Foods to Eat for a Perfect Cleanse

The benefits of cleansing have been practiced and studied for hundreds of years, and when it comes to cleansing as a means to detoxify your body, there are hundreds of cleanse options available. While the benefits of detoxifying your body are indisputable: flushing bacteria, viruses and parasites while aiding the immune system (to name a few), aiding the body's natural detox system can help alleviate fatigue and most importantly, flush out the bowels.

How Do I Pick the Right Detox/Fast?

• Finding a good detox system that works for you and will help you to achieve your goals is important. But as you do research, you'll notice many of the detox systems encourage the same few things: fruits, vegetables, herbal teas and water. Water is the most important part of any cleanse. Determine your goals. And for metabolic reasons, fruit fasting is a particularly wise choice.

Fruit Fasting

• Fruit fasting is an extremely productive way to cleanse your body without constant hunger or requiring lots of strange ingredients. It's also more efficient than juice or water fasting because chewing and swallowing real food allows the digestive system to metabolize food as normal, and prevents the metabolism from entering conservation mode.

How Long Should I Fruit Fast?

• Fruit fasts can be done anywhere from 3 to 30 days, keeping in mind the longer you fast, the more difficult it can be to break the fast. In the morning, choose higher-calorie fruits (think oranges, mangoes and the like) because they set the pace for your metabolism the entire day. Make sure to drink lots of water throughout the day, and also pay attention to hunger.

  Have your next serving of fruit--whatever types in whatever quantity you want--each time you're hungry. Also, some fruit diets encourage you to drink vegetable juice while you're fasting to ensure you receive vital vitamins and minerals, and keep in mind (if you decide to juice) that the best benefits received from juicing are when you prepare the juice yourself.

How Do I End/Break the Fast When I'm Done?

• When ending or "breaking" a fast, as it's often called, continue to observe your body when you become hungry, and eat only then. Remember the whole idea with fasting is to flush toxins, so keep that in mind when you reintroduce yourself to different foods. Start with leafy green vegetables and nuts, and after a day or so, add one or two servings of oats or brown rice into your diet. The last things you should consider bringing back, if at all, are meats and dairy. Chicken, fish and eggs are excellent sources of protein, and one serving per day won't hurt. But cheese and red meat could cause some discomfort in your digestive system, and should be avoided.

How Often Can I Fast?

• You can fast as many times per year as you'd like. It would be wise, if fasting frequently, to do shorter fasts. Remember, a healthy diet is a balanced diet, and restricting too much too often may be risky.