si dawson

[If you're squea­mish, don't read this]

I'd been read­ing a bit about gall blad­der cleanses on Give It To Me Raw, and thought "Hey, why not give that a go?"

So I did.

mMMmm nummy! No, mine doesn't look like this (I'd be in extreme pain if it did).

I did a bunch of research, read about 20 dif­fer­ent ways to do it, and fig­ured out what would work for me, and went ahead and got stuck in.

Most of the sug­ges­tions involve drink­ing olive oil + lemon (or grape­fruit) juice in the evening, lying on your right hand side with your right knee up, for half an hour, then going to sleep.

So, here's what not to do:

1. Don't fig­ure "Why wait till evening? I'll start now!" (2pm in the after­noon). Oth­er­wise you'll be up all night, uhh, run­ning back & forth. This is not as much fun as it sounds.
2. Also, there's a good chance you'll spend the rest of the day burp­ing olive oil. This is REALLY gross. If you're asleep, of course, you won't notice.
3. Gen­er­ally the idea is not to eat all day, then drink the gunk in the evening. I've been hav­ing psyl­lium shakes (cou­ple of tea­spoons psyl­lium husk shaken up in water) early in the morn­ing. To me, that's liq­uid, so no prob­lem, right? Ahh, my body thinks oth­er­wise. Appar­ently this is a solid. Big prob­lem. Blocks you up inside, so the gall stones can't flush out as eas­ily. I spent most of the rest of the day feel­ing pretty ill. I have a sneak­ing sus­pi­cion this also lead to me throw­ing up, later in the piece.
4. I'm a curi­ous guy, but still not curi­ous enough to sift through my "pro­duce". So leav­ing the light on is a good idea, because oth­er­wise it's going to be pitch black when you go rush­ing in there & you'll never get to see the results of all your glo­ri­ous efforts. Once you're sit­ting, there's no way in hell you're get­ting up again. And once you've fin­ished, there's no way in hell you're leav­ing that evil stuff lying around even long enough to get to the light & back.

And here's what did kind of work:

1. I had 2 cups (500ml) of olive oil with 2 cups of lemon juice & the juice of a grape­fruit. All things con­sid­ered, that didn't taste too bad (although I did skull it down). I think the grape­fruit really soft­ened the taste.
2. Tak­ing tiny licks of honey in between gulp­ing ses­sions helped too. I man­aged to get the entire litre (quart) all down in about 5 minutes.
3. Gar­gling with mouth­wash was the only thing I found that reli­ably took the olive oil burps away (I tried apple, pineap­ple juice, water).

Annnnd, some other notes, that you prob­a­bly don't want to know.

1. Plan on being very busy. I lost count after 14 vis­its, oh, and threw up three times (I think about the 13th visit). Inter­est­ingly, I didn't throw up any oil (I would have tasted it), just the pineap­ple juice & water I'd taken sev­eral hours after the oil, to try and rehy­drate a bit and take the olive oil taste away.
2. The next morn­ing my skin really smelt. Not like I've ever smelt it before, and very unusual. Def­i­nite "uh oh, time for a shower" stuff. I'd guess I was detox­ing stuff out through my pores too.
3. As men­tioned above, I kept for­get­ting to switch the light on, so didn't really get to have a quick look & see how it went in terms of stones, but once most of the action was gone & things had calmed down a bit I did remem­ber to switch it on, and the next cou­ple of vis­its saw many things like that looked exactly the size, colour & shape of peas, float­ing in the bowl.
4. The first cou­ple of vis­its were pretty unusual, and def­i­nitely felt like I was clear­ing some large bul­bous things. No way in hell was I gonna go look­ing for them though!!

All in all, pretty much like giv­ing birth to a lit­ter of alien face-huggers.

So, for all the excite­ment, it looks like I did suc­cess­fully clear SOMETHING(S) out of my sys­tem. Some peo­ple men­tion feel­ing incred­i­ble soon after. I must say I just feel worn out. Ahh, I don't think I'll be doing it again in any hurry though *cough*. Heh. Just… No.