By the book, today should have been day two of all orange juice. It wasn’t.

I started off the day with a grapefruit, and some orange juice throughout the morning. For lunch, I had a fruit salad comprised of mango, banana and strawberries. At one point, I had some High Fiber Cereal, although I let it soak through with the soymilk to make sure it was soft.

Throughout all of this, I kept going slowly, making sure nothing was causing me any discomfort or somesuch. But nothing to report. So, I figured I would have a normal dinner and, if that went OK, I would officially call the cleanse over.

So, for dinner, I went to Cha-Ya, a vegan Japanese restaurant near my house. I ordered a clear broth soup with tofu, mushrooms, and veggies in it, although it was the opposite of what the cleanse books recommended, as it had more stuff than broth. I also got a vegan roll, which is just a thick sushi roll with spinach, tofu, carrots, and a few other things in it, and I even dipped it with the wasabi and soy sauce. And I finished off the meal with some gyoza and edamame.

This was about four hours ago, and not a single issue as far as internal groaning, pain, or anything else. That was certainly enough food, with enough textures and such, to make me comfortable that I’m back in the eating saddle again.

So, this officially wraps up the cleanse posts. Thanks for reading.

I said I was done writing about this, but I think it’s sort of necessary to document the journey back to real food, as well, as people might end up reading all of the previous posts and wonder what the recovery is like. I know when I went to Thailand and blogged about my trip, I still get a few e-mails each year asking about different places I stayed and such, thanks to search engines and the like.

So, today was supposed to be orange juice and nothing but orange juice, but I have to admit I was curious to test things out, so I did stray from that. After making my first glass of the morning, I quickly realized that it will take a lot more oranges than I had purchased, since I’m going from needing only two tablespoons of lemon juice per glass to 8ish ounces of pure orange juice. It was also clear that juicing oranges isn’t as easy as juicing lemons, so I brought out my juicer to handle the job. It seemed like too much work to use it for the lemons.

While at Rainbow Grocery, buying a few grapefruit, oranges, and some fruit for an upcoming fruit salad (mango, banana, strawberries, etc.), they also had dates out to sample. So, I took one and ate it, chewing it slowly, although I don’t think there’s much chewing necessary for a date really.

I sort of wanted to test the waters and see if I could get a reaction from my digestive system by tossing something but juice down. Nothing really happened.

So, throughout the afternoon, I’m drinking juice whenever I get hungry and, once again, reading the message boards proved to show the extreme side of things, such as people experiencing total hunger that the juice can’t suppress. I don’t know what the deal is there, as it didn’t really happen with me. And, I should point out, I did not stray from the fast a tiny bit during the 10 days, I did it 100 percent by the book.

By mid-afternoon, I was making some juice, and peeling the grapefruit before putting it in the juicer and, just for kicks, I held three sections back to eat them as-is. My juicer is pretty hardcore in the sense that it is juice, with absolutely no pulp, and in addition to the caloric surge, part of me thinks this is also about introducing solid foods slowly back into the mix. So, I eat those, taking care to chew them pretty thoroughly. No bad reaction.

All day, I hear my digestive track making noise, coming back to life. The noise was internal for most of the afternoon, and finally found its way externally by evening. So, I’m pretty confident that whatever “waking up” is supposed to happen has occurred.

The more I looked at the way to break the cleanse (two days of OJ, and then on the third day it’s OJ for breakfast, a raw fruit salad for lunch, and a raw veggie salad for dinner), I started questioning the intention here. Specifically, that this diet has been taken up by the raw foodies, and they do make a push that after this cleanse, you might want to consider eating raw full-time and such. So, it seems odd that my first solid food would be raw fruit, which is pretty dense and, depending on which fruits I pick, pretty dramatic.

So, since my early experiments with taking in some food had gone well, I decided to have a sort-of dinner tonight. All I did was heat up one of the pre-cooked Jasmine Rice bags from Trader Joe’s, and mix it with soy milk. That seemed like it would be much gentler on the system than raw fruits and vegetables, and possibly not offered up due to the “cooked” aspect (though some of the books did suggest a broth-heavy veggie soup for dinner on day two).

I don’t know that I would recommend breaking the fast early like this, as many people have had realy bad reactions introducing food too early. I just figured jasmine rice and vanilla soy milk seemed about as benign a thing as could be and, even if I reacted badly to it, it didn’t seem like it would torture me as long as an actual dinner. But, it didn’t seem to affect me at all.

So, I’m thinking I’ll go easy with things again tomorrow, and probably have some soup for dinner. Of course, whenever I make soup, it is always a huge pot. I seem incapable of making a small portion, so I’m thinking of going down to Harvest in the Castro and seeing what soups they have and, barring that, possibly doing some vegan split pea at the San Francisco Soup Company in the Westfield Centre. I’d rather do something brothy, though, and they usually only have one vegan option. When it’s two, it was usually black bean, which seems too heavy. We shall see… I’m certainly not going anywhere too upscale just for soup. And I’d cook something before I went canned.