Special Detox Series: The Elimination Drama
Photo: rusvaplauke
Challenges: Dramatic cleanse response, exhaustion.
Beneficial results: Insight into bodily well-being, connection with other cleanse devotees, release of heavy addiction to meat.
Adherence to the Diet: I out-dieted the diet.
Weighty Decisions
Last week, after completing a three-week cleansing program, I began a 28-day elimination diet. The elimination diet begins with two days of a liquid diet more strict than the cleansing diet, followed by a solid diet of rice, beans and fresh produce. Potential allergens such as citrus and soy are then systematically added into the diet to determine what does or does not cause sensitivity reactions.
I’m tracking my experience through this series of articles to share some of the ins and outs of cleansing, and to encourage readers to eat more intentionally, whether cleansing or not.
Along with that encouragement comes the necessity for being honest. Cleansing is not easy; the results are not always immediate or even comfortable. Sometimes the process requires a willingness to interpret your own bodily responses and intuit self-care needs beyond the scope of western medicine.
With cleansing, you’re venturing into uncharted territory – yourself – and while doctors can offer perspective, research and knowledge, your best care sometimes requires your own difficult decisions, based on gut instinct, pun intended. In reality, that’s the true nature of all healthcare. Cleansing just makes it more obvious. My first week on the elimination diet brought on major discomfort, and presented me with tough decisions and unknowns.
As much of a proponent as I am of alternative and holistic medicine, when I was in crisis this week, I wanted concrete answers, research data and explanations. Those never came. Fortunately, unexpected help and relief did.
Meat Elimination Fever
I began the elimination diet last week with two days of drinking nothing but green smoothies – blender shakes made from an apple, a pear, fresh ginger, kale and spinach – in addition to my eight daily glasses of water and other fluids. I got the idea to continuously make a new shake after finishing the last glass from the previous batch in order to avoid any hunger stress. There would always be something ready in the refrigerator to drink. It worked well, and I never felt hungry.
Photo: frakokot
On day one, I felt a momentary kick of nausea immediately after my first sip of lunchtime shake. I thought I was going to be sick, but it passed, and I finished the shake just fine. It tasted good and all was well.
On day two, I had some sneezing, a runny nose and a sore throat. Much of that went away after I did my morning pranayama breathing exercises. In the evening I had a bad case of chills – the kind that comes from the inside. Even after a hot bath, I couldn’t maintain any body heat. It took over an hour to get to sleep.
Early the next morning, around 4 a.m., I woke up warm enough, though feeling vaguely thirsty. I took a big drink of water from the bottle sitting on my nightstand, and everything suddenly changed. Immediate nausea and dizziness kicked in. My heart and head were both pounding. The thirst welling up in my chest became stronger no matter how much I drank. I assumed I was severely dehydrated, which was odd given how much water, soup broth and coconut water I had drank the day before.
After half an hour, it was still getting worse. I could only describe what I felt as a whirling vortex of wrongness going from my lower abdomen up through my head. It was miserably uncomfortable. Finally I vomited at length, and felt a humble bit of relief. My husband drove to the 24-hour grocery to get some Pedialyte. On the advice of my doctor, I wrapped a castor oil pack around my abdomen – more relief.
Worried that I was still dehydrated, we called the paramedics. One of them took my blood pressure and did a quick exam, and to my utter amazement and confusion, said I was showing no signs of dehydration. Whabba wa?
Then, something totally unexpected and rather miraculous happened. The paramedic shared with me some of his experience in treating people who had cleansing responses. He surmised that I was experiencing a detoxification reaction that my body would eventually resolve on its own. He himself was in the middle of a cleanse. The universe had hooked me up!
Photo: Venturist
He had a lot of questions about what kind of cleanse I had done, and what resource I was using for the elimination diet. Unfortunately, I was too out of it to remember my phone number. I was not my usual beacon of nutritional encouragement! In any case, I felt relieved that my openness and honesty about what had possibly caused my condition was met with respect and sincerity. It was a breath of fresh air.
Having had all my vitals checked, I decided I would heal better at home than at a hospital, so I declined transport. Before talking to this paramedic, I had never considered the possibility that my body had just released an overload of toxins into my system. I wouldn’t have thought that, after the three-week cleanse, there could have been that much left to detox. Considering how I felt and what had happened, along with the paramedic’s perspective, it made sense.
