So we stopped the cleanse on Friday, after 6 days. Cara wasn’t feeling well with the laxative process, so we decided to go ahead and begin easing out of it. I’ve said before that after day 4, everything was pretty much golden, so I’m pleased with quitting after having gotten through the hardest part. Now we have to rebuild our gut flora!
The first day off, we only drank orange juice and organic veggie soup broth all day. You can really feel it going all the way through your stomach, it’s really gratifying to feel that clean. And only that little bit of substance literally filled me up, so clearly my stomach has shrunk quite a bit during this. I’ll go on and cite that as a benefit of the cleanse, since i’m definitely going to leverage my decreased intestinal capacity to develop some better eating habits.
I mean, doesn’t that effect put this fast at odds with the stomach stapling surgery that is all the rage now? So, you can spend all this money and have someone tie up your stomach to stop you from wanting to eat so much, or you can exercise some discipline. One site even advocates using the cleanse for that purpose, perhaps taking 6 days of cleanse, then 4 days of eating lighter, then back to fasting, repeat until your portions are where you want them to be. That might be extreme for most people, but if you didn’t mind the lemonade i could see it being a possibility.
I guess i’m kind of eating my words about weight-loss, now, but it isn’t the same. I’d still say that the fast itself doesn’t constitute sustainable weight loss (the water weight drop is worthless, of course.) But the complete reboot of your eating habits and physical makeup do leave you in an advantaged position to affect dietary change.
On that note, Cara and i went grocery shopping to restock the house with stuff. We spent a lot of money on a lot of things, but i’m proud to say that most of it was organic foods and little or none of it was money spent sustaining factory farming (don’t watch these videos unless you’re still eating meat and drinking cow’s milk.) As of now, we’re totally vegetarian.
We also stopped by Cook’s Warehouse at Amsterdam Walk to burn Cara’s $160 gift certificate there. We ended up spending most of it on a couple of appliances: an ice cream maker and a juice extractor! There are a lot of amazing and healthy recipes we can use the ice cream maker for (Alton Brown’s delectable Avocado Ice Cream comes to mind) and the juice extractor will make excellent and interesting supplemental possibilities to our newly-strict diet. Do you know how good carrot juice is?!?!?
On the second day off of the fast, we had a healthy brunch consisting of veggie wraps, pita and hummus, a vegetable omelet, and fruit (we were sharing a bunch of food from The Treehouse, so good and healthy.) Cara had a Mimosa (gotta get that OJ), and i had a glass of cabernet (alcoholism…) Later that night, we cut up some protein dogs (meatless hot dogs) into a bunch of veggies, cooked them up, and ate them on a piece of toasted wheat bread with a little bit of organic salsa on top. This was probably overboard, as my stomach didn’t feel great, and Cara was actually in a lot of pain that night.
The next day, Cara made us an amazing vegetable soup. I wish she’d post the recipe so i could link to it, but needless to say it was an enormous amount of veggies in organic broth. This is the meal we should have had the previous day, according to the instructions (and common sense.) After eating that soup and a bunch of fruit afterwards, i think my stomach is ready for anything again.
The challenge now will be to learning how to be a vegetarian in every day life. When i was eating fish, it wasn’t terribly hard to just go anywhere, anytime. But not allowing any meat at all will narrow my options at many restaurants considerably. Of course, if i do this right, and keep my portions low and my stomach nice and small, it should be just as trivial for me to skip meals when i need to (or just rely on side salads, etc.)
There will probably be one more Master Cleanse-related post where i actually decide whether to advocate this for anyone else or not, but that may not come for another week or so. Just wanted to give a heads up to those of you following me specifically for the cleanse updates, you may not find my technolust nearly as interesting (but that’s your problem.)