Health & Science

I Survived the Dreaded Master Cleanse

Watch my week of drinking lemonade and hunting for the "black snake."

For the past couple years I’ve been hearing more and more talk about the Master Cleanse, the 10-day “lemonade diet.” My friends who have done it (and the celebrity endorsers like Beyoncé) talk about how the cleanse rids your body of “toxins,” and speak in spiritual euphemisms about magical bursts of energy and newfound sensations of purity. It sounded a little cultish to me. So I decided to try for myself to see if there’s any validity to the grand claims.

While on the cleanse, you subsist solely on two liters a day of a blend of lemon juice, maple syrup, cayenne pepper, and water. (You can also drink as much plain water as you want.) The days begin with a salt water flush, in which you drink a liter of warm salt water, then spend about 90 minutes running to the bathroom—sort of like colonoscopy prep. And you cap the night off with a cup of laxative tea.

I always suspected that people who do the cleanse are more after the rapid weight loss that understandably comes from two weeks without solids than the “detoxification” they speak of in such vague but glowing terms. Was it just a more socially acceptable name for an eating disorder? But after my week on the cleanse, I felt myself get a high off of Not-Eating, and noticed myself feeling superior to the “mere mortals” who needed food three times every day. This wasn’t just a crash diet that someone with body image disorders would gravitate to; this was a training program in anorexia.

Below, watch my journey from feeling superhuman on Day 3 to having trouble moving by Day 7, and follow me on my hunt for the elusive “black snake.”

Having trouble watching the video? Click here.

Tags: diet, master cleanse, nutrition

Samantha Henig is the associate editor of Double X, and can be reached at samantha.henig@doublex.com.

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