A few hours after the paramedics left, the vortex phenomenon dissipated, and the only remaining symptoms were exhaustion, occasional shortness of breath, and a powerful lack of hunger for any food at all. I’d never gotten so sick before during a cleanse; now I knew it was in my repertoire of possible reactions.
Don’t get me wrong – I plan to never revisit that reaction again; I’ll do whatever it takes to avoid it. It was just an eye-opening experience to witness the toxic load that remained post-cleanse, utterly jolted out of my body once it was simply able to do so. I slept most of that day, and into the next.
Regaining Balance
The difference between my body’s reactions to the cleanse and the elimination diet had to be the absence of meat. That is not to say that meat is toxic, but perhaps to say that the quantity I was eating may have put enough of a digestive load on my system that it kept it from completely engaging its natural detox processes.
Photo: Tambako the Jaguar
It’s good to know that I’m not as dependent on meat as I thought. I literally feared I would be dysfunctional after one day without it. Remarkably, I never missed it all week, even when my husband cooked it for himself. I felt like an accomplished superhero on my rice diet – ok, well, relatively speaking.
While the elimination diet returns to eating vegetables, fruit, rice and beans on day three, I ate only brown rice through day four, adding in vegetables on day five. I refrained from drinking any more green smoothies on the advice of my naturopath. She suggested I wait to return to those until they taste good to me and seem intuitively right. So far through week one, that hasn’t happened.
I’m going forward with the diet plan, assuming I’ll get back to the green smoothies eventually. I have found new love for my short grain brown rice. It feels like hearty comfort food now, no matter how frequently I eat it. If more health problems arise, I will of course prioritize my own well being over following the diet.
In retrospect, I’ve thought a lot about the sanity of making such drastic dietary changes as I’ve done in such a short amount of time. Is the benefit worth the risk? The conclusion I’ve come to is this: In a perfect world, we would all make moderate, gradual changes toward desired benefits and outcomes. In the real world, eating is complicated and messy; food addictions are gargantuan and pandemic, and to break them, drastic measures are sometimes required. To be smart, always get a complete examination before beginning a cleanse, and confirm that you are able to accommodate any risks associated with drastic dietary changes.
Where eating and everything else is concerned, we tend not to disturb the status quo until the results of our habits become unbearable. What many of us don’t realize is how unbearable our diets are for our bodies. Even the “little things” – diet sodas, caffeine, aspirin, prescription drugs, and sleep deprivation – can add up to profoundly influence our standard of living, our experience of health. Getting old may not be the problem so much as getting overloaded.
In committing to a three week cleanse, we catch a brief, powerful glimpse of how our bodies are meant to feel and function. We need a fast-acting, discrete, highly-structured, supplemented and documented plan to succeed. Gradually sustaining this type of dietary change for months on end would be impossible the first time around.
No immediate success would be experienced, and people would give up. That is why we cleanse; that is why I try drastic changes like the elimination diet. The more I succeed, the more moderate, gradual and sustained I hope to become (if not in all matters of life, perhaps with food).
Finally, I wrote last week that feeling is believing. Yet believing is not the end of the story. If that were the case, one three-week cleanse would change our habits permanently. Stay tuned for my last piece in this series to read more about sustaining change, and turning nutritional realizations into sustainable practices and behavior.
In Three Weeks: Look for the final article of this series, where I’ll report on what food sensitivities I found, and how I completed the diet. In the meanwhile, take care, be good, and eat well.
View the first four installments of Kendra’s spring cleansing process in Special Detox Series: Spring Cleansing in Action, Special Detox Series: Moving and Shaking through Week One, Special Detox Series: Sacred Rituals of Eating and Cleansing, and Special Detox Series: Finishing the Cleanse Yet Beginning the Elimination.
Disclaimer: Kendra Mellinger is not a healthcare professional, and therefore does not prescribe or recommend any treatment for disease or health concerns. Any cleansing program should only be done under the supervision of an experienced healthcare practitioner.
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About the Author
Kendra Mellinger is a pleasure researcher with an MA in Consciousness Studies. A lifelong Trekkie and Carl Sagan fan, her other interests include holistic health, faith & spiritual practice, and domestic engineering. In addition to exploring the world with her partner and three-year-old son, she plays ice hockey in the South Bay and sings bluegrass in the shower. You can contact her here.
