I wanted to do a cleanse or detox of sorts after the new year to reset my body after all of the indulging over the holidays. I am not one to do a juice cleanse or anything so I was looking for something different. Being part of the yogi world, I knew the Ayurvedic diet has shown that that Kitchari has been proven to cleanse the body. So after a few Google searches later, I was able to find a three day Kitchari cleanse that looked just like what I needed. I figured you can do anything for three days right?
What is a Kitchari Cleanse you may be asking?
Simply put, it is where you focus on eating Kitchari in hoping to cleanse the body. To be more specific, here are the rules that we followed (based loosely from this article):
- Drink warm water with lemon first thing in the morning to help flush out any toxins from the night and awaken the digestive system.
- Eat oatmeal for breakfast. For ours, we mostly followed the recipe on the website (oats + pear or apple) but used steel cut oats since that’s what I had.
- Eat Kitchari for lunch and dinner. For these meals, we eat as much as we want of the Kitchari until we feel satisfied but not full.
- Drinking 8-12 cups of fluids throughout the day. We drank warm things like teas and water with lemon to help hydrate the body.
We also tried to always have at least 3 hours between meals to give our body enough time to digest from the previous meal. This meant limiting any snacks as well. If we needed a snack, then we would have raw walnuts and a few blueberries.
So how did it go?
We lasted the three days without any cheating although we both thought about quitting at least once. We didn’t do well with the rules of the cleanse about keeping calm and not exercising. With life with two young girls and dog who is sick, calm doesn’t really happen.
Here are the things we liked about it:
- We didn’t need to meal plan as we knew what we were eating for each meal.
- We each lost weight. Ryan lost 3 lbs and I lost 5lbs. Obviously it is mostly water weight but still, it was nice to let some of the bloat go.
- We weren’t limited to how much we ate. The cleanse doesn’t want you to starve yourself (although Ryan still felt deprived due to his exercise levels).
- I felt better by the third day. Basically overall I felt lighter and healthier. Ryan felt different…
Here are the things we didn’t like about it:
- We got sick of Kitchari. It was good at first but after eating it for 3 days of lunch and dinner, it was a bit much.
- We were both so tired during the cleanse. This was partially due to having no caffeine and partially due to the process of your body releasing toxins. There were multiple times where we would just fall asleep anytime that we sat down and that is very unlike us.
- It wasn’t enough nutrition for the amount of exercise we were doing (this impacted Ryan more than me). Although the cleanse recommends keeping exercise low key, we didn’t follow that.
- I had headaches the second day from caffeine withdrawals. Thankfully these went away on the third day.
- We both got a little achy feeling at some point during the cleanse as well which was just weird. This went away though when we started eating “normal” again.
So what did we learn?
We liked the cleanse because we lost some weight fast and felt like it detoxed our bodies. However, I don’t know if we would do it again because it wore us out and didn’t feel great at points throughout it.
In the future, I would definitely eat Kitchari for some lunches at times but won’t make it something I eat for every meal.
Have you ever done a cleanse?
