Maybe the birds are doing a cleanse too…If God had intended me to shart Depends would come in a bikini style with fun pattern options. (My buns like to be festive, what can I say?) This was my initial reaction the first time someone talked to me about doing a “cleanse” not of the deep breathing variety. See, I’m what they call a negative first responder. Me at 8: You want me to go to DisneyLand?! Don’t you know the Mad Hatter is mad because of severe lead poisoning incurred from his antiquated hat-making techniques? And you want me to go on a ride designed by this idiot?!? (Side note: That trip to Disney I got mononucelosis and ended up not only not getting to ride any of the rides but also missing a month of school. See what paranoia gets you?) Me at 30: You want me to drink a bunch of crappy tasting liquid to flush toxins out of my system? Last I checked my liver wasn’t broken and it’d better be doing something to earn it’s keep in my abdominal cavity, by golly!
So when one of my friends sent me an e-mail with the subject line of “I can’t believe I’m doing this but…” and continued on to say that she and her husband were going to try Jillian Michael’s “Cleanse and Burn” my initial reaction was, well, negative. “Don’t you know she’s already been sued three times over those pills?” I responded shrilly trying not to sound like the bossy know-it-all I totally am. A few days later another friend with a trip coming up e-mailed asking me the quickest way to lose 10 pounds (why she would ask me, the girl still holding on to 10 pounds of baby weight, I have no idea). “Try cutting out a snack and all junk food,” I suggested helpfully.
“I need to drop 10 pounds in a week,” she clarified.
“Well there’s always Master Cleanse,” I joked. “That’s what Beyonce used to slim down for Dream Girls and she lost 20 pounds in two weeks.”
“Perfect!” she exclaimed and started writing down the ingredients.
“Noooo!” I cried. “You might lose some water weight and a lot of poop in the short term but cleanses don’t work!”
“Hmm…” she mused, half-joking, “If I’m just trying to poop a lot, what if I cut to the chase and just take laxatives instead?”
“That would be bulimia,” I sighed.
And then I got an e-mail from an very sensible old Gym Buddy (old because she moved halfway across the country, not because of her age) telling me that she had just started a 30-day cleanse called Isagenix and not only lost 5 pounds and 15.5 inches in the first week but felt so awesome she did two hour-long runs after not having run for nearly a year. Finally the coup d’etat: Experience Life magazine, one of the most respected and scholarly fitness journals in the biz, ran a whole feature story about, yes, the benefits of cleansing, this time touting Ann Louise Gittleman’s “Fast Track Liver Detox” plan.
I think the Universe was telling me to rethink my stance on cleansing. Either that or to stop checking my e-mail.
Do Detoxes Work?
To answer this question we need to look at two factors: the type of cleanse and what your definition of “work” is. A cleanse or detox is defined as, “any health regimen designed to remove toxins from the body.” That’s pretty generic and could encompass practices all the way from sweat lodges to massage to acupuncture to diets so I’m going to narrow it down here to ones that use a drink, pill and/or supplement to cleanse the body. That still leaves a lot a lot A LOT left but it’s a start. Basically there are as many cleanses as you have potentially defective body parts.
As for the definition of “work”, that’s a little more variable. Most people I know – indeed all of my friends who talked to me about it – follow in Beyonce’s stiletto’ed footsteps and cleanse to lose weight or jump start a weight loss plan. Others like Gwyneth Paltrow and Dr. Gittleman recommend detoxing for health purposes such as gaining energy, flushing out toxins, and “restarting” the body. While the latter is very subjective and is mainly supported by people saying things like “I just felt lighter and, you know, cleaner!”, the former is pretty easy to quantify. Either you lose weight or you don’t. Given those criteria I think it’s safe to say that most cleanses work – Beyonce and my Gym Buddy certainly lost plenty of weight.
Jillian Michael’s Big Unanswered Question
One big problem with these plans is that you can’t “cleanse” forever. And what happens when you return to eating again? A popular theory is that since the weight loss is mainly water and poop as soon as you start drinking and eating again the weight will return as well. Beyonce gained all 20 pounds back – not that she seems at all sad about it, to her credit. But my main issue is that most detoxes are oozing with quick-fix smarminess. Jillian Michaels recently did an interview with a local radio station and before she came on the air, the radio show hosts explained that her P.R. rep had specifically forbade them from asking her any questions about her controversial pills. I was disappointed because I have wondered how someone who tells people every week on The Biggest Loser that the way to lose weight is through very hard work in the gym and a lot of self control in the kitchen can start schilling diet pills without her brain imploding from the contradiction. Instead we got to listen to five minutes of her promoting her new yoga DVD.
