1. SOME OF MY TIGHTEST ALLIES THINK I’M GOOFY IN THE HEAD.
When I tell them what I’m doing, many of the people closest to me look like they just bit into a dirty diaper.
“That’s stupid,” a friend frowns. “Reminds me of the ’80s fruit-salad diet.”
“I’d understand if you did it for a few days,” adds a colleague. “Ten days sounds dumb.”
When he hears about the hungry mission at hand, my dad’s eyebrows pinch together – an undetectable blowdart has apparently caught him between the eyes.
His tone goes ominous. “Watch out… for your health,” he says.
This discipline of doubt emerges early and often in my first “master cleanse” – which is also known as the lemonade diet, since the only thing I take in (besides tea and water) for 10 days is a homemade blend of lemon juice, maple syrup and cayenne pepper. And, despite a cult staying power that has kept the diet popular for roughly a half century while other cleanses come and go, I find the response understandable. We’ve built our existence around food; giving it up, at the very least, comes off as counterintuitive.
Questions follow. How will you maintain your energy? Aren’t you skinny enough? And, one more time, how the hell will you go on without eating?
“THE ENERGY IS SO GOOD, SO AWAKENED, YOU’VE GOT TIME AND ENERGY, A DIFFERENT LEVEL OF POWER.”
As the week-and-a-half quest twists like the intestines it’s designed to rinse – through dark moods and powerful urges, from the big picture (food systems) to the quite personal (bowel movements), from Chess Boxing to Beyoncé to Bob Beamon – it encounters answers to all these inquiries. And, ultimately, it ends in a place distant from the discomfort and uncertainty where it began, and a lot closer to a certain commodity called hummus.
2. LEMONS RULE.
The star of this show wears a thick yellow coat – and removes hard stains (and freshens air) in its down time. Admirable qualities, all, but when it comes to human health, the lemon leverages a lot more juice. It cleanses the blood, flushes bacteria from the urinary tract and acts as a liver tonic. Online health hubs give it credit for battling everything from infections, high fever and asthma symptoms to tonsillitis, sore throat and arthritis. High in vitamin C, potassium and minerals, its astringent character tightens our insides, helping loosen toxins from deep tissues and organs. When pioneering nutritionist Stanley Burroughs created the lemonade diet in the 1940s, he did it in part to capture the special citrus’ ability to treat ulcers and other internal ailments.
ACID BLIP: Cleanse proponents advise regularly rinsing the mouth with water during the lemonade diet to minimize the lemon juice’s tendency to eat away at tooth enamel.
There’s more: “You know when your hands are greasy, and you rub them with lemon juice, and all that fat goes away?” Northern California-based author and physician Dr. Elson Haas asks. “That’s what happens in the body. I’ve had patients on the master cleanse whose cholesterol dropped 50 to 100 points.”
The other members of the lemonade diet alliance do their part too. Grade B organic maple syrup (recommended over other grades for its superior minerality) provides the fuel cells need to produce energy in an easy-to-process simple-sugar package. Cayenne pepper packs its own hit list of helpfulness: It functions as a natural stimulant, limits water retention, flushes fluids and provides nutrients, pigments, and vitamins A and C – all while keeping the body a tick warmer than normal, which comes in handy since it counteracts the slight chill fasters usually feel.
In other words, the master cleanse bumper sticker might read: Everything you need, nothing you don’t.
Haas has known this for more than 30 years, since he began integrating traditional understandings like mind-body healing, Jungian therapy, Eastern herbs, nutrition and exercise physiology with the conventional medicine he was versed in at University of Michigan’s med school. Today he is a driving force behind the Preventive Medical Center of Marin, has published seven books on health and nutrition and has led up to 40 people through the master cleanse several times a year for a good three decades.
“All diseases can be traced back to only one primary disease,” he says. “Cell dysfunction.”
That happens for two reasons: cells don’t get the love they need and/or they are scrambled by the unloving elements all too common in our modern foods and environments. “If they’re not getting vitamins, minerals, amino acids from proteins, fatty acids, phyto nutrients from fresh foods, the cells may not operate well,” he says. “On the other side, toxins, metals and chemicals interfere with cell enzymes.
“This is the whole basis for the master cleanser – why we say… ‘Get some nutrients and get rid of junk and toxins.’”
As the toxins say sayonara, the system gets stronger. “The body’s good at detoxifying every day, every minute, every cell, but the garbage in the body can overflow, and most illness is the body trying to get rid of waste – skin rashes, allergies, cholesterol, blood pressure. When people tend to consume too much flour and sugar and dairy and meat and chemicals, that creates more acidic base material the body can’t always get rid of completely.”
