I clearly have Doctor Who on the brain after watching this season’s opener. Love that show.

So… about that cleanse.

I spent the evening bouncing back and forth between believing it was the right decision to stop the cleanse and feeling like a  failure for choosing to give up.

In the end, I think I made the right decision for two specific reasons. #1 – I didn’t just feel off or funky or weird, I felt downright ill. I felt flu-like and weak, and I can’t get my head around how that could be a good/healthy thing, when it seems like everything in my body was telling me there was a problem. #2 – (and this was the big reason) it occurred to me suddenly that there was NO WAY I’d be able to get through tomorrow morning’s run on this kind of fuel. No way. Tomorrow morning begins week 8 of C25K, and there is not a chance that I’m going to risk not completing that run.

So I’m done with the cleanse for sure, but in even the short amount of time I did it I came away with a few lessons.

• There are a TON of ways I can and should be incorporating vegetables into my diet at every meal
• Sweets and I are still an issue, and one that I would like to break
• I don’t like the way I feel when I am constantly, second-by-second thinking about food. I’m much happier when I can relax with food.

I will be adding a lot more produce into my diet, and just sticking with my overall plan to clean up my food with simpler ingredients and less processing. In the end, even a one week switch to less processed, more simply made, shorter ingredient list foods is what finally knocked me out of a plateau that’s been going strong for months.

Have you ever done a cleanse? Did it work for you?