FaST & SLuiCe, D00D.

however i am about to say some ICKY THINGS so do not read on if you are feeling fragile...

Ellie: hmm but i have thought about this quite a lot. i gave up eating meat only a decade ago and i reckon there's still quite a bit in there, rotting away. ugh. and the article mentioned your colon going into super mucous-producing mode whenever you eat fatty or alocoholic things, both of which i do quite a lot. however i do eat a lot of raw fruit and veg... so i suppose that would even things out a bit. as for people being happy with what they put in themselves, well when i was 14 and still eating meat i actually *didn't* know what i was putting into myself, and i didn't know that it would stay there and rot inside me. i didn't know the conditions under which animals are raised for meat... hell until a year or so ago i didn't fully realise the extent to which poisons are added to our everyday foods (veg included) in the forms of growth hormone, fertilizers etc. now i do know... i don't want to put them in there anymore! rather like the guy who wrote the article - now he's seen all the undigested crap in his gut, he won't be so hasty about putting more back in.

I've been thinking about the detox thing quite seriously over the past week because I've managed to give up smoking (a five-year, between five-and-ten per day habit) which was much easier than I thought it was going to be. And although coffee enemas sound a bit Gwyneth to me, the idea of going to Thailand to fast and sluice for a week (clearly and obviously you'd go for three weeks, to eat well on either side of it), lose some weight as side-effect, get *everything* out of one's system that probably shouldn't be there, and do this one time only sounds good, especially when one considers it costs about £250 without the flight.

i think i should add at this point that if i did do the enema thing i probably wouldn't want to look at the results too closely. no colanders full of *ahem* butt mucous for me. and i think that putting coffee (and vinegar!!) up your arse is just a silly thing to do. one cup of nescafe makes me horribly grumpy and jittery, just imagine what 5 gallons directly into the colon would do!!

If you have to replace half the things you flush out it seems very stupid to have it done in the first place. Like people who eat vitamin pills instead of fruit & veg & a balanced diet.

Surely this isn't a very good plan? Some of those internal organs must be of some use. OR WE ENSLAVED BY AN ENORMOUS MEDICAL CONSPIRACY?

Trousers should fit properly v. soon but I'm still interested in this Thai fast as a one time only thing.

But so this week I've become weirdly fascinated by the colon-cleansing thing and the weird happy-go-lucky gross-out tone of the text and the testimonials. Caught a late-night infomercial last week that had a guy cheerfully asking a "caller" if he found his children's stools were longer and larger than his, to which you'd expect a normal human being to be all like "Umm, dude, I don't look at my kids' crap, they just flush"; but no, before the question's even asked he's rhapsodizing about the fullness and heartiness of his children's stools, as opposed to his theoretically withered, unmanly product. Apparently the average adult is carrying around fifteen to twenty pounds of impacted fecal matter: "Talk about weight loss!" says the TV dude. Later a friend is showing me a colon-cleansing text ad, this one centering mostly on intestinal parasites. The testimonials are amazing: "My husband and I have been on the program for just under a month, and every day we flush out a new parasite -- some small, some up to several feet in length." It's claimed that Maria Callas was only cranky cause she had tapeworms, and as soon as those were flushed out, she became a big ball of sunshine.

So I kinda wouldn't mind magically removing whatever built-up gunk is in my digestive system. But check it out: if there were seriously yard-long parasites in my colon, I think I'd rather just not know about it than have to sit around, umm, excreting them. Reinaldo Arenas had some boyhood story about shitting a millipede that's pretty much scarred me for life in that respect.

Snopes on impacted feces: http://www.snopes.com/toxins/fecal.htm "Anecdotes such as these are, in a word, crap."