The picture at the top of this blog is Santorio Sanctorius. Santorio was an Italian physilogist who originated the study of metabolism in the early 1600′s. The reason he is at the top of this blog isn’t because he studied metabolism, but rather the way in which he studied metabolism. Santorio was a big believer in self-experimentation. So he would weigh everything he ate and drank and also weigh everything he peed and crapped. That device he is sitting in in that picture allowed him to weigh himself as he ingested food. This isn’t something he did for a couple weeks or a few months; he did this for 30 years.  But he wasn’t just some nut counting the grams in his shit, he was a brilliant physician who originated or perfected a number of instruments used by physicians of that day including the thermometer. But what I always liked about was that he wanted to figure out how something worked (metabolism) so he spent 30 years weighing and calculating on himself to see if he could try and figure the answers out. I’ve always liked the idea of self-experimentation.

I remember a teacher telling me once about three types of students. I’m paraphrasing here, and I think I’m paraphrasing my teacher paraphrasing something else, so I may not be remembering it correctly but I think it was something like this. If you ask your students to figure out how long it takes for a fingernail to grow a centimeter there are three different things a student will do. The first group of students will not do the assignment at all. The second group will do some research in books or on the internet and try to find the answer. The third group will just make a mark on the base of their fingernail in permanent marker and see how long it takes until it’s a centimeter from the base of the fingernail. I’ve always been one of those in the third group of students. Self-experimentation might not give you the broadest results (because your experimental group is one person), but for an amateur scientist like myself it’s the best way to go. First, you don’t have to coerce other people into your dumb ideas and second you know when there’s been any deviation from the experiment (which you never really know if you’re counting on other people).

So I’ve always been a big fan of trying experiments on myself or even just doing different stunts with eating or exercise or things like that. Nothing serious like Santorius, just things for my own amusement. Once in college I was going on and on about my love for cereal and I proclaimed that I would eat cereal and only cereal for the next week. I put a $100 bounty on my head for anyone who found me eating something other than cereal. The rule was that I could drink anything I want, but eat only cereal. Things were going swimmingly until day 6 when I was “caught” consuming broccoli soup. I insisted that since it was in a cup and I wasn’t chewing on it then I wasn’t “eating” the soup, I was drinking it. My friends put up a fight and I ended up paying out, although I still think I was in the right.  — We had a wooden staircase on campus that was 111 stairs long. Everyone hated climbing it, me included, and so one day I said, “Tonight I am going to go up and down that staircase 100 times.” And over the course of the next 5 hours, I did. I could barely walk the next two days, but from that point on I never really minded going up those stairs when I had to. — Another time I decided I was going to eat nothing but baby carrots and see how long it took until I would go to the bathroom, make a #2, and it would come out orange. Surprisingly, not very long. Just a little over a day.

So one day when my friend Lauren decided she wanted to try the Master Cleanse diet (aka the Lemonade Diet) and she wanted to have a friend join her on it, she knew she could ask me and I’d be all over it, even if it meant consuming nothing but the world’s shittiest lemonade for 20 days. And so in the spring of 1997 I went on the Master Cleanse diet.

In Self-Experimentation, the Master Cleanse, and the Pre-History of The Faddist Part II, I will tell you all about my experience on the Master Cleanse and a revelation I had the following year.