Before starting on a colon cleanse for weight loss, it’s important to make a bit of a plan for how you’re going to approach weight loss in general. Starting a colon cleanse while beginning marathon training and cutting your daily food intake to 800 calories a day will definitely assist you with losing weight, but you’ll also likely hurt yourself in the process as you didn’t go about things intelligently. Colon cleanses can be an excellent weight loss tool, but as part of a weight loss plan everything must be approached properly to ensure success.

To your body, losing weight is just a question of mathematics. Your body really doesn’t care how many calories it gets as long as it gets the carbohydrates, fats, proteins, and related amino acids and vitamins necessary for health. Everything else will either get stored (causing you to gain weight) or expelled in your waste. If you consume too few calories your body will let you know by being hungry, fatigued and likely ill.

It’s been shown in hundreds of studies that a pound of body weight is equal to about 3500 calories. Whether you reduce your diet by 3500 calories in a certain timeframe or you exercise more frequently to burn the additional calories off – if you want permanently lose weight, you’ll need to ensure that you’re taking in fewer calories than you’re burning through your metabolism and exercise.

The best way to handle things would be to see a nutritionist or a physician before you start any dietary or exercise plan. A professional can help assess your current caloric intake versus your exercise and metabolism, and make recommendations of what steps you’ll need to take to help make the math work on your side.

One of the beneficial parts of exercising is that you don’t just burn calories when you’re performing the exercise. Your heart and metabolic rate will remain “up” for at least an additional few hours, sometimes even up to the next day depending on how hard you worked out. Your body needs to repair everything after your workout, and it will consume energy and calories to do so. Also, you’ve probably heard “muscle weighs more than fat” – muscle also burns more calories than fat. As you build out your muscle from exercising, your basal (or “resting”) metabolism will rise and you will burn more calories doing things like sitting around and sleeping.

Stop worrying about how fast you want to lose weight and worry more about committing to hitting your weight loss goals. You’ll feel a whole lot healthier for it!

First, I think it’s important to ensure that we start off with a clear idea of what I mean by “juice fasting”. Here’s a bit about juice fasting from Wikipedia:

Juice fasting is a type of fasting and detox diet in which the practitioner consumes only fruit and vegetable juices. Being available only in digestible carbohydrates, these foods are digested rapidly as the juice digestion process expends only a small amount of energy.

Additional reasons for undergoing juice fasts include religious reasons, losing weight and attempting to wean oneself from unhealthy habits, i.e., smoking, drinking soda, overeating, caffeine addiction, etc. Some more serious participants use juice fasting as an alternative to conventional medical practices, i.e., as a healing technique for pain, cancer, depression, arthritis, severe infections that failed antibiotics, autoimmune diseases and many other supposedly incurable diseases.

I think that accurately sums up what juice fasting is, and the “why” someone would want to juice fast… the reasons are many. I personally completed a two-week juice fast a few years ago and while I don’t think I will do it again, I will tell you that it was a life changing experience.

There are very few strange feelings your body can have that can compare to the feeling that you get when your digestive system shuts down. Literally, after about a day or two (depending on your body) of having no food in your stomach to process, your body will shut down your digestive system and begin working on other things. This is where the proponents of the juice fast say that all of the magic happens.

The theory is that because we go from meal to meal to meal with very little downtime for our digestive system, we don’t give our bodies much time to focus on regular maintenance tasks that are necessary for our well-being. Promoters of caloric restriction as a means to live a longer life look at things this way as well. The more we eat, the more our bodies have to work at processing food instead of bodily maintenance.

If you want to try a juice fast, you can easily do a one, two, or even five-day juice fast without suffering any ill effect on your body. Almost everyone has adequate stores of fats that can be broken down for energy, and the fresh fructose and other sugars you get from the juice will ensure your brain stays functioning properly.

Note that you can’t just go out and buy a few cans of V8 and call it a day. Juice fasting requires a high speed food juicer, as well as copious amounts of fruits and vegetables. Instead of eating a meal, juice up a combo of fruits and veggies and drink the juice. The juice cannot be stored, as the enzymes you release in the juicing process basically begin digesting the nutrients in the juice. So juice your fruits and veggies, drink the juice within 10 minutes, and come back for another helping in a few hours.

