Your Liver Is A Vacuum Cleaner

Our livers are the body’s vacuum cleaner, and they do a pretty heroic job. Even in the most pristine of environments with no toxicants (FYI, toxins are made BY your body, toxicants are the outside bad guys), no stress, organic food, and plenty of water, we still make cellular waste that needs breaking down and eliminating. The liver is working 24/7 to clean your body! We mean normal things like products of metabolism, excess hormones, vitamins, and inflammatory molecules, but it also handles the nasty stuff like heavy metals and harmful chemical compounds like BPA.

A congested liver is like a full vacuum cleaner. You can push the vacuum cleaner over the floor, and it can do its best to suck up the dirt and dog hairs, but if there is no space in the bag, the floor will stay dusty and dirty. So it is with your liver, too much dirt and stuff to clean up in the body means the liver itself gets overloaded. Your body still has the dirty stuff floating around and messing with your DNA… Yikes!

The Basics of Helping Your Liver
Now, there are some basics to giving your liver a helping hand:

• Drink plenty of plain clean water.
• Make sure the diet has lots of antioxidants - Vitamin C especially because we can’t make that ourselves.
• Eating lots of clean vegetables to get plenty of vitamins and minerals
• Avoiding toxicants, like heavy metals, pesticides, sunscreens with nasty stuff in them

But, there are some other things worth knowing.

How Do Medications Play A Role?

All medications taken orally are first broken down and metabolized in the liver. As much as 90% of a medication will be processed leaving 10% to work on the body. Some medications are designed so that after the liver has metabolized them, the resulting molecules are what is needed for the medical effect. Using medications topically - i.e. on the skin, means that the molecules are absorbed immediately into the bloodstream and don’t go through the liver. This is awesome for your liver as it is one less thing to have to metabolize and clean up. Not all medications can be given topically - but most steroid hormones can. Progesterone, estrogens, DHEA, testosterone, can all be put into a cream and then smoothed onto the skin.

Now, this means one more reason to love Silky Peach and other Parlor Games' topical creams; you get the hormones you need without stressing your liver. Plus, you need smaller amounts. Those hormones that are not used immediately at receptors in the body will be metabolized by the liver which is why it’s a good idea to use “just enough” to get the protective effect and no more.

Hormones & Your Liver
Now, hormones are wily things - they love fatty tissue and will happily sit forever in the fatty tissue in different parts of the body. This means that if you were to lose weight, there is a chance that as you burn fat stores, you will release some stored hormones. This can have positive or negative results; for some, increasing levels of estrogen can sometimes result in those estrogen dominance symptoms we all came to loathe:

• Tender and Fibrocystic Breasts
• Increased Forgetfulness
• Foggy Thinking
• Tearful
• Depressed
• Mood Swings (we’re talking crazy beastie)
• BLOATING

If this happens, it could be worth it to add in a little progesterone to balance out that released estrogen. And drink LOTS of water to help make sure everything is flushed out of your body!