Hey everyone! I hope y’all had a chance to get out and enjoy this beautiful 65 degree February weather today. I had a wonderful day with my best friends brunching and perusing around a bridal convention. This was my first experience at one of these shindigs, and, to put it lightly, WHOA that was a lot of estrogen in one room! However, I got a lot of great ideas, made some great contacts, and most importantly, gorged myself on delicious samples. Everything from appetizers to entrees to cakes, we tried it. To say I was miserable on the way home would be an understatement-I had to unbutton my pants. So tonight seemed like the perfect opportunity to start that mini-cleanse I’ve been debating on for awhile. Cleanses and fasts are hotly debated topics in the health world. A lot of people would say that depriving yourself of food in any manner is not healthy. On the other hand, you have a lot of people who say fasting is a time tested cure-all for most of the body’s ailments. So after extensive research, the following are MY opinions on the subject and MY diet. I am not recommending you follow this advice as no two people are the same and you may have to consult with a professional. So with that out of the way, here we go.
Let’s start with researching cleanses and fasts throughout history. In recent years, many celebrities have come forward with their use of cleanses, more specifically, the Master Cleanse, or Lemonade diet. The term Master Cleanse is practically synonymous with Beyonce for me, due to her famously using it to drop a drastic amount of weight for “Dream Girls.” However, the Master Cleanse has been around since the 1940s, invented by Stanley Burroughs and published in the mid 1970s in a book under the same title. Basically, it’s a juice fast where you live on warm lemonade, made with lemon juice, maple syrup and cayenne pepper for 10 days, then over the course of 3 days you re-introduce veggies and fruits and soups to your diet. Mr.Burroughs recommends basically a vegan diet by frowning upon basically any meats or dairy products in a person’s day-to-day diet. There have been plenty of other fasting diets over the course of the past century. Slim Fast, grapefruit diet, juicing… the list goes on. However, let’s go back further in history. In every great religion there is documented use of fasting for spiritual purposes. In the New Testament, within the books of Luke and Acts, fasting is often mentioned in relation to prayer or to clear the mind before making important decisions. Likewise within Buddhism, the Buddha did not experience the great awakening until after fasting and meditation. Muslims are most notoriously documented for their use of fasting during Ramadan, a month-long event where they refrain from eating or drinking between dawn and sunset. I could go on for days listing each religion and their use of fasting but that would get boring and we need to move on. So even FURTHER back in history, if you want to consider the diet of ancient man, they naturally practiced fasting because, well, they had no choice. Hunters and gatherers had seasons of plenty and times where there was no food to be had. Their bodies had to acclimate to storing all the food they could and efficiently distributing all their energy when food sources were scarce.
So, there is your history lesson for the day. With all that being said, I have drawn my own conclusions on fasting. First, I find short term fasting to be a safe and effective practice. Performed in no more than 3-10 day increments, I find that cleansing and fasting can be a terrific way to become more in tune with your own body, shed nasty toxins that are weighing you down, and strengthen your own mind and will-power. Long-term fasting to me seems stupid and wasteful. Ancient man did not willingly go hungry for weeks at a time, nor should I. That statement leads me to my second conclusion: I don’t believe in a full-blown, liquids-only, starvation fest. Instead, I like to maintain small daily liquid cleanses in addition to a supremely clean diet to aid in a healthy body and weight loss. For example, beginning tomorrow, I will start my morning with a Master Cleanse lemonade (8oz of warm water with 2T of pure lemon juice, 1T of pure maple syrup and a dash of cayenne pepper) within 10 mins of being up. I have noticed that this practice helps me with waste elimination, something I struggle with due to my crippling IBS, which may be TMI but to be honest this is a horrible ailment that myself and millions of other people suffer with and deserves someone talking about it because it sucks. Anyway, I’ll follow that with a very clean breakfast, a post-workout protein shake with added veggies and fruits, lunch of fish and rice or quinoa, then replace my 2nd snack with another Master Cleanse lemonade. Dinner will be chicken with veggies. At night prior to bed, a cup of organic senna tea (a natural herbal laxative). I also will drink a bit of warm water with sea salt to also move those toxins out at some point during the day. The goal is for me to get my body as clean as possible, to alleviate any nasty crud I’ve picked up from working in a scummy bar, and to get rid of all the crap food I’ve eaten and re-set my internal system. This type of cleansing seems much more manageable than a full-blown liquid fast. For me personally, I workout far too much and work in a very physical job where I can’t function on ZERO calories. Ideally I would like to incorporate yoga into my morning routine during this time. I am really bad about stretching and yoga can really help your body stretch and push bad things out and give you more of a sense of control over your own mind. However, I say that I would like to start doing yoga in the mornings like, once a week, so we will see how that goes.
I will update post-cleanse with an update. If any of you have any tips or fasts you have performed yourself, let me know! We can discuss! Til then have a blessed day.
Appalachian Barbie 