Hey, it’s Thomas DeLauer. In this video I want to talk about the liver. I want to talk about it in a little bit of different light. You see, we talk about the liver all the time and how it pertains to protecting you from alcohol and how it gets beat up all the time from everything we put in our bodies. We don’t always look at the other aspects of the liver and how it pertains to regular life and how it pertains to your weight loss.

When we look at the liver, we notice that the liver actually helps us absorb nutrients as well. It has a lot of functions that help us metabolize carbohydrates, helps us metabolize fats, and it essentially allows us to absorb and utilize what we need much more effectively. In this video, I’m going to show you a quick way that you can start implementing an easy supplement that’s going to help you detoxify your liver and get the most out of your day, get the most out of your liver.

First, let’s take a look at what the liver actually does in addition to helping you absorb nutrients. The liver helps filter the blood. When you consume something, your body registers it, gets into the bloodstream, and then processes through your liver. Your liver is going to help detox and help pull out what doesn’t really need to be there. In today’s world, there’s a lot of that with what we’re eating. Additionally, the liver also contributes to healthy cholesterol production. Without that healthy cholesterol production, we don’t have good hormone function. Hormones are critical to everything that we’re doing in life, especially when it comes to obtaining the optimum physique and obtaining the best possible levels of energy.

For example, cholesterol is going to help you create testosterone. It’s going to help you create thyroid hormones. It’s going to help you create estrogen. All hormones that you need to have in balance if you’re trying to get in the possible shape. What I’m essentially getting at with this entire video is that if you can take care of your liver and you can detox your liver, then your body doesn’t have to focus so much on detoxing, and it can allow your liver to move forward with progressive activities that are going to help you feel better rather than just maintaining that status quo. It’s going to have more time to focus on regulating sugars and regulating fats. It’s also going to increase the amount of amino acids that are readily available throughout the bloodstream.

In simple terms, what this means is that it means that you’re going to have more protein, more amino acids that are readily available for the muscles to uptake, which means a speedier recovery if you’re weight training. It also means more lean muscle mass, which means less body fat, and it means an increase in metabolism. In addition to that boost in metabolism, it’s also going to help you regulate your blood sugar a little more, which means you may not have the rise and falls that you would ordinarily have. People tend to think that that’s only an insulin and a pancreas thing. The fact is, the liver plays a big part in that.

Let’s talk about how you can simply detox the liver. This isn’t something that is a one-time detox. I’m talking about something you can do throughout the rest of your life. It’s simply called milk thistle. You might have heard of it before, but I want to explain it in a way that makes a little bit more sense than what you might just read on the label of a supplement. Milk thistle contains something called silymarin. It’s been used for thousands of years to help protect the liver. The way that it works is it’s a series of compounds that protect the liver. They protect the liver from the toxins that are flowing through it, getting stuck to the cell membranes. Essentially, what I mean is when your liver is filtering all kinds of bad things that you’re eating, normally they’ll get stuck within the cell membrane of the liver, which means they’ll stay there, pooling there, with toxins in your liver.

What milk thistle does is it’s creates a little protective layer that prevents that from happening. Those toxins get absorbed and they get readily excreted rather than storing in your liver. It’s also going to reduce the cellular inflammation within the liver. What that means is that your liver can regenerate faster. If you do damage your liver, you do go out to drink, or you do party a little too hard one night or you do eat some processed food that’s hard on your liver, it can at least recover and bounce back and get back to duty a little bit quicker.

In 2013, it was found by the European Cytokine Network that taking milk thistle, or silymarin, significantly protected the liver, but not just the liver, other organs as well, from food additives that were normally, extremely harmful. It did this simply through anti-inflammatory properties but also through anti-fibrotic properties of the silymarin.

How much milk thistle do you take, and how do you take it? A standard dose is usually about 200 mg taken a couple times per day. You don’t want to overdo it. If you do take too much milk thistle it can be actually hard on your liver, because your liver’s still processing it. Stick to 100-200 mg two times per day. The other important thing when you’re choosing a milk thistle is that you get one that is bound with phosphatidylcholine. You look on the back label, and you’ll see that it says phosphatidylcholine. The reason that you need it bound with that is because it works effectively with that component. If it’s been stripped or refined, it doesn’t really work as well. That’s very critical.

If you want to increase the effectiveness of your milk thistle, take it with a little bit of beet juice. The nitric oxide component of beet juice is going to help the absorption, and it’s going to help the liver process it a little bit better, which means it’s going to be able to do its job.

There you have it: a quick and easy way that you can protect your liver and also start letting your body focus on what’s important rather than focusing on keeping you the same. As always, keep it locked in here, and I’ll see you in the next video.