Following a life tainted by illness, one yoga instructor has revealed how drinking her own urine every morning has not only given her flawless skin, but also helped her to overcome chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia - a long-term condition that causes agonising pain all over the body.
Kayleigh Oakley, 33, drinks half a pint of her own urine every morning, rubs it on her skin, and then showers.
After being diagnosed with Hashimoto's disease (an autoimmune system illness) when she was 15, Kayleigh was then diagnosed with chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia two years later. This caused every little task in her life to feel like a nightmare.
Speaking to PA, she said:
"I was ill a lot of the time and life felt like really hard work. If someone became unwell around me, my immune system would be so weak that I would get sick, too.
"It was so draining. If I did any strenuous activity I would be in bed for week, and life became pretty miserable."
But two years ago, Kayleigh - who runs an education business and teaches yoga - came across urine therapy, and decided to give it a go.
"I was studying natural healing and medicine and was fascinated by the success stories other people shared about it," she said.
"I had been on a long journey, trying to improve my health. I changed my diet and lifestyle, trying to introduce more holistic things and not taking any pharmaceutical medicines.
"I heard that urine can reset the immune system, promote general good health, and is good for the skin. It is also an ancient yogic technique, so thought I would give it a go."
Now, yogi spends her morning peeing into a glass - drinking the 'mid-stream' of the urine, and opting to discard the first and last parts of the flow which, she says contains sediment and toxins.
"The morning drink contains the most hormones and nutrients.
"It doesn’t taste of much. It’s a bit salty and you can taste some minerals, but because I have a vegan diet, it isn’t strong."
Kayleigh says she views drinking her urine as 'medicine', and that people have just been conditioned to think it's "unclean":
"I have never been horrified by the thought of drinking it and my friends and family accept what I do. We are conditioned to think drinking urine is unclean, but it’s just a sterile filtration of the blood."
"We don’t think twice about taking drugs bought over the counter, with side-effects, yet urine has no side-effects and it works really well."
Kayleigh also says dabbing urine on her skin has helped give her a flawless complexion:
"A lot of expensive skin brands contain urea, which is excreted in urine, so I have also got a really expensive product for free.
"I had an extreme amount of energy, it was amazing
"Urine works really well to clear your skin up, if you have any hormonal issues with it. So, I use it as a moisturiser, just putting some on a cotton wool and popping it on my skin before I jump in the shower. It moisturises and helps exfoliate too."
Kayleigh believes that if it wasn't for her urine therapy, a healthy diet, and daily yoga, she would still be living in pain:
"A combination of my diet and yoga practice, as well as drinking urine every day, has helped to cure me.
"We have an epidemic of treating the symptoms, not the cause. I have tried to look at my body as a whole, see what’s missing and lacking due to nutrient deficiencies. This means I can then start treating it a bit more holistically.
"If I hadn’t gone down the path of healing myself with different therapies, I would be on more medication. There’s a lot of misinformation out there, but you won’t know if drinking urine will help until you try it."