Putting the "Fast" Back in "Fasting"

I started the Master Cleanse today, also known in more gentle circles as the Lemonade Diet.

You've heard tell: for 10 days you live on laxative tea, brackish water (if the name doesn't sell it . . .), and a maple-syrup-lemon-juice-cayenne-pepper-water concoction. What's supposed to happen: a cleansing (as the title implies), complete with hot eliminations that results in one squeaky clean colon, babies. So clean you could eat off it, if after you opened yourself off to extract the colon you didn't bleed out first.

I started it last night with the laxative tea. I read all the horror stories, but I have a stubborn colon, so I didn't get the party that was promised.

I woke up this morning and promptly skipped the brackish water. If it's going to get buy in from me, it'll need another name. Because brackish by any other name has got to be more appealing.

But I did freshly squeeze my lemons (3 per 32 oz batch) and supercayenne my lemonade. Mama likes it spicy.

I drank that for breakfast, drank it for lunch--and then got desperately hungry, incredibly bored (so soon!) and then grossly irritable and depressed. I wasn't expecting that kind of fun until day 4. But this denial reminded me of the two days before my hysterectomy, reminded me of the 24 hours before my colonscopy, reminded me that I'm permanently scheduled for this kind of fun, and without breaking a sweat, I was out of there and in the kitchen and cooking up some Mahi Mahi Veracruzana.

Yes, my people, your math is right. My 10 day fast lasted a whopping 5 waking hours.

I am weak. But I am happy.

Viva la food.