Today was unique in the sense that I felt like getting out of the house, so I had to prepare a cleanse-to-go kit. I made up three little concentrates of lemon juice and maple syrup, one container with enough cayenne pepper, a bottle of water with enough for three servings, and another container in which I could mix it all up.

While walking around downtown, I paid attention to the abundance of food. I say paid attention to it moreso than saying I was compelled to do it. It was intentional. I started to realize that a lot of people on this cleanse eat meat and dairy and a lot of this junk food, and I could see that it is a bit of an obstacle course for them. Hot dog vendors, and mall food courts, and movie snacks… so I think my vegan repulsion at most of this stuff helps me in the cleanse.

I went to see Cassandra’s Dream, the new Woody Allen movie starring Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell. Was a very interesting picture coming from Woody, as there was no trace of his usual nebbish doppelganger, and the two male leads were quite manly. Farrell really shows his range in this one, and I hope it finds an audience. I’m not sure why we seem to constantly shun our elder artists, but we are certainly shooting ourselves in the foot by doing it.

Anyway, while the previews were playing before the movie, I mixed up my batch of lemonade, which was pretty easy, seeing as I only had to measure out some water, dump in the concentrate, sprinkle some cayenne and shake it all up. When I was leaving the movie, I didn’t really have any plans for today and still felt fine, and still had two more shots of lemon mix, so I jumped into seeing Sweeney Todd for a second time. Still holds up. I really love that movie. Same deal, mixed the lemonade up during previews.

After the movies, I went to the gym (had my third lemonade en route from the subway to the gym) and did my cardio. Went fine, watching the Steve Jobs Macworld keynote while doing it. No nasal action and a bare minimum of mouth slime this time around. If I’m burning off 600-650 calories at the gym, and this diet seems to be taking in less than that amount, then clearly any weight loss is just the same-old formula and not some by-product of detoxification.

One thing I noticed today is that I often find my teeth pressed together, not sure if I’m just missing the need to chew things or what that’s about. Not grinding them together or anything, just pressed. Strange.

Eliminations are pretty boring and primarily liquid, of course. I think there was some solid stuff in the movie elimination, but auto-flush toilets, so it disappeared before I got much of a glance.

I think I may have expected more dramatic results because I failed to consider the diets of many people going into this cleanse. People craving meat and cheese (as they say on message boards) and having all this stuff come out of their system. Maybe being vegan gave my body a chance to detox otherwise? Then again, the one book author that talks about doing this cleanse several times a year is a raw food vegan.

I’m sort of at an impasse here. On one hand, I like the concept of detoxing and that I am helping my body eliminate all of this stored stuff and flush it out. But then there’s the whole medical community sort of giving it no attention, other than to sort of raise their eyebrows and question whether it could do harm.

It sort of reminds me of when I did 90 days of Bikram Yoga in a row. Any mood, skin breakout, or anything I felt at all was attributed to my body reacting to the yoga and flushing out toxins. The takeaway was always to just go with it, your body knows what to do with it. So, there’s this whole blind faith element to it all that seems to be based on junk science and feel-good hype.

On the other hand, I completely distrust the medical community as well. Anything that isn’t profitable doesn’t really have a place there. If you eat a bad diet and turn your blood thicker and your heart decides to work harder to move it around properly, you are diagnosed with high blood pressure and put on pills forever to bring your heart rate back down where it should be. Keep eating too much, you’ll probably start needing some cholesterol medication, something for your acid reflux. It goes on and on down the line, people scheduling C-sections for convenience, and I think the circumcision debate within the medical community is we make money if we do it, and we don’t make money if we don’t.

And the cleanse of course is ridiculously cheap: some lemons, syrup, one spice and water? They would hate that!

So, it’s sort of a tug of war between the vague “just go with it” hippies and the morally-bankrupt medical community.

The only thing I know is true is that Chinese medicine does use the appearance of the tongue to diagnose health problems. So, right now, I do have a white tongue, and the book says you’re supposed to cleanse until it turns pink, which means you’ve flushed out all your toxins.

Of course, I have to keep reminding myself that my primary reason for doing the cleanse was to reset my system, break old habits, and start the next 40 years differently. I don’t really need to believe the “science” or anything else, really.

Well, tomorrow marks the halfway point of the cleanse. Going to a show tomorrow night, but otherwise just hanging out and kicking back.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 20th, 2008 at 1:11 am and is filed under Master Cleanse. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.