This master cleansing diet does sound pretty tough to anyone who heard about it. I realized this when half of the yoga class folks learnt about this msater cleansing that I am going through. Most of the people looked shocked and totally cannot believe that one can do this diet ( I love watching their amazement and their reaction, it’s really interesting… heee )

For me, the hardest part was the salt cleansing in the morning where you have to drink one whole litre of salt water. It got abit easier on the fourth day onwards… but still I dread that part. The weird part is that I do not really feel hungry in the morning but only after 8pm especially when I stayed up until 2am.

One thing that really helped was to use sugarcane juice in replacement of the maple syrup. If you are from Singapore or Asian country, it will be far easier to get sugar cane juice. ( In Singapore, they offer sugarcane almost everywhere in the hawker centers and it cost only S$1.50 for a big bag of 500ml ) Sugarcane juice tastes so much better than the maple syrup! And it is so easy to make, just add the lemon juice and cayenne pepper.

Meanwhile I still continued my regular yoga practice ( still went to all my tough classes ).

Difference?

Well, I see that there is not much weight loss ( maybe good or bad ) but I feel much lighter. And probably the best part is that I can balance in my inversions like Pincha Mayusara much longer. Also I feel that I can feel my body more… as in more connected, in fact, I feel that I am able to feel the engagement of the muscles more. Last time I checked, my tummy is still there… But there is a loss in strength. I cannot seem to hold longer in many of the poses and my arms kinda wobbled in some of the arm balancing poses like side plank. Otherwise I feel pretty much ok.

But someone did mention that I looked very tired… hmmm

Warning !

Try to avoid eating with other normal people especially those people who eat alot! I was put to test on my fourth day when I had to meet up with my business partners. And they were like gorging on sinful food like deep fried chicken, rojak ( chinese fruit salad with lots of peanut powder… ), ngoh hiang, sandwiches and more… Also try to avoid topics on delicious food too! Such talk will only get your tummy growling…

ONLY 5 MORE DAYS TO GO!

If you are interested to go on this master cleanse diet, you can check out this book that gives you plenty of information on how to go about starting this diet, what to do or not to do etc :

Master Cleanse Secrets 10 Day Diet

Lemon Detox Diet

2 tablespoon of freshly squeezed lemon juice ( no canned or fake lemons plz... I bought 6 lemons - should have gotten more! If you are lazy, I can tell you now that half lemon is approx. 2 tablespoons. )

2 tablespoon of maple syrup ( organic if possible; note that maple syrup is not a common item to be found in Singapore but I managed to get a 100% pure maple syrup from Canada at an affordable S$6.90 at the local grocery store )

1/10 teaspoon of cayenne pepper

250ml of water at room temperature

I have just mixed the entire mixture in my bottle. Ok, I admit, my measurement was not exact for the cayenne pepper… in fact, i did not even measure… I just sprinkled a fair amount of it into the bottle.

Boy, the whole mixture was pretty hot….still bearable -> I can feel the pepper burning at the back of my throat… perhaps I have added too much? ( I did put in 5 dashes of cayenne pepper in – the cayenne pepper came in a sprinkley top bottle meant for cooks to sprinkle the red fiery pepper to dishes like seafood and meat… )

The mixture does not taste all that bad and I reduced the maple syrup to just half the amount in the recipe ( if you want to lose weight, you can cut down the syrup )…. but as Shirley says, after a few days, I might not think that any more….

The tummy went a bit queasy and a burning throat so far.

Tomorrow morning, I will be doing the internal salt cleansing too when I wake up…

This time, he wanted us to think of the variation in the yoga poses that we take as the action we take to make ourselves happy.

More often than not, people often think of variations of a pose as a lesser pose, in other words, "poorer" or "lesser". To many practitioners, if you do an easier variation, you are weaker and not so good. Don’t blame yourself if you do think that way. Many of us do that.

We think that if we do the easier variation, we are weaker, we are not as good as those who can do the super hard poses. And similarly many of us who can do the "advanced" poses, many times, we feel proud and with time, our egos grow as well. And so much so that our basic yoga poses tend to suffer as a result.

But looking from Charat’s angle, yoga variations are viewed differently. Yoga variations are now ways that we make ourselves happy, our body happy. Why struggle in the hard poses? Why scrunch our faces in torture in the hard poses? Take the variations that we are comfortable with and progress with that. Do yoga with ease, grace and happiness. Yoga when expressed with happiness and grace is truly beautiful and inspiring.

~Namaste

*PS. Keeping my fingers crossed that I can wake up early for Ashtanga class on Tuesday