The fact that the master cleanse accomplishes this with simple and inexpensive ingredients – in direct contrast to the many spendy and exotic-sounding cleanses out there – is an added reason the master ranks as Haas’ and other nutritonists’ favorite. That the components come together in a tasty way – fresh, spicy and lemony sweet – is another appetizing bonus. Or at least for the first several hundred sips.
3. KEEP YOUR FRIENDS CLOSE.
A recent study about friendship plopped participants at the base of a hill and asked them to estimate its steepness. Those with friends beside them, it found, gauged it a mellower mountain.
The same principle applies with this 10-day peak. A good pal was embarking upon an annual spring cleaning herself; another close friend had just completed it. Their coaching, camaraderie and commentary proved clutch; moreover, much of the community lost along with the far-too-tempting happy hours and dinner parties was reclaimed while we methodically juiced lemons and earnestly swapped toilet talk (see Lesson 4, below).
My friend who had just cleansed immediately wrote me a laundry list of insights. “It’s definitely a mental battle as much – or possibly way more – than a physical one,” he reported.
“THAT’S STUPID,” A FRIEND FROWNS. “REMINDS ME OF THE ’80S FRUIT-SALAD DIET.”
That wisdom was soon verified. Like the gladiators of the World Chess Boxing Organization – which staggers four-minute rounds of chess with three-minute rounds of sparring (until checkmate, knockout or 11-round decision) – master cleansers engage in their own poetic duet of body and mind.
Though my tummy tightened in silent vigil with the first splash of juice, and a cranky cloud patrolled the skies of my mind through much of the first two days, I found a way to disarm my discomfort: Every moment I felt remotely famished, I pummeled my hunger with the juice. It proved a heavyweight hitter; I quickly made it my constant companion because it gave me a handle on the physical facet.
But there was no such easy antidote for the suddenly ubiquitous lunch and dinner invites and the social pressures that came with them. The family forgot about the fast religiously; my respectful regrets didn’t get any easier with repetition. Co-workers asked when it would end; one took exception to my regimen when I waved off a post-work watering hole meet. “I hate your purge,” she said.
Strangely, though, the kryptonite to my superjuice powers wasn’t these rejected rendezvouses or the mighty 40-winery, 10-restaurant tasting I had to pass on. It was a wimpy little Wheat Thin.
All damn Day 2 long, a staff writer across the bullpen grazed on them, benevolently enough – but to my ears the crunch, the new sound of a telescoping desperation, was deafening. I erected barriers in our line of sight, turned on my iTunes. My stomach growled. I doused it with lemonade.
When I left the office that day the smoky seduction of Weekly-adjacent Curly’s Barbecue did me no favors. A block later, my mind wasn’t beyond taunting me with long-ago abandoned tastes: Though I hadn’t eaten at the Colonel since Sacha Baron Cohen was just Ali G, when I rolled past I heard Homer Simpson in my head.
Mmmm. KFC.
4. KEEP THE TOILET CLOSER.
When iconic Olympian Bob Beamon soared 29 and a half feet through the thin Mexico City air to set a world record in the long jump, he destroyed the existing record in such dramatic fashion that one sportswriter called him “the man who saw lightning.” He also traveled just far enough to clear the length of a human intestine.
Read: it’s not a short trip from stomach to the sunshine on the other side. And since the ride’s not roller-rink smooth, a lot can get derailed along the way. Expelling those toxins as soon as possible is critical to the cleanse, and aids mightily in minimizing the headaches, soreness and foul moods they produce in the dieter.
The salt water flush, which experts advise on executing first thing in the morning, is an incrementally intense sequence: Dropping two level teaspoons of iodine-free sea salt into a warm quart of water is easy; drinking it is a little difficult, and ultimately passing it along can be rather grueling. (The cayenne escort out doesn’t make this any easier.) Fortunately there is a flotilla of online advice on how and when to flush – including how to adjust salt levels for ideal exiting and how to deploy laxative teas – and the evacuation can be an entertaining spectator sport. Each day is a multiple-episode elimination round on your own reality show: You don’t know what might be kicked out next, but you know it should be interesting.
“After day two I pretty much had no solid eliminations,” my buddy warned, “although many of the forums report that some people eliminate some crazy, solid clay-like substance on, like, days eight through 10. I was kinda hoping for that but it never happened.”
My experience mirrored his, with a surprising amount of material emerging after I was sure there was no food matter left in my matrix. My co-master cleanser welcomed her own surprising solids to the potty party halfway through.
