I'm going to say something that might make "western people" uncomfortable, but that is a well-known fact for those born into traditional cultures:
Your body requires regular cleansing and purging to function at its optimal level.
Now, what that means on an individual level depends on a case-by-case basis, but if you want to age healthily, run on balanced and abundance hormones, and maintain high energy levels, working with your body to figure out how it needs to cleanse is an absolute necessity.
Basically, from a Traditional Chinese Medicine standpoint (and many other traditional medical approaches), everything that we consume, all that's required to build our bodies, sustain our organs, and fuel our lives also comes at the cost of having varying levels of toxins in them. That is to say all meat, however pure and nourishing, all vegetables, however organic and lovingly grown, all air we breathe, all water we drink, and even what we consume on a mental level--everything we consume has a price.
And that's perfectly fine. That's one of the laws of nature and our bodies were perfectly designed with built-in cleansing mechanisms to do just that.
However, what we're generally not taught in western society is that as we spend more time in our bodies and the grace allotted to us in youth is slowly but surely replaced by the wisdom afforded us by experience, we simply must must must make it a priority to provide support to our body and mind's cleansing and detoxifying systems.
Did you know the average person's intestinal system is approximately 25-30 feet in length? This is the place where our body wisely alchemizes the food we choose to ingest and transforms it from raw inputs into life-sustaining energy and nutrition to regenerate and repair our organs, tissues, and cells. It has to do A LOT of sorting through this process, extracting what's helpful and discarding what's not. And as we age and our hormones and metabolism change, it becomes extremely wise to provide support to the body in this process.
Some people choose fasting, some people choose juice cleanses, some work with colonics, others herbal supplements. I have personally worked with all of the above and many more approaches and I can tell you 100% that our body's experience of digestion and alchemy is an exact representation of our emotional and spiritual state.
Of course I feel the need here to add the disclaimer that if you're one of the probably 9 out of 10 women in the US who has experienced some form of disordered eating, then you simply must do this work in conjunction with learning to heal your relationship to yourself and your body. Only when you deeply love and accept yourself can you become aware of the ways your body is communicating with you and bring it into tune like a precision-tuned instrument. Because ultimately, that's what the body is: it has all the wisdom of our ancestors and DNA for how to navigate expertly on the Earth and fulfill all our dreams and destiny. However, as a result of our culture, because most women suffer from extreme self-loathing, internal repression, and animosity with food and their body, we've become completely detached from the guidance our body is so desperately trying to communicate.
Here are a few simple steps to begin the process of healing your relationship with your body:
1. Avoid processed and "shelf-stable" food like the plague. It it doesn't go bad on the shelf, imagine how impossible it is for your body to extract any nutrients from it.
2. Discard cosmetics and personal care products containing lab-made synthetic ingredients that the body doesn't recognize. These trigger your body's immune response and disrupt your hormones and endocrine system. While that may sound "science-y", what it means for you is unstable moods, poor sleep, haggard appearance, etc, etc.
3. Learn about the dangers of synthetic fragrance and slowly, but surely remove them from your life. I'm talking perfumes, cleansers, fabric softeners, drier sheets, air fresheners, the list goes on and on. Many, many of the ingredients in these products are completely illegal in other countries because they are known to be damaging.
So I invite you to start there and to love yourself enough to become educated about the many toxins and dangers that have become commonplace in our post-industrial world. Love yourself enough to learn the discernment required to truly thrive in this lifetime. It's more than possible!