If you thought that detoxification was meant only as a system for bringing drug or alcohol abusers down from their chemical dependencies you would be only partially right. However, this is not the case with detoxifying diets.  Formulas for detox diets are meant to clean your body’s elimination system of impurities from the food we eat and even the air we breathe.  Generally, detoxification diets are designed to clean the colon and liver, where impurities tend to accumulate.

The key to most blueprints for body cleansing diets is to include lots of fiber, lots of water, and eating veggies, nuts, fruits, and beans.  What is missing from the above lists of foods? Meat! Meat intake needs to be reduced.  What else is missing? Processed starches! Bread and pasta are notoriously absent when you are cleansing your bodies’ digestive system.

Cleansing drinks are a great way to give another boost to the healthy detoxification your body needs.  Simply get some of your favorite fruits – berries are especially nutritious and delicious – and throw them in the blender with some purified water and ice.  Whip them up until they are a thick-but-drinkable consistency, and you have an awesome breakfast or snack that will help your colon get rid of the yucky stuff that resides there.

Soups of various kinds are also some of the recipes for detox diets that you can find.  Gazpacho soup and alkaline diet soups are very frequently used for body and colon cleaning diets. Alkaline diets are those that rely heavily on vegetables, nuts, and legumes, all of which help move things along in the digestive system and thus, are beneficial ingredients for any soup recipe.

One particularly popular and tasty alkaline soup recipe is for a vegetable broth. You simply chop up celery, broccoli, spinach, and a zucchini into tiny pieces. Add them to a big pot of distilled water, and simmer for about a half an hour.

Then, run the ingredients through a strainer or colander, reserving the broth.  All those natural vitamins remain in the water when you boil those veggies, which is why you should minimally steam your vegetables when eating them.  In this case, you are after the broth, so it is okay to boil the heck out of the vegetables.  Discard the chopped vegetables and drink the broth.

Each of these recipes for detox diets contain viable ingredients for helping you to lose weight and keeping your body’s elimination system working as it should.