Phoenix From the Ashes: My Cellular Detox Journey
Your body rebuilds itself completely every 7 years. This is what I’ve rebuilt in 3.5 years. Anything is possible with cellular detoxification & regeneration.
I repeat, anything.
Oh, my God.
What’s happening to me?
I don’t know, but it’s scary as hell.
Fear, dread, and shame slither around my belly, gripping it tighter than an icy vise.
My face fills a deep, crimson, flaming red.
Whatever is releasing from my belly is sending massive flames of heat across my face. My skin is parched, my face flushed, my scalp suffocating under my thick, dark locks.
It’s taking over my entire body. And I still don’t know what’s happening.
All I know is what I did to get there.
I look at myself in the mirror in utter despair. I’m too upset to even curl up in a ball, fully clothed in my jeans and sweater.
But I don’t know what else to do.
It was 2016. Most of the first half of that year was a post-medication blur, marked only by countless doctor visits, Beyonce’s tart, sassy Lemonade album drop, and the recent post-promotion glow of career success.
At the beginning of the year, I went off my medication.
I was done with antidepressants and mood stabilizers. I’d had enough.
Nearly 1 in 4 Americans take psychiatric drugs. Like many of them, I took SSRIs, SNRIs and mood stabilizers to control my OCD, anxiety, depression, and PTSD.
And I was part of the 40% of patients who experienced repeated, uncomfortable side effects from those drugs.
I was tired of what they’d done to my body. Tired of how much they weren’t healing me. Tired of the weight I couldn’t lose. Tired of the new, constant nagging pain in my right shoulder that radiated down my arm because so much emotion was blocked, its only outlet was to accumulate and recirculate inside my body.
I was tired of all of it.
And so I made a choice one day: I was ready to try life without medication. I wanted to see what was underneath everything it was covering up.
How much of it was real? How much of it was I missing out on? I didn’t know, but I was ready to find out by feeling my feelings for the first time in years.
Within days of stopping my medication, I feared I’d made a colossal mistake.
I’d stopped mine before without issue other than, predictably, increased anxiety. I knew what to expect.
Or not.
This time was different.
This time, my body absolutely freaked out.
My internal organs were exhausted from two decades of heavy medication to numb my painfully inconvenient emotions and tightly control my OCD, anxiety, depression, and PTSD.
I immediately swelled up with lymphatic fluid that blew my body up almost four clothing sizes to a 14 in a matter of weeks. Trapped energy started moving up my body in heat weaves, pushing what would have become rosacea later in life to the surface, leaving my skin red, raw, and sensitive. My pre-existing hormone imbalance quickly worsened as my adrenal glands surged with adrenaline.
I was not happy trying on size 14 dresses in the Nordstrom dressing room that day.
The discomfort was unbearable. Who was I now?
The shame was even worse. The shame of suddenly looking and feeling nothing like myself. Of watching all my hard work (read: heavily restricting and punishing my body so it would obey me) go down the drain almost overnight. Of being forced to look at my raging body image issues, disordered eating habits, and embarrassing lack of self-love, all screaming so loudly I could no longer ignore them.
I didn’t want to look at any of that, any more than I wanted to look at myself in the mirror. And yet I had to, every day, until I finally found the path that set me free from all of it.
But it didn’t happen overnight. I spent three years searching for answers and relief.
I started with the medical community and, after a few appointments with doctors and specialist, quickly realized they were clueless about helping me. They couldn’t figure out what was wrong, were skeptical of any holistic health treatments, didn’t believe my medication caused my side effects, and spent way too much time on their computers instead of listening to me.
Bye, Felicia.
I moved on to naturopaths, functional medicine practitioners, and acupuncturists. They at least acknowledged adrenal fatigue, placed greater focus on diet and herbs to support me, and introduced me to the basics of detox. We moved the needle together somewhat, but not enough to get me anywhere close to the relief and vitality I so desperately sought.
I even briefly went back on medication for less than a year to calm my anxiety about everything until I finally went off for good in August 2018.
And then it finally happened.
One day, in February 2019, I noticed my hair was growing in thinner and patchier than usual.
Pre-cellular detox, 2019
Oh, my God. Not my hair, too. Not the one body part that, until then, had still felt attractive to me. Was nothing on my body sacred from this force sweeping through me?
I asked my functional medicine doctor about it, then screamed internally when she suggested it was seasonal shedding and told me not to worry.
Seriously? Even to my untrained eye, it was clear that things inside me were further degenerating.
I left her office and began Googling everything I could about hormonal hair loss based on a gut feeling about the root cause. Most of it scared me…until I stumbled on a YouTube video that spoke directly to the core of my deeply wounded soul.
The woman who made the video spoke about her own hair loss and hormonal imbalance/polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) journey with an energy that resonated strongly in my body. She didn’t sound like anyone else I’d talked to about my health.
So I emailed her. We chatted on a Zoom call and agreed that working together made sense.
She immediately ascertained that my body was struggling to release waste and degenerating because toxicity was recirculating inside me. Suddenly everything about my symptoms made sense.
And then, after years of not knowing what I was searching for, she introduced me to the medicine I’d needed my entire life: Cellular detoxification and regeneration.
Fruits, vegetables and other plants are the highest vibrational foods on the planet. You cannot eat a high vibrational diet without eventually creating a high vibrational life.
