369 Cleanse

One of my goals in 2021 is to lose weight. Since none of the common sense techniques worked for my weight loss, I started reading science behind what makes the calorie counting and burning doesn’t work. One of the reasons is gut bacteria. When we consume a lot of processed food, plastics and other everyday pollutants, the natural ratio of bacteria in the gut gets altered. We need to cleanse the toxins and pollutants which get stored in the body to bring it back to normal. Liver is an organ which has the capacity to clean if it is not taxed with digesting complex food. This 369 cleanse by Medical Medium is just that. Clean and heal your body naturally. The downside of the cleanse is that it is very expensive in terms of time and money. It cost me around 4k INR for 9 days without the exotic fruits and vegetables which were on the original cleanse plan but I could not add them. 

 

How to do the cleanse?

 

The diet is named as 369 because new liver cells form every 3 days. Liver understands the language of 3’s. Hence we use that to slowly transition the liver into a self cleaning mode.The first 3 days are a mild transition and the next 3 days are beginning of cleaning and last 3 days are complete cleaning. After the 9th day, it is recommended that you transition slowly out of the cleanse instead of burdening the liver all of a sudden.

 

Mornings of all 9 days

 

I started my day with lemon water(300 ml) followed by pure celery juice (300 ml) with no added water with a 30 minute gap. Then I had a liver rescue smoothie. Bananas, mango, dragon fruit and sprouts make an antioxidant rich smoothie. After another 30 minutes gap, I have coconut water. Even though this looks like a small amount, I used to feel full by the time I finished this in the morning. For mid morning snacks, I had apples

 

Day 1-3

 

I had boiled potatoes, cauliflower and sweet potatoes for lunch and dinner. No oil, salt and artificial preservatives.

 

Day 4-8

 

I either had spinach banana sprouts juice or lettuce, cucumber, mango, tomato,carrot salad.

Important point to note here is that don’t mix bananas and tomatoes as they don’t digest well together.

 

Day 9

 

Drink lots of melon juices and apple-cucumber juices. 

 

On all the days, in the evenings I had hibiscus tea and for snacks I had apples and dates.

 

To put it in a simple way, this has been my routine. This is not the perfect cleanse but I did the best I could with the resources and my taste buds.

 

Why was this easy for me?

 

After eating burgers and pizzas everyday, I didn’t jump into this one morning when I felt the need for cleanse. In general, I eat healthy. In Feb, I started Medical medium morning cleanse. So my mornings were pretty much the same. Instead of heavy metal detox, I did liver rescue smoothie. The biggest pain point for me was eating no oil and salt food for the first three days. That was when I discovered the sweet potatoes. You can just boil them and eat raw and your taste buds are happy. Also, I quit eating rice regularly this year, so this change didn’t have too much impact on me.

 

For the next few days, drinking spinach juice was not a big deal because the bananas gave good taste to it. I usually consumed 250gms of Spinach in a meal and I found it filling. I ate apples and dates for snacks anyway. There was one day, I had a sudden craving for a proper south Indian dosa when I was browsing through Instagram. Again, it was not my taste buds craving for it but it is the fear of missing out. Another day, I craved for Biryani. Then I thought, I anyway eat Biryani only once in a month, it is not like I have it everyday and I just had it a few weeks back. It was again fear of missing out.

 

Overall, it was pretty much doable. In the initial days, I didn’t know what was the right quantity to eat and couldn’t exercise because by the time it was 5 in the evening I was hungry and had to snack on apples. 

 

Also, I had support from my husband. He didn’t stock the house with processed food. Out of sight, out of mind. That’s definitely a trick to not eat processed food. He didn’t expect me to cook elaborate meals for him while I was on the diet thereby no cravings to eat cooked food.

 

I didn’t experience any detox reactions may be because I already had them in the last two months when I first started them.

 

Most importantly, I was able to stick with this because I value health more than anything else.

 

Did I see any results?

 

I felt that my face started glowing. Apart from this, I don’t see any immediate results. I didn’t measure my weight because I wasn’t feeling much lighter anyway. The whole point of this is to cleanse and I am sure that happened. To alleviate symptoms completely, multiple rounds and regular healthy eating is required.

 

How can you do this?

 

For a few months, first start off with a morning cleanse diet.Then slowly, reduce rice intake and increase vegetables and eventually cut off rice completely. Introduce more spinach into your diet in this process. After a few months ( pace of every person is different), you will feel ready to do this diet.

 

If you are finding it difficult to even give it a try, it is all in your head or your gut. The useless bacteria in your gut makes you crave more for the useless food which can feed it. It has colonised your body. Hence it is important for you to overcome your cravings and take control over your body again.

 

What next?

 

I don’t want to let my efforts from the cleanse go into the drain. I will continue with the morning diet and include more spinach into everyday food. May be will do one more round after a few months again.

 

Happy Detox!