How I Conquered Rheumatoid Arthritis – Part 7
The next step in my healing was becoming aware of the importance of detoxification.
I have to admit that I’d often heard this term, or heard people talk about detox cures for years, long before I got sick. I never really paid attention to it because, deep down, I didn’t feel it applied to me, and I also thought of it as a trend.
Once again, through a lot of searching, reading many books, and listening to functional medicine doctors, I came to understand that rheumatoid arthritis, like other autoimmune diseases, was often triggered by internal toxicity that had become too much for the body to handle. The body then had no choice but to attack our cells, saturated with this toxicity.
I’ve come to see autoimmunity differently than what I was told: not as a body that suddenly goes mad and attacks itself for no reason, as my doctors had explained to me over the past years, attributing it solely to my genes, with no possible cure.
Here’s how I understand today what happened inside me: when our internal biology changes to the point that toxins accumulate everywhere, in our cells, lodged in our tissues such as our joints, our tear glands, our thyroid, or other organs, the body then seems to react to what is invading it, even if that means damaging, along the way, the tissues carrying this toxicity. In my view, the damage caused to the affected areas is almost collateral: it isn’t our organs that the body is trying to destroy, but rather the toxicity that has settled there.
Yes, because low-grade chronic inflammation builds up over years. At first, our body manages to handle it without us even realizing it. Then, after a while, it sends us signs; it whispers in our ear in the form of skin problems, fatigue, brain fog, muscle pain, perhaps… until the day it can no longer hold on and screams at us to finally force us to react, once again for our survival.
When that moment arrives, it often coincides with the diagnosis of a chronic illness, such as an autoimmune disease.
Let me illustrate this with a metaphor that’s a bit blunt, but necessary.
If you have one or more autoimmune diseases, in my view, it’s because your body is on fire
The house that shelters you is burning, and you’ll need to proceed step by step. Put out the flames, clear away the debris, and rebuild the house with solid, quality materials, then maintain it so it stays sound. That’s what I had to do to “repair” myself and regain my health. Understanding that my body was on fire inside helped me enormously to make the changes I needed to pull through.
The detoxification process was very important because it allowed me to put out the flames of that house burning inside me before I could rebuild it.
Yes, because I learned that trying to change my diet and eat more foods considered healthy was one thing, but if the toxicity I had accumulated in my body was still present, that didn’t help me, unfortunately.
That’s why I hadn’t managed to reduce my inflammation within the one-month window I had asked my rheumatologist for (which I talked about in Part 4 of my story): the toxicity was still there. Even eating all the organic raspberries in the world, I couldn’t get my health back that way.
When I talk about toxicity, there is, of course, physical toxicity due to our lifestyle: stress, what we eat, what we breathe, what we drink. But that’s not all. Toxicity also comes from our emotions, our thoughts, and our self-esteem. I had to work on all these aspects at once.
To know how to detoxify, you need to understand how our body works and what our detoxification organs are. You’re probably thinking of the liver, yes, indeed, but there are also the lungs, the kidneys, the colon, and even the skin. All these organs are essential to the detoxification process, and I worked to mobilize all of them to detoxify myself.
Let’s start with the liver. I like to call it “the Queen,” because to me it can only be feminine, given how much multitasking it does! It performs more than 500 functions in our body¹: it converts the food we eat into energy, handles detoxification, but also the production and deactivation of hormones, the manufacturing of proteins, bile, and powerful antioxidants like glutathione, and many other functions besides. It has the heavy task of filtering up to 1.5 liters of blood per minute². We don’t realize its importance for most of our lives, except for people affected by liver disease; it’s really in those moments that we realize just how essential it is.
Without getting too technical, it’s important to understand that the liver processes everything that enters our body: what we eat, what we breathe, what we touch.
Added to this is another type of pressure on our body that’s talked about more and more: the electromagnetic waves we’re constantly exposed to, whether from the cellphone we keep on us at all hours, or our home Wi-Fi box. These waves generate oxidative stress in our body, meaning an overproduction of free radicals that exceeds our cells’ antioxidant capacity, while also depleting our antioxidant reserves³. The liver then finds itself with an extra burden to process, as if it were one more toxin. I know it’s hard to do without, myself included, but there are simple steps to reduce this exposure: not keeping your phone too close to you while you sleep, avoiding carrying it on you constantly, especially in your pockets.
To handle the detoxification of everything entering our body, the liver works in two steps. The first phase (phase 1) converts toxins, including medications, making them more reactive in order to prepare them for elimination. An important point about this phase is that the molecules generated this way are temporarily more unstable, and this process also generates free radicals. It’s the second step (phase 2) that neutralizes these reactive molecules through conjugation, making them water-soluble, so they can be excreted through stool or urine without recirculating in our body.
For phases 1 and 2 to work properly, a lot of nutrients are needed: B vitamins, vitamin C, certain specific amino acids, and glutathione, which acts both as an antioxidant and as a conjugation molecule⁴.
Today, with our lifestyle marked by pollution and ultra-processed food, phase 1 is constantly triggered, while phase 2 can’t keep up due to a lack of these key nutrients.
