I am now nearing the end of DAY 7 of the Stanley Burroughs’ Master Cleanse (or Lemonade Cleanse, or Maple Syrup Cleanse). Here’s the deal… No food whatsoever, as this cleanse is designed to give your digestive system a complete rest, as well as clean out the pipes and toxic mucous from your system. So what have I been drinking? Lemonade!
Here’s the recipe: 6 – 12, 10 ounce glasses a day, made as follows…
~ 2 tbsp of lemon juice, squeezed from (preferably organic) lemons
~ 2 tbsp of pure maple syrup (grade b+, preferably organic)
~ 1/10th tsp cayenne pepper
~ The remainder is purified water to the 10 ounce mark
To make things simpler, I took a used protein container and marked 100 ounces on the side. To this empty jug I add 1 tsp of cayenne pepper, 10 ounces of lemon juice, 10 ounces of maple syrup, then fill to the 100 ounce line. Cap it; shake it; I’m done. This is my daily amount, which I then pour into empty bottles and seal tight.
I have read that it is preferable to mix each individual drink separately when needed, as the beneficial enzymes in the freshly-squeezed lemon juice basically become inert (read “die”) when exposed to air for too long. This just isn’t practical for me, so to get around this I fill the bottles to the brim and seal them with no air pockets in the top. They wait in the fridge until needed.
Additionally, as this is a “cleansing fast” designed to CLEAN, you are instructed to drink an herbal laxative tea each night (to loosen things up) and “flush” each morning by drinking a liter of warm water with 2 tsp of UNIODIZED sea salt. Let me tell you, this works!!! If you do this, just allow yourself at least an hour before needing to be anywhere else. I don’t usually laugh when going to the bathroom, but it is quite amusing! ‘Nuff said.
If you’d like more detail on the Master Cleanse and HOW it does what it does, the following article describes it best:
The Master Cleanser - Therapeutic Fasting to Alleviate Toxemia
June 16, 1991, marked the passing of Stanley Burroughs, a pioneer in the field of alternative health care. Author of Healing for the Age of Enlightenment, and The Master Cleanser, Stanley was a man renowned for his research into the role of toxemia in disease.
Since his research and writings have influenced my own life and work to such a great extent, I feel compelled to share with you some of the highlights of one of his most important therapeutic tools the Master Cleanser Lemonade Fast.
It was in 1979 that I under took a specific type of cleansing program in order to prove to my room-mate it would not work! This program involved the Lemonade Diet, developed by Burroughs in 1941. It initially came about in response to his need to find a better method to treat ulcers, and it was some years later that he realized that this diet treated many other diseases successfully, and he named it the Master Cleanser.
This cleansing program worked so well for me that I went on to study all of Stanley Burroughs work and through 1980 I did 100 days in total of the Master Cleanser program and never felt better in my life.
Specific Procedures
The Master Cleanser is a liquid mono-diet that cleanses and detoxifies the body as it stimulates healthy tissue growth. It consists of fresh lime or lemon juice, maple syrup, and cayenne pepper mixed with water and drunk 6-12 times a day. A herbal laxative tea is taken twice a day, and no other food is consumed.
This regimen that can be followed for 10 days, and may also be safely extended to 40 or more days, depending upon a person’s physical condition.
Toxemia and Disease
To understand why this therapeutic diet works its necessary to understand what disease is from a holistic perspective. Dis-ease is simply the accumulation of wastes, toxins, or poisons in the body, which in turn creates the myriad of symptomatic illnesses we are seeing so prevalent in people to day.
The glands and organs of our eliminative systems can easily become overwhelmed by wastes from poor diet, lack of exercise, tension, air and water pollution etc. As much as several pounds of waste can literally become impacted in the colon, adhering to the walls. Over time, the waste will then begin to leach into the blood stream. causing it to be re-circulated throughout the body, and settle into the tissues and cells. This settling of toxins is the final step that acts as a precursor to disease because its constant presence weakens the cells and eventually the entire immune system.
It stands to reason, then, that cleansing the body of this accumulated waste serves to rejuvenate the innate healing mechanisms of the body. so that they can function at optimal capacity to restore health and vitality, the less toxicity that is present in the body, the greater our vital force becomes.
Physiological Process
Because the act of digesting food consumes our energy on an ongoing basis, it follows that the elimination of solid food for short periods of time will make the energy normally used for digestion available for the process of detoxification. Thus the first step is to stop eating food so that the lemonade drink can commence Is work.
Because the lemonade drink is easily assimilated, it places little or no demand on the digestive system. Fresh squeezed lemon juice is a powerful cleanser for the body, and is also high in vitamins. Additionally, it is the only fruit or vegetable to contain cationic and anionic minerals.
Lemon also helps loosen and break up mucus in the body. Mucus is one of the body's defenses to protect it self against irritations. When too much mucus settles in any one area, dis-ease is the natural outcome.
Those of you familiar with colour therapy will also know that lemon, when consumed fresh squeezed, releases the colour that stimulates the body to cleanse itself.
Cayenne pepper, another key ingredient of the diet, breaks up this mucous and acts as a cleanser for the digestive, respiratory, and circulatory systems. It is used by herbalists to treat a wide range of problems and to enhance the effectiveness of many other herbs.
