About a week ago, I decided to do a cleanse. I just feel that something is a bit off in my body. It's been one year and five months since I stopped the long term antibiotic treatment I was on for Lyme disease, and while my health is okay overall, there is room for improvement. I did a lot of research, and decided that a juice cleanse was the best option for me.

My goal was to do three days, evaluate how I felt, and maybe try for two more days. Today is day three. I'm going to wait until the end of the day to decide what to do.

I already eat pretty clean, but I didn't want my body to be in complete shock with a cleanse, so a couple days leading up to day one I really focused on eating a lot of vegetables and other light food, and drinking a ton of water.

On the first day, I drank fruit and vegetable juice that I made with my juicer. But then, I decided I should eliminate a lot of the fruit, as my goal here was to alkalinize and fruit sugars don't help in that respect. So day two was just vegetable juice with a little bit of lemon. Today, I am half-way through day three, and I'm still just doing the vegetable juice with minimal fruit. When the cleanse is over, I'll do a post with the exact "meal" plan, if you're interested.

One of my biggest fears was that I was going to have really bad withdrawals. This happened to me when I completely cut all sugars out of my diet a few years ago. I went through terrible, terrible withdrawal symptoms. (Side note: did you know that sugar affects the brain the same way cocaine and heroin do? It's no wonder the withdrawal is awful!) Since I've slowly reintroduced sugars (not refined, just natural like fruit, maple syrup, etc) into my diet, I was scared I'd have the same reaction. So what happened?

I didn't wind up having withdrawal symptoms! Yay. Just minimal irritability from cravings. I am a texture person, and I am craving smooth almond butter, soft sunflower seeds, and crunchy kale chips (which is brutal, because I cannot find kale chips in Germany). Those are kind of weird things to crave, I know, but it is what it is. The irritability lasted about thirty minutes on day two, but other than that it's been smooth sailing.

As far as energy levels - I haven't gone to the gym, or done a vigorous yoga practice, but I have been able to take my dog for a 45 minute walk every day without feeling lightheaded or sick to my stomach. I've been able to run errands without any problems. This is all a great relief to me, because I had feared I'd have zero energy.

I will report back Monday with my overall experience with the cleanse once it's over.

Have you ever done a cleanse? What type? How'd it go?

PS- Gratitude for the little things, my personal experience with anxiety and depression, and self-care.