Master Cleanse

Apologies for not posting in so long! Mea culpa, work has been ridiculously busy, but of course saving the world is worth the lion's share of my time.

In my neverending quest to explore my own frontiers of health and nutrition, I recently embarked upon a Master Cleanse. For those of you who are not familiar with this, it's a "detox" program that makes the news regularly when the latest celebrity tries it x days before her movie starts. (some refer to it as the Beyonce diet because she lost 10 lbs in 10 days on it) You basically drink a quart of warm water with 2 teaspoons of sea salt in the morning, an herbal laxative at night, and lots of "lemonade" that consists of 2 tablespoons fresh organic lemon juice, 2 tablespoons of grade B organic maple syrup, 1/10 teaspoon cayenne pepper, and 1 cup high quality water.

I was recently deployed in the Shire for a fortnight and decided to try it -- why not.  The BLUF is that I lost 12 lbs in 10 days and felt amazing. By day 8 I had more energy than I knew what to do with, and I was able to bang out three whole wide-grip pullups (I had never been able to do any as I figured my lats weren't strong enough)  

Going back to solid food was somewhat depressing. The first thing I ate was a delicious organic orange, but by the end of my day I was eating cooked soups. It was all plant-based, of course, but still sapped my energy levels and reduced my number of wide-grip pullups to 1.

Would I do something like this again? Perhaps, but not while I'm working where I am. Our lives are far too unpredictable to enjoy a nice scheduled and boring existence.  I'm glad I finished the program, much to the amusement of my coworkers, and now I can check it off my bucket list. It's arguable how much of a "detox" is really going on. The reality is that the human body is in fact always detoxifying, and we have plenty of organs that do just this, but the counterargument is that in modern culture, given the abundance of processed foods and polluted environments, that our bodies can't handle the load of toxins coming in.

If you have any questions about the master cleanse, feel free to ping me on the facebook or at mcs37 at cornell (edu)