I don't care if Courtney Love did it.
My grandfather did it, back in the 60s.
It was 2003, and I was a substitute teacher. I lived on a throughfare. My liver was like...well, I hate liver similes. It was not well. A friend shared an idea with me--a fellow Golden Gopher, a good Minnesota girl with a sturdy last name. Laurie Anderson saved my body. When I told my Pops about it, he said, "What the heck, that's what your grandpa used to do. He called it cleaning the pipes. Once a year, for a week, he did that. But he used honey, not syrup." (Turns out honey is toxic to some, and it's essentially processed, as it's bee puke.)
Laurie shared with me the Master Cleanse, aka the Lemonade Cleanse. Equal parts lemon juice, Grade B maple syrup, pinch of cayenne pepper, warm water to taste.
For up to 40 days without ill effects, it's known to heal all manner of illnesses. Do a little research--the results are weighty, so much so that the guy who came up with the idea, Stanley Burroughs, was harrassed by the FBI for decades. Gout? Gone. Arthritis? Aloha. Alcoholism and drug addiction are curtailed at rates higher than those claimed by prevailing methods. Why the FBI? Seems (not-yet-so-Big) Pharma was worried that he'd come up with a cure-all.
You drink the stuff whenever you get hungry. Only the stuff, plus water, and herbal tea, if you're a fey daddy. haha. Depending on how much you drink, you can either lose weight or stay the same. So it ain't exactly a diet. What it is, is a way to get clean. A total enema.
You've certainly heard about undigested meat, black pepper and all manner of plaques in your miles of intestines. Forget high colonics. This is the Total Colonic. And no one sticks a tube up your ass while you listen to Chuck Mangione on tinny speakers.
The first two days are hell. The lemon juice acid breaks down the plaques. The syrup (Grade B is the earlier, darker stuff from the first tap) is full of vites and dirty goodness. Calories. The cayenne is not necessary in warm weather--it provides body heat as you aren't taking in protein. So------you're swimming in a stirred-up soup of toxins. Add to that the fact that you aren't taking in any caffiene, alcohol, nicotine, fat--the things that keep a fella strong on a good day, and it's HARD.
So you flush. Once a day. Celtic sea salt, 2 tsp to one liter of water, is the same specific weight as blood. So when you slam a liter of salt water, it goes clean through you, taking out the trash. Your intestines don't absorb the water, nor do they take up the salt. Stay close to the potty. Ka-whoosh. The result is something to be experienced.
So after 3 days, you have most of the bad out. A weird euphoria takes over. You feel better. You're funnier. Your true light shines through. The LAST thing you want is a ciggie, a scotch, a steak.
My question, Spacers, is what do you do? To stay sane. To keep it, if not Edenesque, real?
