The liver is the largest solid organ in your body, much bigger than most of us realize, sitting underneath the right lung and weighing in at 1.5 kilos (over 3 lb). Although the liver is very fragile, it can renew itself almost entirely. Amazingly, it can lose up to 90 per cent of its structure and still regenerate itself, given the right conditions, in just six weeks. It’s an absolutely vital organ – it performs as many as 500 functions, many of them essential. The liver is the body’s busiest filter, processor and metabolic factory. Everything that the body takes in (unless it’s injected) passes through the liver, and every second of every day the liver is recycling and detoxifying to keep us healthy. If it’s doing its job properly, the rest of the body works more efficiently and you’ll be able to cleanse, lose weight and reach optimum health more easily. So we need to support this wonderful organ – our chemical factory – as much as possible during the 48-Hour Plan.
some of what the liver does:
Detoxifies – filters out and excretes waste and poisons – e.g. drugs, bacteria from our food. (The liver filters more than a litre of blood every minute!)
Manufactures bile.
Manufactures cholesterol.
Manufactures vitamin A and stores vitamins A, B12, D, E & K.
Manufactures enzymes.
Stores iron and copper.
Metabolizes carbohydrates, proteins and fats.
Disposes of dead blood cells.
Keeps immune system healthy and produces infection-fighting cells (such as microphages).
feeling ‘liverish’
Liver stagnation and the need for detoxification usually come about through toxin or food excesses. If too much food is eaten, especially rich, greasy food, the liver becomes swollen and sluggish in an attempt to break it all down and dispose of it. Hence the expression ‘liverish’: a lovely old-fashioned word used to describe how people feel the day after eating and drinking too much! It’s the same with alcohol, caffeine, drugs, high-protein diets, and exposure to external pollutants and chemicals. They all put too much strain on the liver, if consumed in large quantities.
! TOP TIPS FOR HELPING THE LIVER THE MORNING AFTER THE NIGHT BEFORE
1. The best thing you can do for your liver is undereat – remember ‘Give yourself permission not to eat’? If you’re feeling ‘liverish’ you probably won’t want to eat much anyway, so listen to your body and just drink plenty of water, and vegetable and fruit juices.
2. If you do feel like eating, make sure you eat plenty of fresh raw or steamed vegetables, especially those cruciferous vegetables such as broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, kale and cauliflower, because they’re full of nutrients that really help the liver detox and unload.
3. Brown rice is considered the food of the liver in Chinese medicine, so make sure you have a small portion the morning after the night before, if you can eat.
4. Then have your last meal of that day in the afternoon so the liver and gall bladder have nothing else to do during their precious regeneration cycle from 11 p.m. to 3 a.m.
5. And don’t have a hair of the dog! In fact, give up alcohol for a couple of days. This will help the liver to recover more quickly. Don’t forget that 95 per cent of any alcohol drunk has to be metabolized in the liver, which means all the workers in the chemical factory will be so busy breaking down all those glasses of booze that they won’t have time to do anything else. They won’t manage to metabolize any fat that has been eaten, which means last night’s packet of crisps or chips will just stay in the liver as a fatty build-up!
Remember, alcohol converts straight to fat, not to anything useful like glucose or glycogen.
6. Don’t take painkillers – they’ll put an extra burden on the liver.
7. Do drink ‘Liver Flush’. Mix the juice of half a lemon, half a clove of crushed garlic, a little grated fresh ginger and a dessertspoon of olive oil. Add a small glass of vegetable juice or vegetable stock, stir vigorously and drink. It sounds odd, but it does work – and the oil will help ‘soak up’ the alcohol.
carbs and the liver
The liver’s health is also very important for the proper metabolizing of protein, fat and carbohydrate. Carbs – in the form of sugars and starches – are broken down by the digestion and absorbed into the bloodstream. The blood then travels to the liver, where the sugars are converted into glucose, the fuel the body needs for energy. A healthy liver regulates this fuel in the body and allows certain levels of glucose to circulate in the blood for the cells to use when they need it.
But if you eat more carbohydrate than is immediately required, the liver will convert that extra glucose into glycogen, which will be stored in the liver or in the muscles. Later on, when energy is needed, the liver will convert the glycogen back to glucose and return it to the bloodstream. Excess glucose is then converted into fatty acids and stored as body fat. The liver is very clever!
! TOP TIP FOR WEIGHT LOSS
If you regularly eat large quantities of carbs, however healthy they may be, and you don’t exercise, you will put on weight. Body fat is simply a form of storage for energy. If you decrease your carbs intake and increase exercise those fat reserves are converted straight back to glucose for the body to use as fuel!
long-term liver imbalance
In Chinese medicine, the liver is recognized as being potentially the most congested of all the organs with too much fat and unmetabolized food and too many chemicals disrupting its valuable work and clogging it up. Traditional Chinese physiology states that a healthy liver establishes a smooth flow of energy (chi) through the whole person and that when the liver is ‘happy’ there is no stress or tension. People with unblocked healthy livers tend to be calm and happy, while people with a liver imbalance could be producing all sorts of physiological and psychological symptoms. Just check these lists to see if any of the signs ring a bell!
signs of a liver imbalance
EMOTIONAL
· Anger
· Impatience
· Frustration
· Resentment
· Rudeness
· Edginess
· Aggression
· Stubbornness
· Arrogance
· Violent Temper
· Mood Swings
PHYSICAL
· Nausea or Sickness
· Sudden, Explosive Bowel Movements
· Irregular or Heavy Periods
· Swollen Abdomen
· Migraines
· Craving for Oranges
· Pain that Moves around the Body
· Fibroids
· Cysts
· Haemorrhoids
· Eye Problems
· Red Cheeks
· Frequent Small Thirst
· Hot Palms and Soles of the Feet
· Insomnia
My take is that the liver is like the Planner, and if you treat the liver you’re treating every other organ in your body, especially the kidneys and colon. If you suffer from constipation or a sluggish colon, looking after the liver and giving it everything you can to support it will, eventually, help your colon to function more efficiently. And don’t forget, as you will see in chapter 15, you need your colon to be ‘evacuating’ as often as possible if those toxins are to leave your body!
