Hi 84008,

When we go off the MC, we are recommended to drink only orange juice for most of the first 2 days, and then some thin vegetable broth the evening of the 2nd day. After that, we are recommended to eat vegetable soup - which is cooked - but lightly cooked. The reason that raw foods are recommended is that they contain living enzymes, which help to digest the food, plus the full range of original nutrition. Cooked food is dead food. If you want an idea of what this is like, try making an Master-Cleanse lemon drink, freshly squeezed, and make an extra drink and try it 12 hours later. The freshly made drink will taste more alive, with a wider range of flavours and a kind of pleasing freshness. The older drink will taste blah in comparison. Burroughs recommends a meatless diet and raw foods. Also, juicing fresh vegetables, and fruits (but not together) is a great way to rebuild your nutritional overhead following the MC.

If you can't manage without some cooked food, then eating some raw food along with it is better than eating only cooked food.

It is not a matter of what you can or can't do, it's what you choose to do.

Food combination is helpful for many people. The simplest guidelines are: fruits (and their juices) should be eaten alone. Vegetables can be combined with meat and with starches, but meat should not be combined with starches.

The reason is that digestion is different for each of these groups. Meat is made of amino acids, and so requires an alkaline stomach to help break it down into chyme, so bicarbonate is produced by the liver, the pancreas, and small glands in the intestines, and an alkaline intestinal environment (provided by bile). Starches or carbohydrates, which are complex sugars, require an acid environment in the stomach and need to be chewed thoroughly to start digestion by mixing starches with enzymes in saliva in the mouth. Starches require hydrochloric acid in the stomach, while meat required bicarbonate in the stomach and bile in the intestines. Starches are mostly digested by the time they leave the stomach, while meats are digested in the intestines. If you have a meal with both starch and meat, the stomach and related organs will be prompted to produce both an acid and alkaline environment, with the result that the pH level in the stomach is neutralized, and nothing is adequately digested. The food sits there, allowing harmful bacteria to feast, resulting in the growth of harmful bacteria and the production of harmful bacterial bi-products and gas.

Caloric recommendations: I read somewhere in CZ that you should increase your caloric consumption by no more than 500 calories a day, following the MC. At the same time, it is highly recommended that you increase your metabolic rate by exercising. A mixture of exercise types would be good: Aerobic and weight-bearing exercises, plus some stretching to help release metabolic breakdown material which has settled in your muscles, especially your legs.

Hope this helps!

PC