Tips to Get Your Liver in Shape!

Our world is teeming with hidden chemicals and poisons, but when it comes to fighting off your body’s toxic burden, you’ve got a champ — specifically, your liver. Let me put it this way: Your liver is the like the “most valuable player” when it comes to keeping you healthy and slim. It controls the levels of various chemicals in your body, cleans poisons and toxins out of your system, and helps regulate the amount of fats in your body by producing bile, which digests the fats you eat. In a nutshell, it’s responsible for a lot.

 Many people ignore this key organ by doing and eating things that cause it to work less efficiently, or even to break down. With a little daily maintenance, you can keep your liver running in tip-top shape — and help it help you to lose weight and get healthier.

Here’s what you need to do on a daily basis:

• Twice a day, just before a meal, drink a cup of warm water with the juice of half a fresh lemon or a tablespoon of apple-cider vinegar. This lemon water or vinegar water aids in bile formation, resulting in more efficient fat metabolism.
• Eat protein every day, preferably at every meal. The liver needs the amino acids from protein to produce bile and make all the enzymes used in detoxification.
• Eggs (as long as you’re not allergic to them, of course!) are a great source of protein, plus they have the added benefit of being naturally rich in lecithin, a substance your liver needs to produce bile. Get essential fatty acids daily, especially omegas-3s, from walnuts, flaxseed and/or flaxseed oil, salmon, fish-oil supplements, or cod-liver oil.
• Essential minerals such as copper, magnesium, and zinc play an im­portant role in liver detoxification, along with vitamin C, most of the B vitamins, folic acid, and flavonoids (found in richly colored vegetables such as sweet red peppers).

Your body is like a car. In order to keep it running, you need to put high-quality gas in the fuel tank, investigate when you hear something strange clanking under the hood, and do everything you can to keep it running in optimum condition. You shouldn’t be treating your car better than you treat your body! Your liver processes every single toxin that passes through your body, and it’s about time it receives a little TLC. So get to it!