Lose Weight, Have More Energy and Be Happier in 10 Days: Take Charge of Your Health with the Master Cleanse

Introduction

November 1, 2010

In the fall of 2005, shortly after the second edition was published, I discovered that it was beneficial to take probiotics after the cleanse. and began to promote that on the Internet. (See number seven in the section More Details, below.) It has since been copied on the many thousands of websites offering advice on the Master Cleanse. However, that information never made it into this book. So I made a promise to myself that I would do a third edition.

The number of webpages discussing the Master Cleanse since the first edition is now almost half a million! This has led some people to accuse me of just copying whatever information I found on the Internet. I find this accusation funny considering there were less than a handful of websites devoted to the Master Cleanse when I wrote the first edition and put up the first Internet Bulletin Board (or forum, as they are called these days) at the end of 2003 and personally posted more than 600 answers to people’s questions.

In the first and second edition I answered the 70 most frequently asked questions. Since then, the most frequently asked questions have changed a bit and answering those new questions was another reason I wanted to write this third edition.

I also wanted to publish at least a few of the many scientific studies that validate the Master Cleanse as I am frequently asked for that information by those who would like to spread the word.

My final reason for writing this third edition is the information on anti-aging, which I personally find fascinating and is directly related to the Master Cleanse and fasting. Fasting from time to time (intemittent fasting) and a permanent, restricted-calorie diet with optimum nutrition are the only two methods that have ever been scientifically proven to extend life and reduce the diseases of aging! (See the section Anti-Aging.)

Being overweight has become far too common in America. According to a Business Week article, (Those Heavy Americans, Gene Koretz, Business Week, Nov. 10, 2003) two-thirds of Americans are overweight. The market for weight loss products (low carbohydrate foods, diet programs, reducing supplements, etc.) was projected to surpass $150 billion by 2007.¹

Still worse, obesity or being overweight was the third leading cause of preventable death in the United States from 2003-2006.² Those people it does not kill, it punishes, especially dating singles who want to be attractive to the opposite sex.

A look at our current culture might provide an explanation. Super Size Me is a very entertaining, feature-length color documentary film that shows what happens when the central character actually goes on a 30-day McDonald’s-only diet. For 30 days, he eats breakfast, lunch and dinner at McDonald’s. Nothing passes his lips that cannot be purchased at McDonald’s. And whenever they ask him if he wants it super-sized, he must answer yes and eat it all.

At the beginning of the movie, we see him getting the results of various examinations by health care professionals. His results are all normal and he is given a clean bill of health. After three weeks, one doctor is shocked at how much worse his liver is and encourages him to go off the diet. Our dieter refuses. So, the doctor hands him a number for the hospital emergency room and insists he call if he experiences any symptoms of a heart attack! The doctor is shown in the film saying something along the lines of, I would never have imagined that your diet could reduce your health this fast.

Not only does he gain more weight than expected, but we watch the deterioration in his complexion and mental attitude as well as learn about it from the results of his later blood tests. There are segments where he talks about his worsened mental attitude. His girlfriend, a vegan chef, also talks about his diminished sexual capability. (So, do not show the entire movie to your six year old without seeing it first. His girlfriend’s description is not graphic, but you may have to answer questions you would rather not, if you show that part to your six year old.)

Another scene shows how children with learning and attitude problems change for the better when they are not fed processed food in their school cafeteria.

Toward the end of the movie, McDonald’s French fries, a hamburger and a sandwich are put in separate glass domes along with a fresh-ground hamburger and hand-cut French fries from a local restaurant. The fresh-ground hamburger and hand-cut French fries decomposed as you would expect because they are not refrigerated. However, even without refrigeration, the McDonald’s fries have no visible decomposition even after six weeks!

If they do not decompose like nutritional food, what does your body do with them? Your body uses the food you eat to nourish your body & blood, and build new cells. When you eat something that contains artificial preservatives, colors or flavors, your body has to neutralize it before it is eliminated. This is one of the jobs of the liver. When the liver receives too much to process at the time, it stores those toxins in fat cells in the liver to process later. When the liver runs out of room to store these, it releases them into the body and the body creates fat cells and stores the toxins in the body’s fat cells until the toxins can be processed.

What keeps your liver strong and healthy? Blood from the colon is fed directly to the liver to nourish it. However, the body accumulates uneliminated toxins especially in the large intestine (colon), where blood has to filter through these toxins and poisons to get to the liver. At this point, the whole body is being fed dirty blood. This is like trying to wash your hands in paint to get them clean. This is also what medicine refers to as autointoxication: not intoxication as in happily relaxed, but as in self-poisoned.³

Symptoms of autointoxication include headaches, nausea, mental depression, irritability, stress, tension, tiredness, sluggishness, mental fogginess, indecision, insomnia, and susceptibility to other illnesses.

It is the toxins that Americans are eating and drinking that ares causing the epidemic of overweight. Our bodies cannot handle the volume of toxins we consume on a daily basis.

Think processed food does not have toxins? In the article Why McDonald’s Fries Taste So Good,⁴ the author, Eric Schlosser, says About 90 percent of the money that Americans now spend on food goes to buy processed food. He goes on to say that the flavor is replaced with chemicals to add flavor. For example, there are approximately 350 different chemicals in high-quality artificial strawberry flavor.

