Gee, Think.

I have decided to bring my cleanse to an early end.  I have thoroughly enjoyed the experience, and while I would have liked to go 10 days or more, I feel I must come back to solid food in time for the weekend.

Chinese New Year Celebrations

This weekend is the first of several weekends of Chinese New Year celebrations in which my gung fu school will participate.  This is a very important time of year because our entire association coordinates to meet up and march through the neighborhoods of New York City bringing the traditional Lion and Dragon to restaurants and merchants in the area.  This is a lot of fun and quite rewarding as well.  It is also quite strenuous.  We are out and about all day, with no regular access to water, food or bathrooms.  Of course, we are well taken care of, but there is no guarantee as to when that relief will come.  It is an all day effort and this year I will have a much more active role than last year.  Because person in the school is part of a team, and beyond that the schools work together as one team to represent the association, I want to be able to give it all I’ve got.  If I were to feel weak on account of the cleanse, the extra work would fall to my training brothers.  Reflecting on this, I think that the best choice is to move to solid foods by Friday so that I can be fully ready for Saturday and Sunday.

Future Plans

It is my full intention to finish at least a 10 day master cleanse in the coming months.  Perhaps I will pursue this in sometime in March.

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

Day 6 has come and gone and so I write this post in retrospect on what would be day 8.

On Day 6 I remember feeling completely at home in the cleanse, even more so than day 5.  It was the first day during which all aspects felt familiar.  I had the feeling of, is this “too easy”?  Previously I had associated hunger, weakness, headaches, and other conditions of discomfort with cleansing.  These are some of the symptoms I experienced while on the previous two cleanses that I’ve tried.  Oddly I would say that master cleanse was the most restrictive and most extreme yet it has also proven to be the most painless.

On days when I know that I’ll be exercising in the evening I’ve noticed that I drink much more lemonade.  This feels like an unconscious compensation for the upcoming exertion.

Totals

• 32 oz salt water flush
• 17 glasses of lemonade
• 1 mug of tea