• • The only nourishment that you take is a special lemonade concoction made from the Master Cleanse ingredients: lemon juice, maple syrup, cayenne pepper, and water, six to twelve glasses per day, each glass containing about 110 calories in sugar carbohydrates
• An herbal laxative tea is drunk at night and a quart of salt water is drunk first thing in the morning, resulting in several liquid bowel movements every day — you need to always be near a toilet when you do this diet, and you need to stock up on toilet paper
• You come off the diet by transitioning to solid food over a few days, ideally becoming a raw food vegetarian in Stanley Burroughs’ version of the diet

Detox Symptoms

Detoxifying literally means removing poisons from your body. Once these poisons are gone, you will feel energetic, vital, happy and healthy. It is the poisons that make us feel tired, mentally confused, irritable, unhappy, depressed and ill. Consequently you should look forward to detoxification. Unfortunately, when the toxins are mobilized, they will bring about those unpleasant feelings and tempt you to quit the cleanse before you are through. So, you need to understand the symptoms of detoxification and ensure that you drink your laxative tea and salt water to stimulate elimination of those toxins. My experience with the cleanse and with various people doing it has taught me that whatever symptom I experienced one day, it would be gone the next morning with my bowel movements. It is nevertheless helpful to know when you are detoxifying because it helps you to get through that symptom to know it will be gone tomorrow.

I have grouped the detox symptoms I and others have had into five groups:

1. Cravings: Only 1 person in 4 experiences any hunger on this cleanse and drinking more lemonade or water handles usually handles that. I have, however, observed that people on the cleanse crave what they are detoxifying. Proof that this is true is that the cravings usually go away the next morning with bowel movements. You can crave anything when detoxifying, but most likely you will experience cravings for the most toxic foods, such as pizza, hamburgers, barbeque ribs, etc. The way to tell if it’s a craving rather than true hunger is to imagine sitting down to a large, green salad. If that inspires you, you’re hungry. If all you want is pizza; if that is all you can think about; then, you’re experiencing a craving.
2. Tiredness: When your body fights toxins, whether from detoxifying or an infection, it diverts energy into healing and away from the energy you use to work and play. On my first 20 day cleanse, I was not tired except on the fifteenth day. The next morning, I experienced heat in my bowel movements, an indication that acidic toxins were being eliminated. I also lost all sense of tiredness after that morning’s eliminations.
3. Irritability: This includes boredom and the desire to “just chew something solid”.
4. Physical aches, pains, nausea, vomiting, etc.: These are the most severe reactions and only occur where a person is severely toxic, only a small percentage of people experience these. Fortunately, these have gone away after only a day or two in every case I have heard about.
5. Hot bowel movements: Your body wastes are acidic and when you eliminate the most toxic ones, they actually feel anywhere from warm to burning. This experience is very infrequent, but worth mentioning because hot bowel movements after a day of heavy detox symptoms will confirm that you just eliminated significant toxins.