Hi Kendra,
As much as you focus on the experimental side of life, I focus on the theoretical and spiritual side of life. Call it philosophy or religion… I probably consider it on a level you may not fully imagine. That does not mean my mind is free of faults, I try to walk a delicate line of a “real life” but also multi-dimensional perspective of looking at things. It has only been as I’ve turned 40 that I’ve fully come to comprehend just how unusual this is about myself. I say all this preface, not out of bragging [I don't particularly recommend this approach in life], but out of fact and self-awareness.
Introduction aside. I think there are several aspects of what you say that seem to me to lack a bit in the wisdom category. As you know, our thinking and experience changes us… but sometimes we react out of negative experience – and not out of the more spiritual course of choosing what is best for the total. Even if the total involves self-sacrifice (such as religion generally teaches).
Time is often a limit of our wisdom and it’s expression. I face that limit of time in this reply. So excuse any sharp expression or incomplete explanations of all the angles. There is a point where one tries to convey a message, as short and sweetly as possible, but the message itself is very dramatic. I am picking some E.X.A.M.P.L.E. of concerns, it’s wider than the individual ones I cite, and i comment with utmost respect that it could in fact be my perspective that is entirely in error. It is the sharing of notes and view that I only wish to participate in.
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Kendra said: “I plan to never revisit that reaction again; I’ll do whatever it takes to avoid it.”
My comment to this is that it can sometimes be a mistake in Life to try and over-direct the Future. I sense this general theme in your efforts. “Reactionary”, not “wisdom”. To hold tightly onto control of yourself. To cling very hard to your Ego mind, one of control. Yet Life takes a course it will, regardless of what your powerful mind things. The Earth, your Body, the entire Universe is far more than your Powerful Mind can truly push around.
I’ll contrast the first quote I took with another. Kendra said: “I got the idea to continuously make a new shake after finishing the last glass from the previous batch in order to avoid any hunger stress.”
My comment: You can let your Ego mind get used more to the “real world” of hunger pains. In these modern times of wealth and abundance, we seem to have such absolute convenience and control over food – that it seems to often to control us! Many religious and spiritual people learn to practice fasting as a way of getting the ego under control. The truth is that a healthy body can go days and days with only light food (250 calories). Sure, you will find doctors who contradict this, but I will find doctors who contradict those doctors.
I respect entirely it is your life to live. It is only viewpoint I wish to share. What i see is a heavily modern approach of almost forced water consumption, extremely tight picking of food choices. This seems of a strong Ego, one that may not listen to the body. It takes time to get the Ego out of the way to truly listen to the body. The mind has to live in the moment of time and not pine for the future or be too concerned of the results of the past.
In simple terms, I know the journey is about the journey… but I sense a bit of desire to consume the carrot on your part. With strict schedule, strict structure, strict reporting.
There are other approaches. They are not absolute and precise, they adjust and sometimes they do not. True is False and False is True. It recognizes the impossibility of accounting for all factors… and just embraces that Life is for Living. For example, just eat simpler foods and eat less frequently. I do not have the time to put together the examples of many simple and sustaining diets – but it isn’t that hard. You clearly already have the knowledge. Perhaps the biggest focus is to get the mind and it’s Ego… out of the way.
Agape to you. Respect your own life and your own choices. I am very glad you share your story, I am sure I walk away with something new that i may not realize for days or weeks.
Kendra,
I was pondering doing the elimination diet, which I’ve tried before, but have always “fallen off the wagon.” Interestingly though, the one I tried included eating chicken, turkey, and fish that tend to have low allergy quotients. I was thinking about eating the amount of grains that is necessary on the diet, and if you are a protein type who doesn’t digest grains well (which I’m pretty sure is me), I wonder if it could cause an intense reaction like the one you had? I’m definitely scared for my brain to just be eating grains and no meat protein because I tend very much to go off into lala land (I think it’s a blood sugar thing). Just being curious…but man, I’m sorry you had to go through that! You never know exactly what these cleanses might release!
Hi Kendra,
Thanks for sharing your experience so openly. I’m so sorry you had such a terrible reaction.
I am a big proponent of seasonal cleanses, especially in the Fall and Spring. One thing that I teach in my classes is the importance of preparing your body for a cleanse before you undertake one. You’ve got to build your body up before you break it down. In other words, giving yourself a solid week of antioxidant rich foods, boosting your fiber intake to ensure proper elimination, and increasing water is key. Otherwise, you can get “backed up,” and not have the proper nutrients to help your liver go throgh Phase I and Phase II of detoxification. I am a big fan of Ann Louise Gittleman’s Fast Track Detox Plan, where she outlines in great detail, which foods you must consume in abundance for at least a week before you attempt a juice fast.