Further in his article, he says, One of the most widely used color additives …, cochineal [pronounced koash-a-neil] extract ... is made from the [dried] bodies of [a small] female ... insect harvested mainly in Peru and the Canary Islands. The bug feeds on red cactus berries, and color from the berries accumulates in the females and their unhatched [young]. The insects are collected, dried, and ground into a pigment. It takes about 70,000 of them to produce a pound of carmine, which is used to make processed foods look pink, red, or purple. Dannon strawberry yogurt gets its color from carmine, and so do many frozen fruit bars, candies, and fruit fillings, and Ocean Spray pink-grapefruit juice drink.⁵

The artificial sweetener Aspartame, also sold as NutraSweet, Equal, Equal Measure, and Spoonful, is another good example. The Food and Drug Administration has a system that permits people to report bad health reactions to food and drugs. According to David Rietz’s website (www.dorway.com), in February of 1994, Aspartame accounted for more than 75 percent of all bad reactions reported!

A Plane and Pilot magazine article from January 1990 on food additives explained that diet soft drinks are sweetened artificially by Aspartame (NutraSweet and Equal). Aspartame contains ten percent methanol, a poison, that is released at temperatures above 86º or if left on the shelf for a long time.

The article goes on to say that methanol destroys the brain a little at a time. Immediate effects can either be severe (epileptic seizures, blindness, or chest palpitations) or less noticeable (blurred vision, bright flashes, tunnel vision, ringing or buzzing in ears, migraine headaches, dizziness, loss of equilibrium, or lip and mouth reactions). It reports on an Air Force pilot who directly traced the patterns of tremors and seizures he suffered for two years to his consuming NutraSweet in beverages. His medical problems ceased when he quit drinking NutraSweet.

By the way, on 27 June 1996, without public notice, the FDA removed all restrictions from Aspartame, allowing it to be used in everything, including all heated and baked goods.⁶

Even when you go on a diet and eat less, forcing the body to burn fat, as soon as you go off the diet, the fat returns. The body must create more fat cells to protect itself from the toxins. The only effective way to eliminate the fat is to eliminate the toxins. This is why the Master Cleanse is so effective for not only losing weight, but also increasing energy and making people happier. In the informal survey of 141 people who have done or are on the Master Cleanse, about 80 percent of them report having more energy and more than 90 percent report being happier! This should be no surprise since toxins give you headaches, make you fell tired and irritable, and cause aches and pains. And the Master Cleanse, according to its developer, Stanley Burroughs, not only cleanses the colon, but also the liver, kidneys and other organs and glands.

A raw vegetable, fruit, seed and nut diet will also detoxify you, although more slowly. But in my experience, very, very few people can simply switch to eating 100 percent raw because their cravings overwhelm them and cause them to go off the raw food. However, a great many people can do the Master Cleanse and, having eliminated some cravings, eat a greater percentage of raw food than before. This is supported by the above survey, which showed that people on average rated their diet after the Master Cleanse as being somewhat healthier than before the Master Cleanse.

How did I learn about the Master Cleanse and the raw food diet? Well, in the fall of 1998, I was a successful executive of a small local software company. I was coming home at 6:30 pm and dropping into bed, so tired I did not even eat dinner. I would not get up until it was 8 a.m. and time to go to work again. No one at work, except my wife, knew I was not doing well. At home, however, my excessive tiredness and short temper were inescapable. Worse, food had become my enemy. No matter what I ate, I felt sick afterward.

About a year and a half before, I had been tested and discovered I had enough mercury in my body to interfere with normal system function. Apparently, it was finally getting to me. I sought a local doctor to do a mercury detoxification program on me and before he put me on that program, he gave me a thorough checkup.

The blood test came back with alarming numbers. My fasting blood sugar was in the range of diabetics (157), the fats that circulate in the bloodstream and are stored in the fat tissue (triglycerides) were really, really high (1160) and my cholesterol was in the same scary place (482). The doctor scared me badly enough that I radically changed my diet. I eliminated any sweet food including sweet fruits, sweet vegetables, etc. and added the vitamins and minerals that Adele Davis recommended for diabetics in her book, Let’s Get Well. This was in addition to the mercury detoxification program, which included super greens (a combination of spirulina, blue green algae, alfalfa, wheatgrass and other greens).

Fortunately, in the next four months, my tests all returned to normal levels and I could go back to eating the standard American diet of too many fats, too much sugar, very few raw vegetables or fruits, and lots of processed food. Three years later in May 2002, I had another checkup and this time, although my fasting blood sugar was fine (108), my blood fats were the second highest the doctor had ever seen (1921) and my cholesterol was so scary (525) that he had his office call me in immediately to be put on a prescription. I listened to him, filled it immediately and tried it for three days. It gave me a headache and bad dreams. I figured I had licked the blood sugar problem with nutrition, why could I not lick the cholesterol problem the same way?

