As I’ve said, I was up for anything so I woke up that first morning of the Master Cleanse very eager to try it out. Then I tried the salt-water flush and I thought, “This is the most awful thing I’ve ever tasted in my life.” And it was, right up until a couple hours later when I tried the “lemonade.” Sweet Christ. First off, just because something is liquid and has lemon juice in it, it doesn’t make it lemonade. I knew I would have to stop using that term because that almost made it sound pleasant. I started calling it lemonugh because every time I looked at it I said, “Ugh, not more of this shit.”

The purpose of the Master Cleanse is actually not to lose weight. You will lose weight because you’re only consuming about 600 calories each day from the lemon juice, but that is not the goal of the diet as the proponents will tell you. It’s actual purpose is to detoxify your body. Some of the ways you’ll know it’s working is that you’ll get headaches and feel fatigued, you may have some breakouts of acne, and you’ll often get a coating of gunk on your tongue. This is your body eliminating toxins and it’s all very normal. So I wasn’t put off when it happened to me.

After 20 days on the Master Cleanse program I lost 26 pounds so it seemed to be pretty succesful. On top of that I wasn’t carrying around a bunch of extra toxins in my body, so that was good.

Then a year passed.

In that year I had an increased interest in diet and nutrition and had taken numerous courses in science — a subject I always loved – and had a more scientific mindset than ever.  One day a second friend of mine came up and said she’d like to try the Master Cleanse and she knew that I had done it the previous year and asked for some help on how to do it. So I gave her all the information I had. Then she asked a simple question that may be the reason I’m writing this blog now. She asked, “Will you do it with me?” Well, I’m always up for a challenge but once I’ve done something once, it kind of loses its luster. So it took a lot of prodding on her part but eventually I agreed to go along with her and try it.

But this time I was going to do it the lazy way. It’s a pain to put the lemonade together from fresh lemons so I thought I would use bottled lemon juice. And then I thought maybe I’d use a different form of sugar than maple syrup, I’ve never had much of a taste for maple syrup. I thought I might be able to find some organic cane sugar juice or something like that. After that I figured it could taste alright if it wasn’t for the cayenne pepper so I figured, F the cayenne pepper, just drink it without the stuff. Since I had gone that far I figured I would just buy bottled lemonade from the store and make it real easy on myself. Then I thought, well hell, I’d gone this far, why not just forego the whole lemonade thing all together, why not just drink 600 calories a day of whatever the hell I felt like. Whether it be Coke, or juice, or Hawiian Punch, or Tang, or Starbucks coffee or whatever. This will be a good experiment. I didn’t plan on losing as much weight or getting as detoxified, but I would get to see how vastly different it was to be on the Master Cleanse as opposed to just drinking whatever I felt like.

And guess what?

It didn’t make a goddamn difference at all.

None of it — not the fresh squeezed lemons, the cayenne pepper, the grade-B maple syrup — nothing made a bit of difference.

First the weight loss. On the Master Cleanse I lost 26 pounds in 20 days, however after a couple weeks of eating like a normal person I gained back all but four pounds. The next year when I didn’t follow the rules of the Master Cleanse at all I lost 23 pounds in 20 days. However I kept off eight pounds of it. 

But, of course, what you’ll hear is that the Master Cleanse isn’t about losing weight, it’s about detoxifying your body. And you’ll know it’s working because you’ll have all the symptoms of your body detoxifying. But again, I had those exact same symptoms when I was just drinking 600 calories of whatever I wanted everyday. And then I thought about it rationally. Of course people get headaches on the Master Cleanse, of course they feel tired, when you go on something like this you are essentially making yourself sick from not getting enough protein, calcium, and other nutrients. Tomorrow, instead of eating a normal’s day worth of food, just eat a large fries from McDonalds. At the end of the day you’ll feel tired and worn out. Is that your body detoxifying itself? No, you’re just hungry. The gunk you get on your tongue in the Master Cleanse is just the gunk you get from not eating much food. It’s not your body detoxifying itself.

In fact, if you ask a doctor who isn’t trying to sell you something, you’ll find that in general your body detoxifies itself just fine naturally without going through the Master Cleanse or anything along those lines. But hey, what’s millions of years of evolution when you compare it to a diet that’s been personally tried by Beyonce!

I know there are people who go on this diet and swear by it. The girl I went on it with the second time swore she had clearer skin when it was over. But when we showed our friends before and after pictures, nobody but her could tell one from the other. In a way it’s like astrology, or God; if you believe in it then it’s works for you regardless of whether there’s any truth to it or not.

I’ll put this last part in bold for anyone just skimming this:

In my opinion, which is based on doing the Master Cleanse for 20 days and then doing my own version a year later, I think it is at best a waste of your time and when pushed by people trying to sell books based on the idea, I think it’s pretty much bullshit.

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.