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One cleanse which is well-known among the natural health community is the lemonade cleanse, also known as the Master Cleanse. This is where you consume no foods and drink only water and lemonade — everybody’s favorite cool, refreshing summer drink.
This is a convenient alternate to completely fasting, which will be covered in another segment, because you can still satiate your hunger and provide you both with energy and nutrition.
The premise is pretty simple. You basically take clean, filtered water, and mix it with freshly juiced lemon juice, as well as a sweetener like maple syrup, and you can optionally add a dash of cayenne pepper for extra kick. Stir it all together, and taste it to make sure you have achieved the ideal level of sweet and sour, and enjoy the refreshment.
This is a wellness tonic in its simplicity and its chemistry. Before I address the benefits, I want to point out a couple of flaws with what I just described. First of all, maple syrup is not even a raw food. Rather, it is a cooked, refined product. While I am not a total purist, I think in retrospect, when I did the lemonade cleanse, I used maple syrup and I would have been better served to use something raw, like honey or date sugar to mix into the lemonade to take the punch out of the sourness and balance it with the sweet.
Also, some people will find the use of cayenne pepper objectionable. This is really a personal choice. It is true that peppers can be irritating and over-stimulating to the mucosa, cardiovascular and nervous system. This over-stimulation can cause a bit of a crash later on when the stimulation stops and can cause the nerves to lose responsiveness and cause the individual to lose some natural, dynamic energy. There were times over the years that I was consuming hot peppers and couldn’t get enough of that and would even mix cayenne pepper into my meals as an extra kick. Nowadays, I just don’t really eat them and feel more of a sustained, dynamic energy without them (you can see this covered more in depth in another segment entitled ‘Raw Foods to Consider Avoiding’).
If I were to do another lemonade fast now, I would do it with date sugar and without the cayenne pepper. Your preference on how to make the lemonade and what ingredients are used as a sweetener and whether or not to use the cayenne pepper is 100% up to you. There are no strict rules and it’s your journey.
Getting back into what is the point of using lemonade as a health tonic, there are a number of reasons why this fruit is one of the ultimate wellness-enhancing ingredients out there. The lemon — and its close cousin the lime — is the most astringent fruit out there. This means that it pulls and sucks chemistry out. This is why your lips pucker when you taste it. Even though it is an acid fruit, when digested, it creates an alkaline ash, consisting of calcium, potassium, sodium and magnesium. These chemical compounds are your friends when you are attempting to alkalize the body, making the lemon a very powerful tool in changing your body’s chemistry into being more alkaline to get it into a state of repair and regeneration.
Depriving the body of solid foods creates a massive benefit as well, throwing the body into a state of energetic emptiness. All of the energy that your body typically devotes to digesting solid foods is instead redirected towards cleaning, repair and healing. This is quite an experience, and could even be described as psychedelic.
Throughout the course of the five and a half days I did the cleanse, I was in quite an energetic state, feeling an incredible energy running from the top of my head down to my toes. Once I was at the grocery store, and the person at the checkout counter asked me how I was doing, and I responded, “Fantastic.” Because I really did feel that way, brimming with positivity and energetic lightness.
This lemonade cleanse was an important step for me and really helped me out at a crucial turning point not only in my health journey but overall in my life. This cleanse came at an important time for me because I had become hooked back once again on caffeine and was trying to kick that. After about two years with no caffeine, due to some unforeseen circumstances, I had caved and gotten back into it, consuming the stuff for about two months straight. The lemonade fast allowed me to go off it cold turkey and by the end of the five days I really was able to press onwards without really craving caffeine. About three weeks later, I had completely gotten the caffeine withdrawal symptoms out of my system.
Also, this was a time when I was at a major turning point in terms of my diet. For the prior two and a half years, I had eaten close to 100% raw but was consuming a high-fat diet, and I had experienced a recent intuition that I really should switch to eating less fats and get more nutrition and energy from simple sugars, not fatty acids. This was a difficult transition for me to pull off. However, doing the lemonade cleanse I do believe gave me sort of liftoff momentum to where when I switched back into solid foods after the cleanse, I intentionally was eating the simple fruits and vegetables and avoiding the high-fat type of foods, whether that meant avocados, coconut or olive oil. I was able to successfully make the transition, and the lemonade cleanse was the take-off point so I give great credit to it for that.
Lastly, in terms of how I personally benefitted, the lemonade cleanse came at a time when I was going through a bit of a personal crisis. This had to do with a job I had been working — well, I quit that job and got another job. I did the cleanse during this two-week limbo that I was in, while in between the two jobs. On a personal and existential level, I was sort of wondering what was I doing with my life and who was I really? I think sometimes or every few years as individuals we go through these waves of our own spirit.
Doing the lemonade cleanse really helped to center myself and align my thoughts and self-concepts about really who I am and what I’m all about. This put me at ease and gave me my identity back, which can be very important especially when foraging out into uncharted territory.
As I’ve mentioned with other cleanses, the emotional and mental aspects of doing a cleanse can be just as important as the physical and health benefits you get from doing it. With that said, I don’t want to downplay the raw, powerful, dramatic effect that the lemonade tonic had on my body and could potentially have on yours. It is truly one of the most powerful elixirs you can drink to promote good health.
In terms of the difficulty level of doing it, Day 1 and Day 2 were hard, Day 3 was easy, Day 4 was a reversal and was actually challenging, Day 5 was easy again, and Day 6 was easy too but then I broke the fast that day anyways. Overall, I won’t pretend that it was super-easy, and perhaps it helped to not be working and at home relaxing while doing it. Overall, once you have your lemonade made up, and just make a glass of it whenever you feel like it, your mind wanders away from food and it’s relatively straightforward to just go about your day and night and get through it.
With all that said, although I am sure you will find the providential natural strength and conviction to make it through once you take that leap of faith, it does still build tremendous self-confidence and a feeling of self-efficacy when you can pull it off and finish what you started. Add that to the increased mental and emotional clarity, and your alkalized and energized body, and this lemonade cleanse should certainly be a recipe for your future wellness and success.
Good luck, and make sure to savor both the sour and the sweet of your next lemonade fast.