he Master Cleanser Diet is a lemonade-based liquid diet that's intended for body cleansing, with the useful side effect of steady, measurable weight loss. Basically it's something healthy to do for the body/colon cleansing, that you get most people to do by dangling the carrot of 10-15 pounds lost weight.  Consider the money you'll save not eating any food for 10 days, if you want another benefit.

I first heard of the MC diet from my girlfriend/housemate Malaya in June 2004. I'd long been curious about body detoxification and colon cleansing, while never having actually done anything about it. Since I liked that aspect of it, wanted to lose some weight as well, and the reader testimonials I saw on the Internet seemed pretty solid, I decided to give it a try.

This page archives the various daily blogs in which I talked about the diet, mostly before I began it myself. The first blog on the subject, from July 6, 2004 is on top of this page. Others add more info and detail my feelings and experiences with the diet, and they're added below, in chronological order. The most recent addition is on the bottom.

I kept a running journal while I was on the MC program. Click here to read that.

July 6, 2004

Diet time!

I'd been growing less and less tolerant of my waistline for the past couple of months, and while there was no critical tipping point, in late June I decided I wanted to lose some weight. So I started exercising more, and eating less. It's been 10 or 12 days since then, and I've been doing as much exercise as I can, shin splints permitting (jog down steep half-mile dirt hill, jog back up it, repeat) and eating less, and while we don't have a scale here, I'd say I've lost maybe 5 pounds.

Well, actually I have no idea if I've lost any weight or not, but I can fit comfortably into some jeans that were rather snug a month ago, and that makes me happy. It's not that I especially care how I look in my clothing (ask Malaya how often I consult a mirror on a daily basis) but I do care that I can fit into clothes I like, and while the two pairs of 30" waist cargo pants I bought last summer in a very thin period are still unbuttonable, I feel better about not being a tub-o-guts when I can put on all of my shorts and jeans, and sit down in them.

I bring this up not for the hell of it, but since it's basically the first time in my life I've tried to diet, and I'm surprised how easy it's been. I've tried to cut down on eating some times in the past, but never with much success. Generally I've just changed food; more salad, less fish and chips; that sort of thing. And that works by reducing calories and total food mass. Just don't snack, or if you must snack on celery or an apple or rice cakes. Rather than Doritos or candy or other fatty crap.

But more than not snacking, I'm just not eating that often, and really thinking about it when I do eat. Try it yourself sometime, and rather than thinking, "I want to chew on something." and going to grab a snack or make a meal, wait half an hour and see if you're really hungry. I haven't had more than 2 meals a day, with very minimal snacking, for a week, and it hasn't bothered me at all. I keep wanting to eat, like right now I could easily fry up a Boca burger and fry some FFS and eat that down without a thought. But I don't need to. I just want to salty and greasy and crunch textures and tastes in my mouth.  I'd love to walk over to the nearby 7/11 and buy some Hostess Cupcakes, or some of their day old donuts too. But do I need to do so? No.

I don't usually keep track of what I eat in a given day (which is certainly a good way to get fat), but since I've been limiting my mouthfuls I have been keeping a mental list. It's been a lot easier to do so with less food going in.

Friday I woke up around noon, and didn't eat anything for a couple of hours. When I decided to eat something, more out of habit than actual hunger, I got out a bunch of veggies and the flour tortillas and heated up the pan of super refried beans. I scooped the beans onto the tortilla, threw some bits of pepper jack on it, folded that over and stuck it in the toaster oven. While it was heating I cut up the veggies; red onions, bell peppers, black olives, tomatoes, and got the salsa and sour cream ready. Unfortunately the sour cream smelled like Michael Moore's shoes, so out it went. The rest of the food was good though, and I ate one burrito, expecting to eat one or two three, as I usually do.

However, after I ate one and came back into the kitchen, I stopped and thought about it, and realized that I really wasn't that hungry. Oh, I could have eaten another one easily, and I would have enjoyed it, but I didn't need to. So I didn't, and when Malaya got home from the gym a bit later, and didn't want one either, I put all the stuff away.

