Fatty Fat Fat

All in all, I’m very happy with the course this experiment has taken me. I had expected it to be a test of willpower against hunger, but it was more a test of determination and fighting off temptation. It was surprisingly easier than I expected to maintain and I feel like I’ve learned a lot. Mostly I’m glad to know that I can apply my mind to a task if I choose. At the end of it all, I don’t have a strong reason to believe that any of the claims of “cleansing” are in fact true. I think most accounts of the benefits are overstated, placebo driven, and probably not experimentally verifiable. However, in my first experience with this Cleanse, I feel like I’ve learned a lot, it has helped me crystallize some of my ideas about eating, and I’m almost certain to try it at least once more in my life.

Sustenance vs. Boredom

Humans have to eat. Animals eat to survive. However, the majority of caloric consumption in the United States is in excess of our bodies’ actual energy requirements. * It has become so common for Americans to eat for reasons that don’t have to do with physical needs that I had forgotten (or maybe never knew) why I was eating.

I eat for taste. Delicious things make me happy. The right things hitting my taste buds trigger electrical impulses that correspond to neurons firing off in the pleasure centers of my brain. I like that. So I eat bacon. And steak. And cheetos. And all sorts of other things, all the time, whether my body requires sustenance or not, whether I have been physically active or not.

I eat because its time to eat. I’m not really sure why 11:30 is lunchtime, but I’m a creature of habit and I take that time to eat. I’ve frequently thought “I’m not really hungry” when that time comes around, but then I eat anyway because “If I don’t eat now I’ll get hungry later” or because “Cheetos sound delicious”.

I eat out of boredom. Bored at home? I like cooking, and I like eating. Why not? Sounds like an easy way to make myself happy. Out with friends and there’s still some leftover food at the table? I’m the guy that eats it because its there. Its really hard to make an argument for me eating that to fulfill my daily energy intake requirements.

Is it a problem? I don’t know. But the Master Cleanse helped me differentiate between different reasons for consumption, and I think in turn has helped me reevaluate my reasons for eating. Writing this now, I’m surprised that a 10-day experience can change anything about anyone’s worldview. Sounds silly almost, but this alone has made the Master Cleanse experience a worthwhile investment of time.

Eating is Social

Obviously, eating is often a social event. Its a great way for friends and families to convene in the same space over the same task. What I didn’t realize until the Master Cleanse is that not only is it the case that eating is social, it’s also almost always the case that being social means eating. Any small amount of reflection would have made this clear to me before I actually started the Cleanse, but I eat so much that I don’t even notice how much it is a part of my existence. When I decided to do the Master Cleanse, I thought, “No sweat, this is a mental game. I just modify my diet for 10 days.” It didn’t even occur to me that it bore significant impact on my social calendar as well (which is probably an indictment of my choice of activities and friends as well).

I had always liked eating and food and everything about it, and its easy to dismiss that interest because eating is a necessary human activity. What I didn’t realize is how intensely social of an event eating really is. I think there are good odds that you are reading this now, thinking, “what a loser, all he does is eat.” But really think about it: Almost all social interactions involve eating or drinking at some point.

I couldn’t have dinner with friends, go to happy hour, go to a bar to have a drink with friends on friday or saturday. During my 10 day experiment, I turned down great free tickets to a baseball game to avoid the inevitable question about why I wasn’t drinking a beer or having a hot dog. My friends wanted to go to a concert on Thursday night. I love live music, but politely decline because, well its awkward being the only guy not drinking sometimes, and I have hangups about asking for a glass of water at the bar. I like windsurfing. That sounds pretty safe, until you realize that after you go windsurfing, people like to stop for lunch. Grilling is a great summertime activity, and yes, it involves lots of food.

For the most part, even the activities that don’t actually revolve around food end in participants breaking bread. Granted, I am also enamored of activities that specifically revolve around food, so maybe I am a bit boring, but even my non-food-centric interests peripherally involve food or drink or some manner of caloric consumption. I don’t find this too odd, since nutrition is a mildly important activity for the continuation of, well, breathing. It seems to make sense that societies would somehow build it in to their day-to-day interactions. I just didn’t realize just how much it permeates human activity — so when I cut myself off, it was all the more jarring.

On the plus side, it has made me much more conscious about how I socialize and I have actively been trying to socialize without food.

Other Needs Can Be Social Too

Eating isn’t the only essential human need. Offhand however, I think its the only one we incorporate so strongly into our shared schedules. I imagine that if we were to guess what other needs might be inexplicably tied to social interaction, they’d be other “essential human needs”. I haven’t a clue how to guess what those all are, but from the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs we have sleep, excretion, breathing, water, and sex among others. Why don’t we take shared naps after a nice hard day of windsurfing? Eating doesn’t REQUIRE company any more than sleeping does, though I suppose loss of consciousness makes it a less social activity. For the most part people don’t go to great lengths to pee together. ** Nobody schedules times to get together to drink water. I suppose people did try to make breathing into a social activity at one point, but as far as I know, oxygen bars failed to catch the a wide following in the general public. Sex: It’s still not the cultural norm for large groups to get together for orgies (though it is admittedly becoming a more popular pastime with the increasing popularity of The Lifestyle, one which I have regrettably not yet become deeply involved in).

First dates almost always include consumption. Have a cup of coffee. Dinner. Lunch. Frozen Yogurt. They rarely involve sex or sleep. Seeing how they all sit on the lowest rung of the ladder in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, I think we, society as a whole, should make a larger effort to incorporate those into the notion of acceptable first dates.

Henceforth, requests for dates should not be requests for shared cups of coffee, but shared moments in bed. I have a nagging suspicion that mankind will be generally happier.

* Roy Walford has done some interesting work on reduced calorie intake. The verdict isn’t out on this yet, and there is certainly a lot of literature supporting both sides of the story, so I won’t speculate about which camp is right.

** Girls in social settings seems to be the exception. Girls, I don’t understand why the bathroom is a group sport for you. However, I stand by my claim that excretion is not a social activity on the grounds that even though girls pee together when they are ALREADY in a social setting, they do not go to great lengths to schedule times to pee together. So group urination is really more driven by convenience than of social relevance.

Master Cleanse Index
Master Cleanse: Preparation
Master Cleanse: Lemonade and Cayenne Pepper. Yum!
Master Cleanse: Day 1
Master Cleanse: Day 2
Master Cleanse: Days 3-4
Master Cleanse: Day 5
Master Cleanse: Days 6-7
Master Cleanse: Day 8
Master Cleanse: Day 9
Master Cleanse: Day 10
Master Cleanse: Day 11
Master Cleanse: 2 Weeks Later
Master Cleanse: Final Reflections