My First Cleanse – Days 4 and 5

Back to my sister’s experience on her first cleanse.

That’s commitment!

Day Four:  Pretty sure the Cleanse Fairy visits cleansers the morning of Day Four because I woke up feeling ten years younger.  Revitalized, energized, empty…but in a good way.  Dare I say, clean?  I hop out of bed to make the chocolate ginger shake.  Now I love ginger, my husband does not, but we agreed that this was a pretty nasty shake.  I may have used too much ginger. And my blender isn’t the best, so the ginger wasn’t as liquefied as I would have liked.  I would probably microplane it first then add it to the blender if I were even to make it again, which I probably won’t.  My sudden burst of energy led to a productive morning of spring cleaning the house, then preparing the vegetable frittata.   

Frittata

We went off schedule on this one.  Sunday lunch was supposed to be the same Thai chicken soup from Day two, but I decided to save those leftovers for dinner on day five since it was a work day.  More time to cook and chop on Sunday for the frittata.  I’m actually having the rest of the frittata for dinner tonight and I can honestly say that I’m not looking forward to it.  The coconut milk in it was all wrong.  I would go with almond milk instead, and perhaps that would save it. 

But we choked it down and had higher hopes for the acorn squash wedges with the Asian broccoli salad. 

Acorn Squash

Now, if I hadn’t over steamed my beautiful farmer’s market broccoli and if we had quadrupled the amount of that delicious Asian dressing, this would probably have been a winning meal.  As it was, we had fleeting tastes of the dressing and a lot of over cooked veggies (totally my fault…I likely saw something shiny and completely forgot  about all the steaming that was going on).  So it’s probably unfair to pan the meal, but I doubt I’d make it again. 

I WILL make that dressing again though.  So we were hungry after eating, but this was nothing new to us.  We were old pros by now.  So we went to bed with familiarly empty tummies and looked forward to Day Five. Graduation Day!

Day Five: I woke up again feeling absolutely wonderful, and totally confused.  I had been looking forward to the last day SO much on days one through three, but now I was a little sad it was ending.  My head spun with thoughts of how we should eat when we’ve completed this cleanse.  Do we just go back to our old ways?  We shop organic and farmer’s markets, we cook light and use healthy ingredients.  We indulge in junk food enough to feel satisfied but not so much as to be sick or significantly overweight.  But there’s still another cleanse day ahead and a work cleanse day at that, so putting my ponderings aside I blend up our purple shake.  This was probably my favorite of them all, and more like the smoothies that I make myself on non-cleanse days with the healthy dose of nut butters and the blueberries.  After drinking, I still felt empty in that good way, and off to work I went.  As the morning progressed, I anticipated that 9:30 hunger, the weakness, the slurring words, the utter lack of brain power, but it never came.  I was fine.  Flew home for lunch to power down the Euro nut shake, which was supposed to be for dinner, but I tweaked our schedule slightly to make Monday night dinner an easy leftover.  I think I made that shake wrong.  Too much nut butter.  We don’t have hazelnut butter available, so I went with cashew butter and some almond butter to substitute.  It was good, but it was REALLY rich and thick. I had to eat it with a spoon. My husband LOVED his (I’d made them that morning and put his in a thermos for work.).  He thought it was more like a dessert which was just fine with him.  My portion was smaller than what was recommended because I gave my husband a little more than half so he wouldn’t go hungry at work, but I felt satisfied enough to last my second leg at work.  So, everything went smoothly, my husband came home and we had our final cleanse meal with the Thai chicken soup again.  There was no more complaining, no more wishing for the foods we couldn’t eat.  We felt just fine.  Never full, but usually satisfied.

800 arrows note:  Stay tuned for a wrap up of the 5 day experience, over all thoughts, pounds lost and some great questions…… if we only had access to those celebrity doctors that put together this fun, food experiment!