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Today’s Weight: 191.2 lbs

Today marks the first day of a 10-day fast that my lovely girlfriend and i are embarking on together. It isn’t exactly a fast, though: It is a liquid diet consisting entirely of water, organic lemons, organic maple syrup, and cayenne pepper. The ingredients may sound strange or a bit silly, but each serves an important purpose during the fast, mostly dealing with basic nutrients and energy.

You may not be a stranger to this fast, as it has been around for nearly 70 years and has attracted no small amount of criticism (and hyperbole.) It is called The Master Cleanse, created by Stanley Burroughs in 1941. I’ll talk more about the system itself later, when i have more experience. For now, i just wanted to begin blogging the process for posterity.

Today, we left the house and went shopping for our ingredients. We spent about $100 at the local organic food grocery, Sevananda. We bought almost 20 organic lemons, 64 ounces of organic syrup, a container of sea salt (for a part i haven’t mentioned yet), a hand juicer for the lemons, and liter bottles for bringing our “juice” with us. We got home, mixed up 2 liters of the stuff, and went about our business for the day!

So far, there has been no hunger to speak of, the last thing i ate being a snack around 1am this morning. The juice has done a magnificent job of warding off real hunger, today, but i’m still skeptical of just how long that can last.

The second part of the cleanse is what is called the “saltwater bath”, a nice way of saying “clean your ass out from the inside.” You mix a couple of table spoons of sea salt in with a liter of lukewarm water, and chug the entire thing all at once. Apparently, on an empty stomach, such a concoction will go straight through your stomach and colon, and acts as a natural colonic (sounds a lot better than the ways people are paid to do this for you.)

The saltwater bath is really important during the cleanse, because without solid foods going through the body it is possible that the colon will cease all function altogether (this would be bad.) Of course, the purpose of this program is removing impurities, so getting a colonic along the way seems pretty fitting.

As i write this, i have imbibed the sea salt concoction and am awaiting my first movement. You are supposed to hold off as long as you can (and no passing gas, because you will draw mud!) When you can no longer stand it, you get to do the deed. It takes sometime between 30 minutes and an hour before it should begin, so i figured “Let’s go write that blog post!

I expect the next few days to be the most painful, and the final stretch to be full of enlightenment and changing viewpoints. Stay tuned!