Sorry for the delay with the awards. There were a lot of comments to go through.

Just a reminder of the prizes available

1. Everyone who registered, or followed us on Twitter was entered to win $50
2. Everyone who made a comment over 100 words was entered to win $75. Each comment is a separate entry.
3. Anyone who commented everyday on every topic and over 100 words would be entered to win $100

I decided, for the sake of transparency and authenticity, that we should require winners to claim their prizes by adding a comment to this stream.

Further, I would like to invite each prize winner to provide a guest post on any topic of their choice, but still related to the MCGE. This is an opportunity for the winners to promote their own ideas or websites in a way that would benefit themselves and our participants.

So the winners are:

1. 1st Prize: Paula Hicks $100.00
2. 2nd Prize: Nedje – $75
3. 3rd Prize: Kristen – $50

I will send emails to Paula, Nedje, and Kristen inviting them to claim their prize on this page.

Thanks again everyone for another great event.

Mike

Eating the soup a day later wasn’t bad. Once I finished that, I began to plan my assault on the remaining fruits and veggies in my fridge, and on my counter. I figure I would juice four times, with lots of water in between. As I write this, I have juiced three times and have my last remaining foods. Let me end this post by sharing my juice recipes from today:

Ease-In Juice Recipe 1

• 4 tomatoes
• 1 apple
• 1/2 cucumber
• 2 kiwis

Ease-In Juice Recipe 2

• 1 large bunch of broccoli, including stems
• 1/4 head of cauliflower
• 1 small tomato

Ease-In Juice Recipe 3

• 1 bag of pre-washed spinach
• 1/2 cucumber
• 5 stalks of celery
• 1 kiwi
• 1 apple

Ease-In Juice Recipe 4

• 3 oranges
• 1 apple
• 1 grapefruit
• 1 avocado – technically not juicable, but I will blend it with the rest.

My menu for today included

Snacks for Master Cleanse Ease-In

1 whole grain bun
Organic peanut butter
1 avocado
2 tomatoes
blackberries

Lunch

Veggie Soup

This was only the second time I have tried to make a vegetable soup. The first time was on the Ease-out from Fall 2008. It didn’t turn out great. The veggies were soggy, but the broth tasted okay. The base was mainly onion and mushroom.

Since that time, I have made a few soups with my grandma and my girlfriend, who cooks like a grandma. I think I have the process down, but as they say, practice makes better, and since I haven’t practiced much, I suppose I was asking too much to expect more than a moderate improvement from the last time.

I went shopping on an empty stomach, while coming off a weekend of fast food, so I was craving everything I saw. I probably bought too much, but if there is too much left over, I will just juice it tomorrow.

Vegetable Soup Ingredients for my Master Cleanse

1 large onion
1/2 small red cabbage
4 small beets
3 sticks of celery
4 small red potatoes
2 wedges of garlic
6 large Brussels sprouts

Cumin
All Spice
Garlic powder
Flaked onion

I began by sautéing the onion in a large pot with olive oil. I soon noticed that I didn’t have enough olive oil for my onion – or did I have too much onion for my olive oil? I then realized even quicker that I have no ideas on quantities, but I proceeded anyway – the onion was cooking and the clock was ticking… and besides, I was hungry.

I found more oil, but not until after I’d added some chopped red cabbage to the sautéed onion. I added some cumin and All Spice to the growing base, which was cooking so fast that I had not prepared the next ingredients, so I don’t know, maybe add water now? That decision combined with my first to make two critical mistakes, the first being the overdone onion and cabbage sauté.

So, I had a large soup pot. Too large maybe, but certainly large enough that I decided to add more water than was probably necessary (mistake number two). Now that the water was in, I decided my next ingredient would be the beets. My Grandma always says that to make a borscht, just add beets. While I wasn’t making a borscht, I was adding beets, so perhaps I was still making one by Grandma’s standards.

Having loosely contributed to my girl’s first attempt at borscht recently (by that, I mean I watched and ate), I learned by osmosis that the beets take forever to cook. I would later Google some advice on this, but not until after my potatoes were soggy… oh no, I just gave away the consequence of mistake number 3 – I didn’t cook the beets long enough or early enough, or separate enough, or whatever enough.

At this point, my bed (soup), was made and all I could do was scramble to the finish in an attempt to salvage something soup-like. Grandma also says to throw in whatever is at hand in order to rescue the situation. So I started grabbing more salt (the base was weak from too much water), more spice and onion flakes. Finally, I caved and added a can of pre-made lentil soup. It was organic, at least, containing only pure ingredients, so I was fairly happy with these emergency additives to my fresh soup. They looked like they helped a little.

Well, they did, but only a little. I ate two bowls and my uncle managed one. It’s okay, but certainly not great. I learned some good lessons, and am looking forward to the Ease-Out.