I also work with my clients doing modified elmination diets to test for food sensitivities and have had tremendous success using less “hard-core” tactics. Easy Does It….
To read about the Modified Elimination Diet, please visit my blog:
http://blog.realfoodnutrition.com/2009/03/19/spring-cleanse.aspx
http://blog.realfoodnutrition.com/2009/04/14/testing-for-food-allergies-and-sensitivities.aspx
Dear RoundSparrow,
I am touched by the depth and concern in your comments. Thank you for writing. I need to mention up front that, when I read, “I sense a bit of desire to consume the carrot on your part,” I was indeed munching on a carrot. That was a source of smiles all day.
In addition to being dead on about my carrot habit, yes, you are perceptive in noticing my tendency to tackle food-related issues with the occasional black-and-white determination to make *correct* choices. But I also write about (and practice) compassion with self, moderation, and tempering knowledge with wisdom and patience.
The art of cleansing one’s sense of being is as important as (and inseparable from) cleansing one’s sense of doing. I write more about the former in the previous articles in this series. This present article came from a place of recounting a crisis, where my ego wanted answers and assurance.
One of the benefits of this elimination diet has been to realize experimentally that my fear of having too little meat is no longer necessary or helpful. I have realized I can eat much less and feel much better. That in and of itself is a huge step that is changing the course of nearly forty years, and overcoming an ego-driven fear.
If I am still ruled by anything where food is concerned, it is by an old and outgrown fear of not having enough. I am actually just beginning to develop an ego that feels worthy or able to enjoy food and own some bit of confidence in exercising intentional eating habits, as opposed to resigning myself to what’s readily available (which in the past was 2-for-1 candy bars at the grocery store by my school bus stop).
Reading your comments helped me to articulate that I’m not cleansing (or living, or writing) to develop strict principles about the food I eat, as much as I’m doing it in an effort to escape and finally lay to rest childhood demons I’ve been serving for decades. It’s a structured effort to face those demons and stare them down, become bigger than them and then walk away intact.
If I hold on tightly to the reigns of control it is usually to steel myself against this task. I agree with you that I cannot control the future; I’d like to not be controlled by my past.
Regarding my comment on doing whatever it takes to avoid revisiting that cleansing reaction in the future, I see a difference between attempting to control the future, and holding myself accountable for “showing up” where issues of self care are concerned. I was surprised by the intensity of my body’s reaction. Now that I know food changes can be that powerful, I won’t jump into drastic changes without considering my past experiences.
I don’t want to exchange my memory of what happened for the sake of maintaining membership in the rah-rah cleanse club. I’ll stay in the club, with the experience duly noted. Of course there are many things I can’t control about my health or the universe at large; what I can control is who I am in these situations and where I put my attention. Showing up and choosing my objects of attention in the face of fear is a worthy endeavor.
Beyond all this cleansing and dieting, the ultimate goal is simply to be a person who eats; and one who has accepted, integrated, and moved beyond her fears and hatred of the need to eat. That’s where I’m coming from. Thank you for joining me along the way, and thanks for writing.
Thanks for your comments, Christine. The good part about falling off the wagon is you get a closer glimpse of important details along the way, rather than just sailing by.
)
I wasn’t eating any grains at all when I had the intense reaction. I was just drinking the green smoothies made with fruits & vegetables. But I was very afraid of the same thing you mention–going off into bad blood sugar la-la land without the meat.
When I went back to eating organic brown rice along with the fruits and vegetables on day three and after with the elimination diet, before adding meat back in, I really felt surprisingly fine. There did come a time though, in week three, where I decided to add in some chicken just to be prudent. And instead of adding in my previous giant slabs-o’-carcass, I chose dishes that had smaller amounts of meat added in.
I didn’t know if I could survive being vegetarian for a month. I survived it for two weeks just fine, and have eaten a substantially decreased amount of meat since, going from 18 servings per week to six or seven. Rice continues to be the only grain I eat, getting additional protein from eggs, nuts and mung beans.
As I’m sure you would say yourself, trust your instinct of what’s right for you, testing it occasionally if you want in ways that seem manageable and safe. Thanks again!
Sylvie, thank you for your comments, and for the great resources! I really like the idea of amping up nutrients before beginning detox. Your classes sound wonderfully valuable. Reading your modified elim diet made my mouth water…I think that’s a sign. Thanks again and keep up the great work.
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