That was something like 3pm, and I drank a lot of water and had a few peanuts in the evening, but I didn't eat anything else until around 10pm, when I made a medium-sized platter of nachos supreme to share with Malaya. We ended up eating about 90% of it and rather than stuffing down the rest, I just threw it out. And that was it. I had maybe 8 peanut butter pretzel bites with some white wine around 4am, while I was writing and getting ready to go to bed, and went to bed at 7am feeling fine.  The 1.5 meals and a couple of small snacks were all I needed for the day.

Saturday, I had a couple of plain TJ's rice cakes with some orange juice when I got up around 1pm, ended up throwing out half of the orange juice when I noticed that the inside bottom of my glass was covered with stuck on black gunk (probably debris thrown up and somehow not rinsed away by the dishwasher), and had one burrito around 4.  I ate a veggie burger and a few FFS around midnight, and that was it, other than a couple sticks of celery during the afternoon, just to have something to chew on. I got out Saturday afternoon and ran a couple of miles up and down hill too, so it's not like I was too tired and listless from lack of food to move.

Sunday and Monday were much the same, with at most 2 meals a day, and rather limited snacking. Will I last at this pace, eating maybe 50% of what I usually would? I dunno, but it's been nearly 2 weeks and I feel fine.

One thing the diet does very well; makes me realize how much of eating is just a habit. It tastes good, we enjoy doing it, so we do. It's a social thing for a lot of people, but I don't really socialize much (other than with Malaya) and while we eat together every day, we don't always do so at the same time, while eating the same thing. I was in the habit of having a large meal every 4 or 5 hours, so I did. I was in the habit of snacking in between meals, so I did. Whether or not I was hungry enough to actually need to eat was not a major factor in my dietary planning.  Food tastes good, and eating makes us feel good. It's a basic survival instinct, and it's reinforced by an abundance of tasty options. The fact that few of those things are actually good for us is secondary, as is the fact that few of us (including myself, or I wouldn't be dieting in the first place) with constant access to food can turn it down often enough to stay fit and thin.

My diet isn't anything special. Eat what you like, just eat less of it and exercise more often.  The "Sporadic Bursts of Willpower Diet" wouldn't move too many books, would it? Not a real catchy title. So how about this one? The Master Cleanser. Sounds a bit like an S&M mistress, but it's a diet that Malaya's best friend heard about and grew interested in, and that she and Malaya are going to try out sometime this summer. I wasn't real interested in it initially, since it's basically a fast with some lemonade drinks and lots of herbal tea to cleanse the digestive system (orally administered enemas, basically). It's meant to be cleansing and healthy, not so much a diet, even though most people who stick with it for a week or longer (the suggested is 10 days) lose a lot of weight. Like 10 or 15 or 20 pounds.

As I say, I wasn't much interested, but after reading most of the reader reviews for the book on Amazon.com, I'm a lot more curious. A sample review:

I was told about this book by my local Health Food Store owner. I had read much about fasting and had tried a 3 day water fast previously. But, when I got this book, it just seemed like a great way to cleanse through fasting. I couldn't believe the difference between a water fast and the Miracle Cleansing Fast. Not only was it delicious, but I felt no lightheadedness, no headaches, no loss of energy...I just felt terrific! I love the 'clean' feeling, inside, you get from this fast and actually dread going back to eating because of it. I have told many people about the Lemonade Fast and have enjoyed watching as many reluctantly decided to sip my brew and were surprised at how wonderful it tastes. During an 11 day fast, I lost 14 lbs., took it along with me while I played golf, and had absolutely no problems. I love this book, I love doing this fast, and I highly recommend giving this method a try.

Given that I'd never really dieted, (at least not on purpose), it should be obvious that I've never fasted either. My mom has done weekend ones for years, and really enjoys the mental clarity and quick weight loss they provide, but I just figured I'd be too hungry to stand it. However, as I've successfully cut my food consumption by about 50% over the past week+, just by paying attention to when I eat and not eating unless I'm really hungry, I'm curious about trying the Master Cleanser one.

