It is that time again. The time of year that my wife and I do a metabolic cleanse. Wait…before you click, think about it. Pesticides, additives and preservatives on your food. Pollution in your air; tiny particles, hydrocarbons, car exhaust, Radon. Perhaps city tap water is not as pure as we would hope. Then there are the elective toxins; fast food, alcohol, pharmaceuticals, smoking etc. etc. All this “stuff” adds up!
It is day 4 of the cleanse (of 21 days). Today I woke up a few minutes before the alarm, refreshed. I said good morning to my wife, and followed with, “Hey, you don’t have morning breath!” She replied “Ditto”! Then I got on the scale, pleasantly surprised to see I was 5 lb. lighter than just a few days ago!
The cleanse we are doing is a raw foods cleanse which is much better than several different cleanses I have done. I remember my first was the “Master cleanse”. I could consume as much as I could of a drink that consisted of 1 gal of purified water, juice of one lemon, 1 T. maple syrup, a few sprinkles of cayenne pepper. It tastes like weak spicy lemonade, and is not bad.
The good news is that is all you have to eat for 7 – 30 days! Surprisingly, I was not hungry (as long as I avoided people who were cooking or eating anything remotely tasty). The bad news is that there are 2 phases of detoxification. Phase one pulls toxins out of storage in the fat cells and liver. Phase two in the liver converts the toxins from oil soluble to water soluble state, which can then be eliminated. The stuff is again circulating, and you can feel it. When this happens, it can make you feel mildly flu-like. I felt that way for the whole week on the master cleanse. When someone feels truly lousy on a cleanse, it is because they have failed to regulate phase 2 to keep up with phase one.