet potato noodles. Alternatively grate or julienne.

Heat a wok or large frying pan, spray lightly with olive oil, cook sweet potato on med heat tossing occasionally.  When 5mins cooking time left on salmon add zucchini noodles and a little more olive oil spray.

Serve and drizzle with remaining sauce.

Serves 2
Enjoy!

One Week Into My Detox and I'm Still Alive

Not that I ever thought I wouldn’t be, but I think that’s how people sometimes feel when they embark on a detox program.

I have to say that transitioning into this cleanse has been unbelievably easy for me. Yes, I can here you saying “But you’re a Naturopath, of course it’s easy. You should be healthy anyway!”.

And I am. But I’m not perfect and I fall into habits quite easily. Before I started this cleanse I was having a coffee every morning, drinking red wine too regularly and, I just opened a new clinic which was a very busy and full on month, so there were way too many “quick” dinners A.K.A takeaways.

I started my cleanse on a Thursday because I expected to get caffeine withdrawals so didn’t want to be at work when that happened. But it never did.
I expected to get cravings for red wine and chocolate but that still hasn’t happened and on Monday I gave my left over (home made) bounty bars away without even flinching!

What’s the secret to my success? Well I think there are a few things going on here.

The lack of coffee withdrawals I think is due to the fact that I did a 6 week detox at the beginning of this year which really improved my liver function and my liver has (so far) been keeping up with processing my daily coffee intake.

The lack of cravings is partly due mindset, partly because I like being healthy and looking after my body and partly because I am still eating lots of really yummy food! I start my day with a green banana smoothie, then I might snack on some nuts, lunch is a salad with boiled egg, walnuts and pepitas, maybe some rice crackers with macadamia butter as an arvo snack and then something yummy for dinner like salmon and veggies or chicken quinoa salad. So I really don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything when it comes to food.

I’ve also been getting up of a morning and exercising (walking or hula hooping), doing my stretching, I went for a massage on Friday and I had a bath on Saturday AND Sunday. So I really have been practising what I preach and it feels great!

It’s so nice to do a cleanse every 6 months or so just to check in with yourself, mentally and physically, and to get back on track with your health and lifestyle goals. And the fact that I’ve found it so easy this time just reinforces the benefits and proves that a good cleanse program really does have long lasting results