Benefits of Using Lemon For Dieting Purposes
A lot of diets — especially diets that focus on detoxing your body — focus on incorporating large amounts of lemon juice in hot water.
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However, it appears that those dieting tips may be more on-track than most of the others being hyped these days. In 1939, Jethro Kloss discusses the value of lemons in his timeless natural health guide “Back to Eden”:
“The medicinal value of the lemon is as follows: it is an antiseptic, or is an agent that will prevent sepsis… It is also anti-scorbutic, the term meaning a remedy will prevent disease and assist in cleansing the system of impurities. The lemon is a wonderful stimulant to the liver and is a dissolvent of uric acid and other poisons, liquefies the bile, and is very good in cases of malaria… As a food, we find, owing to its potassium content, it will nourish the brain and nerve cells..”
The guy fills up 2-and-one-half pages of remedies and benefits for the lemon. (See more Back to Eden on Amazon)
So, lets look at how lemon juice helps you detox, how lemon improves your overall health, and finally, how to properly use hot lemon juice and water (not that there is any major trick to it!)
How Lemon Helps you Detox:
So, does lemon really help your body purify itself?
Lemon is a Diuretic
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Lemon is found in many books as being listed as a diuretic. Unfortunately, there does not seem to be a lot of papers or research into this aspect of lemons. However, people who tried using lemons have stated that they have seen increased urination. This can help the body flush toxins from the kidneys, as well as help lower high blood pressure.
Lemon helps Elimination
What is generally more agreed upon is that hot lemon juice can help as a mild laxative. One of the best ways to use this is make some lemon juice into hot water and drink first thing every morning. This enables the body to cleanse itself and be better prepared to defend itself for the day. After all, a good part of your body’s immune system relies on the health of your gut to operate effectively.
Lemon for Clear Skin
Lemon is noted to help improve the clarity of your skin through a couple of different methods. First of all helps increase the vitamin C content of the body, which directly impacts how healthy the skin appears.
Additionally, you can cut a lemon, and just rub its juice directly into your skin (avoiding the eyes!) which can both help tighten your pores, and acts as a mild astringent, cutting oil the tension in cleansing the skin.
Lemon’s Other Health Benefits
High Vitamin C content
Vitamins C has so many amazing benefits — and is so well known — that it is almost pointless to try to cover it all here. However, one of the biggest benefits of vitamin C is that it improves your body’s production of collagen, helping to heal faster from injury, and increasing your skin’s resistance against cancer. It is also well known that vitamin C can help the body resist colds and flu better, leading to a happier, healthier life.
Lemon is one of the best sources of vitamin C — at 40 mg/ 100 g — it has just 10 mg less than the orange, and more than grapefruit and spinach!
Lemon to Help Balance pH
because our diets are so heavily sugar-based, most of us have bodies that are much more acidic than they should be. although limits themselves are acidic, when they are digested the leave behind an alkaline residue (often called “alkaline ash”), which helps restore the body’s balance away from acidity.
Improving Overall Health
here’s the bottom line, any time, we can replace-bad-for-us drinks, with something that can help reduce hunger cravings, cut the sugar out of our life, and improve major components of our health such as the elimination and immune function, we are on the winning side.
Plus lemon can help heal the body, improving liver function, and carrying asthma attacks and the common cold.
Regularly drinking hot lemon water will put you in that “winning circle”
Tips for Preparing Hot Water and Lemon
- Before cutting your fresh lemon, you should roll it across a table or flat surface with the palm of your hand, helping to “beat it up a little” and releasing more juice and pectin. (Pectin is great for helping reduce hunger cravings!)
- Do not mix sugar into your lemon water. First of all, lemon water is actually rather tasty and is a drink have enjoyed for many years. Secondly, sugar is bad for you adding both unnecessary calories and acidity to your body.
- Cut the lemon in half and squeeze it into about 8 oz of water. Now, this does not have to be hot water, but if you are doing it in the morning to help stimulate your body and digestive system, you will want it to be at least warm water.
- Other than using lemon juice in the morning, there is no required best way to use lemon for your health. Feel free to experiment, just remember that for optimum health you want to drink at least 6-8 glasses of water a day. And, the more lemon the better!