In addition to feeling better, detoxifying, and losing a bunch of weight in very short order, the whole bowel-cleansing aspect of it intrigues me. If you're wondering what that is, read this article and hold on to your chair. It's about a water fast with enemas thrown in for variety, but the end results are about the same. It's also the funniest news articles I've ever read, and I blogged about it back on March 13, 2002, in an update that's since been archived on the Food: Diet article page.  I don't think we'll get such dramatic um... results, from just the lemonade/maple syrup/cayenne pepper drinks of the Master Cleanser diet, since we're not going to be dropping 5 gallon enemas along with it, but think about it. The Master Cleanser weight loss is coming primarily from your body sloughing off the accumulated crap (literally) inside of it, and quite a bit of that stuff is built up in your intestines from a lifetime of eating food the human body did not evolve to digest, in quantities the human body did not evolve to tolerate. They don't call it "cleanser" for nothing. As I said, read that Guardian UK article, and see if you ever want to put red meat into your body again.

Speaking of eating meat, or not, I suppose I should comment on the Atkins Diet fad, since it's getting more and more popular (at least judging by the amount of TV commercials I see for low-carb foods) despite regular warnings from health experts that it's dangerous. The Atkins/no-carb diet is essentially the opposite of the Master Cleanser diet; on Atkins you gorge yourself on protein of every kind, meat and cheese and eggs and such, while avoiding almost all carbohydrates. That means no bread, pasta, almost no vegetables, fruits, beans, etc. Calories aren't counted on Atkins, and most people use it as an excuse to eat as much as they want.

I'm generalizing a bit; I've not read any books on it, but you can bet neither have 90% of the other people out there, a depressing amount of whom are now eating worse than ever, consuming more red meat and eggs, and sending their cholesterol and weight skyrocketing out of some half-hearted fantasy that if they cut their carbs a bit, they'll lose weight anyway.  Enjoy your heart attacks, kids.

People get very passionate about Atkins, since it's a dream for some, and a nightmare for others. I'd hate it personally, but I don't like to eat meat that much. I do like cheese, but in limited doses, and almost always on top of other things, like nachos or pizza. I could never stick to the Atkins diet, even if it guaranteed weight loss, which is why I've never given it much thought. 

It does work, for a while, if you stick to it. Logically it's insane; how can you eat fatty stuff like steak and eggs and lose weight?  It works, if you're very strict and adhere religiously to the guidelines, because you can eat less and still feel full, due to the high energy/protein aspect of the food. But mostly it's great for first timers, since the lack of carbs sends the body into a state called ketosis, in which you shed stored water rapidly. It's a sort of forced dehydration, and people can indeed drop 8 or 10 pounds in less than a week, even while eating steak, pork chops, hamburger, etc. If you enjoy that sort of food, it seems like a miracle.

And it is, for a couple of weeks. By then almost everyone loses it and returns to eating pasta, bread, and other carb-heavy stuff, their bodies put the water weight back on (which is healthy; your body carries that to keep you from dying if you go thirsty for a couple of days) and they end up heavier than they were pre-Atkins, and disillusioned by their diet failure. But, since it's basically a dream diet for most Americans, and lets them eat all the fat and meat they want, they'll probably try it again in a few months or a year, since after all, they lost so much weight so quickly. That part is easier to remember than the 2 or 3 pounds a week they put on for a month afterwards. Of course the real sticking point is how much you've increased your risk of heart disease, cancer, and other things tied to heavy red meat consumption, but we won't know more about that for a decade or two, until lots of Atkins dieters have been on the program for decades, and we can evaluate the long term damage.

Cutting your carbs can work long term, but it's largely done by limiting portion size and calories. Humans can survive with far less carbs than most of us eat. Of course we can survive with far less of all food as well, as my last two weeks of dieting have demonstrated. Basically, every diet works, if you just stick with it. No diet at all, just eating what you like in smaller portions while exercising, will work as well. It's just that hardly anyone has the will power to stick to that for long.

Radical diets, like strict no-carb and the lemonade fast cleansing thing I mentioned above, are for short bursts, and should ideally scour your body of toxins. The problem with Atkins is that you're shoveling in terribly unhealthy food, things omnivorous humans are not meant to survive on, and you probably need a cleansing fast afterwards just to get back to normal.  It would be interesting to take an overweight person, put them on Atkins for two weeks, and then as the ketosis was fading out stick them on a cleansing liquid fast for another couple of weeks. It would be one way to purge all of that built up meat from their lower intestine, at least, and though they'd probably not lose so much weight on the liquid diet portion (since their bodies were soaking up liquid to replace what they lost from the ketosis) they'd certainly lose weight overall. If they lived.