“I could see chunks and they were smelly,” she e-mailed on Day 5. “So I can tell [the cleanse] was working! It was disgusting.”
5. NO CLUTTER STANDS A CHANCE.
The fact that Beyoncé Knowles knocked around her toxins to shed weight for Dreamgirls – or that Howard Stern’s wingwoman Robin Quivers heard word of the master cleanse from David Blaine and dropped 70-plus over three sessions in ’04 – aren’t the reasons the lemonade diet is adored by those in the know. Folks love it most because it keeps energy strikingly high in the process.
Exercise is not only doable, Haas encourages it, as sweating accelerates the body’s flush and reinforces long-term healthy habits the food-free streak is designed to perpetuate. (Sauna sessions and loofa work also help.) A Day 1 basketball game worked me into a little wooziness, but from there I felt fine swimming, biking and running, and stronger doing it as the days progressed.
Later I came across a passage from Haas’ Staying Healthy with the Seasons – after I’d somehow found time to plant a native garden in the front yard, weed the veggie plot in the back, help install a toilet, wash the car, clean two desks, scrub the kitchen, blaze through some bills, complete long overdue calls to old friends and read a chimney stack of articles that had been staring at me for more than two months. “Decision making and the ability to follow through usually improve,” it read, “and procrastination disappears.”
HEAVY THOUGHT: While some lemonade diet to lose weight – and often do, though experts differ on their likelihood of a binge return to the real world – those with a stabilized weight don’t see much of a drop at all.
“My wife used to love it when I did my cleanse,” Hass told me later. “I’d clean the kitchen, the closet. I think it’s just that the energy is so good, so awakened, you don’t like the clutter, things need to feel more balanced, and you’ve got time and energy, a different level of power.”
There are other reasons to honor the “do it now” instinct. The year’s hottest months are here, and heat helps temper the fasting body temp’s tendency to dip a touch. Moreover, just a couple of months ago lemons were going for $1 each in supermarkets; now they’re $1.39 a pound at Trader Joe’s. (The maple syrup’s $17.99 a quart – not cheap, but savings on other food make it very manageable.) It’s also the season to accidentally make friends. After spotting a lemon tree dripping with yellow sunshine down the block from my house, I knocked on the front door, encountered an old contemporary from high school and filled a bag with sweet organic fruit.
6. LISTEN TO THE HIPPO.
Garlic bread had long ago descended upon my dreams, but it was Day 8 when the hunger really began to rumble.
A day earlier my cleanse collaborator – whose temperament I had seen soften and in whose eyes I had detected a new spark – had e-mailed this:
I AM A HUNGRY HUNGRY HIPPO READY TO EAT A WILDEBEAST!!!!!!!!!!!!
HELP ME!!!
do they say anything about binge eating in the books?
binge eating ice cream for days?
filet mignons and garlic mashed potatoes?
pumpkin pies?
chocolate chip cookies right out of the oven?
help!
A day later, back on Day 8, I got a startling update. While at work teaching in front of the class, she told me her vision went patchy, her head dizzy, her knees wobbly. She promptly adjourned for miso soup the first opportunity she could. Haas – who writes, “have faith and listen to your body and you will know intuitively when it’s time to end your cleanse. Hunger may set in after being absent” – would’ve been proud.
But this meant the cleanse commiseration society had held its last meeting. I was on my own.
Left to my own devices, I couldn’t resist some anticipatory shopping at Trader Joe’s – not the best motivational move of my infant cleansing career.
Breads gave me the googly eyes, ready to leap into my arms. Bananas never looked so good – same for the apples – someone had Technicolorized the produce. A row over, I reflexively flipped my lip just in time to rope in a rogue wad of saliva that nearly showered the selection of orange juices.
For days my food interest had waned – just a day or two earlier I had studied a gorgeous Gayle’s Bakery chocolate-and-coffee cake in the Weekly kitchen with the detachment of a forensic detective – now such attention would be merely masochistic. Food reviews that came easily became self-mutilating machinations. The rotating Yogi teas with which I broke my tastebud boredom were losing their oomph. And it slowly dawned on me that the juice no longer dented the ache like before.
7. HUMMUS IS A HEAVEN-SENT MEDITERRANEAN PASTE.
My on-board computer was still looping rapid-eye-movement reveries of garlic bread. My transmission was starting to heave with hunger pangs. But I was still a machine. The morning of Day 10 I rose, guzzled salt water without so much as a stall and squeezed my lemons at professional juice-bar RPMs. The peaceful idle that had settled into my mind and body on Day 3 – relaxed but alert, calm but clear – still purred.
