How Do I Know If I Actually Need a Detox? The Signs Your Body Is Telling You

Mark Hyman (0:00)

It's telling you that some of the foods you're eating are affecting your immune system, your hormones, your gut microbiome, in ways that your body doesn't like. If I had one test and one treatment, and I was stranded on a deserted island, and that was the only thing I could choose to do, to treat my patients, it would be the 10-day detox, both as a diagnostic and a therapeutic. There's no better test and no better treatment for chronic disease.

Welcome back to Office Hours, I'm Dr. Mark Hyman. I'm here with Emma, my producer, and we're going to be talking about my favorite topic, which is the 10-day detox, because it's something that everybody should do at least once to know what's really happening in their body. So let's get into it.

Emma (0:42)

All right, Mark, we've heard you talk about the 10-day detox for years. But something I don't think I've heard you explain is why you created it in the first place. So let's go back to the origin of it. What were you seeing in your patients that made you think, I want to try something different?

Mark Hyman (0:57)

Well, look, Emma, I've been a practicing doctor for nearly 40 years, which is a terrifying statement to make, but I think it's true. And functional medicine, I've been practicing for 30 years. And what was really clear up front was that food is medicine, that food is information, that it's code, that it upgrades or downgrades your biological software with every bite, and that it is a powerful tool for healing. And that there are two fundamental things wrong with our diet. One is there's too much stuff that our body doesn't like, that creates inflammation, that dis-regulates our microbiome, that makes us insulin resistant, that adversely affects our immune system. And there's not enough of the protective foods that we need to actually create healing in the body and activate all of our healing systems. So I was very early on doing what we called elimination diets. I don't even like that term, but essentially, it's like getting rid of gluten, dairy, sugar, processed food, blah, blah, blah. But it's also not just what you eliminate, it's what you add that matters. This episode is brought to you by Function Health, empowering you to live 100 healthy years with over 160 lab tests for just $365 a year and use the code MARK2026 to get $50 off your membership. And I began to realize that as I was applying this for various problems that people had, whether it was a migraine or whether it was, I don't know, gut issues or autoimmune disease or depression, whatever it was, that if I did it a certain way, and we'll talk about what that way is, and I kind of modified the functional medicine elimination diet a little bit to be more, I think, adhering to what I thought would create the most impact in the shortest amount of time to have the most profound healing benefits that people could actually feel. Because I didn't want people to just trust what I had to say. I didn't want people to do what I told them because I told them, I want them to have the experience of what their body is telling them and whether it feels good or not. I always say the smartest doctor in the room is your own body. It's going to tell you what works. If you eat gluten and you get a migraine, your body is telling you something, like that's information. And so I realized after doing this for a long time in my practice that this was something useful for the general population and that it was a tool that I wanted to get out there in the world.

And you know, when people do the elimination diet, sometimes you do it for 10 days, for 2 weeks, for 3 weeks, for 3 months, for 1 year. If I called the 1-year detox, no one would buy it. So I called it the 10-day detox diet. And essentially, it was an elimination diet. It doesn't relate to everything. It doesn't relate to eggs or nuts or nightshades. And there's more advanced versions like the autumnal paleo diet that does that. But it was good enough that I was seeing dramatic results across the board over and over again in thousands of patients in my practice and in tens of thousands or more online and other places. So, that's really why I created the book, The Tendent Detox Diet. It came out in 2014 Earlier than that, I had a detox box which came out in 2005, which was way before then, which was very similar to this. It was a little bit different, but very similar. And I was just seeing incredible results from it. So I wanted to provide something in the world that people could follow that was clear.