— Start & Finish

So it’s been about a week since we’ve finished our cleanse. (I absolutely hate that word with a passion, and the kinds of people that use it all the time, but I hate detox equally, so I am really at a loss here for nomenclature that doesn’t irritate me.)  Overall, I would say this plan works really well for certain things and it definitely made us both feel a lot better.

Pros:

• Digestion is amazing now.
• Skin is clear.
• Weight Loss of about 10 pounds each.
• Bland foods taste amazing, and we have essentially reset our tolerance to both spicy foods and alcohol.
• Less time wasted digesting heavy foods.
• Huge money savings from eating out way less.
• My constant stuffy nose is gone (possible allergy to one of the foods we cut out.)

Cons:

• Way less energy than you’d think. My friend Trevor says that brown rice and complex carbohydrates produce insulin, which makes you a lot more tired than you normally would be.  You can remedy this by eating less at meal time, and carrying some energy-filled snacks around with you, like bananas, seeds, nuts.
• A guilt and eating mentality that borders the eating disorder pitfall.  We are both afraid of eating rich food now, not because we don’t want to gain weight, but because it actually tastes too rich and makes us sick even thinking about it.  Things with lots of cheese, oil, and gluten specifically.  We’ll have to reintroduce things very slowly in order to avoid feeling ill.
• Very hard to stop drinking coffee and alcohol for the first week, but the withdrawal headaches and social anxiety go away after a week.  You get used to having water in a bar with your friends, and you learn to get your wakeup energy from porridge and bananas instead of caffeine.

Overall, I’d say this was a very positive experience. I just hope we don’t revert to our old bad habits too quickly, or the whole thing could be more than just a waste of time; it could have undesirable effects on our gastro-digestive process.  We’ll see how the next few weeks go!  My verdict? If you are having any kinds of adverse reactions to food, or you feel sluggish, slow and are getting sick regularly, you could try this out for a few weeks.  It certainly did a lot more good than bad, and was a lot easier  than we thought.  More than anything, we found the most positive outcome of the whole experience was  finding out how strong our willpower was.

You can buy his book online, but I don’t recommend the book itself. If you can borrow a friend’s copy (ours is up for grabs if anyone wants it). I don’t particularly think it’s worth buying because it’s poorly organized and doesn’t give you enough specific information about what you’re supposed to do.  We did more reading about the detox online than in the actual book… It contains only a small handful of recipes and doesn’t have any instructions regarding process or rules.  It seems more like it’s made up of slides from an investigative lecture than a book that can actually help you.