I’m not eating and I’m taking my mom with me.
It’s been a whole 3 months since my last (and first) fasting cleanse, and I am pleased to find myself sticking with the plan to fast at the change of every season with cleanse #2. Rumored benefits of this are improved immune system functioning and improved mindfulness.
For ages I avoided the Master Cleanser because I thought it was some fad detox that was only popular because of Beyonce. I turned up my snooty health-nut nose until this blog intercepted me. When I went to a seminar for my Master’s just a week or two ago, the houseful of people putting me up for the night were abuzz about the cleanse, which has been featured in a recent Natural Awakenings article.
Oh my god! People actually talking about detoxing and I hadn’t already guinea-pigged myself out as a science project to see what it’s like? Obviously this had to be rectified. Fad or legit? Me & mamma are about to find out.
So here I am, the night before beginning 10 days of the Master Cleanser. Yesterday and today were raw food only, to ease into the lemonade-cayenne-maple syrup mix that will be our sustenance for the next week and a half. Somehow, I’m really not sure how, I’ve convinced my mom to join me for an adventure that is going to turn her world upside down. Having fasted before, I’m committed to the full 10 days of the detox. My mom, new to detox, is shooting for 5 days. I’m so proud of her, since she has a host of diet-related issues that this may help her with, including fatigue, low energy levels, and moodiness. I’m aiming to shave off the 20+ toxin-laden pounds that are keeping me out of my ideal BMI range, and work toward the low-calorie levels that have been shown (with science!) to help lengthen life. As per my 2100 challenge, I gotta get on it ASAP.
So what exactly does this Master Cleanser entail?
Well, the detox was invented 30 or so years ago by this guy Stanley Burroughs. Apparently the lemonade, cayenne pepper, distilled water and grade-B organic maple syrup mixture you drink every day does a Mr. Clean worthy job of scrubbing the junk out of your insides. One book I’ve been reading on it tell us that over time, your colon forms a thick mucous membrane between what gets through and what’s stuck to the walls, kind of like plaque in you arteries. The Master Cleanser is supposed to hack into that layer, as well as boost metabolism so that you can burn away fat, which is the primo site for storing the gunk in our food, air and water that isn’t suppose to get into to healthy human bodies.
Technically this isn’t much of a fast, since we’ll be getting a healthy dose of calories from the lemonade, but no solid food still counts as fasting in my book. Here’s a breakdown of what we’re doing:
-Drink a quart of saltwater in the morning (to jump-start the digestive system)
-drink 60 oz of the lemonade/cayenne/maple syrup drink a day
-finish out the evening with a laxative tea…yum…
-we’re adding wheat grass supplements for protein, which was OK-ed by the Master Cleanse Secrets book mom got for us online. I suppose that was supposed to be a secret? Whoops…
So tomorrow the adventure begins! The first 3 days are supposed to be hell, and then everything’s uphill from there. So I’ll be reporting back tomorrow, live from hell! (don’t blame me for cranky posts, please…)