Perhaps she prefers to let her Cleanse and Burn system speak for itself. Martha Edwards over at That’s Fit tried it out for the full two weeks and reported that while the cleanse pills made her “get the runs” and the burn pills made her “jittery” the side effects did lessen over time and she lost 3 pounds which made her happy although she qualifies her weight loss by explaining that she also made an effort to clean up her diet despite being told by the PR folk, “that’s one of the selling points of the product … no special diet is required.” So what of my friend and her husband who also tried it out? My friend quit after the second day when she was knocked out by diarrhea and stomach cramps. She wasn’t sure if it was the stomach flu which was making the rounds or rather really aggressive cleansing action from the pills. Either way she didn’t finish her pack. Her husband however went through the whole thing and reported similar feelings to Edwards saying that he “pooped a lot” during the first week and spent the second week on a caffeine buzz. He did not lose any weight.
Conclusions
I have no conclusions for you. Honestly I am really conflicted about this subject still. And normally I would try it out myself (oh yes I would!) so I could see how it made me personally feel but I’m nursing and I’m not about to take any risks with Jelly Bean’s food supply. On one hand, there is no reputable research that cleanses and detoxes lead to long-term weight loss or health improvements. But on the other hand there are a lot of people who certainly think they do. So now I’m asking you – any of you tried a cleanse or detox? What was your goal in doing it (i.e. weight loss or health improvement)? Did it work? Anyone ever lost a bunch of weight really quickly for a special occasion like a cruise, wedding, or reunion?
Ok I will not be writing a novel, or trying not to, but the human body by it's very nature cleanses itself. And the better the quality of food you ingest, the easier and less "cleaning" it has to do. Big Macs vs. raw vegan zucchini noodles. I think that for people who eat the former, a cleanse may be a way for the to jumpstart their *transition* into a healthier lifestyle but if they are only cleansing and then plan to start up with their unhealthy food choices again, then what's the point. Dont bother.
As a high raw vegan, I have never cleansed. I have never taken anything like that, ever. I eat a high raw vegan diet and moved down this spectrum starting with vegetarian by age 12 to rawish veggie to veganish to cooked vegan to high raw vegan and it works for me, I feel healthful and i think that when you are on the right dietary path, you don't need cleanses. When you're on the wrong path, you do.
Ok it's 1:30am and not sure my thoughts are totally coherent.
nitey.
🙂
FOR ME cleanses= starvation by any other name.
FOR ME cleanses = a smidgetad outta whack with eating 'normally' which for me is intuitively.
FOR ME cleanses are not intuitive.
sign me,
Judgy McJudgerpants 🙂
If you eat clean and cut the processed foods and drink water, your body will really clean itself out.
Those cleanses stuff scare me personally. I am a busy person and it seems that doing a cleanse means that you spend lots and lots of time on the toilet.
I've never done a cleanse. I think that would screw with my blood sugar. I can barely stand an overnight fast (ie, sleeping)! Anytime I feel the need to cleanse my system, I drink a lot more water. My body tells me when I've been eating too much processed food by making me really thirsty, and I think the water kind of washes things out 🙂
Argh.
Cleanses.
If you don't want toxins in your body, don't ingest them in the first place.
If you want to flush, use a toilet. Let the liver alone to do its thing.
Things.
Myriad things.
In the book, The House of God, a story of a doctor finding his way through the medical gauntlet of his internship, he meets a resident who tells him, "Money in medicine is in poop, either starting it or stopping it!"
I take the mainstream view on this one, the body naturally cleanses a person who eats a healthy diet and moves around.
I don’t think cleanses are a good idea. Our body has these neat things to clear itself of toxins: a liver and bowel. It does a pretty good job. I don’t think cleanses do anything but flush out water (so you drop water weight) and flush out crap (so you lose, um, crap). As soon as you start eating food again, you gain it all back—and then some if you binge out of hunger. Does Beyonce look thinner now because she did a cleanse once? No, she gained it all back. They’re not sustainable in the least.
