Anyone ever tried it? I had a co-worker recommend it to me about a year ago, and I blew him off as a quack. Then, a couple weeks ago we got to talking about it again and he told me the name of it, and some more about his experiences with it. So I looked it up on the internet and was surprised to find quite a bit of information on it. Apparently it’s been around since the 40’s, and this Stanley Burrows guy wrote a book back in the 70’s about it. I found it on pdf here. It has a lot of talk basically trying to convince folks to become vegetarians, but after reading it and skimming a few message boards I decided it was worth a shot. Let me stress that my purpose in this was to clean myself out and give myself a fresh start, not to jump on some diet fad bandwagon just hoping to starve myself to lose weight.
I recently turned 33, and have never really been terribly careful about what I eat. Lots of TV dinners, frozen pizzas, corn dogs, etc has made it’s way into my gullet over the years. I’m not a pig, but I’ve just never put any effort into learning to cook. The pre-processed easy to make foods have always been convenient. However, I have realized I’m not getting any younger, and I’m definitely carrying some extra pounds. I’m not 19 anymore, and the extra weight doesn’t come off as easily as it used to. Also, I’ve found myself with more aches and pains, trouble sleeping, and often have an upset stomach.
The first couple days were rough, your brain is telling you that you need to eat, and it’s a matter of will to resist. I started on a 3 day weekend, Saturday morning. By the second day I was getting headaches from the caffeine withdrawals, which carried over to the third day. By the 4th day when I went back to work, I felt pretty good. I was loosing weight at the rate of about 2 pounds a day, and I wasn’t really hungry any more.
The Salt water flush they tell you to do every morning wasn’t terribly pleasant. I had a tough time muscling down the whole quart, and I had to get up at 5am so that I would be finished with my “evacuations†by 7am so I could get to work. I would take a couple sports bottles of the lemonade with me to drink when I got hungry, and it went pretty well. Even when my co-worker who works in the same room as me brought in a very tempting Philly Cheese Steak sandwich.
Coming off the cleanse is tricky, I tried drinking just the orange juice but it wasn’t cutting it. So by lunch I went over to the grocery and picked up a vegetarian soup from the deli and ate it. It may have been a bit too soon, as my stomach did a good deal of rumbling after about 30minutes or so, but by the time I got off work it was settled again. I made a nice salad for dinner, and am basically back to eating whole foods again.
In the end, after 10 days on the cleanse, I lost about 18 pounds and I feel much better than before I started. I’m sleeping better, my stomach hasn’t had problems since, and I feel like I’ve given myself a fresh start. I’ve refined my eating habits (for now, hopefully it sticks) eating many more vegetables and keeping things healthy. I’m hoping to lose an additional 30 pounds by summer, eating healthy and working out. I haven’t given up meat, I don’t care what all those hippies say. We’re carnivores, damn it. But I have cut back a bit, and am more careful about the types of meat I use.
Anyways, I thought I’d share this experience with you all. For those who get something out of it, good on ya. For those who now want to make your jibes, chop chop. And they better be good.