I've really been meaning to write a little bit here about my experience with the Master cleanse. I only stayed on it for 10 days this time but I could've easily have gone longer. The reason why I stopped doing it after 10 days is because that is the commitment that I made to begin with and I did not want to restrict everyone else in my life for a second weekend this time around. I certainly will be going back on the master cleanse, however, for several different reasons.

I really didn't notice much in the way of detoxification on the cleanse. I felt reasonably well the entire time although I did have a slight headache when I woke up in the morning a few days. I think this was more because I was sleeping with the windows open and there was a lot of pollen in the air. As soon as I shut the windows and turned the filter on for the night, the headaches disappeared. Two weeks before I began the cleanse I made sure that I cut my coffee consumption down to 1 cup a day in order to not go through caffeine withdrawal, that worked wonderfully.

It took two days for the salt water flush to actually take effect. It did a little bit of damage on the first day but the second day I finally realized what everybody was talking about. I've had a lot of problems with IBS throughout my entire life so this was something that I was concerned about when I first began. Everything was going along rather normally except for a large amount of mucus that was being passed almost every morning. Then something happened toward the end of the fast that really made me wonder what was going on.

On the seventh day, something personal happened in my life that was extremely stressful. I've been through this sort of thing before and it typically leaves me unable to really function as a normal human being. I went through it all pretty well and I attribute a lot of that to the clear thinking that I had as a result of the cleanse. On the evening of the eighth day, however, I began to be very emotionally irritated and I started to get cramps as if I was having a colitis attack. After about an hour of that happening, I ended up in the bathroom and passed a lot of solids, something that really took me by surprise. I had read that it could potentially happen but I figured I was pretty much in the clear. For the next 24 hours, I was in the bathroom about a dozen times. I was amazed that there could actually be that much hiding inside of me. The first salt water flush after that took care of most of it and the second one seemed to clear it up entirely.

I am going to resume my normal eating, only on a modified basis. I am going to add a lot of raw food and green smoothies into the mix. I also already have a case of young coconut in the refrigerator, ready to go. My wife is very happy and proud of me that I went through this faithfully and she is also looking forward to eating healthier. Since I am primarily responsible for the preparation of food in our household, the fact that I am going to eat healthy will mean that she is going to eat that way as well. She always feels better when we eat a high raw diet.

The next time I go on The Master Cleanse I am not going to limit myself as far as the number of days. Although I may stop short of going for the full 40 days, I realize now that it is not all that difficult to go without food, especially when you have the cleansing drinks available on a regular basis. In fact, I was rarely hungry whenever I was fasting at all except in the evenings and I attribute that mainly to habitual eating patterns. The one weekend was also a rough for me because I was not as structured as I am during the week. I tried to keep some of the drink with me all of the time but there were several occasions when I went three to four hours without drinking any. On one occasion my wife and I took some friends out to and all-you-can-eat ribs joint. I have to admit that was a little bit difficult but I stood my ground.

To any of you that are contemplating doing the master cleanse, the advice that I really have for you is to make sure that you have it firmly set in your mind that you want to do it. I don't think that I would have been as successful if I had gone into it with any doubts in my mind that I would complete the full 10 days. I was prepared in advance with the lemons and other ingredients necessary and I made sure that I stuck to a rigid schedule as far as drinking the drink (except on the weekend).

For those of you who are interested, I ended up losing 12 pounds, more or less, some of which will probably come back after I resume eating. As far as weight loss is concerned, however, I probably could have lost close to the same amount doing a low glycemic diet with legumes and veggies at every meal. I enjoy fitting in my clothes a little bit better but that is not what this cleanse was all about for me. It was about gaining a measure of better health and more mental clarity, both of which I feel I received in abundance. I'm going to miss feeling exactly this way as a result of going back to eating. Perhaps if I eat well I will not experience the brain fog that I had before I went on the master cleanse.