Take a moment to imagine what it would be like if you could never take out the garbage. What would you do?

You might be alright for a couple of weeks, but after a while your house would become very disgusting.

You might get bugs inside your house, and new stains in lots of places. The aroma would not be pleasant. Imagine the things you would no longer be comfortable doing?

That’s a devastating scenario we’ve played out. Well, your body is very similar.

Each cell in the entire body has its own waste products, which are transported to the outer membrane to be collected by blood and lympatic systems. The food we eat is partially used, and we need to get rid of some of it. Same with the liquids we drink.

Our body has multiple systems that eliminate waste:

The intestinal tract
The blood and lymphatic systems transport waste
The lungs
The kidneys
The skin

Bowel movements need to be large and frequent. As a general rule, for each time that you eat, 2 to 3 hours later you should be having a bowel movement. If you don’t, a process called bowel compaction begins.

This involves a neurological feedback loop between the internal and external anal sphincter muscles, which makes it perpetually harder to have a successful bowel movement depending upon how much resistance you give after you first feel the urge to have a bowel movement.

This involves the formation of mucous-filled and disease-ridden pockets in the intestinal tract. It also makes the food that you eat less useful and more wasteful, because it is so much harder to absorb the nutrients into your blood supply, because the wall of the intestinal tract has become hard and crusty.

The bowels can also be obstructed by inadequate dietary fiber intake, insufficient water, consumption of highly processed or chemical laden foods – especially those with heavily processed wheat, certain medications, unhealthy gut flora, and in other ways.

Blood

The blood and lymphatic systems can become overloaded with waste. When this happens, you are likely to experience fatigue, headaches, and water retention or edema – especially in the lower legs.

One thing that can contribute to this might include a weak heart – which could be the result of an unhealthy diet especially with too many saturated fats, a sedentary lifestyle, over-consumption of sodium without maintaining a healthy sodium-potassium balance, kidney failure, smoking, unhealthy lungs, use of stimulants, and a variety of other factors.

Other things that can contribute to overloaded blood and lymph include: consumption of toxins, things that place heavy demand on the liver (alcoholism, high stress, inadequate sleep, certain drugs, toxic or chemically-rich foods, etc…), a sedentary lifestyle, inadequate consumption of vegetables (particularly the bitter ones), and more.

Lungs

The lungs receive waste products from the blood system in the same exchange by which the blood becomes oxygenated. If you are a smoker, you have pretty much destroyed this waste-removal system. This also becomes a problem when you don’t exhale completely enough to remove the waste from the lungs.

Other possible issues could be inadequate or irregular cardiovascular exercise, frequent respiratory illness, or problems with the swallowing mechanism – to keep food out of the lungs.

Kidneys

The kidneys work very hard to filter the blood. When too much demand is placed on the kidneys, they fail, with downstream affects on the heart.

Eating too much meat, not consuming enough water, too many toxins in the blood which the kidneys must filter out, too much calcium and other heavy minerals that the body is trying to get rid of, certain drugs such as caffeine, and other factors – can place heavy demand on the kidneys.

Skin

The skin is our largest organ. It serves a variety of functions. Its primary mechanism for waste removal is sweat – which cleanses the blood and lymph, burns fat, and may improve intestinal motility.

Overview

I didn’t discuss everything that’s important for health. I was really just focusing on providing an overview of waste removal. Other things are very important – such as emotional state, the frequency of eating, the volume of food consumed, consumption of vital nutrients including a daily habit of raw vegetables and fruits – especially the dark leafy-green vegetables, exercise habits, and so forth...

I’ve touched briefly on why the waste systems of the body are important, and some of the choices we can make that will prevent these waste systems from performing their job.

This information is highly applicable to stroke recovery, because a properly functioning body is needed to feel and be healthy, and because lack of a clean environment inside the body leads to an unhealthy environment for the brain. In order to rebuild, the brain absolutely needs a clean and nutrient-rich environment. We call this the brain-body connection.

That’s it for now. Thanks for joining. Talk to you soon.

Waste Removal

Powered by Wave AI