Fasting or detoxing minimizes the liver’s work – so the 48-Hour Plan will be like a three-day bank holiday weekend for this precious organ, giving it time to stop routine work and give itself a thorough spring clean! And the biggest help we can give the liver, apart from diet, is a technique as old as the hills!
castor oil packing for the liver
Castor oil was used therapeutically for hundreds, if not thousands, of years in ancient India, China, Persia, Egypt, Africa, Greece and Rome. Rather more recently, our grannies knew about the usefulness of castor oil and used it for all sorts of ailments before the advent of modern medicines. My grandmother used to make any child suffering from constipation swallow a tablespoon of castor oil. (Yuck!) What are less understood are the benefits of rubbing castor oil into the skin and how this can affect the nearest organs. One of my clients swears by it for relieving conditions as diverse as painful swollen toes and psoriasis.
benefits of castor oil packing
Improves colon elimination.
Reduces flatulence and nausea!
Improves digestive assimilation.
Stimulates liver, gall bladder and pancreas.
Improves lymphatic and blood circulations.
Draws acids and infections out of the body.
Reduces inflammation and swelling.
Relieves pain, including headaches.
Improves nervous system.
No one is too sure how castor oil works, but there are plenty of theories around, along with some scientific research. Applying castor oil to the skin, from where it is absorbed into the bloodstream, appears to act as a trigger for the prostaglandins – the potent hormone-like substances that affect blood pressure, metabolism, nerve impulses, immunity and, interestingly, inflammation. This could explain why my client’s problems cleared up. Castor oil also seems to be ‘bioenergetic’, emitting a white light visible 6–8 inches around the container. Many complementary therapists believe that its extraordinary molecular make-up may have energetic properties similar to that of a crystal.
As far as the liver is concerned, the theory I like the most, and the one that has produced the best results for my clients and myself, is that putting castor oil on to the skin appears to release the mucus lying under the area where the oil is rubbed in. Don’t ask me how or why, it just does! Your liver may have years’ worth of toxicity in it, and castor oil packing can’t possibly hurt you – it has to be worth a try, albeit a bit messy!
However, I am recommending castor oil packing for the liver only as part of a dedicated six-week or longer detox and not for the Weekend Plan. It’s absolutely fine to regularly rub castor oil into the skin near an ache or pain, but using it on the liver with the packing method is a more serious undertaking. During a longer detox you should use the technique outlined below on three consecutive evenings a week, for three consecutive weeks. And then leave a week before repeating the regime. It would be a good idea to follow a three-day castor oil treatment with a colonic irrigation as your body needs to get all those backed-up toxins out as quickly as it possibly can. If you’re doing a six-week detox, it might be worthwhile considering a colonic half way through your detox anyway to help shift things along! There’s no point getting everything moving if it’s got nowhere to go.
how to do castor oil packs
YOU WILL NEED:
Castor Oil
A Woollen or Normal Flannel
A Bin Liner, Plastic Bag (preferably without lettering – the castor oil might make this run) or Clingfilm
An Old Towel
A Hot-Water Bottle
METHOD:
Apply the castor oil generously to the flannel, but without saturating it.
Place over your liver.
Cover the flannel with a plastic food bag, or bin liner, or wrap clingfilm around the body to hold the cloth in place as it can leak and turn very messy.
Cover the whole area with an old towel, and wrap it around the body. A length of crêpe bandage can be used to hold it in place.
The hot-water bottle is then placed over the liver, to encourage the body to absorb the oil. Keep the hot-water bottle in place for 30–60 minutes while you rest, then remove it. You can then go to bed, leaving the oil on overnight.
Wash off the excess oil when you’ve finished, or the next morning.
Store the cloth in an airtight container. It can be reused lots of times before it needs washing.
THE LAZY, QUICK WAY – ALMOST AS EFFECTIVE!
Cover the skin above the liver in castor oil, and sit in a warm (not hot) bath for a minimum of 20 minutes. After that, you can either leave the oil on and wear an old T-shirt, or wash it off and go to bed. Either way, your skin will have absorbed most of it and you will sleep like a log.
Or: Cover the area over the liver in castor oil, put a filthy old T-shirt on, place a hot-water bottle on top, and go to bed. Remove the hot-water bottle after 30–60 minutes and go to sleep.
Again, this can be done on three nights in a row per week for three consecutive weeks. Then have a week off before repeating.
For the Weekend Plan, I’m suggesting an Epsom salts bath (explained in chapter 15). These don’t work on the liver to quite the same degree as castor oil packing, but they do a very good job getting the lymph moving and detoxifying you, and are hugely relaxing.