The Cleanse

The first step to taking better care of my myself is to do a detox. So what exactly is a cleanse/detox? 

Google defines cleanse as:

"Rid (a person, place or thing) of something unpleasant, unwanted, or defiling."

Google defines detox as: 

"The process of removing toxic substances or qualities."

Many people have done detoxes/cleanses or in so many words, a fast. People such as Cesar Chavez and Ghandi fasted for weeks for political protests. Even though their body was very weak, they admitted to feeling pure and feeling enlightened. Many people do short fasting for religious reasons such as Buddhists, Christians, Catholics, Mormons, Taoist, and Jews. All of these instances are called fasts because the individual only consumes water and nothing else. This may be good for a day or two but anything beyond could potentially harm your body in the long run. 

But I'm not doing a fast. I'm doing a cleanse. 

But I mentioned fasts because it carries the same idea and common experiences. There are different types of cleanses: juice cleanse (only consuming juice), the master cleanse (only consuming lemonade and water), and the raw food cleanse. I am doing the raw food cleanse. 

I have done the master cleanse before where for ten days I consumed only water and lemonade that I made out of maple syrup, lemon juice and cayenne pepper. The lemonade was actually really good and I recommend anyone who enjoys lemonade to make it on any occasion. I probably could have done this cleanse a little better. I didn't drink enough of the lemonade and I probably wasn't getting enough calories (go figure). I ended up passing out twice in the last day (I did it for ten) and I never passed out before so I was a little confused why I was standing up and the next thing I knew was staring at the ceiling. You are also suppose to do a salt-water flush everyday to basically give you diarrhea but I just couldn't keep down a gallon of water that tasted like it came straight out of the ocean. Despite these mistakes, I found the cleanse to be overall enlightening. Around day 3, I found myself finding deep inner strength within myself to not eat donuts uncontrollably and I mean DEEP INNER STRENGTH. This cleanse was probably one of the hardest things I have ever done because even in high school when I had anorexic traits, I would still allow myself a cracker at the end of the day. Well not anymore. Around day 5 the feeling passed and even though I still thought about food, I thought about food in a different way. I thought about how to treat my body well. I thought about the benefits of food and what food did for me in other ways that just tasting good. I also felt a sense of calm, not exhausted or tired but calm. The next few days was smooth sailing. (I lost ten pounds in ten days but this actually was not the point when I started it so I wasn't upset when I gained it back in the next few months). 

I expect that even though a raw food cleanse won't be as aggressive, there will still be things in common. I expect around day 3-5, I'm going to feel like I'm starving. I'm hoping this won't happen as strongly as before since I will have an abundance of fruits and vegetables without a limit. But I can expect my body will crave sugar and salt and I'll still be looking at donuts like they are my holy savior. I also expect my body to go through withdrawal meaning I'll probably get migraines like I did with the master cleanse and feel extremely irritable and tired the first few days. But I hope towards the end, I feel enlightened once again or at least motivated to treat my body better. If you go through such an experience for ten days, the least you can do is use that time to stop a think about the treatment of your vessel for the rest of your existence. Little price to pay. 

The guidelines of my personal detox will include: 

1. Fruits and vegetables. The only thing is not to use spices, salts, sugar or dressing when eating these things. This will probably be the challenge for me since that is exactly what I do every time I eat fruit or vegetables. 
2. The first 24 hours will be fasting. Looking through many ideas through the internet, a
3. lot of sites suggested fasting for 24 hours to get a head start of the cleanse but this will count as Day 1 in my ten day cleanse. 
4. I was told not to gorge on anything like sugar or alcohol but actually slowly prepare my body for the cleanse by eating lots fruits and vegetables. I completely disregarded this knowing full well what I should be doing. And I ate everything like the world was going to end. I ate pie, donuts, pasta. In fact the only sort of nutrition I probably got was the vegetable juice I've been constantly drinking with the last two weeks and cooked broccolli sautéed with garlic salt which in fact my daughter choose for dinner (not me). I know I'm going to pay for this probably in the next 3-5 days. 
5. The freebie that I'm going to allow myself is V8 low sodium vegetable juice. This is not incredibly ideal since I'm going RAW to get the most nutrients but I don't have a juicer and even if I did, I would probably make disgusting vegetable juice. Even though there is some salt, I'm getting low-sodium to limit that amount and since I've been craving this stuff so much, I figure at some point, I'm going to want to cave and this will be my saving grace. Its not like I'm allowing myself green tea soda or anything. 
6. I will not be working out. I expect I'm going to feel weaker than I normally do and so running or lifting weights which take a lot of strength within me will probably be out of the question. I'll still be riding my bike around campus, possibly be doing yoga but I'm going to see this cleanse as a time to rest and heal my insides. 

Every day, I'll include a post about how I'm feeling emotionally and physically. Hopefully this will keep me on track but also show the small amount of readers and myself the process if anyone feels curious to see how shitty I feel or would like to consider a cleanse themselves.

Happy Blogging! 

Photos used from Google, Pinterest and my personal Facebook