I have hippy friends who go on and on about the master cleanse, and I suppose maybe a weekend master cleanse would flush out poo from your system, but noone cen tell me I can drink just maple syrup, lemon juice and cayenne pepper for days and days and not kill everyone around me. We have a liver and a colon. They do their thing properly and we should be fine if we're eating well. It's not real weight loss. It isn't sustainable. You might as well just go to one of those wierd hippy bowel cleanse places and get an enema. Equally silly…
I could see maybe a raw food diet or something similar to work on cleaning out your system, but really? My running theory is if I have to ask myself and really try and convince myself that something is healthy against all my better judgement…well, it isn't.
Heck NO! I have to stay far, far away from these types of diets/cleanse/starvation or whatever name you want to call them because they trigger eating disorders for me.
In college I lost weight by my own special "diet", which was buying a giant soda pop each morning and s l o w l y sipping on it all day long. That was all I ate. It was enough to keep the stomach growling/hunger pains at bay so that I could STARVE myself. Not good.
I've done Recleanse a couple of times (http://www.recleanse.com/), in which I basically cut out wheat and dairy for a week. Oh, and sugar and salt.(Wahhhh!) There were also some pills to take but they didn't seem to do anything for me, not like the super-pooper pills other cleanses make you take.
It was kind of a fun thing to do with my husband – a week-long challenge. Both of us felt like we were just eating too much crap so we wanted to eat, "cleanly" to try to "reset" our tastebuds. Very scientific, I'm sure.
I might have lost a few pounds (which is also what I wanted to be honest) but what I really liked was intentionally treating my diet as something to fuel my body rather than something to satisfy my palate. It helped me to rethink my reasons for choosing the foods I regularly do and helped with re-appreciating more natural foods.
That being said, we ended the cleanse by going to a restaurant famous for it's bbq pork. My husband literally cried in anticipation, relief and hunger while we were waiting for our orders to arrive. Um…this kinda makes me wonder if a cleanse can make a person more disordered in their eating – can make them think about food too much – instead of the opposite.
???
LG
The only cleanse I ever did was when I worked with a nutritionist; she put me on a week-long "cleanse" as a way to prepare me for healthier eating, but it consisted of lots of fruits and veggies, lean proteins, healthy snacks, and no caffeine or processed sugar. It was basically eating super-clean for a week. And my system cleaned itself out. Which says, to me anyway, that our bodies will do what they need to do, as long as we treat them well.
The "lemonade" cleanse, the colonics, the pills…these are all things Hollywood types do in order to lose weight for a role, a photoshoot, or an awards ceremony. They don't last, and can be very dangerous.
I have, unfortunately, tried the Master Cleanse. It was one of the worst experiences of my life! Not only do I (now) think it is dangerous and a waste of time- I can promise you that it's not worth it based solely on the fact that everyone around you will hate you. I was beyond grumpy, could not workout if I tried, and the smell of food started to make me sick.
Anyway, as everyone else has said- eat well, take care of yourself, you body will do the rest. 🙂
– Britt
Seems like you have a consensus, Charlotte 🙂
For me, I am just not a cleanse person. My feeling is if you eat the right foods, your bod will poop for you! Yes, sometimes there is a "hold up" but it works its way out eventually if you eat right & hydrate. Plus, as you mentioned in the article, at some point, ya got to go back to regular eating.. the pounds come back on.
I also dislike this quick fix mentality. If ya needed to lose 10 pounds for something and ya knew it, why not just do it right, give yourself the time & learn how to do it right & keep it off.
Just my own personal thoughts.
"…she had just started a 30-day cleanse called Isagenix and not only lost 5 pounds and 15.5 inches in the first week but felt so awesome she did two hour-long runs after not having run for nearly a year."
Umm…sounds like shin splints or a stress fracture waiting to happen… Just sayin'!
i'm really leery of cleanses. they just seem silly. i believe in the power of the human body and that it will cleanse itself!
I believe the ONLY way to cleanse the body is by eating clean food. Period. No pills, no crazy drinks. That is crazy stuff. These bodies are too valuable to mess with that way. Tons of vegetables, fruits, lean proteins, fiber, and water. It's the only way to cleanse the body.
I believe the ONLY way to cleanse the body is by eating clean food. Period. No pills, no crazy drinks. That is crazy stuff. These bodies are too valuable to mess with that way. Tons of vegetables, fruits, lean proteins, fiber, and water. It's the only way to cleanse the body.
I believe the ONLY way to cleanse the body is by eating clean food. Period. No pills, no crazy drinks. That is crazy stuff. These bodies are too valuable to mess with that way. Tons of vegetables, fruits, lean proteins, fiber, and water. It's the only way to cleanse the body.
