So I pretty much chose the worst ways to ease out of the cleanse. It was kind of a binge effect from abstaining from food for too long. I wish that I could have gone longer on the cleanse but with the way work was last week.. it was just too hectic to be doing a cleanse which really deserves calm, predictable, stable days. I had the opposite.

I’m still very glad I did it as I learned quite a bit about my body. I made some pasta Saturday night that caused a mild allergic reaction (itchy throat). Still not completely sure what caused it but the possibilities are: seasoned sausage, tomatoes, wheat, or serrano pepper. It’s possible I have some other allergy I am unaware of that is typically masked by strong allergy meds. Going to have to do some experimenting to see what caused / masked it.

So I woke up still feeling sick and weak. I managed to get a salt water flush in around 11am. By early afternoon I was feeling much better but was crazy hungry. I decided that my body was telling me it was time to end the cleanse so I started off with some orange juice and grapes. I really wanted to see my tongue finish the white stage and go pink but that would have probably taken another day or two. I couldn’t fathom drinking any more lemonade.. it was kind of getting old.

Unfortunately I didn’t make it to the store right after work so early evening I was craving some food and went for chips and salsa. Not the best ease out food. Probably going to pay for that one.

I went to Safeway later in the evening and stocked up on some orange juice, a few veggies and got a packet of ramen to do a stir fry with. The stir fry didn’t work out too well. I really need to get some non-stick pans but you can’t beat free gourmet pans. It ended up being quite the mess and I only ate a few bites. It was too much oil to eat anyway this soon after the cleanse.

I also wound up with some of my once favorite SweetTart jelly beans. I managed to polish off most of the bag but they have kind of lost their appeal since its mostly chemicals and sugar. Sugar really was the worst idea for ease out but Safeway happened to have them when typically they are pretty hard to find. I was really surprised that Safeway had them considering it is 1/4 or less the size of a regular Safeway.

Today hasn’t been the most pleasant of days. Work was crazy today with multiple projects and support sessions happening all at once. I managed to make it through it though. I skipped the salt water flush again today due to so much going on until about 1pm. On top of that I am feeling the sickness portion of the cleanse. Spent most of the day with a little headache, a throat cough, being cold and kind of weak. It’s 9:30pm as I’m writing this I have only had two glasses of lemonade today. I haven’t really been hungry though. I do miss food and am looking forward to next week very much! 4 cleanse days to go!

I spent most of the evening watching TV under a blanket trying to get some rest. Need to go to bed at a decent time tonight.. last night I was up till past 2am. It seems I have a team call with my direct manager at 6am. I think he forgot that a good portion of us are west coast based.

Today seemed to go by pretty quick. Had a lot of chaos with work.. tons of things going on and impossible to stay on top of everything. Had a chance to catch up with two friends today.. one via phone and one via chat. That was quite nice.

I skipped the salt water flush again today due to my morning being eaten up. I did pretty bad at spacing out the lemonades today. Since I’m still drinking four double mixes a day, it shouldn’t be that hard but I lost track of time a lot today, especially this evening. I spent most of the evening researching recipes and methods for cooking small meals quick. Most of which was watching Jamie Oliver videos on Youtube. He has some really great ideas and methods that I really want to learn from.

I was hungry a few times today but that ended up being due to me not drinking the lemonades on a regular schedule. I think right now what I really miss is cooking. It’s fun. It’s creative. You get to experiment. I definitely want to push my cooking skills more once the cleanse is over. While I thought about scrapping the cleanse today, I am now at the half way point so I might as well finish it. If I don’t, I know I am going to be mad at myself and will end up doing it again so I better just do it right the first time.

I’ve had some weird eye pressure today and a slight headache. Took a short nap this afternoon because it was too hard to focus. I seem to be getting some sort of cold or sickness right now. I was a little flush earlier this evening and realized that I was starting to get a sort of cold cough. My feet have been pretty cold the past few days.. granted I should have just put socks on. Usually I don’t have much of a problem but I know the cleanse can have some effects like that.

On day one or two I got the white film on my tongue and my breath was pretty bad. It seems like it has partly cleared up today and my breath smells a lot better. I’m excited to see what it’s like when the film totally clears up.

I found out today that The Postal Service added a tour stop in Portland. Originally I was thinking about a trip to CA to see them, or going to Sasquatch at the Gorge but those would have cost $300+. Definitely excited to go, that will be on July 17th. I ended up pre-ordering the vinyl version of their 10th Anniversary album release. Kind of expensive at $60 with shipping but I’m a long time fan so I’m not going to worry about it. I ordered their original album on vinyl a few months ago. I still need to get a record player tho.. haha. You can’t pass up a good opportunity to get an original vinyl for a band like them though. I was in shock when I found out they were going to tour again as their original and only LP album was from 2002.

Well I better go to bed.. long day tomorrow with lots of maintenance being done at Disney.

So far, I am down 11 lbs. which brings me to 241. That means my BMI is now 34.6.. ouch. On the positive side, it’s down from 39 (272 lbs. in Jan 2011). Did some digging today and found out my ‘recommended’ weight is 130-175 based on my height / age. That would be a dream. For the time being, my current goal still remains at 180.