You can also pair a juice fast with a colon cleanse, however you will need to ensure that you start eating again as soon as you feel very hungry (you will know when this is, I assure you.) Check out the link below to view our many colon cleanse reviews:

Here are a couple more links with regards to juice fasting. Be sure to come back and let us know if you decide to try a fast, and how it went!

http://altmedicine.about.com/od/detoxcleansing/a/juice_fasting.htm

http://www.juicefasting.org/

Scientific and psychological factors aside – losing weight is just plain tough. But the question is – why? Why is weight loss such a challenge? Well, in my experience of asking this question, I’ve managed to successfully get a whole ton of various answers from different people, depending on their upbringing, social background, education, and more. Here are a few answers that stuck out to me:

1) There’s no convincing reason to bother losing weight – hearing this from more than a few people managed to stun me pretty significantly. One would think that the health risks of being overweight and obese – diabetes, heart disease, and a whole host of other illnesses – combined with the general social stigma would be enough to just flat out convince people that being overweight or obese isn’t the way humans are supposed to live. It seems, however, that is not the case. Depending on the local and national culture, weight and physical appearance can be something that’s just not thought much about. Compare the drastic physical differences between the average American and the average Scandinavian, for example.

The lesson here: If the people around you are overweight, and you’re overweight, you’re probably going to be less inclined to bother losing your additional weight. If you want to lose weight, try hanging around with fit people!

2) Weight loss is just too tough – I hear this one time and time again… that going from overweight/obese to a healthy weight or even to physically fit is too much of a challenge for people to undertake. My perception on this topic, for the most part, is that many people who decide they want to lose weight don’t have a realistic plan of action for doing this. There are a lot of factors in weight loss and weight control, including diet/calorie intake, level of physical activity, nutritional supplementation, and overall health management, just to name a few. Planning this out can be an extraordinary task – part of the reason some of the colon cleanses you see on this site like Digest-It and Bowtrol are so popular is that they handle much of the supplementation and internal health stuff for you, so you can focus on other things. You need to form a weight loss plan to ensure that you’re able to stay on the path to success.

The lesson here: If you want to lose weight, seek the help of a trainer and/or a personal coach to help you plan SMART goals, and be sure to do the things that your body and mind require for you to stay motivated. Don’t deny yourself of rewards and celebrate your success!

3) I’m perfectly happy with the way I am – if this is the case, and you TRULY are and are not just telling yourself this because of fear, laziness or another reason, then all the power to you. You have every right to enjoy life the way you want to.

The lesson here: Just remember that in the future, you might have to cover some additional health costs due to your lifestyle choice, and your ability to enjoy things like travel and other stuff later in life may be compromised.

What do you think? What are some of the factors you’ve seen or heard about why it’s so challenging to lose weight?

One of the questions that I get asked the most is: How often should a person do a colon cleanse? Is once a year enough, or twice a year… or should you be cleansing monthly? The answer is that the needs of your digestive tract are unique to your body, and only you can dictate how often you need to be cleansing.

There are many factors that play in to the amount of waste that will back up in your system. First, you have to consider the amount of dietary fiber you consume. If you consume quite a bit of fiber, then you’re likely to have smooth passage of waste through your body on a regular basis. However, if you’re the type that likes to eat processed/junk foods (aren’t we all) or the type that eats a lot of white flour foods with few raw fruits and vegetables, you may not be getting enough fiber. And that can raise the need for you to cleanse and rinse out your digestive tract.

The next item you need to worry about is your regular water intake. If you keep yourself well-hydrated, then your body will have enough water to ensure that your digestive system is functioning properly. Actually, part of the function of your colon is to reclaim water from your waste, so having a healthy colon will even help keep you hydrated! Once again though, if you are the typical North American that drinks a good deal of caffeine and doesn’t have a very regular water intake, you probably are doing more harm than good to your digestive tract.

