Whether you chew it and swallow it, slather it on your body, scrub it into your scalp, or spray it all over you, you should know it’s going end up inside you and this article is all about what it may or may not be doing to you and your fat loss goals….

Meet your liver.  Aptly called by some your “Project Manager”.  Let’s pretend for a moment that your body is a house, and you embarking on a new journey of health is a newly constructed house after tearing down the old one. Like any good construction job, when contractors come to the house, they first must be sent to the project manager to find out where they are supposed to go and when. The process of building a house is a complex and timely matter that must be adhered to by a set protocol…such as, lay the foundation, build the walls, dry it in, etc.

Therefore if the gutter-guys show up, but you don’t even have the house framed yet, he’ll have to wait. Your project manager will set him aside until the set time that is right for gutters to be installed.

The same is true for your body.  Your body is a complex, precise system of activities that have to be adhered to by a set protocol of breathing oxygen, nutrition, movement, rest, and more. 

So what happens when there are so many contractors showing up at the job sight and your project manager isn’t ready for them yet and can’t use them?  Your project manager might just walk out and quit on the job.

Let’s set up the scenario.

Your liver’s main job is to filter the blood before passing it to the rest of the body.  This means anything that comes into your “House” via skin cream, cracker-jack snacks, shampoo and straightening serum, aftershave, pollution, deodorant, sodas, coffees and crazy artificial coffee creamers, nail polishes, teas, Big Macs, cigarette smoke, perfumes, all goes straight to your “project manager” and has to filtered out before entering the rest of your body.  And if mass quantities of processed chemicals in cleaning products and toiletries, as well as processed foods from fast food and boxed nutrition are coming in, in addition to polluted, stuffy office air or lots of car fumes from being in traffic are all coming in at once, chances are two things are going to occur:

1. Your liver is going to make the executive decision to wrap each toxin in fat since it doesn’t know what to do with the toxin.  Enter on-going weight gain for “no apparent reason”. Your liver says, “I haven’t got time for this, and not sure where to send you because I’m not sure what you are,“Mr. Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil” so I’ll just store you in a fat cell.
2. Your live will no longer function normally and walk out on the job and leave you in a diseased state.

Allow this to go on long enough and pretty soon you’ll be staring at a piece of paper from your doctor with the diagnosis, “Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease”.  Not a good place to be.

So what does this have to do with fat burning? Well, obviously if your liver has chosen to store toxins in fat cells, chances are your fat cells are going to be increasing in size, rather than what happens with a healthy liver and good nutrition who filters out what little impurities are present and then sends the signal to burn stored body fat for energy since “all systems are go!”.  That’s right.  If your body is doing what it is supposed to do based on the proper oxygen, nutrition, movement and rest that’s occurring then the fat-burning machine that you were made to be.

That leads me to my top 5 Steps to Help your Liver (Project Manager) do his job and do it well and make you the fat-burning machine you were created for!

1. Reduce or even better completely eliminate processed sugar, processed fast foods, even gluten-free processed foods, and too much fruits specifically high-sugar fruits like grapes, pineapple, oranges, FRUIT JUICE OF ANY KIND, and stick to low sugar fruits instead.
2. Reduce or completely eliminate parabens, sulfates, and  of all kinds from skincare, haircare, sops, makeup and anything else that goes on your skin.  If it goes on your skin make sure it’s as natural as possible and a good rule of thumb is if there is an ingredient that you shouldn’t eat, then you shouldn’t put it on your body either. Consider eliminating harmful cleaning products that you could breath in or touch too, such as Windex, Clorox, and All-purpose cleaners.  Switch instead to cleaning with things like Vinegar and baking soda!
3. Take in liver friendly foods like dark leafy greens, and vegetables of all kinds!  In addition to helping the liver heal, vegetables will detoxify those excess estrogens and environmental toxins out of the body.
4. Crowd out all sodas, juices, sweet teas, and alcohol (yes red wine too) with water, specifically water with lemon and apple cider vinegar which can actually help the liver function more optimally!  Check out the liver detoxifying “Mock-tail” inside this newsletter for a zingy, fizzy way to help your liver do what it needs to do.
5. Supplement with a few key liver-helpers such as an herb Schisandra, Turmeric,  N-Acetyl Cestiene, Alpha Lipoic Acid, Zinc, Magnesium, and especially…liver itself.  That’s right, consider eating grass-fed liver from cows, or chickens, whichever you prefer….or if you prefer none at all, no biggee.  Consider a liver supplement containing several of the herbs I listed above like ATP Science’s Cort RX, which I personally take and recommend.  Cort RX contains a quality array of herbs that help are known anti-inflammatory, anti-oxidant, immune modulating and liver protective herbs.  Available at www.atpscience.com.

If your project manager walks out on the job because he can’t handle the workload, you are looking at the possibility of your house sitting and rotting or completely crumbling altogether.  Take care of your liver, and it will take care of you!