The liver is about three and a half pounds, it’s on the right side of your body and it has over 500 functions. It does everything from immune control, digestion, detoxification of chemicals, building up of proteins, and so many things. It’s an amazing and miraculous organ. it has 50.000 to 100.000 small little units of cells that help do the needed work. Your body could be functioning pretty good with only 90% of your liver destroyed or dysfunctional.
So a lot of times the liver will not show up until more than 90% of it is destroyed. Thus, without proper check-ups, you can’t always know if your liver is badly damaged until its too late..
Some of the symptoms of having some real bad liver issues are the following: when you get bloating, you have right shoulder pain, the whites of your eyes turn yellow, there’s a lot of skin issues, itching of the bottom of the feet and the palms of the hand, basketball-type belly. You can really predict the health of the liver by the person’s lifestyle habits.
There’s several stages of liver damage that can occur. One of them is inflammation.
Inflammation can arise from a virus but it also could be the cause of bad eating or alcohol. So every time you drink alcohol, it creates a trauma for your liver, kind of a whiplash, because you’re basically killing liver cells when you’re doing that.
This will result in fatty deposits that lodge into the liver, so over time the liver can be replaced whit fat, which really isn’t what you want for your body.
Many people with huge bellies have a fatty liver. If they just had an ultrasound check they would be able to identify that, but it’s very hard to detect chronic liver problems, unless you do a biopsy, because it doesn’t always show up on a blood test. So over time when you have this inflammatory state of continuing damage on the liver because of bad habits, you develop scar tissue, and that leads into something called cirrhosis.
Cirrhosis is actually the liver filling up with fibrous tissue that’s making it dysfunctional and you start to lose the function of the liver. But again, you can get away with only a small portion of your liver working before you even notice a lot of symptoms. So just because you are feeling good on the outside, that’s not a clear indicator of your actual liver condition.
When the liver swells up because there’s not a lot of space, it could put pressure on the heart and can create heart arrhythmia issues, and a lot of skipped beats. It can create high blood pressure and increase pulse rate – that’s because the liver is right next to the heart and it will compress on the heart. When the person sleeps on their left side and they have an enlarged liver, it will compress the heart and will also make it hard to breathe and sleep at night. People having liver issues tend to sleep better on the right side of their body.
The liver is one of the only organs in the body that can completely 100% regenerate by itself. That’s the good news! The bad news is it takes a long time to regenerate the liver cells. It could take up to three years. Thus if having bad lifestyle habits, you might be damaging the liver at a faster rate than it can regenerate.
The worst recommendation people can have is: “everything in moderation”, because you cannot heal the liver having a moderate amount of junk food to the diet, because again, if you’re drinking every night or every other day or even once a week, it could take you one, two, three, four days for that liver to recover, and so you never really let it fully recover. So it’s the accumulation of letting the liver recover and heal, that helps it regenerate, an this takes a long time.
What we need to do is to eliminate the things that are destroying the liver. Alcohol is probably on the first place as a liver enemy. Even if you drink a small amount of alcohol every day, it creates huge damage on the liver.
How to get the fat out of your liver?
Stop the things that are destroying the liver and add the things that will create a healthy liver.
One of the powerful things that you can do is to consume bitter vegetables, the ones that don’t taste good. The more bitter the better, like the collar greens, mustard greens, the kales, the spinaches, those are really good for liver regeneration. The radishes are really good for liver and you have to start consuming those on a regular basis.
The other thing is that the liver does not do well with deep fried foods, but it does need certain oils. The types of fats that are good for the liver are the medium chain triglycerides, like the coconut oils. The coconut oil is one of the best oils for the liver because it doesn’t seem to strain the liver at all. It takes the stress off the liver.
The ones that destroys the liver are the corn oils that you would buy at the store, or of course the hydrogenated oils, those are really, really bad. Butter is actually a medium chain triglyceride too, so that would be okay to consume.
The other thing that’s really good for the liver and which will clean out some of the toxic waste, would be apple cider vinegar mixed with water. You can take a teaspoon of apple cider vinegar, put it in your glass of water and consume that a few times a day, that is really good to strip off the fat off of your liver.
As you consume these vegetables that have a lot of the B vitamins, especially like vitamin B2, choline, folate – over time all those key B vitamins will help the liver regenerate. Your liver will get better and better, but you’ll need to stop drinking alcohol.
One of the replacements for the alcohol would be the kombucha tea. You can get it from a local natural food store. Kombucha tea creates a similar effect to alcohol, you feel very relaxed and calm. That would be one substitute and it’s also really good for the liver.
Those are some of the best tips on reversing a fatty liver, it’s doable but you have to take aggressive approach, you have to keep helping your liver, give it time and have patience.