By May 2002, my wife had been eating a 100 percent raw fruit, vegetable, nuts and seeds diet for more than two months. She was looking healthy and radiant, had lost weight, had plenty of energy and felt great. I tried to ignore how healthy she was for several months, but after the prescription fiasco, I decided I would go on the same diet and see what happened. I was not feeling as bad as I had before the mercury detoxification; I still did not realize my road rage was connected to my health; and I still did not have the energy I used to have. But was that not normal?

When I started the raw vegetarian diet in May 2002, I weighed over 230 pounds. I wore pants with a size 40 waist, which were tight. Over the next six months, I lost more than thirty pounds and was now fitting into size 37 pants. But more importantly I felt great and had lots of energy. Road rage became a thing of the past. People who saw me asked what I was doing to look so much better.

In December 2002, I began wondering if I should do some kind of cleanse. I had done a liver/gall bladder cleanse some years before and wondered if perhaps another type of cleanse or a whole series of different cleanses was something I needed at this point. So when I discovered the Master Cleanse by Stanley Burroughs at the end of December, I decided to do it starting in January 2003.

The Master Cleanse changed my life. I did it for 20 days and lost 23 pounds. Much, much more important, I felt fabulous and was now able to work 10 - 14 hour days with no strain at all and I was happier than I had been in years and years!

My wife also did the Master Cleanse. So did my twentyseven year old son and his girl friend, as well as a friend I had not seen in three years. When he heard I had lost over fifty pounds and felt great, he said he wanted to do it and did not care what it was. He discovered that on the Master Cleanse, he could still walk his six miles a day and he had enough energy to also ride his bike another four miles most days as well.

I already had a website for raw food and decided to add information on the Master Cleanse and a bulletin board so people who had questions could have a place to get answers from those who had done the Master Cleanse. From there, it was only a small step to see if we could get 100 people to do the Master Cleanse in January 2004 to start the year. Amazingly, with only one story in a local monthly health magazine and word of mouth, we ended up with more than 110 people doing it! That has increased to over 1200 in January of 2009!

Did I keep the weight off? That’s a question I am frequently asked. Well, I finished my first Master Cleanse on 24 January 2003 weighing 175 pounds. For the next five years, doing three or four Master Cleanses a year, I stayed between 175 and 185. In October 2007, I began a program of research into the nature and laws of life that requires I eat every day and so I have not done a Master Cleanse since then. I look forward to finishing my research and again doing regular Master Cleanses. I am currently 200 pounds, but still in vibrant good health and it shows.

I wish you the best,

Peter Glickman

Part I:

First Things First

Perspective

The daughter of a friend of mine left for college this year. But first, my friend had a father-daughter talk with her. He did not like Bob, the boy she was dating at school. Bob did not have a job, was not in school and had no plans for the future. The other day, he received a letter from her:

Dear Dad,

This letter may be hard to take, so please sit down and have a cup of coffee while you read it.

I know you don’t like Bob, but if you would get to know him you’ll you’d like him as much as I do. I certainly hope so … because I’ve decided to move in with Bob. It means I’ll be further from the college, but that’s something else I want to tell you … I’m going to drop out of school and get a job to support us. I know how much you value education, but you also taught me to think for myself. And right now, that’s what I think is best.

Anyway, both Bob and I hope you’ll take the time to get to know him because we’ve decided to get married. He’s really great and I’m sure you’ll like him when you get to know him.

And the best news of all? I′m pregnant! So, I′m sure you′ll agree our getting married is the best thing to do.

Love, Your daughter, Amy

At the bottom of the page in small letters are the words, Please turn over. The dad wonders what could possibly be next and quickly turns the page.

Dad,

I’m sorry to have put you through all that. I’m not pregnant and we’re not getting married. I’m certainly not dropping out of school for Bob; I broke off with him a couple days ago. You were right, he was a jerk.

However, I did get a D in chemistry. I just wanted to put it in perspective.

This story makes an important point: Perspective is very important.

Much has been said, published and broadcast about America’s health care system, the medical advances we have made and that it is the best health care system in the world. I would like to give you a different perspective.

Current Health Care Statistics

Cancer

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the cancer rate in America more than doubled from the start of the War on Cancer in 1971 to the year 2001.⁷ This was in spite of the fact that the National Cancer Institute’s annual budget went from $150 million in 1971 to $4.6 billion in 2005, an increase of thirty times.⁸ Now 40.77% of men and women born today will be diagnosed with cancer at some time during their lifetime!⁹

Heart Disease

One person in three suffers from some form of heart or circulatory system disease, including high blood pressure, heart disease and stroke. One out of every three people dies from these conditions. That is more than 2,400 deaths each day, an average of one death every 37 seconds.¹⁰

Diabetes

The United States saw a 136 percent increase in the number of people with diabetes between 1980 and 2007.¹¹

Obesity

The number of adults who are extremely obese and thus likely to have serious health problems increased 600% from 1961 to 2006, according to the CDC.¹² The extremely obese have more than twice the risk of heart disease, high blood pressure and diabetes than normal weight Americans .¹³

Cost of Health Care

Although America spent 36 times as much money as Cuba on health care in 1997 according to the World Health Organization ($3724 vs. $109), an American male was only expected to live one