Get stoned on Friday night, spend Saturday relaxing in the Sauna, pass a drug test on Monday. Sounds like a rather fulfilling weekend doesn’t it.
Unfortunately, it’s not quite the way things are going to work.
Whether you just had your first puff or you are a chronic smoker will have a big difference on how well this method is going to work for you, but you probably need to understand how THC is stored in your body to understand how effective the sauna detox method is going to be and if you can sweat out the THC no problem.
What Is THC?
THC is the primary part of cannabis that gives you the ‘high’. There are over 100 cannabinoids in cannabis, of which Tetrahydrocannabinol is only one, but it is the most well know, and the levels of THC in a product will determine the effects it has. For users of CBD products, the THC has usually been removed, or is in such a low dose as to be barely perceptible. However, even very low doses of THC can be detected in a drug test, so be aware of what you are using and how it may affect you.
THC works by attaching itself to the Cannabinoid receptors in your brain, which activates them, helping your body flood with dopamine. Excess THC, or for people who have an allergy or adverse reaction to THC, can cause an increase in heart rate and anxiety, and in a small percentage of this population may cause mild hallucinations.
THC In The Human Body
THC can be consumed in a great many ways, the cannabis plant can be dried and smoked like tobacco, it can be added to food and eaten in the same way as any other herb like basil or parsley, it can be turned into an oil through a range of processes and applied topically or added to food or it can vaped. Although each method of consuming marijuana will produce slightly different effects, with inhalation tending to be a faster ‘hit’ than an edible, which may explain why people who are used to smoking weed tend to overdose when they instead have a hash cookie.
Whether THC is inhaled, absorbed or ingested, it will eventually end up being processed by the liver, and stored in fat cells. https://sapiensoup.com/human-metabolism-thc THC can remain stored in your fat cells for up to 90days, and will only be slowly released into the bloodstream over this time. It is the fact that THC is fat soluble that makes it stay in your system for so long, unlike alcohol or other chemicals like LSD which are more water soluble, so can be processed faster by your kidneys and tend to be excreted out in your urine quite quickly.
Sweating Out The THC
Everyone knows that if you sweat enough, you’ll start to lose weight. Unfortunately, particularly for our purposes, what you are losing is water weight, which as soon as you have a drink of water will start to fill you out again.
Although there is a strong idea that when you sweat you are sweating out all the toxins, this isn’t quite accurate. No one is going to get high from licking your sweaty body, as most of your sweat is made up of water, with a little salt, and miniscule amounts of environmental toxicants (like THC).
Sweating in a sauna (or a hot yoga session), can help remove the THC and toxins from your body by increasing the body temperature, which may cause the body to expend more calories, which of course, the body gets from those fat cells. However, this is a much more effective way to remove water soluble drugs rather than fat soluble drugs.
If you decide to go to the sauna method to remove THC from your body, you will need to ensure that you don’t overdo it. Heating your body up, and maintaining that level of heat for hours at a time, is more likely to kill you through heat exhaustion than it is to remove the last traces of drugs from your system. You will also need to ensure that you drink a lot of water in order to prevent dehydration (although, again, too much water can also be a problem, you want to be consuming no more than 27 ounces (1liter) an hour.
Being dehydrated will not help pass a drug test, and having concentrated urine can be a definite disadvantage.
If you are only an occasional user of pot this method might be enough to see you clean, but if you are a heavy user then there is a high chance that you will still fail a drug test.
Detection Levels In Drug Tests
One of the factors that will decide whether this method is going to work for you or not is what sort of drug test you will be given.
With a hair analysis sample the sauna method will have next to no effect. The act of sweating and washing your hair repeatedly may actually remove some of the residual traces of cannabis from the surface of your hair, but this isn’t really what a hair drug test is looking at. With a hair sample test a small number of strands from your head are cut next to your scalp and sent to a lab for testing. They are looking at the internal hair shaft which sweating and shampoo have no effect on. This method of drug test can actually detect drug use for up to 90 days.
With a blood test this method may help a little, particularly if you are also drinking a liter water an hour while you do so. However, blood tests are generally only used to tell if you are currently under the influence of a substance, and if so at what level of intoxication. THC does not stay in the bloodstream for a significant amount of time, so you will probably get a relatively clean blood test around 5 hours after the effects of the high have worn off.