What Supplements Are Helpful During Drug Detox?
If you are looking to complete a drug detox, what supplements are helpful to take during medical detox to help replenish any lost nutrients?
In recent times, the word detox has come to mean cleansing your body of toxins by sticking to some special diet or avoiding certain kinds of foods for good. But when this word is applied to a drug detox it is so much more than that. Yes, you are still cleansing your body from the drugs you have become addicted to… Detoxing from drugs is a natural process that the body will undergo by itself when you are ridding yourself from the substances that are killing you. While you are removing the bad stuff from your body it is best to replace it with good things to help you through the process.
I have gone through a drug detox myself, and it is not the most pleasant experience. I dealt with painful physical and mental side effects as a result of detoxing my body from drugs. So taking supplements during this time helped my body to recover faster so I could focus more on recovering my mind from addiction.
Getting the Right Nutrients During a Drug Detox
While detoxing my body from drugs was painful enough, I was also hurting tremendously from lack of nutrition because of my active addiction. We tend to starve ourselves of nutrients that we need while abusing drugs, whether it is from the drugs themselves, not eating enough food, eating food with no nutritional value, or a combination of the three. There are a few key ways that we starve our bodies of what it needs during active addiction:
- Decreased appetite – People who abuse crack, cocaine, or meth will experience little to no appetite. You won’t be making good choices when it comes to food if you are not eating enough.
- Increased appetite – Drugs like heroin and other opioids cause someone to crave sweet things like candy and soda. People who abuse marijuana also experience an extremely increased appetite and will eat foods with no nutritional value as a result.
- Empty calories – Alcoholics consume high amounts of calories from alcoholic drinks.
- No nutrient absorption – Many drugs cause nutrients you do eat to not be absorbed by the body. Healthy meals end up being a waste.
Essential Vitamins During a Substance Abuse Detox
Vitamins are essential to your body to properly function every day. This is even truer when you are dealing with a drug detox because they not only help your body remove the drugs and toxins, but they do their part to rebuild your immune system. I took supplements during my stay in detox for these reasons. It made the process a little bit more bearable for me. A few supplements that can help you too during drug detox include:
- Vitamin B – This vitamin will help quickly remove the toxins from your body. They do their part by getting your digestive system out of wack, produce more blood cells, and turn sugars into energy.
- Vitamin C – This supplement helps to support the immune system and can also reduce the stress felt during the detox process. This supplement can even be found in fruits and vegetables.
- Vitamin E – This helps reduce the damage that was done to your body from the drugs. It can help restore damage to the skin and restores your blood cells.
- Magnesium and calcium – These do their part by calming your central nervous system and alleviates anxiety. This is most helpful during early detox when withdrawal symptoms are the most severe.
- Proteins – Proteins in food are broken down when you eat and release amino acids. This helps rebuild damaged cells from drug use and even helps with drug cravings.
- Omega-3 fatty acids – This supplement is linked to heart health and helps with depression. This can be consumed by eating fish, but most people will take a fish oil supplement.
Get Help from a Drug Detox Center
There are a lot of different ways to get the vitamins you need during your drug detox. When I was in detox, I had a hard time eating at the beginning and many others experience this as well. A drug detox center will be able to provide you with supplements and multivitamins in the meantime. Once you do feel like eating again, make sure you eat a balanced diet with lots of protein, carbs, fruits, and vegetables. These supplements can do wonders to make your detox process more comfortable for you. The drug detox centers at Evoke Waltham can help you figure out which supplements are best for your drug detox.