I had planned to make a salad today, but it is late and I am tired. I am going to pass on the salad for now, and juice like a mad-man tomorrow. That soup did me in. Guess I will have another bowl.

Salad

Postponed due to soupiness.

I created the Ease-In strategy in order to bookend the Lemonade Diet, and to Ease-Out to a perfect two weeks (beginning on a Monday and ending on a Sunday). Because the Lemonade Diet doesn’t start until the Thursday, you are quickly into your first weekend. We all know that weekends go quickly, and since this is the first weekend of your cleanse – one that doesn’t include the customary weekend eating or drinking – you will want this weekend to go by quickly. Next thing you know, you are well on your way to the finish line (the following weekend). All you have to do is get through one full work week and, basically, you are done. The Ease-Out allows for a letup from the psychological discipline you have been maintaining for ten days. When the Friday rolls around, and it is time for the orange juice, you are feeling great about preparing simple meals over the weekend.

The Ease-In process has also helped me while I began work on this website. When I first started this blog, I did so for two reasons. I wanted to share with people both the process and my personal experience of the Master Cleanse. That was two-and-a-half years ago. I uploaded a few pages describing how I did the cleanse, and that was about it. I was working full-time then, and I was increasingly aware of the income possibilities provided by blogging. I knew I wanted to write and produce information products such as books, music and film, and so I realized that blogging would be an interesting experiment, one that was directly related to my ambitions.

Since that time, this blog has grown substantially as one of the leading online resources for people searching for information on The Master Cleanse. During that time, while building the blog, I have cleansed along with my readers, and learned lessons on both cleansing and blogging. So, during the Ease-In, I am also able to prepare my approach to blogging about My Master Cleanse Experience.

I don’t like to cleanse too often. You may want to explore your own desired cleansing frequency. Intervals of nine months seem to work for me. Six months seems too short and one year seems too long. As this blog developed, I have fallen into a routine around winter, spring, summer and fall that happens to coincide perfectly with major holidays and, for some, resolutions to end the binges they have just concluded. Therefore, I didn’t cleanse the last two times (winter 2009 and spring 2009). I am, however, cleansing with you this time.

As I sit here typing, it is 11:00 a.m. in Saskatchewan. I am home for the summer months, and will be cleansing at the lake. I am hungry because I haven’t prepared my meals for the day, and I am waiting to head out on the town and collect my required goods for both the blogging and the cleansing.

My Ease-In Day 1 has become filled with preparations for this cleanse. Not only am I going out to get my produce – lemons and maple syrup for the cleanse (I have my cayenne and sea salt), veggies for my soups, salads and juices, but I am also going out to get juicers, water bottles for lemonade, juices, water purifiers and pure water and more, so that I can blog and cleanse in a meaningful way.

During the next two weeks, I am hoping to focus almost entirely on this cleanse, and on this blog. I will be asking for feedback in some cases, and making changes to features and content structure. Hopefully it will make for an overall better process, now and in the future. I will also be commenting frequently and asking questions to accompany the planned daily Twitter “Q and A”, to be held every day at 6:00 p.m. EST. For fifteen minutes, I will be online at Twitter to chat and answer questions. As ever, it is not about me, but my experience – actually, our experience; the experience of every average person who dares to research and experiment with alternative lifestyles. It is through exposure to our comments and support that others may realize flashes of their own truth – glimpsed through the fog of hype and marketing – in their quest for health and wellness.

This Ease-In process, then, is about more than preparing my food and my mind for the cleanse. But of course, I still need to remember, it is also about that too… I am hungry now, I should go and prepare. I am looking forward to yet another great experience, and the lessons that come with it.

The Ease-In – An Optional Warmup

The Ease-In process is a term I created to describe the opposite of the previously described Ease-Out, or the process of breaking the fast, as Stanley Burroughs and others call it. I chose those terms because they are simple and descriptive. The Master Cleanse and Lemonade Diet are a challenge; a powerful change in both thinking and action, and the entire process requires both a warm-up and a cool-down. If you were planning to start a two-week training course for competition that required a physically demanding effort, you would of course prepare yourself. Perhaps an even better analogy would be the warm-up and cool-down before and after exercise. It’s not essential, but it is easier on the body to complete the exercise, and produces less consequences (avoiding injury) if you do it.

Day 1 – Removing Processed Foods and Flesh Foods

Removing processed foods is the easiest way in which we can begin to deviate from our standard modern diets. We all eat these types of food every day: refined sugars, salt, and flours; modified oils in wrapped treats and snacks; fast food with white buns and processed cheese. Even restaurant food, which we might assume is healthier, often uses processed oils and flours to create their pastas, breads and sauces.

