Liver Cleansing Cautions

Liver cleansing is a popular way to detoxify your body and lose weight. Jumping straight into a liver cleanse without properly preparing your body, however, can do more harm than good. So can abruptly resuming your old diet after your cleanse--especially if your diet contains lots of refined foods, alcohol or preservatives and lacks adequate fiber and fluids. Liver cleansing isn't for everyone, either, and can worsen certain conditions. It's best to check with your health-care provider before attempting a cleanse.

Time Frame

Before performing a cleanse, eliminate foods and substances that are hard on your liver and provide your liver with what nationally known nutritionist Ann Louise Gittleman calls "liver-loving foods." Do this for a full week before cleansing. This provides your liver nutritional support before you require it to do extra, heavy duty work. That's because when your liver undergoes its detoxification processes, it takes a couple of steps. In the first, it mobilizes enzymes that bind with toxins and start oxidizing them, with some becoming neutralized and others actually becoming more toxic to your body. In the second step, your liver binds the second type of toxins with a nutrient or amino acid. If the liver doesn't finish this second phase, your system gets overloaded with extra toxins, and you are worse off than you were before. Toxins that fall into the second category come from substances like alcohol, medicines and hormones. Refined carbohydrates, hormones, nitrates, caffeine and preservatives can all disrupt this second phase in the liver.

Expert Insight

Do not perform a liver cleanse without cleaning out your colon first, advises Jon Barron in "Lessons from the Miracle Doctors." This provides an outlet for the toxins your liver releases, he advises.

Warning

Depending on the method, performing a liver cleanse may be unsafe if you have certain medical conditions. If you have gallstones, for example, and you use a liver flush that calls for large amounts of olive oil, this will cause your gallbladder to contract. That can cause a gallstone to get lodged in the gallbladder's narrow opening. You'd need emergency surgery to remedy this situation, advises DeWayne McCulley in "Death to Diabetes: The Six Stages of Type 2 Diabetes Control and Reversal." He also advises that absence of symptoms related to the gallbladder does not mean you have no risk, so your liver flush should be conducted under the auspices of a health-care professional.

Considerations

Support your liver with a special diet for three days after a liver cleanse, advises Gittleman, author of "The Fast Track Detox Diet." Otherwise, you'll end up being more "toxic," bloated and constipated than before you did the cleanse. Gittleman recommends a combination of foods. Eat a probiotic food such as yogurt or sauerkraut. Consume citrus fruits, cruciferous vegetables and green leafy vegetables and herbs. Use sulfur-rich foods like garlic and onions. Add liver healers like artichokes, beets, celery and asparagus. Round out your daily eating plan with fiber-rich foods or fiber supplements, lean protein and oil that contains healthy fats. Drink half of your weight in purified water daily.

Misconceptions

Conducting a liver cleanse is not the end of the process, according to Barron. You also need to use a liver-building tonic regularly. Barron recommends one that does three things: stimulates your liver to rebuild itself via herbs like milk thistle, protects your liver with herbs like picrorhiza kurroa and cleans fat from your liver with herbs like dandelion root, artichoke, barberry or beet leaf.