Liquid and Detox Diets Really Just a Form of Starvation?

I’ve been around long enough, and intuned with the diet and weight loss circuit, to see a lot of fad diets and kind of crazy weight loss theories and diets, and one of the most perplexing to me is the liquid and detox diet, which go hand in hand because a detox diet is usually one that is based in the dieter mostly just drinking some sort of concoction.

I even tried one, the most popular and well known detox diet, called the Master Cleanse, whose instructions come in a neat little pamphlet-like yellow booklet, and instruct the user to prepare a concoction of lemon juice, maple syrup and cayenne pepper, and drink only that for days, combined with preparing a salt water internal enema, where you drink warm salt water and basically poop within a half hour, cleansing the intestines and the colon – it’s called something like a “salt water bath”. My boyfriend went on the Mater Cleanse with me, he lasted one day and I lasted three. We hated it to be honest.

I know that they say that after day three is often when you lose any desire for food, but for me quite frankly, I felt that it just wasn’t normal. And for someone who has struggled with eating disorders her whole life and still lives with the demon of bulimia from the past, I felt like not eating was just another (accepted) form of an eating disorder. I hated having to smell people’s lunches and foods when I went out to the mall during that time, and I even suffered through watching my boyfriend eat a piece of pizza since he hopped off the wagon before I did.

Honestly, for the few pounds I would have lost that would have been all water weight anyways – you don’t lose any fat that short term – I just felt that it was sort of a bizarre disguise for a starvation type eating disorder. I know there are some that swear by the health effects of the cleanse, but for me, it just wasn’t the right thing, and I personally believe that you can eat right and cleanse the body through eating, not starvation, better than you can by only consuming liquids and defacating more often, which is what these diets are designed to do for you.

There are some who do the cleanse regularly, a couple times a year, and swear by it, and that’s great for them, but I just don’t think it’s for everyone, and I don’t think that it should be primarily used for weight loss purposes, I think it should be used as more of a cleansing – break from food and it’s trappings sort of thing, otherwise, you’re going to tread in dangerous territory with thinking that this will be a long term weight loss goal getter for you.