Cleanse diets and "toxins"

[DanTex]

From reading about different cleanse/raw food/fasting diets, I have been able to put together pieces of the theory that these appear to based on. It goes roughly like this.

Your body has toxins stored up, primarily in the fat cells. These toxins come from different places: chemicals in the environment, food additives, etc. Stored toxins mess with your body chemistry, your hormones, your metabolism; they make you hungry, lethargic, depressed. They can also cause things like hypothyroidism, diabetes, obesity, bad skin, mental health problems, and just general unwellness.

So what you need to do is get rid of the toxins. Some people claim that there are herbs and special diets that can extract toxins from cells. Other people claim that things like saunas, colonics, fasting, whatever else you can imagine, will cause toxins to be released. And, presumably just losing fat will get rid of the toxins being stored in the fat cells. Moreover, you should to take lots of fiber and antioxidants to flush toxins out of your system safely and prevent them from messing you up on the way out. And you should eat organic foods because they have less toxins. And maybe you should only eat (preferably raw) vegetables because animals and fish are all full of chemicals and hormones.

So, my question is, is there a scientific basis for all/any of this? It seems that the scientific community is pretty dismissive of the whole idea of "detox" diets, their opinion seems to be that the body is very good at getting rid of toxins, that's what the liver does, and all this "cleanse" talk is just nonsense. Now, I am scientific and skeptic by nature, but that answer doesn't seem fully satisfactory. It's one thing to say that most "cleanse" or "detox" diets are fads, but that doesn't mean the whole theory of toxins is incorrect. In other words, maybe there are lots of stored-up toxins in fat cells, they are extremely harmful, it is possible to get rid of them and thereby increase your health significantly, but a week of maple syrup and cayenne pepper is not going to do it.

So my questions are, to those who are knowledgeable about this sort of thing:

1) Is it in fact true that fat cells store toxins that affect your hormones, metabolism, and are generally damaging to your health?
2) Is there any reliable way of getting rid of the toxins, or of neutralizing their effects?
3) Is there scientific research backing this theory?