Due to work I ended up skipping the salt water flush again today but I still had normal BMs first thing. Went to Safeway around 11am to buy lemons but their selection wasn’t very good. No organic and the ones they did have were too small. I wound up buying two so I would have some to use this afternoon and decided I would drive up to Central Market in the afternoon to get enough to finish up the cleanse with. Originally, I had planned on going for organic but for $0.20 more the lemons were half the size. Not worth it. I realized that they had two brands of lemons there.. Sunkist and California. I ended up hunting to find 20 of the largest California ones I could find. I realized while juicing that the Sunkist ones have about 5-10 large seeds and then another 10-15 small ones. I had to start using a strainer to get them all out which meant I was missing all of the lemon pulp. With the California lemons, there are 4-6 large seeds which are super easy to fish out while not losing any of the pulp.

One of the things I have found fascinating while on the cleanse is my asthma symptoms, or lack thereof rather. I stopped taking all meds which included Singular (allergies & asthma), Dulera (maintenance asthma inhaler), Proair (rescue asthma inhaler) and Zyrtec (allergies) among a few others. Now typically I use the Proair inhaler quite a bit and more than I should. My symptoms are never severe but rather an annoyance that feels like a constriction near the top of my throat. For 2 days I didn’t touch the Proair at all and over the last 48 hours I have only used it a few times which is basically after I brush my teeth.. the mint or something seems to aggravate my throat a little bit. I stopped using normal toothpaste a long time ago as I found that Sodium Lauryl Sulfate makes me get 10x more canker sores.. not fun. So now I use Nature’s Gate Natural Toothpaste and I rarely get any (maybe one every few months). Quite nice. I probably could get by without using the inhaler after using toothpaste but then I think about my breathing more since it’s a little louder. Hard to describe. It’s especially annoying while trying to fall asleep so the inhaler relieves that.

Today was cake compared to yesterday. Didn’t really dream about eating normal food. It was nice to be at Safeway and Central Market and smell something delicious but not be totally craving it. If I went to the store yesterday the way I was, I probably would have caved. When I was at Safeway, I had to walk around the block to stop by the ATM. It was the first time I have been outside during the day in a while and as I’ve heard described in the Master Cleanse Diaries, colors seemed more vivid.. more saturated. Maybe it was not being outside in a while, maybe it was just that it was actually nice out.. or maybe it was the cleanse. Living in the city and driving can get a bit pathetic at times because you go from apartment –> parking garage –> car –> drive –> parking garage –> destination and back. You can go quite a while without actually going ‘outside’ if you’re not careful.

That brings me to my final thought for tonight.. I am seriously considering getting a dog. Probably strange to anyone reading this that knows me as I have always been a cat person. Granted, allergies will make any kind of pet besides a goldfish problematic. I plan on getting allergy shots which will help. I’m also thinking about a hypo-allergenic dog like a pomeranian. In any event, I need a companion that will not let me be lazy and force me outside more due to the example above.

Today has been a huge challenge. I didn’t sleep well at all. I wanted to go to bed early, I think I got in bed around 11pm and shut my phone off around 11:30pm. I stayed in bed awake until at least 1:30am which included numerous trips to the bathroom (5-10 ish), mostly just for #1, though one or two were for #2. I guess I shouldn’t have had lemonade and water so late.

Well after still being wide awake at 1:30am, I got up and decided to watch TV for a few hours. I think I finally got in bed again around 3:30am only to be woken up around 5am to go #2. Strange having a BM so early considering I just took two tabs of the herbal laxative.

To make the day more exciting, I got woken up by work at 9:30am with some customer incidents going on. Wound up being on the phone for a few hours which meant being at my computer, meaning no real ability to do the SWF. By noon I gave up holding out on eating and went straight for a lemonade mixture. Also frustrating was that today was an EMC holiday but not a Disney holiday, meaning that work gave me the day off except our customer was working which meant it’s not really a day off. It seems like EMC and Disney pick the opposite holidays to observe. I remember a few where Disney took the day off but EMC didn’t. I guess it’s about time to take a two week vacation and detox from work.

Most of the day involved dreaming about food. There were a few times that I would say I was slightly hungry, but really, it was all in my head. I wanted the comfort of eating something, of tasting something. Chips and salsa was the wish for the day. And what sucks is I have a sealed bag of chips and tons of salsa around. So many times I wanted to dig in today, it has been quite the challenge. Again, this isn’t really hunger.. it’s just wanting to ‘eat’.

The thought of quitting the cleanse came up at least 5 times today. In the afternoon, I decided that I needed some visual way of tracking where I’m at as this is going to be impossible without visualizing the goal. I heard of people doing post-its to track the days left which sounded like a good idea, but I needed something with more gratification. To do that I decided to use blue post-its for tracking remaining salt water flushes, yellow for glasses of lemonade, green for the herbal laxative tabs and orange for the ease out orange juice. A little overkill but necessary if I am going to have any hope of finishing this without cheating.

Also, today has proven how I need to do my blogging at night before I forget the day. I wonder if that’s what kept me up last night.. a feeling of incompleteness.

There’s a Winston Churchill quote I just heard on Teen Wolf that about sums up the Master Cleanse.. “If you’re going through hell, keep going.”

Hoping for a better start tomorrow morning as that may be the key to overcoming the hurdle of days 3-5.

Going to bed at 11:30pm tonight and hoping I’ll be able to get a good night of sleep. I’m going to have to make a trip to the store first thing as I used up all of the good lemons today. All I have left are the ones from Walmart. I almost used one today but there was a bunch of goo stuff on the skin. Too many potential chemicals.. not worth it. Unfortunately I have a 8am team call so I better try to get to sleep.