Lemonade Cleanse (Day 1)

Although my writing in this blog has been kind of sporadic, it's still a blog, and now that I actually have something to blog about (for the next 10 days at least), I'm going to treat you to the play-by-play of how it goes.

As some of you know, today I am beginning Stanley Burrough's "Master Cleanse," which you can do for anywhere from 10 to 40 days. I will be sticking to 10 days. Well, I'm going to shoot for 5 days, and then if I make it that far, I'll go for the gold and do the full 10. I actually only have 14 days left in Costa Rica, and I am spending most of them on this cleanse. However, the other four days include my birthday, graduation (and the subsequent fancy dinner), and my last night in town. Plus, the past few weeks have included some gastrointestinal problems for me, so this cleanse-- which cleans out your intestinal system-- seemed like a logical solution. One of my coworkers completed it and she looks and feels fabulous. Her skin was practically glowing and she had more energy than she had had in weeks. Now, let's see if my experience is the same.

For those of you who don't know, the lemonade cleanse includes drinking liters and liters of the same mixture everyday. Its ingredients are 1) juice, fresh squeezed, from limes or lemons, 2) pure maple syrup, Grade B or C, that has not been processed, 3) a pinch of cayenne pepper, and 4) pure spring water. I just mixed up my first batch and I am sitting here drinking it, and I have to say, it's pretty tasty. You also include a 1-L saltwater flush every day, where you drink a liter of spring water with sea salt dissolved in it to clean out your system. Needless to say, I'll be doing the saltwater flush in the evenings in the privacy of my own home. The way the lemonade cleanse works is by cleaning your system of toxins. The maple syrup provides calories for you to survive, the cayenne pepper stems hunger, and the lemon (in my case, lime) juice does the cleaning, I suppose. In conjunction with the salt water. It's about 1pm now, so I'm going to go about my day as normal (shower, getting a pedicure, doing some laundry if the rain ever lets up) and I'll check back in this evening or tomorrow with an update on how it's going.

Up, up, and away!