Although making a conscious decision to change your diet is an important first step to improving your health, some factors will either contribute to or derail your success, which you may have never considered before. To help your body make this change in a lasting and comfortable way, the next step after your initial decision should be to prepare your body to accept the change.

If you are going to change the type of food you eat or even the quantity of food you eat (when dieting, for instance), you must prepare your body. This involves two very important factors:

1. The cleansing of toxins
2. Giving your body time to change enzyme production

A healthy cleanse of your body will only be effective in the long term if you stop doing the things that caused the toxic condition in the first place. A cleansing of the toxins is the ultimate goal, but there are steps leading to that goal that must be followed first.

Adding to the diet, instead of taking away, introduces the body to a “new way of thinking,” so to speak. That’s because your body has already changed its physiological functions to adapt to your past and present lifestyle. These adaptations occur all the way to the cellular level because the body must continue to create new cells as the old ones need replacing. This process is necessary for survival, and your body will use whatever it is given to survive.  

Perhaps the most noticeable adaptation to our bodies’ lifestyle is in the enzyme production necessary for whatever diet we choose to eat. In other words, based on what you eat, your body produces enzymes as a catalyst in the chemical reactions of digestion. If you change your diet too suddenly, your body is not prepared with the proper enzymes to digest the new foods you’re eating. And your body will surely let you know with some of the most unpleasant symptoms.

So, as you slowly begin adding healthy foods – vegetables and other complex carbohydrates – to your diet, the next step is to lessen the stimulatory substances you’ve been ingesting gradually. 

That is, consuming less and less of the substances that stimulate the body, like coffee, meat, sugar, salt, and tobacco. “Less and less” because these things must be done slowly, so your body has time to adapt physically to its new processing quest.