Gee, Think.

I write this post on Day 7 on the morning of Day 8.  Life has been busy lately.

Day 7 was the first day that I felt any kind of internal discomfort while on the cleanse.  On this day, I remember waking with a sense of shall I say, emptiness and sagging, in my gut below my belly button.  This feeling continued and slightly intensified into mid afternoon.  The sensation itself is hard to describe since I’ve never quite experienced it before.  My guess is that I was feeling the effects of a higher concentrations of cayenne pepper in the lemonade.  I should note that for most of Day 6 and into Day 7 I was including just under a quarter teaspoon of cayenne pepper per glass of lemonade.  Over the previous 5 days I had adapted to the spicyness and became less and less sensitive to it.  As I became less sensitive to the taste, I began to add more.

On Day 6 I prepared 4 glasses worth of lemonade, cayenne pepper included, and drank them more than an hour later.  This gave the pepper time to steep.  It’s flavor really matured in that time.  When I took the first sip I got a “Wow” kind of surprise at the spiciness, but it was welcome since I love spicy food and it was a bit of variation in the midst of a mono-diet.  I can’t say for certain if the addition cayenne pepper had caused these feelings of discomfort, but my intuition says that it did.  It’s my suspicion that the extra amount of pepper that I added to each glass slowly accumulated over a 24-36 hour period to the point.  Mind you the recipe calls for a  tenth teaspoon of cayenne per glass and I was using 3-4 times that amount.  It was delicious.

Initially when this feeling was brewing my attitude was just to go with it and wait it out.  I thought that it would surely pass in an hour or so.  When it continued into mid afternoon I had become a little discouraged and actually wondered “what if this gets much worse?”  I was worried that it might intensify.  Happily, it did not.  At the suggestion of my wife I drank some hot water and almost immediately started to feel better.  I had been feeling cold in the office while wearing multiple layers including an undershirt, dress shirt, sweater, and blazer.  Our office can be cold from time to time, but I noticed that no one else was bundled up quite like I was.  I think that the chilled water that I included in the lemonade was just enough to push my internal body temperature over the limit and slightly away from equilibrium.  The hot water cleared all this up.  I drank two roughly 12 ounces mugs of it and felt much improved.  I think the water had a double benefit of both warming me up and diluting what may have become a concentration of cayenne in my gut. I was quite relieved to be feeling better, and celebrated by enthusiastically preparing for a night of exercise.

Totals

• 32 oz salt water flush
• 11 glasses of homemade lemonade
• 2 glasses of ~12 ounces hot water

Tags: cleansing, health, master cleanse

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 28th, 2009 at 7:23 am and is filed under health. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.