The maple syrup provides energy from an unprocessed sugar which still contains many of its original nutrients.
On the subject, the absence of minerals and vitamins in processed sugars makes the digestive system rob the body of these precious nutrient stores in order to metabolize the sugars. If too many processed foods are eaten, the pancreas seems to one of the first organs affected, often resulting in hypoglycemia and then further deterioration of the pancreas.
The herbal laxative tea is used to stimulate peristalsis of the colon, since the only other way to do it is to eat a diet high in fibre. The lemonade drink, or Master Cleanser, having no fibre, must use a laxative to remove the waste as it is being shed from the colon wall, otherwise it will stay in the body, leading to tiredness and any number of problems.
I want to reinforce that this is no starvation diet. At 6' 2" and 227lbs (starting weight) I'm a fairly big man; it's safe to say I don't eat like a bird! LOL! And while the first day was the toughest for me - I kept going to the fridge and opening it, only to have to 'check' myself and close it again (you wouldn't believe how many food commercials are on TV!!!), it has gotten much easier as the days go on.
I have been very strict too, as I figure that if I am going to subject myself to this measure of discipline, I want to be damn sure I get the full effects from it. The ONLY “cheating” I have been doing – if you can even call it that – is one cup of black coffee in the morning. I enjoy my coffee and as I get a wicked headache if I don’t have a cup in the morning, have to admit to being addicted to the caffeine. Were it a FOOD, and a load on my digestive system, I would most definitely tough it out and skip it… but as it is not a food (it’s basically coloured water with caffeine – a colourless, odourless chemical), I can’t see that one cup of BLACK coffee is going to change anything as there isn’t really anything for my digestive system to ‘process’.
How have I felt? In a word, “Much better than I thought I would… great in fact!” Okay, that’s a sentence… but you get the idea! Me and 799 of my friends will be racing in a 67 kilometer mountain bike race called The Test of Metal (www.testofmetal.com) in June. Consequently, LOTS of training is in order. I already teach a group cycling class at the Apollo Athletic Club in Abbotsford, but have added some long distance mountain biking to the menu to build up some big base & endurance. While I was initially curious/concerned how my ol’ bod would react to such as drastic change in diet in relation to my training, so far I have not had to cut back on the intensity or regularity of my training, which I'm glad about! I figure I am still getting at least 1000 calories a day from the maple syrup in my lemonade (about 120 ounces a day), which is obviously enough. I have my 3 hour long ride coming up on the weekend and was just planning on stocking my ‘Wingnut Gear hydration bladder’ with my lemonade, probably cutting back on the cayenne for this mix, and hoping this would suffice energy-wise. I think it will.
I'd like to add that I am not doing the MC to lose weight - and I think that this is where many get mislead about it. While losing weight is an added bonus (if you have the weight to lose), I am doing it to clean myself out! I'm 42 years old and figure that I have been storing up all kinds of toxins in my body for years. I never used to be allergic to anything, but now many types of beers (except for the most pure, unpasturized and no added preservative varieties) and many types of wines cause my nose to completely stuff up like I'm having some kind of allergic reaction. This isn’t supposed to happen! Also, I have had problems with my sinuses for a few years now, and the steroidal spray that the doctor gave me only seemed to make my throat sore which, as a singer, doesn't help. The MC is designed to clean out all the old mucous - along with the toxins - from your system, REMOVING all the causes for these adult-onset allergies and the like. And so I thought, what the hey… I'll subject myself to a 10 day experiment to see if it works!
I have to say that so far so good as I haven't needed any sinus meds at all, and my head is feeling "clearer" than I can ever remember it feeling. I've also dropped 11 lbs and 1.5% body fat, but as I said... that's just a bonus for me because I am already so svelte! Haha!
So here’s a quick daily breakdown so far:
* I weigh and measure first thing in the morning after I go pee, to get a consistent reading from day 2 day.
Day 0 – Super Bowl! Food & drink galore! Buuuurp!
Day 1 – 231lbs
Okay… I’m going to record myself as weighing 227lbs simply because I ate and drank SOOO much at the Super Bowl party, that this weight just isn’t realistic. I know I weighed 227 the morning prior, so that’s what my official start weight shall be… 227lbs.
This has to be what is to go down in record as the hardest day! I don’t know how many times I went back & forth to the fridge!
Day 2 – 224.5 lbs (21% Body Fat)
I ordered an electronic body fat monitor so I could chart more than just what the scale reads. I know that I will not be losing “water-weight” during this cleanse as I’m super-hydrated all day (I drink about 4+ liters a day when you consider the lemonade, the tea, and all the water I want), but I do want to get an idea how much of what I lose is lean mass and how much is fat. The BF monitor didn’t arrive until day 2, which is why I don’t have a measure for day 1.
Day 3 – 222.5 lbs (20% BF)
Day 4 – 221.5 lbs (19.6% BF)
Day 5 – 220 lbs (19.5% BF)
Day 6 – 219.5 lbs (18.8% BF)
I taught a group cycling class at the local club today and felt GREAT. I had tons of energy.
Day 7 – 216 lbs (19.5% BF)
I couldn’t tell you why my BF increased while my weight dropped. We’ll see what happens tomorrow.