Okay I really don't get the whole detox hype. If you eat a clean diet and get your sweat on regularly, your body will be fine. The human body is a fascinating system that is capable of getting rid of toxins. Why do people go through the misery!? I mean, if it makes you happy, go ahead.
The best way is to eat a clean diet. Burn clean fuel and you won't need the oil change.
I work for an alternative MD, and I've seen certain types of liver cleanses under the supervision of my boss work miracles. He used them to just clean people out and totally start from scratch if he feels a patient is "toxic". He has saved lives, and I totally believe they can work. However, people that try them to simply lose weight quickly are doing them for the wrong reasons. That's not the purpose. I've done two different cleanses both using rice protein powdered drinks. I did lose a little weight, but again that wasn't that point. Not sure what I think about the Master Cleanse. I do think it's good to give your digestive system a break every once in a while, but honestly, I'd rather die than not eat any food for 10 days.
If you're interested in cleansing in a healthy way that doesn't require starving in any way, look into raw veganism. It really helped me and a lot of my friends/family with both weight and health issues. Check out the info at http://www.foodnsport.com. It's not a gimmick, and it's not a miracle cure, it's just plain clean eating. Your body does the rest, no silly pills required.
Cleanses are a load of bunk, and dangerous too. You will end up puting your body into starvation mode by depriving it, then after the metabolism has slowed down to preserve your fat stores, and you go back to regular eating habits, the weight will pile back on. Trust me, I know from experience.
I don't feel like there is a problem occasionally eating light, or even fasting a few meals; I have been known to go liquid (smoothies, soups, etc) for a day if I know that I will be in a bathing suit the next day, just to remove the bloat. But long-term cleansing and deprivation is a no-no. Your body will rebel.
The only time I feel a need to "cleanse" is when I've been eating a lot of processed, unhealthy foods. When I go back to eating how I should (fruits, veggies, fiber, water, unprocessed foods), I feel so much better. If I ate like this all the time, I would probably never feel a need to cleanse. I once looked into doing something like the master cleanse, but it seemed like a bunch of bunk and I agree with almost all of the comments made about this post.
I suppose some would think that when I went raw for a month, that was a "cleanse"… and yeah, I did lose a few pounds. I also gained them back within a week 😉
I know why people want to do "cleanses", but I don't think that they're a healthy way to go. Eating raw was still pretty healthy because I was getting all my nutrients, but when people only drink maple syrup/water/lemon juice for a week, I think of that as more starving themselves than anything else… if we're getting appropriate nutrients and eating real food, then that's all the cleansing that we really need.
I had to do a GI-prescribed "cleanse" to get ready for a surgery. I was on a liquid diet for 48 hours, so it wasn't technically a cleanse, but I was EMPTY at the end of those 2 days, if you know what I mean. I felt amazing the second morning, and even went to a 90 min yoga class. But I ate everything in sight after the surgery.
Clearly, this wasn't done for weight loss, and I know I did lose weight, because I got weighed at the appt, but I was also dehydrated. I don't ever want to do it again, but my stomach issues were completely gone after. So, I guess they do work, in that you start from scratch, but they also probably rid your body of all good bacteria.
I am NOT pro-liquid cleanses. No fat and no protein equals horrible blood sugar roller coaster, plus your body isn't able to carry out the full detox process without those macronutrients. If you are eating pretty much organic, whole unprocessed foods, you're probably doing alright.
9 weight loss
I think it's interesting how eating a diet full of fruits and veggies instead of junk food is considered a cleanse now. I mean, isn't that what we are supposed to be eating most of the time. I don't think it's possible to eat crap for most of the month and then "cleanse" your body by starving for a week.
I tried a box cleanse, just for the hell of it. It was just as you put it–stuff that makes you pee and poop. Not really healthy, IMO, though if you're constipated from eating junk, you may feel temporarily better for awhile, and you'll lose all that poop 'n' water weight for a bit (which looks like a lot, at first).
The body cleans itself if you take good care of it. Eat well and exercise the right amount for you and sleep well and be kind. No shortcuts.
I haven't fasted in decades (that's the old school term, by the way). You'd have to pay me large sums of money to do it today. But it's interesting that HEabie has seen miracles at her doc's office. I'm in the dark about it, honestly.
Here's the easiest way to cleanse: cut our processed foods, increase foods that stimulate and heal the liver, which is the main organ of detoxification. And find out the Do's and Dont's of Detox Diets for free right here: http://www.MyTenDayTransformation.com
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