The detoxification process can contribute to itchy armpits for some individuals.
Itch is part of the body getting rid of stuff is doesn’t want, doesn’t need, and can’t process. Brace yourself, here is a little armpit story from Mary.
When I was 25 years old, I dropped out of college and moved to rural New Hampshire in an Emersonian desire to “become a writer.” I lived in a simple log cabin, measuring just under 40 square feet: no electricity, no running water, no bathroom. My refrigerator was a bucket lowered into an ice cold well. My toilet was an outhouse. My food came primarily from an organic garden that I shared with my brother and his wife.
I lost 45 pounds so quickly after my move to New Hampshire that one Sunday afternoon playing volleyball with local friends my shorts fell down. One of the women on my team saw my quick grab of my sagging drawers and said Mary, we either have to get you a new pair of cut-offs (that’s what we called our denim shorts back then) or a piece of rope. I had no mirror, no scale, — no frame of reference for what was happening to my body. So I went to the much larger log cabin where my swizzle stick of a brother lived and tried on a pair of his jeans. They fit.
Okay, why am I telling this story? Because, in moving from the toxic environs of the south side of Chicago, where I had grown up on the Standard American Diet (SAD), I had made lots of changes. I was seeing a chiropractor, drinking pristine well water, breathing fresh pine-scented air, rarely if ever exposed to fluorescent lighting, watching no television, rigorously working my lymphatic and muscular systems every day by gardening and simply walking lots and lots in a mountainous terrain. But I think, most importantly, I had changed my religion. Yep, I had become a Vegangelical — a Vegangelical, that is, with very itchy armpits.
It’s been 25 years and I don’t remember if I had given up all deodorant at that time or if I had substituted some sort of natural deodorant. All I know is my armpits itched, and I mean they itched all the time. Which by the way was not any kind of a problem living in a town of 13 people on a mountainside in rural New Hampshire. But one day I took my pits to town. I was standing in a grocery store in Claremont, New Hampshire, on the verge of a toxic purchase (Fritos) and openly itching my armpits, when one of my neighbors tapped my shoulder. I turned, bag of Fritos in hand, to face the grand pooh bah of our town, a real Euell Gibbons of a guy, a guy greener than Kermit himself. And, without the least little bit of judgment, he said to me, “So you’re going through the itchy armpit thing.” I was at the same time both mortified and curious. He proceeded to tell me that detoxing oftentimes manifested as itchy pits — that he had gone through it himself years earlier, and to not worry, one day it would simply go away. He said he saw it happen to most everyone when they first switched to a more natural lifestyle. He walked away, saying over his shoulder, “I’m more of a Cheetos man myself.” And true to his word one day my itchy pits stopped itching.