I wrote most of the above on the weekend, updated it Monday night, and here's the latest update. Malaya returned home from shopping and a visit to her parents' house Monday evening with all of the Master Cleanser ingredients, including two plastic jugs with measurements on the side, a lemon juicer, grade B maple syrup, cayenne pepper, and about 20 pounds of lemons, picked from the tree in her parents' back yard. The start date is Friday, so we'll be eating our last meals for a while the next three days, and mostly trying to get rid of everything perishable in the fridge, I suspect.  Needless to say, discussion of the diet progress will most likely figure large in the blogs next week, so stay tuned.

Or run screaming in horror if the prospect of surviving entirely on sugary lemon juice and lots of roughage-enhanced herbal tea makes you unhappy.

July 8, 2004

The infamous lemonade cleansing diet program is set to begin on Friday (more on this in Sunday's blog) and with a hard date, we've been planning our meals to terminate that day. We're not actually going right on the lemonade mixture then, since you're supposed to ease into it a bit with a day before of no big meals, and ideally no small ones either. We don't eat much lately anyway, but we'll probably go with big Jamba Juices and some other insubstantial stuff. Tomato soup, ramen, fruit, etc. Then, starting Saturday, we'll be on the lemonade only, while chugging late night salt water washes, herbal teas, etc, to help clear out the pipes. So to speak.

The funny thing about this count down is that we know we're eating our last food Thursday, and won't be eating again for a week or more after that. So we've been trying to consume everything perishable in advance, while not doing any shopping. Also, we're still dieting, but with the prospect of no solid food for a while, we're making sure we eat things we really like on these last few days. We got our favorite sandwiches at Claim Jumper for lunch Wednesday, ate half of them (that's all most normal people can eat of their sandwiches) and then had various light leftovers for a late dinner (corn on the cob, fried rice I've been experimenting with lately, ramen, two nectarines, etc).

Thursday we'll probably hit Sweet Tomatoes for a late lunch/early dinner (our first meal of the day, given our sleeping schedules and stuff ourselves on salad, soup, and muffins. Then we'll eat the last halves of our sandwiches late Thursday night, and that'll be that. Smoothies and such Friday, and then lemonade w/ maple syrup and cayenne pepper from then on, for a week+. I'm not hugely excited about it, though I'm curious to see how it goes.

July 10, 2004

So what did I do today (Friday)? Not a damn lot. It's what I'm going to do starting tomorrow that's of interest.

As related in the last couple of blogs, Malaya and me are going to embark upon a week or more of eating nothing at all, and drinking nothing but lemonade, maple syrup, and cayenne pepper. Wacky? Perhaps, but thousands of people do it for 10 or more days every year, and most of them swear by it. It's called the Master Cleanser diet, and in addition to giving people an average 1-1.5 pound a day weight loss, it has all sorts of other health benefits. Ours may not be as glowing as this guy's "cured MS and my wife's ovarian cancer" but we'll see how it goes, since we're starting Saturday morning.

The day before the fast is supposed to be the day you ease into it. No big meals, no meat or anything else difficult to digest. Just vegetables, etc. So far, I'm right on track, and I'm not even hungry, currently. And anyway, as I've blogged about several times recently, hunger mostly psychological.

Thursday we ate 2 small meals each, and had some popcorn for a snack. That was about it. We were up late (well, late for Malaya, normal for me) working Thursday night, and didn't get into bed until 6am. I didn't sleep very well; woke up several times with a head crammed full of very vivid and strange dreams in which I'd created entire fantasy worlds, none of which made any sense at all once I was awake and thinking about the small bits of them that I remembered.  But that's about the usual score for my dreams.

