This Friday is the Second Annual Brown Friday Celebration. In honor of my clients, I suppress the urge to indulge in retail therapy in order to offer a post-Thanksgiving cathartic experience to all. I’m not promoting binging and purging, but Thanksgiving is filled with lots of love and in many families, love is also known as force-feeding. So there’s no need to blame your family for feeling like shit the next day, just get it out with a good ‘ol anal cleansing. Book your colonic appointment, yo!
Our skin is full of shit and I encourage you to dry brush everyday because it takes less than five minutes to make your skin feel so fresh and so clean, you may not even need to shower! Showers are boring anyway. Dry brushing improves not just the quality of your skin (even known to reduce cellulite!), but the quality of your body’s drainage.
Ever since reading The Raw Food Detox Diet by Natalia Rose, my original inspiration for everything detox, I have dry brushed everyday before getting in the shower (I do shower sometimes, but prefer the shower bidet). Dry brushing stimulates the lymphatic system, which is responsible for removing cellular waste and debris from body tissues. Lymph nodes are spread throughout the body with heavy concentration around the neck, armpits and groin area and serve as sites for immunity cells, which assist our immune system in filtering out cancer cells and foreign substances. The lymphatic system needs a lot of encouragement to assist in these processes because it does not have its own heartbeat pumping these fluids out. Dry brushing is the easiest activity to incorporate into your daily life to help drain your lymph. Dry brushing has even been associated with alleviating bloat because it encourages the lymphatic system to drain excess water and toxins, improving digestion.
Lymphatic drainage is so powerful that it is employed at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. One of my favorite clients owns a popular massage spot, Knead, in Downtown Jersey City. Her knowledge of the body is impressive and she was trained/certified at Memorial Sloan Kettering in lymphatic drainage massage. I believe she is the only one with such credentials in the entire state of NJ! I always assumed that every kind of massage assists in lymph drainage, but I stand corrected. Deep tissue massage actually has the opposite effect on lymph. While it helps break up crystallized lactic acid in the muscles and soften scar tissue, it cuts off lymph drainage. Lymph drainage massage is more like gentle tickling. Sign me up!
So while it may seem like dry brushing ain’t doing shit, trust that it is actually assisting one of your immune system’s most important functions. Brush your entire body, with special concentration around your pits, neck, stomach and groin area. Make sure to brush in the direction of your heart, which is best for circulation. You can find my favorite Yerba Prima Tampico dry brush at any health food store.
Last week I felt like utter shit. My sinuses were congested in an allergy-kind-of-way and I was chronically tired. It was no mystery to me. I know I’ve been eating a whole bunch of crap (lots of soy, wheat, fried foods and too much wine). You see… if you eat like shit, you feel like shit. And if you don’t take big shits, you feel even shittier (Damn, I just realized I’m a sage).
One of my New Years Resolutions was to stop eating meat and that just segued into eventually becoming vegan again with the exception of some honey and wearing my old leather. In a past life, I was a raw vegan for about two years, which propelled me into the alternative health world and then into insanity. After becoming completely orthorexic (unhealthily obsessed with clean eating), I finally admitted I had a problem and needed to chill the fuck out. So I transitioned back to eating cooked vegan foods, then pescatarianism, then vegetarianism, then straight up carnivorism and finally constipationism. So I threw this journey in reverse and have arrived back at veganism (not raw veganism) because videos like this really strike a chord with me and keep me from being a “weak ass motherfucker”:
But eating too many nasty tofucken-like dishes has been slowing me down and proving to be just as constipating as its meat counterparts. Plus who knows what’s in that shit?
For those following, you know I wanted to do another one of Andreas Moritz’s Liver & Gallbladder Cleanse early November. I started my Liver Cleanse on Monday and just completed it today. For the first time, I released no stones in the toilet unlike past cleanses. I guess this disproves the theory that the stones released on the seventh day are, in fact, gallstones and not coagulated olive oil. I’m feeling like a better version of myself, thanks be to God.
So my takeaway from both my alternative health journey that started about ten years ago and my entire liver cleansing journey that started just two years ago as my New Years Resolution in 2015 is that no diet will make anyone perfect. Finding a lifestyle that incorporates a mostly plant-based diet that is kind to your liver will benefit you, your digestive tract, your karma and the environment. And having this knowledge is empowering for those times you just feel like fucking shit.
