Master Cleanse

After a serious deep fried food extravaganza, book-ended by champagne and followed by a bout of stomach flu, the master cleanse seems more than appealing. (also, everyone loves maple syrup!)

a fast that requires subsisting for 10 or more days solely on an elixir of fresh-squeezed lemon juice, cayenne pepper, maple syrup and water. While popular diets and fasts come and go, master cleanse remains a perennial favorite, a kind of folk regimen that owes its popularity to word of mouth and the Internet.

Created in the 1940’s by a nutrition guru, Stanley Burroughs, to treat ulcers and other internal ailments, the fast enjoyed a vogue in the late ’70s after the publication of his book “The Master Cleanser.” Its fans then were health-conscious types, interested in purging their bodies of impurities and toxins like pesticides and food additives. (...) fasters who drink six glasses of the lemony potion a day — the low end of the recommended amount — are consuming about 650 calories, far less than the 1,600-plus calories the average woman needs to maintain her weight or the roughly 2,400 calories a man requires.“Of course you’re going to lose weight, you’re starving yourself.” Seldom do the pounds stay off, she added, and people have a tendency to binge once they begin eating again.

The enduring popularity of the cleanse may have as much to do with its instant results as with the drink’s relatively inoffensive taste (think lemon Gatorade with a spicy kick) and simple recipe: 2 tablespoons lemon juice, 2 tablespoons Grade-B maple syrup, 1/10 teaspoon cayenne pepper and 8 ounces of spring or purified water. According to “The Master Cleanser,” Burroughs’s book, the lemon acts as a purifier and provides potassium, the cayenne pepper adds B and C vitamins and aids in circulation, and maple syrup, a sugar, provides energy and minerals. Burroughs suggested that fasters drink anywhere from 6 to 12 glasses of the stuff a day as well as a mixture of water and sea salt in the morning and an herbal laxative tea in the evening, to help aid in waste removal.