This is pretty gross, and good to know:

This blew me away.  I was watching Headline News and saw a story on how NYC is going to start requiring fast food chains to specify the nutrition facts of their food on the menu.  Their effort is to help people understand what they are consuming so they know how they are killing themselves.  I’m all for it.  There is so much bad stuff in that food.  For a little empirical data, they reported on the Awesome Blossom from Chili’s.  Just think up a picture in your head of how many calories and how fattening it is.  Would you guess 2,710 calories and 203 grams of fat?  How about 36g of saturated fat and 6,360 milligrams of sodium?  Damn gina! You can see the details here: http://www.calorieking.com/foods/food.php?category_id=21&brand_id=205&food_id=106848

You would have to jog for over 5 hours to burn that off! The damage you do to your heart is an entirely different story…

For the second time, I am trying to clean myself on the inside. The inspiration is simply in all the bad stuff we poison ourselves with many times a week. This mainly includes alcohol & hard to digest foods.

The person on a typical Western Diet holds 8 meals of undigested food and waste material in the colon, while the person on the high fiber diet holds only 3. (healingdaily.com)

When we continuously eat foods that are hard to digest, we don’t give our bodies a chance to digest and purge those items that are more difficult to break down. Hard to break down foods includes processed, high-fat, and complex carbohydrate (polysaccharides) foods. The harder our bodies have to work to digest the food in our system, the longer it takes to break them down and get them out. When we don’t give our bodies a chance to break down and purge, the undigested wast that our intestines have to work on start to build up. Very simply, this is why people should cleanse.

Food that remains in our digestive tract for long periods of time can become toxic, can increase mucus and plaque in the intestines, along with a lot of other nasty stuff. One very important thing about our digestive tract is that it is where the good and the bad of what we eat is absorbed and goes into our bloodstream. So the toxins that we unwittingly leave sitting in our intestines easily can affect our well being. For this, we should cleanse.

I personally am doing the Stanley Burroughs Master Cleanser Diet, published in 1976 (about $6 on amazon.com, but available at most health stores or B&N). I have heard great things from many people, but it is my first and only fast/cleanse I have ever done. You eat no food, but drink a “Lemonade” concoction 6 times daily of Lemon Juice, Grade B Organic Maple Syrup, and Cayenne Pepper. I do yoga along with it, so I supplement my cleanse with a little Apple Sauce before the yoga. Just so I don’t die. Though I’m sure I wouldn’t, but that’s the optimist in me.

I’m not, and would never claim to be, an authority on all this, but I do want to treat my body well, and function happily now and in the future. Colon Cancer is the 2nd leading cause of cancer deaths in the US, and the fact that we leave our intestines to be cesspools of rotting meals of days, weeks, and months past certainly helps maintain that statistic.

I will be eating junk food again; hamburgers, pizza, fries, quesidillas, cheesecake, Mexican food in general, and much more. I love food, I love to cook, I love to enjoy things that bring happiness, and I love simplicity. The effort in this case is to know what can cause a great deal of discomfort, or down the line, even death, and do our best to mitigate our risks based on what we know.

I have some links below of some potentially very helpful info:

• Lemon Cleanse - Getting started with the Master Cleanse
• Colon/kidney detoxification - 7 sections of simple and straightforward info on being healthy
• Basal Metabolic Rate