The Master Cleanse and Sherry's salad

I haven't talked about it on here before, but just over a month ago I did the master cleanse. It's basically a full-on detox for 10 days, where you have no food, just a drink that you make from fresh lemon juice, grade B maple syrup (or madal bal tree syrup which I used as it contains more nutrients), cayenne pepper and water. It is hard but it is a really great detox. In them mornings you're meant to do a salt water flush- I tried this once, it was revolting, and didn't have the desired effect! It's meant to make you go to the loo and empty it all out of you, but it just stayed in my stomach, swishing around and gave me a massive bloated belly. So I switched to doing coffee enemas, which were really effective and a great cleansing/ detoxifying aid. In the evenings you have a herbal laxative tea. This whole process really cleanses your colon and bowel and I felt lighter and freer at the end of it. It sounds a bit wanky to say this but I really did feel detoxified mentally as well as physically at the end of it.

Then after the 10 days, you need to ease yourself back into food, so you do 2 days of just drinking fresh organic orange juice. To be honest, I wasn't looking forward to orange juice that much, but I got a load of oranges and put them through my juicer and oh my days... it was the BEST orange juice I had ever tasted! After 10 days without food I felt like my taste buds were exploding! Then the next 2 days I just had a variety of different fruit and vegetable juices, to prepare my body for going back to solid food gradually. I made some delicious ones, including carrot, beetroot, apple and celery, and pear and ginger. Yum! But the most interesting thing about this 4 day period was that I started taking psyllium husk to finish off the cleansing process and clear out the remaining debris from my intestines. Oh my gosh, I won't go into detail here but it really does work, you wouldn't believe what starts coming out of you! If you're interested, do a google image search for mucoid plaque (if you're not eating!) and take a look! I have to say, it was quite satisfying! And now I'm fully back on food, my digestion has definitely improved. Probably shouldn't go into any further detail now, don't want to gross people out any more than I already have ;)

Anyway, the results of this were so great- I felt a million times better, really happy, light, healthy and positive, oh and I lost 13lbs (put 2 lbs back on when I started eating again and my colon started filling up again, but hey!) that I kept talking about it to my friends. And Sherry decided to give it a go herself. She'd been having some health issues which doing a good detox and eating more raw foods could really help. She did amazingly, even getting up at the crack of dawn to do the salt flush every morning (well done Sherry!). She's now completed the full cleanse, and is starting to eat raw foods. She made an amazing looking salad the other day which I have to share with you. See the picture below.

Sherry's salad

Liquid gold elixir

It has in it: lettuce, beetroot, cress, marinated courgette strips, grated carrot, marinated corn and red onion, red chili, enoki mushrooms, cashews and sesame seeds. Yum! She also made a dressing from Natalia Rose's Raw Food Detox Diet book, the liquid gold elixir, which she says is possibly the best thing she's ever tasted! That was one of the first raw books I bought, yet I never made that dressing but I am definitely going to make it after that recommendation! Sherry, you are inspiring me.

So,  I still haven't got round to making that chili but tonight that is definitely going to be my dinner. I will let you know how it turns out. It better be good after all my building it up! I'm sure it will, I love all Ani Phyo's recipes. So I'll do another post either later or tomorrow to let you know how the chili was. And I want to get some of those enoki mushrooms- apparently you can get them in Asda, but I reckon I've seen them in the little Japanese shop up the road so will be popping up there in my lunch break. I'll be having a big salad with taco nut meat and sour kream for lunch, and some more crackers (which I've already scoffed...) And I had a delicious green smoothie for breakfast. It's all good!