The cleanse officially began last night sooner than I would have liked. Only 90 minutes after drinking the tea and going to bed, it was working. So, I’ll drink it as prescribed once more tonight, but if it kicks in within two hours, then I’ll have to roll it back and drink it two hours before I go to bed. I mean, the idea is just getting this stuff out, I don’t think when is all that critical.

Upon waking up, I had to drink my quart of warm salt water. This is one of the parts I was most dreading, thinking to salt water gargles when I had a sore throat, it causing me to gag, and having to spit it right back out. I intentionally bought the expensive salt because I’d read online where people said at first they just bought cheap non-iodized sea salt for the Master Cleanse, and it made them gag, so the grey celtic sea salt is supposed to work for that. So, I mixed up the salt water, and… it is a much lower concentration than what I would normally gargle with, but beyond that it goes down pretty easy.

However, once inside, you can tell it’s got something special going on as you feel it sort of make its way through you. The books say it can take as long as 90 minutes to work, and I can’t imagine what could possibly take people that long. I think I was done within 30, with probably half going out the front door and half going out the back door. I noticed immediately how mucus in my nasal cavity seemed to want out, and I was sort of coughing up phlegm, which is not any part of my morning ritual. I know that’s standard for people who consume dairy, but it was strange for me.

Then, after a bit, I made up my first batch of the lemonade. I’m rather shocked that I hadn’t made up a glass well in advance of this cleanse to try it. I mean, this is my only meal for 10+ days, and I go into it blind? Well, let’s face it. I love citrus fruit, maple syrup, and cayenne pepper. Clearly, the only wildcard in the mix is the cayenne. So, I mix it up, and goes down easy. I try and treat it like nourishment and food, rather than a beverage, so I sip it down slowly while reading e-mail or whatever (which I should do whenever I’m eating anything, I know, I know..).

I was predicting I might be too drained to work out and such on the cleanse,  but I think that is more predicting and anticipating behavior than reacting to your body’s clear signals. So, I made a point to work out on day one. I did 45 minutes of cardio, the usual. One interesting thing was that I was waiting for 11 a.m. for the “all clear” from the salt water, but then had a moment of hesitation about whether I should go to the gym then or wait until after lunch. Of course, lunch and every other meal are just a glass of lemonade, but it just sort of shows how meals sort of set the schedule for my day normally. As though working out through lunch might cause me to faint or something.

The day was largely without incident. I don’t know what I was expecting, but it seemed like it was more like being a slave to the bathroom, or a life that would be made easier with Depends. But, honestly, it’s nothing too crazy. It’s certainly not my normal feeling in regards to needing to eliminate, but more like when you have colon hydrotherapy (if you ever have). You can tell you’re going to have to go well in advance of it necessarily needing to happen. I even sort of let it seemingly build up rather than immediately running to the loo, since I knew it wasn’t going to amount to much anyway. So, it wouldn’t really be a problem in the outside world.

When I read about the 6 to 12 glasses, and that I should only stick closer to the 6 side to reduce, I was a bit worried. I figured I would be floating up around the 12 side, maybe even having more since I worked out. So far, I’ve had four?! And that’s been for like 11 hours? So, I’m actually going to have to make sure I have the minimum six? I certainly wouldn’t have predicted that.

The only thing I didn’t have was the mint tea, which is something allowed on the diet for variety, but not really part of the actual diet itself. I’m trying not to drink too much excess water while doing this, since if you drink too much you can dilute the lemonade. And, if you think the stuff does have special magic to roto-root you out, it would make sense to keep it as concentrated as possible. But again, it’s not that I’ve been wanting or denying myself water or anything else. I feel rather contented by it all.

I did take a nap late in the afternoon, but that’s not unusual or indicative of anything special. I also found that some of the cayenne floats on the surface of the lemonade but some sinks to the bottom, so it’s important to keep swirling it around while you drink it or else that last sip is a bit too hot.

But I also got some stuff in the mail today to review for Vegocentric, so I’ll try and bang through some of that this week, too. More cleanse coverage as it happens…

Tonight, I went to Millennium for dinner. It is my favorite vegan restaurant. For a starter, I had sweet potato gnocchi and mushrooms over a nice cream sauce. My entree was a grapefruit-sesame glazed tempeh with edamame mashed potatoes, kim chee, roasted brussel sprouts and broccoli rabe, and some grapefruit sections. Dessert was a poached pear with ice cream, wading in a lovely pool of coconut milk and large tapioca pearls.

Before going to bed in a short while, I will drink some laxative tea and, starting tomorrow, I will officially be doing The Master Cleanse (aka The Lemonade Diet). Oddly enough, I actually got re-inspired to do it after watching a guy whose videos I regularly watch mention that he had done it before, and was going to do it again soon. If he starts his cleanse while I’m doing mine, I’ll start posting his videos here. He also has a separate site with all of the videos from when he first did his cleanse. In addition, I am doing this cleanse with my friend Eriq, so we’ll probably be talking way too much about this stuff over the next few days, as well.

I’ve always been intrigued by doing a fast (although, technically, fasting is drinking water and eating nothing; this is merely a cleanse). The idea is that your body has a natural ability to flush out your system, hit reset on a lot of lingering habits, and by giving your body a time-out from having to digest food for a minimum of 10 days, it can use that energy to do other things.

