You know the fad of "cleanses"? Ways to "purify" and "flush" your body of any "toxins" or "chemicals" inside?
I'm using a lot of quotation marks because I know your entire body is chemicals, and your liver is going to remove toxins from your body, not tomato juice or alkaline water. (On a side note, if someone other than a doctor wants you to drink something with a pH lower than 2.5 or higher than 10, they are trying to hurt you.)
But I also know that with my general anxiety I, and a lot of people who suffer from it, have an obsession with being clean. It's a little like OCD, but it can manifest in picking- trying to get all the bumps off your skin, regardless of if you bleed. Or obsessive showering, cleaning of your space, or restricting foods. It's clear in the popularity of the pimple-popping videos on youtube that it makes people feel better. Cleaner.
Starting when I was young, I would have dreams, and then fantasies, about running myself through a coffee-strainer type filter. Some sort of laser machine that would slough off my dead skin, my unwanted body hair, toxins, and cell-waste, take out anything I was allergic to, or anything my immune system was attacking, second hand smoke, anything caught in my lungs, viruses, harmful bacteria, extra fats, and leave it in a blood-black sludge under my feet.
This kind of fantasy is easily exploited into fad diets and so-called cleanses. Because, really, we grew up with the plastic organs passed out in class, of what our lungs or liver or brain or stomach, or any number of organs might look like if we messed with the wrong things. Alcohol, meth, soda pop, cigarettes. We learn livers can fail, or just not work well enough. Then we learn sugar addiction is real, realize we have it, and if you have a mind that runs a mile a minute, it's a downward spiral.
But really, all I have are fantasies of my coffee filter laser, because fad-diets aren't going to help my body. My body is doing its job and keeping me as clean and healthy as it can. I can't scrub stains out of my organs manually.
I have to just bring less garbage into my body.