My first cleanse – Day 2

We continue my sister’s series of her first cleanse, using a “Five Day Flush Gut Cleanse” developed by Dr. Junger, presented by Dr. Oz.

Day two:  We’re off work. Nothing to do all day but think about all the food we can’t eat.  huh, maybe not the greatest idea?  SO we decide to keep busy.  We drink our Green Coco Shake, which we both preferred to the Grasshopper shake the day before.  Then we decided to do a little yard work.  We got a little obsessive and stayed outside working until lunch.  We had really worked up an appetite, so thank goodness we got to look forward to a hardy, hot….um..green salad?  Yeah, green salad with almonds (which made the dish), black olives (yum), and a s dressing of….wait.  No dressing?  That’s right, a dry, raw salad for lunch, or “rabbit food” as my husband non-lovingly called it.  But the salads were HUGE (I doubled the recipe unsure if it was for 1 or 2 people) and somehow satisfied us enough to go back outside and keep working until it was time to pick up the kids from school.  We actually made an entire herb garden that day.  Complete with double stacked railroad ties, and organic soil with organic mulch on top.  It was beautiful and in the past, my husband and I enjoyed nothing more than sitting on our porch after work like this and enjoying a beer….Hmm…I mean carrot sticks.  Today, we enjoy carrot sticks.  And there it is again: that 5:00 inner clock ringing for a beer or glass of wine.  The evening of Day 2 had me so tempted to cheat with a beer, that I began to visualize all the ice cream and bacon I couldn’t eat so that I wouldn’t think about all the wine and beer I couldn’t drink.  And you know?  It worked.  Probably not the kind of visualization exercise my sister had in mind when she was offering supportive ideas to get me through the cravings, but still, it worked.  I loved the text my sister sent me asking if I wanted to try some “distractive breathing” and I texted back with, “NO!  I want to try some distractive drinking!”  Ah, it’s important to laugh when you’re in hell.  My reward at the end of the day was an amazing chicken coconut soup, that was perfect, “except noodles would have really made this,” according to my husband.  We both had to laugh at the truth of that statement because it applied to just about everything we had eaten.  But we did it, and that takes us to Day Three.

800 arrows note:  Day three is typically the hardest, it’s when detox symptoms are likely to begin, stay tuned to see how my sister and her amazing husband do once the “cleansing” part of the cleanse begins.