Yesterday was a good day. We celebrated the 10 year anniversary of Release NYC, where I worked as a colon hydrotherapist since 2009. I apprenticed under the owner, Tommy DeVito, who taught me how to give a proper colonic without getting shit all over the place. Release NYC will officially be closing its doors at the end of the month, so apparently, I have one week to get my ice skates out of there – I skated at Bryant Park on three different lunch breaks over two years ago, but refuse to chuck the skates!
I began liver cleansing almost two years ago to get rid of some wrinkles, dark under eye circles and severe menstrual cramps. I’ve seen improvement in all areas. However, I was also hoping the whites of my eyes would clear up. I had started noticing some yellowing around the inner corners that was bothering the shit out of me. Yellowing of the skin and eyes is associated with jaundice, a condition where bile buildup in the blood resulting from a clogged liver actually stains the skin and eyes. I didn’t understand why my liver still seemed fucked after all this cleansing.
Fate would have it that a visit to the eye doctor of all doctors solved this mystery for me. I went for a routine check up and the Doc basically clarified that I’m a dirtbag. Dirty contacts were the culprit causing a build up of dirt in my eyes, staining my eyes yellow. I wasn’t really following, but he said something to this effect: dirty contacts were forcing my eyes to create a buildup of white blood cells as an inflammatory response to the foreign substance, and that layer of cells (just like skin) gets suntanned. Left unaddressed, it could get so bad that it turn black over time especially because these cells are raised higher than the rest of my eyeball cells and thus, more exposed to the sun (like your nose). He said I just need to diligently change my contacts every two weeks and wear my glasses at least once a week and this should all clear up in about a year and half.
My eyes are already looking clearer after a few months of being a little less of a dirtbag. In any case, I plan on doing another liver cleanse in early November. Who’s with me??
This weekend is my favorite art event of the year! The annual Jersey City Art and Studio Tour promotes local artists throughout the city by encouraging different bars, restaurants, galleries, and homeowners to host local art shows. You can download a map at thejcast.com and check out all the art Jersey City has to offer, including my shitty bathroom signs. I am supposed to be open on Saturday from 1-6pm, but I can’t promise I won’t get the itch to go check out some art, so please see my entire art show below. If you would like to purchase a pair of bathroom signs for your favorite bar or restaurant, please email me jen@doodyfreegirl.com
Come meet me tonight at CAP Beauty in the West Village at 7pm! I’ll be there to answer all of your burning questions about colonics and show you all of my favorite natural beauty products / makeup in the store. You can read CAP Beauty’s blog post on me here.
For those receiving my newsletters, you know how much I admire and respect my friend, Kimberly Snyder and her vegan health philosophy. If you already follow her books or want to learn more about her, please come to the book signing event for her new book, Radical Beauty. I’ll be there 🙂
I keep promising everyone a blog post on how to keep your home smelling as sweet as the Doody Free shop. My secret weapon is this nebulizing essential oil diffuser and of course, essential oils. As you may know, I like to diffuse lemongrass. The nebulizing diffuser is definitely superior to humidifying diffusers. I use both, but the nebulizing diffuser extracts the oil straight from the bottle, creating a richer, more potent scent that really fills the room, especially larger rooms. You can adjust the timer as you please. I like to have it diffuse the essential oil for five or ten minutes straight every twenty minutes. Beware that it is loud AF. I guess that is the major complaint with this diffuser, but I find it to be nothing more more annoying than white noise, an excellent substitute for the smell of shit.
I’m proud to say my clients learn all sorts of shit from me. I will do my best to teach you the things that could make your life better. You want to know where the best health markets in NYC and Jersey City are? You want to know where to get the best facials? You want to know how to lose weight sustainably? I’m your girl.
So it’s no surprise, that I will also teach you how to affordably and safely rip out your peach fuzz mustache, should this be one of your goals in life. I’ve been getting my stache waxed, plucked or threaded since middle school shortly after I was first teased about it. Being more of a DIYer, going to the salon is a major drag even for only a few minutes. In fact, before discovering laser hair removal, I’d spent many hours in the bathroom waxing my own vagina and mutilating myself trying to extract the ingrown hairs (0% fun). If you’re an existing client or subscribe to my weekly newsletters, you already know about my love for laser hair removal. Now, it is my duty to share with you a more recent discovery that will allow you to “thread” your own mustache without ripping off your skin: the REM Spring.
