My Honest Opinion: The New Year Cleanse

If you haven't been around here long, or you haven't been digging through my archives, you probably don't know that I am completely and TOTALLY obsessed with my weight.

It's a problem, I admit, but one that I try to keep a firm grip on.

(For all those who are wondering, I have a whole section of posts dedicated to fitness and 3 sections of posts dedicated to my weight maintenance, my most recent posts can be found here.

But for those who know me best, it's probably no surprise that my dedication to get the rest of this baby weight off (in case you don't know or forgot, I had a baby last February, blew up like a house and have devoted the past year to working it off, yada yada) I decided to start my year off with a cleanse.

Because, I assumed it would help me shed some of that holiday weight faster.

And because I wanted to kick start my metabolism into thinking, "THIS is the year we let her wear a bikini!"

But mostly because, you know, I wanted to be healthy and stuff.

Alas, I have flaws that could possibly inhibit my ability to complete said cleanse:

1.  I like food ALOT.

2.  I can't survive on a no-indulgence-for-weeks-on-end schedule.

3.  I tend to believe that the key to healthy weight is exercise and not diet.

Knowing that, I realized pretty quickly that I couldn't be dedicated to anything food/diet related long term.

Now, rest assured extensive research was done before choosing what cleanse I chose, i.e., I googled "healthy 3 day cleanse", saw Dr. Oz's name, remembered that my mother in law once called him "the King of Poop", thought, If he's the King of Poop, surely his cleanse will get me to where I want to be. Then printed it out and headed to the grocery store.

Because that's how I roll.

S-T-U-P-I-D

I had to make some substitutions.

And being me, I planned to workout at least 2 of the 3 days.

I know.

Stupid.

But that meant I would have to supplement, since Dr. Oz's idea of protein was 1 tablespoon of almond butter a day.

And then I had to substitute strawberries for raspberries when my grocery store didn't have them in stock.

And lemons for limes that my 2 year old apparently dropped out of the grocery cart.

The long and short of it - I cheated left and right.

But here is the plan I (mostly) followed:

Day 1, I followed everything by the book.

Or as closely as my lame attempt at buying groceries could get me.

And gagged my way through all 3 shakes.

The lunch time shake was seriously a come to Jesus moment.

The consistency of kale, cucumbers, celery and coconut "oil" (think crisco) is pretty much the most detestable consistency known to mankind.

Think vegetable flavored blubber.

Mind over matter, people.  Mind.over.matter.

Day 2, I chewed the celery and blended everything else.

If anything, it got worse.

By day 3, I was willing to chew it all, but opted to chew the celery and cucumbers and blend everything else.

I still gagged through it (something about the kale is really, really awful) but at least the flavor was better.

The dinner shake isn't too bad, if you blend the kale up very finely, and breakfast can be yummy if you add enough stevia to it....

I will admit, the cravings were rough.

Lunch time was horrific.

Watching my 2 year old munch chicken nuggets, knowing that I had to chug almost 40 oz of gelatinous vegetables is enough to bring Chuck Norris to his knees in tears!

And believe me when I say, I looked forward to the protein supplements everyday.

Only partially because they taste like chocolate and are actually the consistency of liquid.

Somehow, though, I survived it.

It wasn't fun.

Or easy.

The headaches were HORRIFIC.

But I only had those on the days that I exercised.

I have heard several people who drink caffeine say that they attributed their headaches to the lack of it, but since I don't drink caffeine and still had headaches, I can only assume that was due to the lack of calories while my body was trying to make up for what I had burned during my workouts.

Did I mention how stupid that was??

All in all, it's over.

For those of you who are wondering if you should do a cleanse, or if you should do this cleanse, here's what I have to say:

1.  Don't expect to lose gross amounts of weight on this cleanse.  I lost a little over 2 lbs.  Not bad for a 3 day cleanse, but nothing compared to what I was hoping.

2,  This cleanse is full of alot of water!  What little weight you will lose will probably not be in solid form.
King of Poop is a very loose term based upon this cleanse.  I'm really not sure their shouldn't be a coup in the land of Poop.  Just sayin'.

3.  If you are looking for a quick cleanse, I would give this a shot.  But I would also recommend chewing alot more that sipping.

Post - Script:
It's too soon to tell what improvements I will see after having completed this, but I will try to follow up on this next week.   Feel free to let me know what you have tried and what impacted you most about it!