Do you wanna lay me down?

[raybear]

I ate some bad nachos for lunch yesterday. That I made myself with stale tortilla chips, but I didn't realize HOW bad. I thought they just weren't very tasty and ruined my appetite for a bit. But then I started lots of digestive gurgling last night at work, and this morning at 5 am I was awoken by cramping and had to hurry off to the bathroom. [Don't worry, I'm not going to go into any major detail here about bodily functions, though if you read my journal, you know I maybe I'm not always the standard measure of what is "overshare", so consider yourself duly warned, I suppose.]

So I decided to do a salt water flush, where you drink a quart of water in one sitting, that has two teaspoons of sea salt added to it. I attempted this when I did the "Master Clease" about a year ago, but after one sip, I gagged and dumped it out and never tried it again. I might have oversalted it. This time it wasn't as bad. I mean, it wasn't yummy or even pleasant, but no wretching occured and I finished the whole quart. Maybe I've used my neti pot so much, I'm more used to exposing my muscous membranes to warm saline. Now I'm at the computer which is approximately 6 feet from the bathroom because I have been in there several times already and will be in there some more. Because as one ritual for the salt water flush indicated, a main ingredient for the process is "toilet paper". But of course now I'm reading more and more about various cleansing, flushes, etc. etc. and have come across some amazing gems. One is from a woman who cured herself from candida illnesses with her colon cleanses, which ok, cool, sure, I can get behind this. And now she is selling the combination of herbs/supplements that she used to others so they can heal themselves. Her site includes directions for cleanses, including the salt water flush, and she doesn't give instructions for anything that odd, but her explanations for why they work are sort of hilarious. The principal of salt water flushes is really about the osmosis (in the scientific meaning, not the metaphoric one) and the idea that the salted water is ph-balanced with blood so that it doesn't get absorbed into our system, it instead passes through quickly, taking bad things in the intestines with it. Except according to her, salt water flushes work because of "gravity". Um, ok.

Then there are the people who started a website for their book called "Cleansing or Surgery?" which is pretty awesome title, and about in-line with the general "Master Cleanse" way of seeing the world and the body. I read about their salt water flush procedure, which is standard, but there's a great line of advice that says "don't pass gas at this time unless you're on the toilet because it might be liquid". I appreciate such forthright information, because otherwise you learn it the hard way. I start clicking around to see their other cleanses, and they have a "tooth cleanse", which intrigued me even more when I came upon this quote: We don't have to be dependent on dentists. There is another way. The Lord Jesus has led us to a daily tooth cleansing plan that has kept our family's teeth healthy.

I love people. And I'm totally going to find some Sanguinaria root for making these specific people's mouthwash, whether it came directly from Lord Jesus or not.

Comments

[raybear.livejournal.com]

But I don't think you want it to be hypertonic either, because the point is to neither to pull water out of your body, nor to put water in. It's to flush straight through without stopping to process anything. Like an enema. Hence the salt water flush often being referred to as a "top-down enema".

The neti pot analogy is about not causing irritation as it passes through, not the passing through itself. To me, it makes sense -- why wouldn't the saline concentration of the mucuousy tissues of your head be similar to your intestines?

[unscrambled.livejournal.com]

It might be the same salinity, but the mucousy tissues in sinuses are there to (mostly) excrete (and block chunks of bad from being absorbed), and the intestines (mostly) to absorb (and the stomach/pancreas/liver/bile ducts to secrete)--different kinds of epithelial cells in different concentrations. It's a different set of activities.

So, do you think that toxins came out of you? Are they supposed to live on the surfaces of your intestines, just sitting there? How come they don't get absorbed? This has always confused me about cleansing, and the explanations for it.

[raybear.livejournal.com]

Hmm, why couldn't they be living down there on the surface, along with all that 'good bacteria'? Though really, I have no idea why it works! That's your job. My job is to do weird isht like drink a quart of warm salt water and anecdotally report my findings. (Which, incidentally, it's just after 4 pm, no water has come out inappropriate orifices since the early morning experience, and everything feels great inside. Given my ongoing battle with possible-IBS (or whatever is going on with me, since I get wildly inconsistent results whenever I give up entire groups, like gluten or dairy or caffeine), at this point the why/how is interesting to me, but not as interesting to me as actual results in my body. Actually the one thing that does work fairly consistently too is glutamine supplements. This parenthetical got longer than I expected.)

I do think there is something to fasting though. I just don't exactly know what this "something" is because so much of the information is trapped among overeager healthnuts, disbelieving western scientists, centuries of different cultures doing it but not recording it (or having the information destroyed/forgotten) and a million internet anecdotes.

I'm so glad you're in (pre)med school, this is way better than google!

[unscrambled.livejournal.com]

Toxins (at least in the sense that I think you're suggesting (which is a part of this, right? the word "toxins," which in the health nut sense means everything and nothing) meaning heavy metals and whatever else--are chemicals, not living. So for example, there's significant evidence that toxins end up in our bloodstream and secretions (which is why breastfeeding moms aren't supposed to eat fish with mercury, thalidomide turned out to be a less good idea, etc.). I never got this about cleansing.

And, I have been disgustingly sick from food poisoning before, and there is a weird feeling of a "do-over" when you've been, uh, excreting for a couple of days. I wonder about where that feeling comes from.

Honestly, I think there is a psychological ass excretion/insertion thing going on with all of this. I don't think it's the only thing, but it's certainly convenient to have a socially sanctioned (inasmuch as this is socially sanctioned) way to stress the butt, insert things in the butt, shit in ways that are personally satisfying. I'm certainly not opposed to that.

[unscrambled.livejournal.com]

It's going to be way better when I know a bunch more and am no longer a beginning student. Maybe you should write me a letter--let unscrambled into your school so I can learn about the colon!

[raybear.livejournal.com]

If I did use the word toxins (I'm not even sure and I'm replying to this comment only in my window and can't read everything I've written), I probably did use in the healthnut way of 'everything'. Or in the metaphoric way of "bad things I don't want in my body". So to be more specific about what I actually mean, why I have found satisfaction in cleansings is less about getting mercury out of my body and more about getting bacteria/virus/parasites out. Cause that chemical isht is my tissues, as I know from my undergraduate thesis on analyzing the findings of studies that were trying to determine the link between breast cancer incidence and PCBs. I don't remember much about my environmental science degree, but I remember that week of not much sleep and poring over medical journals, in order to crank out those 50 pages and graduate.

Given that I also get certain satisfaction from an enema, I'm sure there was the psychology appeal too of a "top-down enema", especially at a time the physical act of the enema is not at all appealing or possibly even doable, given the post-bad-nachos state my intestines and the entry-way were in. Especially since drinking the flush covered way more mileage (literally) than the insertion method, which has always seemed sort of shallow and more the equivalent of a quick shower before a sex date, and not really about doing something for my actual guts and their work in digesting. I mean, an enema isn't really a spiritual experience. Drinking a quart of warm salt water and massaging my guts while the sun was rising out my window was.

Also in my reading today was the use of bentonite, which led me to geophagy, which led me back to bentonite which can be purchased in health food stores. Volcanic ash! I might have to try it.

[unscrambled.livejournal.com]

now my gmail ads are about Lindsay Lohan's colon cleanse. I think I'm still a slacker mom, overall.