17.
The 3-Day Fix-It Cleanse
Think of how good you feel in a clean and freshly scrubbed environment,
whether it’s your kitchen, when all the cooking splatter gets wiped away with
shine and lemon scents, or your car, when the wrappers, pebbles, and trash are
vacuumed up and outta there. Or even your newly organized closet—when
you’ve winnowed down, made your donations, and turned that cramped storage
space into a tidy cove of serenity.
That’s what dietary cleanses do: They help to remove the grit and grime from
your innards, reboot all of your systems, and set you up to speed through the
green lights of life.
Once you’ve completed the 21-Day Plan and you’ve graduated to eating the
FIXES way, every day, you may still feel the need for a cleanse every so often.
Think of it as a kind of dietary temp worker. It comes in occasionally for three
days, gets some necessary work done, then may return sometime down the road.
I do a cleanse four times a year—once every time the seasons change—as a way
to reenergize and keep myself nutritionally inspired. You may choose to cleanse
as often as once every two months (I wouldn’t do it more frequently than that),
or immediately following a few days of straying, like after a vacation, the
holidays, or a particularly indulgent weekend.
The purpose is to give your systems a quick jolt by feeding your organs a
strong dose of healthy foods and zero doses of unhealthy ones, by restricting
your calories a bit to help your stomach realize it doesn’t need as much food as
you think, and by making you feel cleaner because you’re eating cleaner. In
other words, a cleanse helps you out of a junk funk and puts you back on track to
healthier eating.
You are not going to lose dramatic amounts of weight on my three-day cleanse
(though you may certainly see some movement on the scale for a variety of