Whenever you make large changes in life, the first week can be the most intense and our experience was no different for our candida cleanse!
Some potentially uncomfortable side effects are common when undertaking a candida cleanse as large amounts of fungus die at once and release their toxic metabolic by-products into the human body. This is so normal that it has a name - a Herxheimer reaction - but it can cause symptoms that lead some people to prematurely abort their full cleanse protocol.
Since all people are different and have various factors affecting their lives and health, our group experienced a whole cascade of symptoms! However, there are a few reoccurring symptoms that we all experienced that we want to share with you. That way if you decide to embark on this same journey of health you will have an idea of what to expect!
Let start off with Day 1 and take a look at our most common symptoms:
If you take a look at the chart above you will see the top three occurring symptoms are tiredness, excessively strong feelings or emotions, and increased appetite.
Tiredness while detoxing:
We were expecting the top symptom while doing this cleanse to be decreased energy levels. It is commonly known that the first thing affected when your body goes through change - especially cleaning out things that should not be in our body - is that you have less energy or experience some tiredness. It is much like being sick when your white blood cells are working very hard to clear out the foreign invader: you are might feel the need to sleep a lot more to give your body the energy it needs to keep working hard on the task at hand!
Excessively Strong feelings or emotions while detoxing:
Candida overgrowth often effects the digestive tract first. The gut has more nerves than the spinal cord and more neurotransmitters than the brain; in fact, 95% of the body's serotonin is located in the guts. Some even refer to it as the body's second brain, so it may come as no surprise that in cleaning out this system, intense thoughts and feelings may be stirred up (or that candida overgrowth is linked to depression, anxiety, and ADHD, but that's a topic for another post).
Our physical bodies are much more connected to our emotions and memories than most people realize. If people have emotional issues they are working through, it will often cause them physical pain or ailments. In turn it makes total sense that when you are cleansing your physical being you might release some clogged up emotional aspects as well.
The most common trait our group has seen from these emotional cleansing of feelings is either extreme sadness, a little bit of old frustration/anger, and in some cases extreme happiness. Many of us have remembered old traumas vividly over the last week, and this really is a blessing if you don't ignore what is happening - which is might be what caused it to get stuck in the first place! If you look at past trauma from an objective point of view, it is usually easier to understand why that might be coming up during this cleansing process and it can help to release the trauma. This is where the support of a group cleanse is especially wonderful!
Increased appetite:
This was a very interesting and somewhat unexpected side effect of the cleanse. For most of us, the increase in appetite only came for day 1 and day 2 of the first week, after which we steadily had a decrease in appetite.
The increase can be attributed to a few things:
1.) Any change in diet can lead to either increase or decrease in appetite. Many of us had pretty clean diets before this, but removing meat and dairy was a huge step for some of us that had never gone without one of those on a daily basis our entire lives, let alone both of them.
2.) More likely the increase of appetite was caused by our body signaling it wanted nutrition, because for the first time in a very long time none of us were eating anything that was feeding the candida. Instead, our bodies were telling us that they needed the nutrition from the food being eaten.
This increased appetite requires some conscious awareness; it doesn't mean we can randomly eat just because you feel unsatisfied. Some of us had not had actually hunger pains in YEARS (which is a sign your stomach is shrinking), even though we were consuming the same quantity of food during the detox - but the quality and types of food are much different once you are only feeding yourself and not candida.
You have to keep in mind that when you are detoxing things are actually happening - your body has to awaken and identify all the toxic garbage that needs to be removed, and then it gets filtered to your organs that support detox, such as your kidneys and liver. Once they do their job, there are only a few ways that toxins make it out of the body: b0wel, urine, the skin, and the breath.
Now take a look at how our symptoms decreased over the first 7 day period:
After day four - when we took a break from the turpentine protocol - our symptoms decreased dramatically, and some community members went back to zero symptoms! You will see in later results how they felt even better after most of the detoxing side effects wore off. Many of us also experienced beneficial symptoms while detoxing; such as an increase in mental clarity and mental energy!
Take a look at our percentages after day seven of the candida cleanse:
The important thing to keep in mind is that the detoxing portion of the cleanse does not last forever, and is very minimal discomfort to most people, especially when you consider the long term benefits! You also need to make sure you are supporting your detoxing organs to maximum results with minimum die off:
- Stay hydrated!
- Have at least one bowel movement a day and potentially multiple so those toxins aren't sitting in your intestinal track and reabsorbing!
- Sweat as much as you can to help your skin detox - it's the largest organ on your body!
- Consider adding some conscious breathing techniques to your day. Even taking just 10 deep breaths makes a significant difference!
We encourage you to stay the course and pay extra special attention to taking care of yourself if you too have die off symptoms!
We are happy to report others are joining in this process and are sending us their results to track their progress towards better health! If you would like to be part of this personal transformation please fill out the form linked here every day: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSduXMOHbhju--F49_hLjvqAYWjeQld9Yj-6TPTaJzpDnu62qg/viewform
We hope this will inspire you to do additional research and work towards the best possible health for yourself!
For additional resources on this topic, please check out some of these links and the ones above:
https://www.mindbodygreen.com/0-3461/Dont-Try-a-Detox-Without-Knowing-This.html
https://www.nikigratrix.com/healing-emotions-dealing-with-emotional-detox-reactions/
*This information is not intended to be medical advice; it is just shared research & experience.
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