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In this episode of The Functional Medicine Radio Show, Dr. Carri’s special guest Dr. Deanna Minich explains how you can gain more vitality and joy by doing a life detox.
Dr. Deanna Minich is a functional nutritionist with a unique approach to clinical medicine that combines physiology and psychology. She has trained in functional medicine for the past decade with the “father of functional medicine,” Dr. Jeffrey Bland, as her mentor, and has served on the Institute of Functional Medicine’s Nutrition Advisory Board and curriculum committee teaching nutrition in their Detox Module.
She recently hosted The Detox Summit, an online event featuring 30 experts on detox, which was attended by almost 70K people worldwide. Following the Detox Summit, she led 3000 people through The Detox Challenge, a 21-day, online, functional medicine-oriented detoxification program. Her newest book is called Whole Detox: A 21-Day Personalized Program to Break Through Barriers in Every Area of Your Life.
Main Questions Asked:
- Can you explain what the 7 is all about?
- Can you gloss over what those 7 areas are?
- Can you walk us through what the 21-day program would be like?
- Can you talk about a patient who went through the program and the problems they were struggling with before and the transformation with their health and life?
- Is there anything else about your life detox program that you think is important for our listeners to hear?
Key Points made by Dr. Deanna:
- What I found in working with people all these years is that, when I would change their food, they started having changes in their lives.
- Detox is more than just changing your eating. When we change our eating, we change our living. When we change our living, we change our lives.
- In the book I talk about not just avoiding but what we need to bring in to nourish ourselves. I think that’s one of the very important pieces of detox programs out there that’s missing.
- I’d rather do a yin/yang approach where we focus on one side which is of course the removal of and looking at toxicities in our lives. On the other side of the coin, you have to think about what you’re going to put in place of those things once you remove them.
- Body-Mind-Spirit. I started looking deeper into what it means to connect our mind with our body. What about the effect of emotions on our health? Relationships? Whether or not we feel lonely versus having a community. I found that there are 7 parts to who we are. We have these 7 big areas into which we bucket our lives.
- To make it easy, I associate things with color. Think of the rainbow. Red is the Root (looking at the physical parts of us). Orange is connected to the Flow (emotions, creativity, self-expression). Yellow is connected to the Fire (transformation). Green is about the Heart (love). Aquamarine is the Throat area (speaking our truth, how we take things in, mindful eating). Indigo is connected to the Brain (insight). White is Spirit (life force).
- In the book there are chapters that describe each of those different colors and systems within you. As you move through the book, you get to the questionnaire which you can take to find out where you’re at. It’s a great gauge, you can always use it. Then you’re provided with 21 pages with different prescriptions for each day. You actually get the 7 different things you can do every day of the 21-day life detox.
- It’s been made so it will cost you no more than 30 minutes of your day to do these things outside of the eating, of course. If you can’t spend that 30 minutes, if you can take a part of it, something that you feel really drawn to, and go there, especially because we know that whatever you choose is going to ripple through your system and influence these 7 layers.
- All the recipes are in there and they’re all color-coded. People like the colors. I’ve been asked if the color can be doing something here. Yes, it is!
- In the book, we have a colorful insert that will take you through all of the different colors, what they stand for, what they represent. And you start thinking of yourself not just in numbers or in lab values but you start thinking of yourself as a spectrum.
- One of the things I like to do too is encourage creative expression. When people do the life detox, they start to open up to just creative ways to live. People start taking up painting, drawing, writing poetry, and taking pictures of their meals.
- Our goal isn’t really to have people lose weight. It’s really to help people feel energized to live and to live to their fullest.
- Working on ourselves is the best way to heal the planet.
- If you feel like you can’t wrap your head around doing all of this, join our community experience. Twice a year we do an online life detox program and that is absolutely powerful to be in the presence of thousands of people doing this.
Resources Mentioned:
Dr. Deanna’s Whole Detox facebook page
Book – Reclaim Your Energy and Feel Normal Again
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