The Lemon Diet

For a minimum of 4 (10 or 30 is also possible) days, drink:

2 Tablespoons (1 fluid ounce) fresh-squeezed lemon or lime juice (approx. ½ lemon),

2 Tablespoons (1 fluid ounce) organic Grade B maple syrup, not maple-flavored sugar syrup or syrup from companies that use formaldehyde to harvest their syrup,

1/10 Teaspoon or more cayenne pepper (hot red pepper), and

1 Cup (8 fluid ounces) purified or spring water, NOT fluoridated water.

For diabetics, there is a section in some editions of The Master Cleanser on using molasses rather than maple syrup in the beginning of the cleanse. Any diabetic should read the book and consult their doctor before beginning the cleanse.

Drink six to twelve glasses of this lemonade mixture daily. No food is eaten nor any vitamin supplements taken during the cleanse. If you get hungry, have another glass of lemonade. After all, this is also called the "Lemonade Diet."

If you are overweight, you may use less maple syrup. If you are underweight, use more maple syrup if you wish.

If you are worried about losing weight, Burroughs says, "The only things you can possibly lose are mucus, waste, and disease. Healthy tissue will not be eliminated."

Do not vary the amount of lemon juice per glass and be sure to drink at least six glasses of lemonade a day. You can drink more water, if you want.

Enhance Your Elimination

This is a cleanse as opposed to a weight loss diet. So, you need to ensure you are eliminating the toxins that are being loosened in your system. Cravings, aches, pains, mental irritability and tiredness will turn on as your toxins are mobilized. To eliminate these unpleasant sensations, you need to be sure you have two, three, or more bowel movements a day.

Drink a laxative herb tea each evening. You can find it in your local health food store. I recommend senna tea blend with senna being about half of it by weight. (Senna is an herb that promotes bowel movement.) The kind I've bought warn you not to drink more than two cups per day.

Each morning on an empty stomach, add two teaspoons of non-iodized sea salt to a full quart of water. Do not use ordinary iodized salt as it will not work properly. Drink the entire quart of salt water first thing in the morning. "Chug" this — drink it as fast as possible. Within an hour several bowel movements will likely occur. (You'll need to be by a toilet for half an hour to an hour.) If you do not have several bowel movements, try a little more salt in the water the next day until it works.

Drink the herb laxative tea at night to loosen and the salt water each morning to wash it out. If you can't drink the salt water in the morning, drink the herb laxative tea at night and in the morning.

Breaking Your Fast

Breaking a long fast is very, very important. You should ease your way back to solid food after one or two additional days of juices, orange or grapefruit. If you are going back to raw fruits and vegetables, you may do so on the afternoon of the second day.

If you have been a meat eater and/or milk products consumer, shift to cooked vegetable soup on the afternoon of the second day and a salad for dinner. Keep the lemonade drink as your breakfast drink after that. Of course, you would do better with the least amount of meat and no milk products as they are very productive of mucus and hinder digestionand absorption of nutrients.

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 — I have only known one or two people to be hungry on this cleanse. Drinking more lemonade or water 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.
  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.
  3. Irritability — This includes 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.

A Special Note on Headaches

In talking to people doing the cleanse, I've learned that people with caffeine addiction (coffee, soft drinks, etc.) may experience headaches for the first 2 to 4 days.

Final Note

I hope you will have the same wonderful increase in mental clarity, health, energy and positive mental attitude that I and others have found.