Now, I’m a natural skeptic. I have three books about the cleanse, and all of them at some point have that line that is crossed, and we’re into the world or energy, auras, and the oft-derided mucoid plaque (a rubbery intestinal wall lining that only seems to exist among people who simultaneously offer a way to get rid of it). But, I promise, if in the next few weeks a three foot long rubbery stool comes out of me, I will let you know. Oh yeah, I will be blogging this thing on here daily and some of the details are a bit TMI, but I’ll try to go as euphemistic as possible.

Honestly, I’m more interested in writing about the emotional side of the cleanse. I didn’t get where I am today by missing many meals, and I am very hard-wired and rigid about when I eat. So, the concept of going for days without that schedule, well, it’s certainly something worth getting rid of.

To the uninitiated, here’s the basic idea of the Master Cleanse. Every night before bed, you drink a laxative tea, since you will be eating no solid food to sort of kick start the engine down there. When you wake up, you drink a quart of water mixed with two teaspoons of non-iodized sea salt (I got the highly-touted, and expensive Grey Celtic Sea Salt). The salt water is sort of a top-down enema, as the salt gives the water the same acidity as blood so it won’t be absorbed by your system. Along those lines, it’s all coming right back out, by the way, so you should be home for the next 90 minutes after drinking the salt water. The upside is the salt water does give you a bit more of a “schedule” on that stuff, as opposed to the laxative tea, which is a bit more freewheeling with your schedule.

OK, after that you get to have 6 to 12 glasses of the “lemonade,” which is a mixture of water, organic grade B maple syrup, organic cayenne pepper, and organic fresh-squeezed lemons. I am not giving the measurements here, as I consider this a journal of my cleanse and not information from which anyone should start doing the cleanse themselves.

The cleanse both detoxifies and reduces, meaning I’m not only cleaning house internally, but the house should get smaller at the same time. For people looking to lose weight on this, only use half the maple syrup mentioned in the recipe. People wanting to maintain or gain weight can also add it. This is the diet Beyonce used when shooting Dreamgirls, so she could go from shooting her “older” scenes to looking slimmer and younger. It is also the diet Howard Stern’s sidekick Robin Quivers used to lose a lot of weight. That said, there is also a testimonial in the book of a skinny guy who did the Master Cleanse for like 28 days and gained eight pounds of muscle.

Your body uses about 25 percent of its energy on digestion. So, the upside is that you are actually rewarded with more energy on the cleanse, and it shouldn’t get in the way of doing anything else in your life. Working out at the gym is perfectly fine, although I am going to hold off on adding my weight training into the mix until after the cleanse. Of course, I should note that everyone’s experience with the cleanse seems to be very different, some people sit around napping and others keep on jogging.

I am excited by many of the prospects of doing the cleanse, but there is also trepidation. Mainly, I’m an eater. Pretty clockwork about it. When I wake up, I have breakfast. Lunch is pretty fixed, and dinner is also regular. In addition, I’m still looking for a job, meaning I’ve got a LOT of time here, and meals were sort of how I broke up the day. Now, don’t get me wrong, I think this is a good system to dismantle, I’m just point out that it is one of the major hurdles.

One of the main reasons for the cleanse, though, is I want to have the experience of not eating. Back when I was really fat, it was no shock how it came to be. I remember when I was a full-time student with a full-time job, and most days had four meals. There was the breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but then… on the drive home, I would usually get a quarter pounder with cheese (sometimes two), large fries, and a large soda (not sure if I was doing the delusional diet soda or not at that point). By the time I arrived home, this food was already gone, and shortly thereafter I was in bed.

So, I’ve been at the high end of the Standard American Diet, then I was vegetarian for a while, though ovo-lacto heavy, so not as healthy as it should have been. And for the last three years or such, I’ve been low-fat vegan. Even when I overeat now, it is overconsumption of primarily low-fat vegan food, which always strikes me as lame that I’m not at least doing something fun like a pint of vegan cookie dough ice cream.

I’ve covered the whole spectrum from overeating unhealthy foods to being on what most people consider to be a severe vegan diet (which is laughable seeing how enjoyable it is), but I want to cover the final frontier, which is: no food.
Now, to be fair, I’m not going on a water fast here. This is technically food and not a fast. But this is probably as close as I’m ever getting to a proper fast.

Emotional outlook largely determines success with the cleanse, and I’m doing mine up proper. The first book I’ll be reading while cleansing is Happier by Tal Ben-Shahar, who is the Harvard professor that teaches one of the most popular classes on campus, all about happiness. Unlike the more new agey and spiritual things I’ve read along these lines, this seems to be perched across many disciplines, and should be a fun read. If I tear through that, I also have You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay, as well as the extended edition of the recently-released movie of the same name. Beyond that, we’ll just fold in some Wayne Dyer to round things out.

So, this is my food blog and I have a separate journal site, but I think this is the most appropriate home for these entries, because food and spirituality and emotional attachments and everything else are a big part of what I’m trying to explore on Vegocentric.

Well, I’m getting tired and I have some laxative tea that needs brewing here. Stay tuned.