She taught me all the basics I needed to hit the ground running:
How to transition to a diet rich in fruit and raw vegan foods. Cool. I was down with that and 100% ready to cancel my super-extra-not-working-for-me current diet.
Why I didn’t need to be afraid of fructose. Did this mean I could finally let go of all that Paleo and keto community-induced fear of eating fruit and enjoy it again? SIGN ME UP.
How fruit and greens could give me more energy than the protein- and fat-packed diets I was used to ever could. Good, because they made me hungry, tired and anxious on the reg. #OverIt
The power of celery juice first thing in the morning. Celery as medicine? Why the hell not? It can’t be worse than anything else I’ve tried.
How to dry fast and take herbs to help my kidneys and lymphatic system open back up so my body could begin releasing waste. This is the most fascinating part I’d heard yet. Give me allll the scientific details immediately so I can go nerd out on them later, please.
But most importantly, she told me what to expect emotionally as my body adjusted to my new diet and lifestyle.
During the first month, I felt amazing as toxicity left my body and dense nutrients entered it. A calm unlike anything I’d ever felt washed over me. I jokingly referred to it as the “celery juice calm.”
Then the first emotional wave she’d prepped me for hit.
And it was intense.
Fruit and the detox process bring up everything to be healed in your life. Everything.
It exposes your physical degeneration and weaknesses. It brings your suppressed emotions to the surface. And it pulls your subconscious thoughts and trauma out of your body and into your conscious mind.
It’s not for the faint of heart.
But I was ready. After years of emotional numbness, I was ready to feel.
And to feel alive again.
Pandora’s box had opened. The portal to my new life was staring right at me, seducing me closer with every bite of fruit, sip of celery juice, overnight dry fast, and wildly messy emotional purge.
I spent most of 2019 crying out trauma on a near daily basis as my kidneys, lymphatic system and GI tract flushed years of toxicity out of me.
On the surface, it looked and sounded as if my emotions had gone horribly off track.
But when I explained that not crying, getting angry, or feeling most emotions for a majority of my life was what made me sick in the first place, it made more sense.
And then my body and life began speaking for themselves.
I began losing weight immediately upon starting my cellular detox journey. Within eight months, I lost all four of the extra clothing sizes I’d gained. I gradually dropped another size in 2020 and one final size by 2022 before stabilizing at a comfortable size 4, a body size I hadn’t seen since college.
Post-cellular detox, 2022
The intense heat that sensitized and ate away at my facial skin receded. My face brightened and I started looking happier as I began lightening up emotionally.
As my body healed, my body image and relationship with food improved. I began to eat intuitively and lovingly, based on how I felt. Gradually, I stopped avoiding the mirror, and I stopped picking myself apart so viciously every time I did look in it.
I began relating to people differently as my anxiety and depression began to heal. I dropped old emotional patterns that no longer served me.
This is the point in post-medication and cellular detox life where we regain connection to our authentic selves and find creativity as our life force energy radiates outward.
And I leaned all the way in, adopting several new passions. I bought a camera and took photography classes. I started cooking delicious cellular detox/regeneration-friendly meals while home during the pandemic. And I finally started writing regularly again this spring and summer, a craft I had long abandoned after pivoting from a journalism degree to the analytical business world.
The cellular detox path didn’t just give me my old life and body back. It upgraded me to an entirely new body and way of life I never thought I’d be able to have.
It gave me all the life force energy I’d lost and plenty more that I hadn’t had in years – or ever.
Oh, and my hair? That’s the best part. 😊
Deep in cellular regeneration and creativity, 2020
While some of my hair issues were hormonal, it turned out the rest were from haircuts where too much weight was taken out, leaving it thin and limp. I found out completely by accident after I felt drawn to switch hair stylists for the first time in seven years shortly after beginning my detox journey.
The first new stylist I tried didn’t know how to take weight out, and I left the salon with hair more voluminous than it had been in years – and now it was too thick. The Universe has a wicked sense of humor at times.
Eventually, my hair returned mostly to normal – a new, better normal. I found a stylist who understood my hair better than anyone who had ever cut it before. And, as I deepened my cellular detox journey by healing my thyroid and adrenals, my hair stopped shedding, starting up again only after a bout with Covid-19 brought back some of the hormonal issues I’d previously healed.
Nothing I won’t heal again.
Everything I just told you is only a sliver of the healing I’ve experienced in the past 3 ½ years. And my journey is still ongoing as I work on transforming deeper layers of physical symptoms, emotional trauma, and mental patterns.
We’ve barely scratched the surface today.
But I’ll leave you with one more healing story:
Until recently, I still froze with trauma most of the time at the thought of writing publicly about the last few years of my life.
It’s taken me five years to feel safe enough to write another post this personal, but I promise it won’t be that long again.
Because I’m excited to write an ongoing series around everything I’ve experienced and learned along the way. To teach you what I know so you can heal, too. To help you radiate and fill up your life with the same life force energy that transformed mine.
Watch for my next story soon. ❤️
In the meantime, I’d love to chat with you about how much transformation is possible in your life – and how you can do it with more speed, efficiency, and ease than I did.
Email me at laura@laurakzegar.com for $500 off enrollment in my new Life Force Accelerator coaching program through 10/2/2022 or book a 1:1 session with me.
My hair and I would love to support you.