I got up around 1 and got right to work on the computer, after a quick morning email/surf. Malaya headed to the gym for an hour, then we worked side by side for a couple of hours before going to get a jumbo Jamba Juice each around 5. I sipped most of mine (Peach Pleasure) and held off eating until around 11pm, when I cut up the red and yellow bell peppers that were going to go bad, along with 4 remaining stalks of celery. Since neither of us are going to eat for a week+, we've been trying to eat up everything perishable in the fridge, while not buying anything to replace it with either. We're doing pretty well there too, since with those last veggies gone and the 3 eggs Malaya's going to eat later, we're down to little more than condiments.  Better than I did last July, pre-move, when I had to go buy two coolers that morning just to fit most of what I'd left in my fridge into them, since the coolers themselves were cheaper than all of the food I was putting into them.

So up at 1, big fruit smoothie that afternoon, plate of raw bell peppers and celery at midnight (seasoned with no more than the water I used to wash them) and for me, that's it. I'm finishing my Jamba off right now, and with any luck I can go the last 4 or 5 hours of wakefulness without eating anything more. In fact I can't, since we're going to start the Master Cleanser regime with herbal tea in a couple of hours, and after that nothing but lemonade in the day, herbal tea at night, and salt water washes in the morning on an empty stomach are allowed for the duration.  The herbal tea may be interesting, since it's "dieter's tea" meaning you take it and you lose some weight pretty quickly. And they're not talking about amputation or regurgitation, so you do the math.

I'm also okay with being hungry now, since they say the first 3 or 4 days of a fast/juice diet are the hard ones, when you feel hungry and want to eat. Once you get past that point your body adjusts to the lack of solid food and you feel fine. I hope so, anyway. I'll just be somewhat hungry now and get over it a day sooner than I would have otherwise, thus making me happy by Wed or Thurs, rather than Tues or Wed. Right?

Being sporadically hungry for the past few days has helped me write though, since I know if I'm lost in my work I won't think about food, and if I'm not thinking about it I don't feel hungry. A couple more weeks of starvation and I can knock this novel right out!

Oddly enough, a regular reader mailed in a few days ago. She said she hadn't visited the site for a few weeks, and when she came to catch up what was on the page but my whole Master Cleanser blog. It made her curious enough to read up on it, since she'd long wondered about lower intestine cleaning diets, and she went and bought the book and is going to try it out herself. I'll post updates on how it's going for Malaya and I, and while I can't really hope to write anything as memorably-hilarious as this UK Guardian reporter's trip to the enema resort, I'll do what I can. And I'll let you know how it goes for the site reader who mailed in as well, if she gives me a future update.

In fact, I think I'll do my diet experience as a sort of pseudo-blog. I'll write short updates every so often, time stamping them, and then post what's collected over two days. And no, every update won't be about what's collected over those two days, at least not in the sense that the UK Guardian article linked above was. *cough*

I can also imagine going on this diet/cleanse for a couple of weeks every year, and maybe making it an annual or bi-annual thing. I mean like in the future, when I am theoretically published and famous and all of that, and I would try to get site readers to try it themselves. Group peer pressure/support seems to help most people when they're trying to do something new or difficult.

For one last diet note, I posted the other day about my dismay at seeing my actual body weight, after not stepping on a scale in years. I weighed 179, which was about 15 more than I expected. The odd part was when I next weighed myself, the next morning, I was down to 172. How did I lose 7 pounds in 12 hours? And no, I wasn't doing the Master Cleanser thing yet, or even herbal tea. Since then I've weighed myself several times a day, and I've been everywhere from 170 to 177. Some of it is clothing, but I'm not hopping on there in hiking boots and a leather jacket. Who knew house pants and a t-shirt made such a difference?

I'm sure some of it is our $10 scale being less than scientifically accurate, but it's also me, fluctuating up and down in weight a lot depending on whether I just chugged a bottle of water, ate dinner, peed, etc.  Being as body weight is the opposite of penis length measurement (in both cases the man assumes the best measurement ever taken is the accurate one), I'm assuming that I actually weigh 170, at most, and that the others are bloated inaccuracies brought on by water retention, heavy clothing, or both of the above.

Although, I suppose I should actually assume the highest weight is the accurate one, so I'll feel better about weight loss on the Master Cleanser. Hell, I've lost as much as 9 pounds already in 3 days, and I haven't even begun it!

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