Dadgum Anne Hathaway and her product endorsements. Ever since her days as Princess of Genovia, I have held her and her gigantic mouth on some sort of mythical pedestal in which she could do no wrong. So, of course, when I was reading an article online about celebrity cleanses (what good is my digestive research if it's not thorough?) and I saw that Ms. H swore by the David Kirsch 48-Hour Super Charged Cleanse to get her ready for awards shows, I thought it might be worth a try.
I had been reading horror stories about how much crap gets caught up in your intestines, and how some people are carrying around up to 30 extra pounds of cement-hard waste. Apparently, the longer the poo sits in your system, the dryer and harder it gets, and it can become stuck to your intestinal walls and sit in there for years. Years! I started having problems in 11th grade. Was it possible that there might be 10 years of crusty poo wedged into my large intestine? Obviously I needed to cleanse myself. And after watching a segment of Jackass in which Johnny Knoxville goes for a colon cleansing (while wearing a Santa suit), I decided that the 48-Hour Super Charged Cleanse would cause me less anxiety and psychological scarring.
Of course, there are homemade cleanses that you can make yourself, which primarily consist of a mixture of water, honey, lemon, and cayenne pepper, but since none of that offers any fiber, you have to chug liters of a saline solution in order to force yourself to poop. It sounded horrifying. So I opted to buy the more expensive pre-made solution with built-in poop inducers.
This particular cleanse (the David Kirsch/Anne Hathaway one) consists of four ounces of a lemonade-like solution mixed with four ounces of water four times a day. You're allowed to supplement the cleanse with as much water or unsweetened decaffinated herbal tea as you want. Everything else is off limits. The website states that if you're chewing, you're cheating. Ok, fine. The bottle of the cleanse solution is 30 bucks, and they recommend you add a 30-day pack of their probiotic supplements to help get your digestive system back on track when you finish the cleanse. I thought, 'What's another 20 bucks in the whole scheme of things?', and added a pack of them to my online shopping bag as well. Please don't judge me.
After a couple of days, my poison arrived via Fed-Ex in a ridiculously oversized cardboard box. I decided to wait until the weekend to do my cleanse. Didn't want to fall out in the middle of Tuesday-night Zumba. Luckily I had the following weekend completely free and so I drank my first glass of watered-down lemonade on Saturday morning. Up until about 8:00pm that night, all was going well, if not a little boring. Then I started to get a headache. My stomach had been growling since breakfast, but it was easy enough to ignore, especially with the Sex and the City box set diverting my attention for hours. But nobody can enjoy television with a headache. And I wasn't sure if I was allowed to take an aspirin. I had read that a headache is a normal part of a cleanse or fast, and I was kinda expecting it. But when it came, I got mad. I felt terrible all over my body, I had been miserably hiding out in my room to keep away from all foody temptations for over 10 hours, and the headache was the last straw. So to get back at David Kirsch, I ate an entire bag of chocolate-covered almonds. And that was that. Cleanse was over. I dumped the rest of the "lemonade" down the drain, threw the plastic bottle into the recycling, started cramming every edible thing in the kitchen down my throat, and eventually found myself back where I started: hours of fun constipation. Thanks a lot, David Kirsch.
Looking back, I'm a little disappointed in myself that I didn't even make it a whole day. Who knows how light and floaty I could have gotten if I'd done all 48 hours correctly? Oh well, it was an expensive lesson learned the hard way: Even respectable young starlets with enormous gobs can unwittingly lead you down a bad road. I don't blame Anne in the least. She probably had no idea that her indirect endorsement of a wackadoodle "miracle" product would lead to my food binge. She remains firmly rooted onto her pedestal. Plus, she probably hires people to stand around her with flyswatters and whack at her fingers when she reaches for the Pringles can. At least, if I had her money, that's what I'd do.
The upside to all this: I started taking the probiotic supplements soon after and quickly realized that my three-times-a-week was turning into three-times-a-day. Since I've had a lifelong pathological fear of pooping, at first this was very distressing. I soon came to realize, however, that a good poop can take a bad digestive day and upgrade it to at least mediocre. And until I grow enough balls to go have a real colonic, mediocre (in the stomach sense) is plenty good enough for me.
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