By Derek Henry, Holistic Health Coach for Healing the Body
Your health is directly connected to your liver. So if you see visible signs of liver damage, you have already created significant issues and need to take immediate action to start healing this highly important organ. Let’s see how your liver shapes up, and what you can do about it.
Understand Your Liver
The liver is your largest interior organ and is primarily responsible for keeping our bloodstream free of toxic poisons. If it was allowed to fully complete this mission, we could live forever! Not only is it a large filter, but it also plays a key role in digestion, the formation of blood, and defending our bodies against infection.
In fact, during digestion your liver secretes bile into our small intestine in order to lubricate our intestinal walls. This bile regulates our amount of friendly bacteria, destroys unwanted organisms, and stimulates peristaltic activity to help move fecal matter through and out of our body.
When the liver is weak or congested, it’s ability to neutralize toxic substances becomes hampered, and toxic bile becomes secreted which moves through your small intestine creating inflammation, and what is often known as ‘leaky gut’.
For these reasons, and several others, your liver health is paramount in achieving true health due to it’s connection to all these factors. It must be healed in order for your digestion, immune system, and over all well being to be at ideal levels.
Signs of Liver Damage
The difficulty with the liver is that it doesn’t ‘cry out in pain’. You can do serious damage to it and never experience symptoms you would connect or directly relate to a congested liver. However, there are many signs such as several deep lines or puffiness between the eyebrows, and being unable to tolerate the cold in winter. On the flip side, if your liver is overactive, you may also feel feverish and find summer months very uncomfortable. Othersymptoms and signs of liver damage include:
- Anemia
- Hemorrhoids
- Dark urine
- Small red ’spots’ the size of a pinhead that come and go in various parts on the body
- Skin problems such as eczema, acne, hives, itching, rashes. Skin may have dark pigmentation or spots on face, back of hands, forehead, or around the nose.
- Jaundice (yellowing of skin)
- Eye problems (sensitivity to light, moving spots, double vision)
- Whites of eyes become yellow
- Mineral deficiency
- Hormonal imbalances in women creating malfunctions in conception and loss of sex drive
- Hormonal imbalances in men which may produce feminine qualities
- Loss of weight
- Obesity
- Sinus and tonsil issues
- Alternating constipation and diarrhea
- Headaches, dizziness, and shivering
- Sensitivity to chemicals and smells
- Loss of appetite
- Eating disorders
- Diabetes
- Hepatitis
- Cirrhosis
Since an impaired liver can not process toxins, even the brain and central nervous system are affected. This can cause depression, daydreaming, an inability to concentrate and remember things, and more severe things like mental outbursts.
How Does Liver Damage Occur?
Since our liver is a large filter, everything we take must pass through it.
- It stores all the remains of drugs, vaccines, birth control, and prescriptions we have taken throughout our entire lifetime.
- Excessive alcohol consumption.
- The fats from dairy and fried foods, as well as flour products, weaken the liver.
- Improper food combining.
- Filling your stomach past 80% full slows down your liver function so that it becomes inefficient.
- Chronic and/or acute exposure to synthetic materials and chemicals
- Lack of sleep and fatigue will also weaken the liver. This is a vicious cycle because as the liver weakens it becomes more difficult to sleep. If you find you are sleepy after eating, and/or feel wide awake at 1 or 2 am, you can be reasonably assured you have sustained liver damage. You may also tend to worry at that time or have negative thoughts.
It should also be noted to pregnant or nursing women that more and more newborns are having damaged livers as a result of mothers poor eating habits. The liver of the fetus intercepts everything the mother eats and changes it into something useful, or something that will clog its tiny new organ.
Healing the Liver From Inflicted Damage
Simply stated, we need to stop overworking it by changing the way we eat if we want to heal our liver.
In addition to that, we must work on cleaning up the colon and encouraging the liver to heal through herbs (like milk thistle, artichoke leaf, dandelion leaf) and probiotics. Exercise is a daily must (walking, yoga, rebounding), as well as resting more (but not immediately after meals).
The emotion of anger is also connected to the liver so do not hold in your anger, or relive or feel any anger towards any situation. As you cleanse your liver, you may feel uncontrollably angry and irritated at everything.
Liver Cleansing
The liver is one organ you want to gently cleanse, so going directly to a full scale liver cleanse may not be a good idea for proper healing. However, what is even more vital to start with is eating properly and starting to cleanse and detox your blood.
You need to rest your digestive tract by eating lightly, and making your meals small, vegetarian, and alkaline so that there is very little energy required for the act of digestion. If you happen to lose your appetite, drink lemon water and take vegetable broths with a sea vegetable base. It may also be a great time for juicing with green vegetables as the primary source.
Also, you need to avoid fats from animal foods and look to avoid them altogether. Stay away from vegetable oils and butter as they will slow down liver function. Eat lightly steamed and blended foods, and ones that are rich in chlorophyll (dark green in nature). Your last meal should always be a light one so your stomach is empty when you go to bed
Also take a good probiotic producing beverage such as apple cider vinegar and coconut kefir. They are excellent liver cleansers and provide an optimal environment for digestion. If you do decide to start on some liver cleansing herbs, consider that your body needs to be fortified properly before your liver can do that effectively.
Following that, consider herbs like dandelion, artichoke leaf, milk thistle, and reishi. This liver and gallbladder tea, combined with this liver tonic, will give you a great start.
*Image of “liver“ via Shutterstock
