As it came to be, my twenties were filled with deprivation. When my friends were staying up late, sleeping around with cute boys, and bar-hopping, I was taking 36 hour call shifts and waking up at 4am every day. In some ways, I feel like my life didn’t start until I was thirty, and by that point, I had a bit of a sense of entitlement about how I chose to live my lifestyle. As in, I deserved to finally have fun, even if it meant unhealthy lifestyle choices.

 

So I went from eating nothing as a resident (who had time?) to eating duck confit and barbecued ribs and truffle fries. And, as you can imagine, I gained about twenty pounds. But God dammit, I deserved it. I had been deprived long enough. And after running around the hospital at warp speed for eight years (the security guard called me Speedy Gonzalez), I decided to take it down a notch. Over time, my regular step aerobics routine downgraded from 4-5 times/ week to once or twice a month, until I finally cancelled my gym membership. It just felt like a waste of money. And somehow, one glass of wine at dinner parties turned into one or two(and sometimes three) glasses on an ordinary night, just so I could take the edge off. Until suddenly, I’m almost forty, eating crap, drinking nightly, and exercising sporadically. Why? I’m not even sure any more. I used to be a total health food junkie, and I never drank until I was twenty-one, and then only maybe once a month. And my trips to the gym were a great release that really helped me stay centered. So how did I slide from such a healthy lifestyle? I’m really not sure. Lazyness, maybe. Or maybe the whole thing has been a form of anesthesia to put me to sleep so I don’t have to think about the patient whose baby died or the pain and shame of my two divorces or the trauma of losing my father. But maybe it’s just habit.

 

After the cleanse, I feel strong, brave enough to face the truth about my life and my health, so those choices I made almost ten years ago, when I was ready to break free from the chains of my medical education, no longer serve me. I look at myself through the eyes of my daughter and long to model something better for her. Rather than telling her she can’t drink my wine because it’s “Mommy Juice,” I’d rather have her begging to sip my wheatgrass and getting excited about raw live pizza, instead of cheeseburger macaroni Hamburger Helper.

 

So why did the cleanse change my life? Before the cleanse, I feel like my life was the water after a heavy rainfall, just racing along the same paths cut into the earth, rarely varying its course. Or like a movie stuck on fast forward. The cleanse was like a giant PAUSE button. Of course, it helps that all of my routines changed at the same time. Because we just moved, we live in a new town, and I have a new job, everything is different. So my life is ripe for change to begin with. But by taking six days to step out of my life with the specific intention of nurturing my body, I have rerouted the flow of my life, the way water changes directions when a log falls in the path of the water’s outflow. It’s an opportunity for conscious change, and since I’m Owning Change these days, I’m very open to that.

 

It’s been three days now since I finished the cleanse, and I’m still trying to make decisions about what comes next. For three days now, I’ve eaten a vegan, mostly raw foods diet. And my whole family has joined in. Yesterday, for breakfast, we ate Ezekial raw sprouted grain cereal with almond milk. For lunch, we had raw hummus/veggie wraps in sprouted tortillas. For dinner, we enjoyed a big salad with a cup of white bean tomato soup. For the most part, everyone is enjoying it, and no one feels deprived. (Though Siena is begging me for a hot dog).

I’ve also ordered the Green Star juicer and the BlendTec blender, and I’m trying to decide whether to get a dehydrator, which can be used to make flax seed crackers, raw pie and pizza crusts and other such raw, crunchy delicacies. This comes as a surprise, even to myself. Normally, I’m not much of an adopter. As a teen, peer pressure didn’t influence me much- I chose not to have sex or drink alcohol until I was at least five years older than everyone else I knew, and drugs didn’t interest me at all. I don’t buy clothes based on trends- I buy what I like. I don’t choose music based on what’s in the top 40. I listen to everything and make my own choices. So I wouldn’t normally be the kind of person who would do a cleanse and then go buy all the gear, just so it could sit under my sink and gather dust. When I commit to doing something, I do it.

 

So today, post-cleanse, I’m straddling some fences, trying to decide how I want my life to be. I’m sure some people do this cleanse as a way to detox and then jump back into their old habits, but I’ve been inclined to keep my finger on the pause button for a little while longer, while I figure everything out. Now that we live in this awesome foodie city, will I only eat out at Café Gratitude? No. Will I quit eating meat and stop using my oven? No. Will I be a raw foods vegan for the rest of my life? Not likely. But I’m rethinking what we eat, how our food is grown and raised, and how our bodies are nourished. And when Matt asked me last night to share a bottle of wine with him, I shook my head. Not that I won’t ever drink wine again- I probably will. But not yet. I’m not ready. My colon might be cleansed, but my mind has a lot more cleansing to do.

So where do I go from here? I don’t know. How exactly has the cleanse changed my life? I can’t say for sure. But I feel like a transformation is in progress. As I write this in my new home in Muir Beach, which lies right over the San Andreas Fault (yikes!), I feel as if the tectonic plates of my life are shifting just so. When it all evens out, I know things are going to be different. I just feel it in every juicy, nutrient-rich, enzymatically-active cell of my cleansed body.