My First Cleanse – Day 3

Sorry for the delay, without further adieu back to my sister generously sharing her experience on the 5-Day Gut Flush Cleanse brought to you by Dr. Junger:

Day Three:  Oh hold on, rewind.  11:00pm…one hour before Day Three and I wake up to use the bathroom.  There’s a lot of waking up to use the bathroom during this cleanse because you are supposed to guzzle water from morning until night.  So I wake up, and my first thought was, “Oh, I drank too much wine.”  Then waking up a little more, no I didn’t, so what’s with the headache, the nausea, the dizziness?  Starvation perhaps?  I shrug it off and go back to bed.  Awaken on Day three to…blah.  No energy, headache continues, nauseated, and well….let’s just say that the “Gut Flush” part of the cleanse seemed to live up to it’s name that morning.  My husband, who had reported less energy since we began, did not share my symptoms.  He just noted that he slept 12 hours the night before.  His typical amount of sleep is 6 hours a night.  Still, I slug out of bed to make the Vanilla almond shake, which I don’t remember very well.  I wasn’t feeling awesome, and it was probably fine. Not great or terrible enough to remember.  Then I sat on the couch and watched HGTV until I begrudgingly stood up again to cook the Thai chicken salad, which revived me quite a bit.  Fantastically good.  After lunch my husband and I took a break, got a sitter and went to a movie.  This is really only noteworthy because the smell of the popcorn almost killed me.  I wasn’t prepared for that olfactory siren song, but I scooted past the concession and was able to focus on Divergent, or I think I did.   If you were to ask me what happened in the movie, I think I’d say, “Four was hot, and I was hungry.”  So, focus was not there on Day Three. Neither was energy, but we got home and made our roasted vegetable soup, and it was meh.  Not my favorite, and despite huge portions, not very satisfying, but better than raw greens so I took it.  What I also eagerly took was information from my sister that I was allowed a small bite of 70% cocoa dark chocolate to treat my headache.  Truthfully, my headache had resolved after dinner, but I still broke off two nickel sized pieces of chocolate for my husband and I, handed him his portion, and told him, “We have headaches.”  He laughed and said, “I love you.”  Hopefully this made up for being snappy with him earlier in the day.  Yeah, I was really irritable on day three. 

800 arrows note:  I’m no doctor, nutritionist, registered dietician, etc. so depending on your goals for a five day cleanse, the dark chocolate trick for a headache may or may not be a good choice for you.  When cleansing taking something like Advil isn’t ideal, but if you’ve tried water, walks, acupressure (you know the hand squeeze thing), etc., a small portion of chocolate (good quality, 70% dark or higher) is a fun thing to try and on day 3 of a cleanse it’s a good mood booster as well!

P.S.  800 arrows agrees with my sister’s synopsis of “Divergent”, I’d like to add the music and costumes were also enjoyable, but mainly…..it’s Four.