From personal experience, I would worry much more about cleansing too much than cleansing too little. I do take cleansing supplements regularly to keep my system as healthy as possible… and I try to eat as healthy as I can. If you’re doing a colon cleanse every month, every two months, etc… you should be safe. Just be sure to keep yourself hydrated and eating the proper foods while you’re on your cleanse and you will be fine.

Another issue is that are so many good products on the market for colon cleansing that one can suffer serious option fatigue picking through them. You can read our colon cleanse reviews here for more information and user testimonials of cleanses. Pick yourself one and get your cleanse on!

It’s important to ensure that while you are doing a colon cleanse you are exercising regularly to achieve maximum weight loss. This doesn’t mean that you need to be pumping iron at the gym or running marathons, but you should definitely be adding some regular exercise in to your daily routine to help the process along. Here are a couple of easy tips to milk some exercise from your day.

Tip 1 – Walk or take transit to work: This one is the easiest. If you’re within an hour’s walk to your workplace, then skip bringing the car at least a couple days per week. If you’re not that close or you need to ensure that you can minimize your time spent walking… you can always take transit. Believe it or not, even the walk to the bus stop and back on both ends of your trip will add up. If it’s a mile in total from your house to the bus stop and from the bus stop on the other end to your workplace, you’ll add 20 miles a month of walking in to your routine. Very easy!

Tip 2 – Park at the far end of the parking lot: When you head shopping, to the mall, or anywhere that you’re facing a huge parking lot – just park at the far end. Unless you’re planning on purchasing something enormous like a television, you’ll be able to handle the walk there and back with ease. If you’re buying groceries for the family, you can always push the shopping cart through the parking lot to your car. Believe me – it’s amazing how much additional walking you can get out of this simple tip.

Tip 3 – Go for a walk after every meal: If you want to ensure that you’re burning off calories that are coming in, go for a brisk 20-30 minute walk after each meal. This will boost your metabolism, causing you to digest your food a bit faster so that your body can claim the energy needed, and the quicker metabolism will use additional calories to get the job done.

Tip 4 – Take the stairs: Here’s how this works. Any time you see an elevator, find the stairs and use them instead. If you see an escalator – be sure to walk on it instead of standing. Taking the stairs *down* generally doesn’t give much of a benefit so feel free to use the elevator while going down to save time. But taking the stairs up is a challenging exercise that will definitely maximize your calorie burn!

There you go – a few easy tips that will help you maximize the amount of weight loss you experience while colon cleansing. Good luck and keep at it!!

Having a healthy daily intake of dietary fiber is an important part of keeping your colon healthy. Dietary fiber (we’ll refer to it as “fiber” from here on out) is the part of plant foods such as fruits, vegetables and grains that pass through your digestive system and colon without being digested. As fiber passes, it absorbs water and helps keep all of the food and waste passing smoothly through the intestines. A person without a good intake of fiber is going to have some… difficulty with their natural daily processes.

Fiber is made up of non-starch polysaccharides – such as cellulose – and other plant components such as waxes, chitins, pectins, dextrins and oligosaccharides. You can obtain fiber – usually categorized as either “water-soluble” or “insoluble” – through eating a wide variety of plant-based foods. Insoluble fiber attracts water as it passes through the intestines, which softens the waste and causes it to move a bit more quickly through your colon and digestive tract.

Fiber plays an important part in other dietary processes as well. Fiber is very beneficial for those trying to lose weight, as it helps you feel full for longer periods, causing less hunger and snacking cravings. Because fiber is obtained through healthy foods such as fruits and vegetables, obtaining a proper amount of fiber in your diet revolves around insuring you are eating lots of fruits and veggies which are loaded with additional vitamins and nutrients.

Any colon cleanse that you see recommended on this site, whether it is Colon xR, Total Cleanse, or Colon Cleanse Pro, will all have a good amount of fiber as an added part of the product. We believe through our testing that fiber is a very important piece of any colon cleanse and will help scrub your colon clean of the toxins and impurities that have built up. Fiber will also help with the weight loss portion of your colon cleanse, if that is your goal.