Before long, though, I became aware of the buzz of a bee against my brain’s windshield. It was hankering for hummus, humming louder than anything on my appetite’s highway.
But pride insisted I make it to dinner. A tiny spiderweb of starbursts along the right-hand edge of my vision suggested I put my pride in park.
I drove on instead. A brisk set of deadlines helped distract me through the a.m. After a few afternoon sets of tennis, however, I noticed I felt a disinterest in what I was doing creep in for the first time all week.
The stew detonated that disinterest. That evening, as my fallen teacher friend stirred up a robust medley of potatoes, beans, celery, carrots and heirloom tomatoes, I was riveted; the smell occupied my nose, my imagination, my mitochondria.
All cleanse coaches encourage a very cautious return to the world of ordinary intake by way of broths and various fruit juices (for the first couple of days) to avoid ripping up the refurbished gastrointestinal roadway. Since I’d generously garaged the two weeks of epicurean rediscovery I had planned (temporarily) – fresh charbroiled tilapia tacos from Turtle Bay, glorious tandoris at Ambrosia, fine wines from local vines, homemade pastas, dripping melts and spinach salads – I felt it was fair to allow an indulgence in an iota (or seven) of beloved hummus and avocado as I waited for more liquefied fare. I reverentially sliced small triangles of ripe fruit, swiped it with fresh hummus, and layered it onto chunks of sprouted whole grain bread.
Then I took the slow train back to solids that Haas advises – as in chew, chew, chew – seriously. I might’ve anyway: I wanted to gnaw each sacred morsel until I had pulled forth every fiber of flavor.
“We get so used to intense tastes, sugars and spices, we don’t appreciate natural flavors of foods,” Haas says. “Simple things like a salad or an apple can be really good, and we feel the energy and the taste much more intensely after cleansing.”
Avocado and hummus on bread, an apple, a straightforward stew: simple snacks, surely, by all accounts. For me, simply bliss.
Snacking had become a spiritual experience.
8. I LIKE GOOD ENERGY.
There are ways to better understand what’s good for us, and how that differs from the tempting things that aren’t, and the surprising things engineered into what we eat. We can study labels. We can research ingredients. We can listen to nutritionists and our parents. We can pour over the Omnivore’s Dilemma; we can watch Food Inc. But there’s another way to get to a foodstuff’s heart – through the stomach.
My stomach clearly told me that we actually need very little of all that’s thrown at us. The clean slate provided by the cleanse – my diet co-pilot, who has done the master cleanse five times, says the cleanse “feels like hitting the reset button” – allows me to draw direct connections between what I eat and how I feel. Haas notes his clients naturally arc away from sugars, caffeine, alcohol, nicotine and chemicals once they see how good they felt without them. Put differently, we don’t know what we have until it’s gone, and when we do, we don’t really want all of it back.
“After the cleanse, [we] can equate everyday symptoms, mood swings to what we’ve put in our bodies. Most Western doctors never think of that,” he says. “It’s ‘there’s a pill for headache pain, for indigestion’… People learn themselves that if they put their hand in fire, ‘Oh that’s hot, guess I won’t do that.’”
9. WESTERN MEDICINE IS A LITTLE SOUR ON THE LEMONADE DIET.
“So few calories in one day is hard on the body,” said CHOMP dietician Michelle Barth.
But I didn’t feel hungry, I replied.
“You get into starvation mode,” she said. “After a while you don’t feel hungry.”
Wait. I didn’t feel like I was starving – I felt stronger than ever.
“Starvation can have a euphoric feeling,” Barth said.
Samuel Klein directs the Center for Nutrition at Washington University’s med school in St. Louis. He contends he knows no data that proves medical benefits emerge with the expelled intestinal waste.
“The body does that naturally,” he said.
Barth – who, while suspicious, sounded open to the diet, having allowed her son to try it (“I kept him close”) – made another interesting point. She doesn’t know why there isn’t much evidence either way.
10. GO WITH WHAT I KNOW.
In the absence of more evidence, here’s what I do know. I have never urinated remotely close to as many times in a 10-day time period. My body odor disappeared from my person within the first few days, and from my porcelain deposits a day later. My intestines have never worked better. And I know that a wise diet is my most affordable healthcare plan.
I know I now chew foods longer and savor their flavors more deeply, almost compulsively. I drink less caffeine and eat less sugar. I would recommend the fast to friends.
I also know that when my body has felt burdened with magnetic-but-unnecessary extras from going out too much or not eating well enough, I’ve returned to the jug twice since my 10-day trial – for three – and four-day spells – and emerged re-empowered: When life gives me an unhealthy feeling, I make lemonade.