We are sitting on the dock of the bay and kind of thinking about what we are going to do today? What are we going to eat? And I have Yuri.

In this interview, while Yuri and I are sitting at the dock of the bay, we are going to talk about:

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Yuri, will you introduce yourself and maybe you can talk about cleansing and how often should someone cleanse.

Maybe we can talk about those two things but first let people know who you are and about your legendary status on YouTube because that’s how I ran into Yuri. I was surfing around YouTube and I came across Yuri and all of his videos.

Yuri Elkaim: All 400 of them.

Rick Kaselj: Yes, all 400.

Yuri Elkaim: My educational background is in Kinesiology. I went on to later study Holistic Nutrition. Now nutrition has become my passion because there was a scenario in my life that was far out of control for 20 years. Once I got a handle on it, it made all the difference.

Like Rick said, we started out by producing tons of awesome videos on YouTube for over 40,000 subscribers on YouTube. Our mission is to help 10 million people by 2018 with this information on getting healthier, training smarter, and living a better life. We’ve been able to help over 80,000 people the last couple of years and it’s been tremendous.

My goal is just simply to get this information to more people because there is a lot of misinformation that leads to a lot of confusion and lot of powerlessness when that happens.

Rick Kaselj: We will start off with the thought that cleansing. Is it dangerous?

Yuri Elkaim: First of all, cleansing and detoxification are used synonymously and interchangeably.

Detoxification is a process that every single cell in your body goes through on a 24/7 basis. Your cells do the same thing you do when you have to go to the bathroom to poop or pee your cells do the same thing. When that builds up, you need to get rid of it. You need to get rid of the toxins that were built up from the foods that we eat. This happens every single second of every single day.

Cleansing is a process that we can do to facilitate that and make that more efficient. I have always believed that cleansing the way that most people do it is dangerous. I don’t recommend it the way that most people do it because what it doesn’t do is it doesn’t instill proper habits.

What most people do is they go through the year, they enjoy the holidays and then on January 1st they start thinking “I am going to change and I am going to get healthy. I am going to start this lemonade cleanse or I am going to grab these cool cleansing pills and I am going to lose 10 lbs of fat.” That’s great though but the thing is useless if you do not change how you eat and go back to the way you ate before.

Those don’t create positive changes and they don’t foster better habits. A lot of cases they are not really necessary and bring some health issues. Some cleaning products contain stimulants or laxatives with herbs which literally just excite your bowels into ejecting stuff and that’s not a healthy way of improving the health in your digestive tract.

The lure of this pill is that we live in a culture where if we have a problem, we take a pill, and then we are fixed. The reality is we are not fixed.

Whether somebody wants to lose weight or wants to achieve a better health, it’s not about going to a supplement store and grabbing the latest bottle of supplements or doing some radical cleanse for a certain amount of time and then going back to the way you ate before, that’s the last thing that you should do.

You are actually better off just doing a one day intervention fasting if you want to do that.

Rick Kaselj: Traditionally, what most people do is they will do it like once a year and it’s like a onetime event for 3, 5, 7, 10 days or whatever. What are your thoughts on that? And how should people think about it as more like a lifestyle?

Yuri Elkaim: We think of the New Year as a new start. That’s when most of us want to kick start our body. That’s when most people think about cleansing and that’s great. Whatever it is that is giving you that motivation to start is probably very important. Do a cleanse once a year or maybe twice a year, for example in summer or fall.

But again, we encourage everyone to think about cleansing as something that they can do on a daily basis. It’s one of the small little things that you can do to improve the health in your body every single day because when you do that it’s the best way to cleanse.

Once we understand that there is stuff that our body does 24/7, we need to ask what are the simple little things that we can do from the foods that we avoid and the foods that we choose to eat that can help that process. In conjunction with maybe doing something a little bit more focused do it once or twice a year. Those little things on a daily basis really are the most important things to see permanent and lasting change.

Rick Kaselj: Awesome. So thank you very much Yuri and thank you very much exercises for injuries readers, viewers, and listeners.

Rick Kaselj, MS