Make sure you’re getting enough fiber in your daily diet! If you’re lacking and want to get your fiber in an easy to take pill or capsule form, click here to check out our Colon Cleanse Reviews for many different products and select the one that you feel is right for you!

Are you on a diet, or trying to lose weight? Losing weight and maintaining that weight loss is one of the greatest challenges any individual can undertake. Along with proper diet and exercise, a colon cleanse will help you achieve your weight loss goals and provide you with a cleaner, healthier body.

The colon is the last piece of the digestive system that waste passes through on its way out of the body. The colon works to recover electrolytes, salt, and water from waste before it is passed. Beneficial bacteria in the colon, known as “gut flora,” break down fiber in the waste for nourishment and create enzymes which are used in turn by the cells in the lining of the colon for nourishment.

If you’re currently eating a diet that is very rich in fiber, vegetables and fruits, then you’re a step ahead in keeping your colon healthy. However, if you’re guilty of eating a processed or “junk” foods, fast food, simple carbohydrates, or fatty foods, you are repeatedly putting a great deal of stress on your colon. An unhealthy colon puts a significant burden on the digestive system and other important bodily functions.

The colon works to remove bodily waste from the small intestine to outside of the body by muscle contraction. If the colon is blocked or lined with toxins and old waste, the system will slow down and the muscle action made less effective. In turn, the gut flora won’t provide as much benefit, which will reduce the overall health of your colon and digestive tract. Colon cleansing will assist the mobility of waste passage, and help —restore the system to proper working order.

Because of the less-than-ideal condition of the average person’s colon, It is recommended that you begin your weight loss regime with a colon cleanse. By starting with the cleanse, you will provide your body with a clean, healthy slate to continue to build and meet your weight loss goals. The added energy and vitality you feel will translate into increased stamina for your exercise program. You’ll also receive a nice “kick start” to your weight loss — many people lose anywhere from five to ten pounds during a colon cleanse.

One other very important item to consider is your water consumption. Cleansing and dieting in general are very dehydrating — your body is making use of a lot of water during exercise to burn calories, and using a lot during cleansing to flush out the toxins. Be sure to drink a minimum of eight glasses of water a day — this works out to about two liters. If you feel thirsty, you’ve waited too long to drink.

Be sure to click here and check out our Colon Cleanse Reviews so that you can find the cleanse that’s right for you! Digest-It and Bowtrol are highly recommended.

Overall, colon cleansing will give you a nice boost in your weight loss efforts, help you feel in better health, boost your energy and stamina, and improve the efficiency of your entire digestive tract. Remember to stay true to your weight loss goals and to work hard and you’ll achieve positive results. Good luck with your cleanse!

In my last post, I talked about some of the benefits that colon cleansing will bring to your health. Here’s some information on the minor “side effects” that you might experience during your cleanse.

Like any natural health remedy or medication, colon cleansing has the potential for minor side effects which vary based on the individual. Some of the possible side effects include:

-nausea which may be accompanied by fever
-headaches or migraines
-aching or pain
-exhaustion

If you encounter any side effects, they will usually clear up quickly and you may or may not need to stop the cleanse. If you feel that your side effects are serious, stop the cleanse and seek out the advice of a doctor or other medical professional.

Don’t forget to ensure that you are well hydrated; keeping your water intake high will aid the cleanse and help prevent the side effects that will accompany dehydration.

How can I best avoid the side effects of colon cleansing?

As with anything, the key to avoiding side effects is by cleansing in moderation. If you engage in any method of colon cleansing too frequently without giving your body time to recover, you may end up damaging your colon. You can also reduce your colon’s effectiveness by cleansing too often as the beneficial bacteria and flora will be repeatedly washed away. This will negatively impact your body’s natural functions, and also your immune system. Follow the guidelines or instructions that you receive with your colon cleansing product and be sure to use it properly.

Keep these tips in mind and you will have a positive experience with your cleanse. Good luck!