Days of Grain and Miso: Some Thoughts on Cleanses

On New Year's Day, after an Eve that ended somewhere around four, I woke up to take a shower. As one does. As I do every single day. But something set this day apart.

And that thing was a full-length mirror.

For reasons only explicable to my brother and his Romanian landlady, his bathroom features a floor-to-ceiling reflective surface, the perfect thing for reflecting my puffy, lumpy, bumpy body in all of its post-debauchery glory. "Damn girl," I said, "something has got to change." A cleanse (as found on My New Roots) was the only conclusion.

Now as I limp into the eleventh day of the cleanse, furtively noshing on a cheese-laden panini, I have come to a couple of conclusions about cleanses. First, brown rice rapidly loses its charms. Second, a world without dairy and all of its delicious by-products is not a world I want to contemplate living in. And third, being on a cleanse is just one big marker of privilege.

There's a difference between being on a cleanse and starving, although the menu's rather similar (rice, rice, rice). In the first, you're supposed to spend a lot of the time being present and listening to your body's needs, which is the opposite of what you want to do in the second situation. It's hard to make it through another day of subsistence working if you're congratulating yourself for having hunger pains. My, aren't you virtuous, for giving up something you could so easily pay for.

And even compared to people who aren't starving, cleansing is still a sign of disposable time. Grains must be boiled, vegetables steamed, lemons squeezed into hot water before you run out the door. It's not a task for single parents, unless they have a sizeable divorce settlement and a nanny watching the kids. Or people working two jobs.

This isn't intended to be critical of cleanses. They harm no one, we could all be more conscious of the crap that goes into our bodies, etc. etc. Rather, I'm disappointed that my days of fasting have not led to some higher plane of consciousness. Instead, I'm just more conscious of the fact that I'm middle-class and terribly privileged. But then, I guess I always had the BA to prove that.