What’s the impact? Highly reactive toxins from phase 1 that can’t be excreted and end up recirculating in our body. The liver is also involved in eliminating our hormones: when this elimination doesn’t happen properly, our estrogen load can increase, for example. This can contribute to various imbalances: skin problems, disorders linked to estrogen metabolism such as endometriosis and breast⁵ and ovarian cancers. And beyond excess estrogen, when toxicity in the body can’t be cleared and builds up, it leads to chronic inflammation, which is the starting point of autoimmune diseases⁶ and other chronic illnesses⁷.
What helps with detoxification? Many foods, especially those rich in sulfur like garlic, onion, shallot, and leek, cruciferous vegetables like broccoli, cauliflower, and kale, and leafy greens like spinach⁵.
You might think: “I already eat a lot of vegetables.” Quality matters. Today, eating organic as much as possible should be a priority because non-organic foods contain pesticide and herbicide residues that reduce their nutritional quality and add even more toxicity to our bodies, which the liver then has to process⁸.
How you prepare these vegetables also matters. For green vegetables, keep in mind that chlorophyll, the pigment that lets plants produce energy from sunlight, is destroyed by cooking at too high a heat, and that the vitamins and minerals they contain are also reduced by heat.
In my case, the raw form was appropriate. I drank a lot of green smoothies made mostly of cruciferous vegetables, with a bit of fruit, and above all, omega-3s.
And this is the moment for me to remind you that this is my story, based on my constitution and the conditions that were mine. The principles I explain, like detoxification in this chapter, apply to everyone; but the method may differ depending on your condition, your constitution, and the medications you take. For example, if you suffer from hypothyroidism, it’s best not to consume too many raw crucifers, especially in smoothie form, as they can interfere with thyroid function. If you have a sensitive gut, raw vegetables aren’t for you either, but there are other alternatives. That’s why it’s best to do a lot of research or be guided by a nutrition professional, and to never blindly apply someone else’s diet without checking whether it’s suited to your own particular situation.
That’s also why I decided to study and train so I could help others safely, because there’s no one-size-fits-all solution that works for everyone; protocols need to be adapted and personalized to the individual for them to work and for the person to regain their health.
With that said, let’s get back to my detoxification, and to the fact that these cruciferous foods, raw and in the form of green smoothies, were one of the important elements of my journey. I started consuming them regularly and drinking a lot of water. I started feeling better, and above all regaining a lot of energy; this helped me enormously to detoxify.
Alongside this, I combined periods of fasting. The fasting I used to practice every year for religious reasons changed everything, because I learned how to practice it even better, in a way that becomes truly therapeutic (and I believe this was always its intended purpose, across all religions and faiths). I also learned how I needed to break my fast afterward to get all its benefits.
I’ll tell you more about that in Part 8.
References
¹ American Liver Foundation (2023) The Healthy Liver. Available at: https://liverfoundation.org/about-your-liver/how-liver-diseases-progress/the-healthy-liver/ (Accessed: July 2026).
² ScienceInsights (2024) Does the Liver Clean Blood? Here’s How It Works. Available at: https://scienceinsights.org/does-the-liver-clean-blood-heres-how-it-works/ (Accessed: July 2026).
³ Kıvrak, E.G. et al. (2017) ‘Effects of electromagnetic fields exposure on the antioxidant defense system’, Journal of Microscopy and Ultrastructure, 5(4), pp. 167–176. Available at: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6025786/ (Accessed: July 2026).
⁴ Panda, C. et al. (2023) ‘Guided Metabolic Detoxification Program Supports Phase II Detoxification Enzymes and Antioxidant Balance in Healthy Participants’, Nutrients, 15(9), p. 2209. Available at: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10181083/ (Accessed: July 2026).
⁵ Hodges, R.E. and Minich, D.M. (2015) ‘Modulation of Metabolic Detoxification Pathways Using Foods and Food-Derived Components: A Scientific Review with Clinical Application’, Journal of Nutrition and Metabolism, 2015, Article ID 760689. Available at: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4488002/ (Accessed: July 2026).
⁶ Vojdani, A., Pollard, K.M. and Campbell, A.W. (2014) ‘Environmental Triggers and Autoimmunity’, Autoimmune Diseases, 2014, Article ID 798029. Available at: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4290643/ (Accessed: July 2026).
⁷ Sears, M.E. and Genuis, S.J. (2012) ‘Environmental Determinants of Chronic Disease and Medical Approaches: Recognition, Avoidance, Supportive Therapy, and Detoxification’, Journal of Environmental and Public Health, 2012, Article ID 356798. Available at: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3270432/ (Accessed: July 2026).
⁸ Barański, M., Srednicka-Tober, D., Volakakis, N., Seal, C., Sanderson, R., Stewart, G.B., Benbrook, C., Biavati, B., Markellou, E., Giotis, C., Gromadzka-Ostrowska, J., Rembiałkowska, E., Skwarło-Sońta, K., Tahvonen, R., Janovská, D., Niggli, U., Nicot, P. and Leifert, C. (2014) ‘Higher Antioxidant and Lower Cadmium Concentrations and Lower Incidence of Pesticide Residues in Organically Grown Crops: A Systematic Literature Review and Meta-Analyses’, British Journal of Nutrition, 112(5), pp. 794–811. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007114514001366 (Accessed: July 2026).