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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.
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