Cleansing During the Winter Months

By Alchemy 30/01/2012

A nutritional and enlightening piece, fixed to February and the colder months – by Caroline Mansfield.
Traditional cleansing programs that call for freshly pressed juices, raw foods, and even room temperature water with lemon juice, maple syrup, and pepper may work for most people when the weather is warm, but how does one experience an effective cleanse without feeling exceedingly cold and frail during late winter and early spring?

There’s a reason why our bodies crave hot soups and cooked foods during colder months. To ignore the need to support a minimum core body temperature is to allow significant enervation, which is never conducive to supporting optimal health.

I’m not a fan of one, two, or even three day water-only fasts – these short periods of deprivation do little but cause you to lose healthy muscle tissue.

To give your organs a period of rest and to experience a solid, system-wide cleanse during colder months, I typically recommend using hot vegetable broth. If you make your own vegetable broth with generous amounts of nutrient-rich vegetables, you’ll have a mineral-rich liquid to fuel your everyday activities while you avoid slowing down your self-healing and self-cleansing mechanisms with large meals. You can sip on hot vegetable broth throughout the day. And whenever you feel like something more substantial, you can have room temperature vegetables and fruits – lettuce, celery, carrots, avocados, apples, pears, and persimmons are good choices throughout autumn  and early winter.

So long as you heed the desire to have some healthy, whole foods whenever your body calls for them, you can do this “vegetable broth plus whole vegetables and fruits cleanse” for one to seven days during colder months whenever you feel the need to rest, get lighter, and be rejuvenated.
To make nutrient-rich vegetable broth for a cleanse, you’ll need:

x1 whole onion, halved
x
3 ribs of celery (chopped)
x
3 carrots (chopped
)
x1 zucchini (chopped
)
x3 waxy potatoes (chopped) (replace with sweet potato if potato sensitive)
Greens such as kale,
Swiss chard,
Beet tops or turnip tops (chopped),
Add a bay leaf or any other herbs you like

Place all ingredients in a large pot and bring to the boil.  Reduce heat and simmer for at least an hour.  Strain out the vegetables (pressing hard on the vegetables to release all the goodness).  Discard the cooked vegetable pulp.