In my first Deep Dive, I wrote about enemas — what they actually are, why most people are doing them wrong, and the role they’ve played in my own cleansing practice for over a decade.
And what I mentioned there is that my own arc with true detox didn’t start with enemas.
It started with a colonic.
In my mid-twenties, I was working for a hypergrowth tech startup in New York, deep in the corporate grind.
From the outside, things looked good. From the inside, I was struggling.
I was struggling with gut issues like bloating, gas, and stomach discomfort. I had cystic acne along my jawline and chin that nothing topical or pharmaceutical could touch. My body was inflamed in ways I could feel and see. My hormones were suppressed from birth control and subsequently an IUD I had relied on for over a decade, and the downstream effects were all telling me something was really off.
I had tried the conventional route.
I had tried the functional route.
I had tried clean food, movement, supplements, all the things a high-functioning, ambitious twenty-something tries when something is wrong.
Nothing was working.
And, the worst part wasn’t the symptoms. It was the quiet knowing that I was doing all the “right” things and getting nowhere.
Then, someone I followed on social media mentioned a colon hydrotherapist in the East Village named Gil Jacobs.
Gil has been dubbed the godfather of colonics for good reason — he’s been doing this work since 1989 and has performed somewhere in the neighborhood of 70,000 gravity colonics. He’s not just a practitioner; he’s a teacher, a philosopher of cleansing, a true force.
I went to his small East Village studio, nervous and skeptical, and had my first gravity colonic.
What I remember most isn’t the procedure itself.
It’s the walk home.
I walked from the Lower East Side back across Manhattan to my apartment on the East Side, and somewhere along that 20-minute walk — clearer, lighter, more vibrant, more present than I’d felt in years — I had the thought that became the foundation of everything I do now:
Detox is the missing link.
Not nutrition.
Not supplements.
Not movement.
Not the wellness optimization stack I had been working through in good faith for years.
Deep cellular cleansing and detoxification — actually clearing what the body has been holding — was the piece absolutely nobody had told me about, the piece that suddenly made everything else make sense.
That walk home rerouted my life.
Over the months and years that followed, my gut healed, my skin cleared, and the inflammation came down. I removed the IUD and let my body recalibrate. And, I eventually quit a venture capital job to pursue my long-time passion for health and detox.
So, What Is A Colonic?
Before I take you behind the paywall — into the methods, the protocols, my personal practice, and the directory I share with my clients — I want to make sure we’re working from a common understanding.
If you’ve never had a colonic, what you imagine and what actually happens are probably very different.
Imagine your digestive system as a long, twisting tube. The last section — the colon, or large intestine — is where your body absorbs residual water and electrolytes from food, forms stool, and carries waste (both endogenous and exogenous) out of the body.
A colonic, also called colon hydrotherapy or colon cleanse, is a procedure in which water is gently introduced into the colon to flush out accumulated waste matter that may be deeply impacted on the colon’s inner lining.
It’s a bit like giving your colon a shower.
The water helps soften and loosen anything stuck to the colon walls, and that waste is then flushed out through a tube.
That’s the simple version.
The actual procedure has more nuance — there are two main methods of delivering the water (gravity vs. pressurized), two main system setups (open vs. closed), and significant variation in practitioners and quality. Most people who try colonics once and dismiss them have actually had a poorly-executed pressurized colonic, not the real thing.
Below the paywall, I’m going to walk you through everything I know.
What you’ll find below:
Why colon clearance is the foundation of every other form of detox
The real difference between gravity and pressurized colonics (and why I always recommend gravity if possible)
The difference between open and closed systems, and which one I prefer
The specific method Gil uses — the Woods Gravity Method — and why it matters
My pre-colonic protocol (48-72 hours before the session)
What to actually expect during a session
What to do immediately after
How often I get them, and how often is too often
Who shouldn’t get a colonic
My curated worldwide directory of colon hydrotherapists I trust