”Love Your Liver” – A Key To Health

We live in a polluted world. There are literally tens of thousands of toxins in our air, water, and food supplies, and they all add up and stack up on one another. Due to such exposures, the organs of your body can quickly get overloaded and overwhelmed, becoming unable to function optimally. When this happens, the stage is set for disease to begin. But even without the appearance of actual disease, you can, as far too many people do today, feel lousy even when your doctor is unable to find anything wrong with you.

This is particularly true when it comes to impaired liver function, since it is your liver that is your body’s primary defense against toxicity, along with the many of hundreds of other functions it must carry out each day.

The Energy Medicine approaches that we advocate in our book Outstanding Health look at the electrical, or energetic, status of the liver (as well as all other organs and glands). In an electrocardiogram, the electrical impulse of the heart precedes the physical heartbeat. The same thing is true for all of your body’s other organs. In every case, electrical changes in the organs precede physical symptoms, often months or more before the physical symptoms themselves arise. So when the electrical status of the liver becomes abnormal, people will often have symptoms such as migraine or insomnia, and this is something you can’t see on a liver function blood test or an ultrasound of the liver.

Energy Medicine reveals that the livers of most people today are sluggish due to toxic overload, tissue acidity, and various other factors. To prevent disease and achieve outstanding health, it is essential to restore the liver to an optimal state of energetic, physical, and chemical balance.

Here is a point we want to emphasize with you: If you looked at nothing else in your body and only went about cleaning up your liver and improving its energetic and overall functioning, you would go a very long way toward improving your health and feeling better. Don’t forget, the first four letters in liver are L-I-V-E. (By the way, most people don’t even know the location of the liver in the body. It sits right behind the right breast.)

IMPROVING LIVER FUNCTION AND ENERGY
There are a variety of methods for restoring optimal liver function, many of which you can do on your own. For example, you can start your day by drinking a glass of pure, filtered water to which you add the juice of a fresh-squeezed, organic lemon. Doing so will help reduce acidity in your body and help your liver to eliminate toxins. Eating liver-cleansing foods on a regular basis will also help. In this category, some of the best foods are cruciferous vegetables, such as broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, kale, and radishes. These foods help boost the production of enzymes in the liver that flush out toxins. As an added and very important bonus, cruciferous vegetables have also been shown to reduce the risk of cancer. Various nutritional supplements, such as vitamin C, alpha-lipoic acid, and N-acetyl-cysteine (NAC), can also help, as can various herbal remedies, such as dandelion root, milk thistle, peppermint, and turmeric.

Here is a juice recipe you can also use to nourish your liver if you have a juicer or a blender or food processor capable of making vegetable juice. It is very simple to make. All you need is:

• One medium-sized
• One organic carrot
• One medium organic cucumber
• Two medium-sized organic beets (including the beet tops)
• One whole organic clove of garlic (peeled)

*It’s important that these foods be organic so that you can be sure they are free of pesticides, herbicides, and other toxins used in nonorganic farming practices, all of which place burden on your liver.

Wash each vegetable and then add it to your juicer or other kitchen device. Before drinking the juice, you can add a pinch of sea or Celtic salt, if you wish. Drinking a small glass of this juice on a regular basis will help stimulate your liver to flush out stored toxins.

A self-care energetic technique that you can use to help balance the liver is to massage the acupuncture point called Liver 3 clockwise for one minute twice a day. That point is found on the top of your feet. You can locate it by running your finger in the groove between your big toe and second toe, one inch below the webspace, where it will sink into a small depression. This point is often used by acupuncturists to balance the liver and reduce liver stagnation.

According to acupuncture theory, regularly massaging this point can help improve a variety of conditions, including digestion, constipation, nausea, vision issues such as blurred vision or red, swollen eyes, headache, pain or tension in the upper torso, and insomnia, all of which can be caused or made worse by sluggish liver function. Additionally, massaging Liver 3 can also help ease feelings of anxiety, anger, and irritability, which Chinese medicine also associates with a stagnant, or sluggish, liver. For best results, you want to massage this point on both of your feet.

These simple self-care steps can go a long way to helping your liver optimally do the job it was designed by nature to do – keep you healthy.