Cleansing for the New Year

That's right! The USDA and FSA girls took on the Dr. Oz 3 day Detox Cleanse!  When you work with a lot of women, it isn't uncommon to try diets together.  Since I've been here, we've done just about every diet in the book together. Weight Watchers, Cabbage Soup, Body by Vi, you name it.  Someone always falls off the wagon and eventually drags everyone else with them.  This is definitely NOT an easy diet to follow, even though it is only 3 days.  I am happy to report that Loren and  I made it the entire 3 days!  Tracey and Laura both lasted until dinner on the third day, and poor Carolyn just couldn't stomach the shakes after the first day!  As you can see from the picture, each day you drink green tea, a breakfast shake, a lunch shake, a snack shake, and a dinner shake, then you soak in a bath of Epsom salt and lavender. 

Day one is definitely the easiest day because you are excited and motivated!  We started out with our green tea and breakfast shake, measuring everything out perfectly, then reassured each other that the shakes really aren't that bad, and we can do this!  Which was true, the breakfast shake is my favorite, and it tastes mostly like banana and almond butter. I always repeat it as my snack shake.

Everything was fine and dandy...until lunch time.  We mixed up the concoction of greens and behold, the shake looked like the vomit from the exorcist movie.  It was awful.  All you could taste was celery!  I hate celery, so this was especially terrible for me, but everyone else agreed that it was horrid.  Three of us reluctantly choked it down, and the other two just decided to go hungry.  On days two and three we decided to just eat the celery, and leave it out of the shake.  This made a HUGE difference, and the shake was actually decent.

We brought to-go cups and made the dinner shake before we left, so we could wait until later in the evening to drink it.  We made our snack shakes and sipped on those as we prepared our delicious dinner.  The dinner shake wasn't terrible, but the cayenne pepper taste was not my favorite.

After the final detox weigh-in, I lost 8 pounds, which is pretty freaking good for 3 days!  I feel great!  I have plenty of energy and strength, and I was able to attend/teach Zumba classes with no problem.  I was only hungry at night before I went to bed, but then again I usually am!  My only complaint about this detox is that it is a huge hassle.  If I wasn't doing it with 4 other women, I probably wouldn't have finished the 3 days.  It is difficult to find and buy all of the ingredients, and then measuring, chopping, preparing, and blending everything takes entirely too much time and effort.

Would I do it again?  Definitely.  It's really not THAT bad.  It's just fun to joke about how terrible it is.  Like I said, I don't know if I could do it alone, but if the girls at work wanted to do it again, I would be game!  I wouldn't mind doing it once a month just to keep myself clean and detoxed, but I don't know if I could ever convince them to do it again!