Many people are currently performing colon cleanses or cleanses in general due to the high publicity in recent years on TV infomercials. The use of these colon cleanses to evacuate undigested fecal matter, or mucoid plaque or parasites frequently does not work, and sometimes participants can get allergic to the ingredients. You may also get allergic to psyllium husks during the cleanse.
There is one fundamental reason a colon cleanse does not work. The reason is because your digestion is underactive.
If you were disappointed with the small amount of mucoid plaque to come out or lack of it, your digestive system is probably underactive and cold. If your digestion is underactive, that is then one of the sources of the production of muocid plaque to begin with.
Tonification of the bowels refers to the increase of muscular contractions which are responsible for generating bowel movements. There are specific tonifying herbal formulas which can increase the ease of bowel movements in the morning. These are not laxative herbal formulas, although they can be the same brand name.
Although similar and perhaps the resultant cause of eating too many cold foods, if the digestive enyzymes are insufficient perhaps due to eating too many cold or cooked foods, or food sensitivities, there will be poor evacuation or bowel movements. Often times the bowel movements will be smelly as well.
In Traditional Chinese Medicine, the stomach is considered a furnace. Consider yourself digesting an apple, and consider what a cooked apple looks like in a pie. Its mushy -- it’s been cooked. When the "furnace" is constantly fed cold foods, it does not work properly anymore -- it cools off. The fire which stokes digestive “furnace”; is often referred to as the digestive fire. To give you an example, eating oranges, or grapefruits in a colder wet climate may eventually impair your digestion and reduce your digestive fire!
People with a poorly functioning digestive system may see bits of undigested food in the stool.
Sometimes these bits of undigested foods are so small they cannot be seen by the naked eye. Some common offenders are leafy greens such as kale, and spinach, dark lettuces. Many people have a “cold” and underactive stomach which then leads to undigested food in the first place, and therefore mucoid plaque in the second.
Seeing undigested food in the stool is a big alarm bell that you need to begin to fix your digestion as soon as possible.
If you cannot digest food properly, then digesting the colon cleanse herbs will also be problematic.
If you also eat a predominantly raw food diet then your diet may also reduce your "digestive fire". You may become cold inside, yearning for warming foods, wearing warming clothes all the time. People with poor digestive fire often have to eat everything piping hot, and rarely like to eat cold food. Digestive fire often reduces as we age.
So it would make sense to then get your digestion working, starting with your stomach, and then retry the colon cleanse later. That is where the vibrational readings can help. You would need a plan to succeed at improving your digestion.
Before you perform a colon cleanse your body is in a homeostatic state. That means that your liver, your pancreas, your stomach, and you gut (small intestines) are used to the way they all work together.
So cleaning the colon out and expecting your digestion to all work better again, especially solving bowel trouble such as few bowel movements per day or per week may be expecting too much.
Some colon cleanses do not target your small intestine where most of your food gets digested, and where there can also be mucoid plaque.
Most colon cleanses are meant to target the large intestine only. The small intestine is where most of your food gets digested, and absorbed.
If you do not have sufficient evacuation, i.e. you do not have 1-3 bowel movements per day, you fixing that is what the colon cleanse is for.
Whatever colon cleanse product you have taken, they are designed with assumptions in mind.
A Vibrational reading will determine what you can tolerate, and what is the priority. To get exceptional results with cleansing and healing, you will need a professional plan and approach. The assumptions are that you are having enough bowel movements to evacuate the fecal matter, and also the mucoid plaque. Other assumptions are that your diet is not so mucous forming.
If you have symptoms while on a colon cleanse you are probably weakening your kidneys, and it may be advisable to stop or go much more gently. Following the principles of Natural Healing will help.
Most people, I would estimate over 90% have an underactive colon as well. This is because we do not normally listen to our body calling us to go evacuate, and instead we continue working, performing our daily tasks.
Our colon is constantly pushing its contents down to be evacuated. That process is called peristaltic action. So, some of us have jobs which do not permit us to do listen to the "nature call" and then we ignore the evacuation request. When this goes on for years and years, the colon then becomes underactive, fecal matter backs up, and we may become fully constipated. Your bowel movements can smell, you can strain to evacuate, even with much fibre added to the diet.
One answer to succeeding at colon cleansing is to tonify the bowels first.
What exactly does that mean. Well, if you tonify your muscles, they become stronger. There are two ways to successfully tonify your bowels. One is to use a special herbal supplement that tonifies your bowels. The other is to exercise more frequently. There really is no substitute for long term exercise on the body, and the many positive benefits. A herbal formula can help with beginning this process, and the exercise can heal any constipation in synergy with that formula. Its actually normal to have one bowel movement after every meal, and for the bowel movements to be shaped in a big S.
Note that tonification is not the same thing as taking a laxative, even if that laxative is a herbal product. A good tonification product for the bowels can take anywhere from 3-9 months to achieve the desired result. A laxative is a quick measure to generate a bowel movement to stop auto toxemia. Auto toxemia is when you are poisoning yourself, and you generally feel rotten because you have not had a bowel movement in days.
Some people get further constipated while on a colon cleanse. This is further proof that your bowels need tonification. Its not advised to eat white bread products, pastries, pizza, potato chips, corn chips, etc. Also following food combining rules, for example, avoiding eating grains with meats, or high carbohydrate foods such as potatoes whilst doing a colon cleanse can help remove mucoid plaque faster.
The best foods to stop constipation while undergoing a colon cleanse are grapes and oranges. Hot teas also work well.
There are colon cleanses where you are required to fast on apple juice. These typically can feed the Candida microbe in the gut making it pathogenic and turning it into a fungal form.
Any resulting Candida fungal overgrowth or proliferation will thus over power the beneficial flora in the gut as well, possibly leading to further constipation and obscure symptoms as well. Thrush, Vaginal Yeast Infection, and even Penile Yeast Infection (Balanitis) can result.
Candida is a fungal organism which often feeds on high carbohydrate foods such as breads, pastries, sugar.
If you have a lot of candida in the gut, you are almost guaranteed to have an underactive digestion (low stomach acid). This is because what you do not digest, the candida will digest for you.
If you colon cleanse at the wrong season or during a season change you may suffer from adverse reactions, such as mood swings, anxiety, poor sleep, and further constipation. The right season to colon cleanse depends on your organ energy makeup, but for most people it would be in late spring, early summer, and in the depths of summer. If you have poor organ energy, medical qi gong is advised first before proceeding on a colon cleanse.
After a colon cleanse, replenishing the intestinal flora in the colon is essential. The flora (good bacterium) in the colon are also responsible for generating the urge to evacuate. They produce B-Vitamins essential for health. There are supplements to provide the flora, and they are called probiotics. There are a variety of yogurts promoted to have a probiotic effect containing valuable flora such as acidopholous, and bifidobacterium They are labeled as having cultures A or cultures B. These can promote regularity. As long as regular exercise is sufficient, these can often succeed.
Updated: March 29, 2010.