DETOX and juice diets have been popular over recent years, especially among women and those wanting to lose weight.

Many choose to detox after a period of excessive calorie consumption, such as Christmas, holidays or parties.

The idea behind a detox diet is to rid the body of toxins and fast track weight loss. But do detox and juice diets really work?

Firstly, toxins come from pretty much everything and everywhere.

The food we eat, the water we drink, traffic pollution, cleaning products, deodorant, lack or sleep, exercise ... yes, most things.

So if we are going to truly detox then we need to take a look at our whole lifestyle and not just what we consume.

While we are overloaded with toxins and we do need to get rid of them, unfortunately it’s just not possible for our body to go at a super-human-rate to excrete all of these toxins from drinking juice.

In fact, if we restrict our diets to purely fruit and veg and significantly cut out proteins, we actually shut down the first stages of liver detoxification which can take months to recover. Not to mention the effect restricting calories has on our metabolism.

The fact is that our bodies have their own system of detoxification. So if we are concerned about our health and wellbeing, a long-term lifestyle change will be much more efficient at reducing the harmful effects toxic waste has on our bodies, rather than a few days or weeks of a juice or detox diet.

Eating good quality food (organic where possible), drinking filtered water, cutting down on alcohol, not smoking or being around those who do, sleeping well, not running or exercising in heavy traffic or polluted areas, not using air fresheners, using less cleaning products or less harmful ones, not exercising excessively, going easy on aerosols, cutting back on medication or finding natural pain relief, wearing sunscreen ... these are all small changes you can make that are more substantial in detoxifying your body.

Along with these, drink plenty of water (filtered), with fresh fruit and vegetables.

Where weight loss is concerned, the fewer toxins you open yourself to, or consume, the easier it will be to control your weight.