Eliminating meat from our diet

The next big step is to remove the food we eat from the flesh of animals. Of course there is a lot of debate about the topic of the proper human diet, and so I would save that discussion for another time (I would conclude we are 80 herbivore and 20 per cent carnivore). But there is no debate that we are less able to digest flesh foods. This makes the protein and other nutrients from flesh food more difficult to access. Furthermore, the negative effects of flesh foods are what we want to reduce, if not eliminate.

Eliminating the dairy products from our diet

Dairy products are our first processed food. Our mothers were the first manufacturers of food that we require to grow towards a self-sustaining and self-providing being. Despite the fact that we were designed to process our mother’s milk for a brief period of time, the same cannot be said for the milk of other beings, particularly in the refined, pasteurized and processed forms of butter and cheese – or worse yet, Kraft cheese slices or Cheeze-Whiz.

Soups, Salads, Whole Grains, No Dairy and No Meat

Today offers a short visit into the vegan world. We certainly won’t be applying all the rigid rules of the orthodox vegan diet, but we are getting close. Tomorrow, we will approach what is called the Raw Food Diet, in which no food is ever cooked. Today, however, we can enjoy some of the most simple and enjoyable foods to prepare and cook: soups and salads.

So Registration will now close Wednesday July 8th at 12 AM PST. The Lemonade Diet will begin the next day.

For everyone doing the Ease-In, please feel free to begin to post your comments and questions on the appropriate pages. I am creating pages for each day of the cleanse, as well as for each topic so have a look out for those new pages.

Good luck everyone.

I am going to try something new this time around. Every night at 6:00 p.m. EST, I am going to hold a “Q and A” on Twitter. Of course, anyone can ask questions and even give answers. I will be online for at least fifteen minutes, to moderate some of the questions.

You can participate by registering at Twitter (if you don’t already have an account) or by simply following The Master Cleanse at Twitter

Sorry for the delay with the awards. There were a lot of comments to go through.

Just a reminder of the prizes available

1. Everyone who registered, or followed us on Twitter was entered to win $50
2. Everyone who made a comment over 100 words was entered to win $75. Each comment is a separate entry.
3. Anyone who commented everyday on every topic and over 100 words would be entered to win $100

I decided, for the sake of transparency and authenticity, that we should require winners to claim their prizes by adding a comment to this stream.

Further, I would like to invite each prize winner to provide a guest post on any topic of their choice, but still related to the MCGE. This is an opportunity for the winners to promote their own ideas or websites in a way that would benefit themselves and our participants.

So the winners are:

1. $50 – Ms. N
2. $75 – Joi
3. $100 – No one. There was only 1 contestant who seemed to qualify, and that was Kristen. I have realized that there are 2 Kristens. One was a finalist for MCGE Winter 2009. The Kristen from this event is different. Upon review there she just missed qualifying by a few posts on a few days. But thanks so much for the effort. Kristen, if you feel I made an error and you did indeed qualify by posting every day, on every topic, in every category and over 100 words, then you would indeed qualify and I will re-evaluate.

I will send emails to each Joi, Ms. N and Kristen inviting them to claim their prize on this page.

Please note that I have still a few bugs. Once registered with the email support, you are not automatically registered with the website. In order to have your comments listed like Joi’s comments are listed you need to be registered at the website. I will try to work that out for the next event which begins Monday July 6th, 2009. It is the Master Cleanse Group Experience Summer 2009 and is the first Monday following North America’s summer long weekends. Registration will open 1 month before.

Thanks again everyone for another great event.

Mike

Congrats on making it through the Master Cleanse Group Experience – Spring 2009.

It was another successful journey together, with lots of great support provided by everyone.

I will be making the draws after I have done some preliminary preparations.

Here are a few stats on MCGE.09.04.13:

We had a total of 309 people register for the Master Cleanse group support.

333 People are following us on Twitter.

There were 757 Comments in total, that accumulated almost 100,000 words of support. Congrats! That is an average of 120 words per comment.

There were 3 prizes available:

1. Everyone who registered, or who followed us on Twitter, was entered to win $50.
2. Everyone who made a comment over 100 words was entered to win $75. Each comment is a separate entry.
3. Anyone who commented every day on every topic, using over 100 words, was entered to win $100.

Now I have some work to do, to make sure everyone is entered correctly.

The first one is easy enough, but the next two will take some analysis. For the grand prize, I will have to select finalists (for the first MCGE1 there were four finalists).

In order to be a finalist, you would have had to post each day (16 days) on five topics = 80 comments.

I will now go to check the stats. I will post Monday with the results.

If you liked this post you might like these as well:

• Ease-Out – Day 2 – Juicing and Soup Broths
• Twitter “Q and A” – Every night for 15 minutes at 6:00 p.m. EST
• Master Cleanse Group Experience – Summer 2009 Registration is now open
• Share this Contest for $100
• Master Cleanse – Day-to-Day – Name Each Day Contest

My Experience Comment Counter

Questions or comments? Email me here: mjo@themastercleanse.org

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