Red Pee

By: Susan Howard

I woke to red pee.

It’s the morning of my first juice cleanse day and I am already peeing red.  I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to last the full three days, so during the pre-cleanse phase not only did I omit coffee, but I did a few trial runs with carrot beet juice.  Thus the pee.  It took me a second to realize it though.  Imagine.

Day One, I am having conversations with myself about food and if I ever really liked it in the first place, all that chewing and digesting, who needs it, so 80’s.  I am hanging on to this mantra like a thin fraying rope.

The bottles are super pretty, and I, like any good American, am a sucker for good packaging.

Juice one tastes good, but is green in color, sort of weird in the am.

Pee two: red as well, plus a poop, normal looking.

I wish I could eat even a cracker.

More juice, more pee.  Pineapple, apple mint juice is a treat that I enjoy at dinner time.

My pee is clear now, the kind of clear that looks like the toilet water.  No yellow at all.

It’s 7:30 pm on Day One and I still have 3 juices left to drink!  I am strangely determined to drink each one and to follow the program as closely as possible.  Instead of little sips, I am aggressively gulping down the final drinks.  One that was really looming: the chlorophyll H2O -a bright green water -actually doesn’t taste like the sea sludge I was expecting; in fact it doesn’t taste like much.

Ya know how when you do something really hard like sprinting up a hill, you don’t realize how hard it is until you stop, then it hits you and immediately you gasp for breath?  That’s what gulping these juices is like.   I can drink them down okay, it’s the aftermath that really gets me.

There is an almond milk juice that is my final one.  I am really looking forward to it.  At least that is something that sounds like something.

The conversations about the lack of necessity food has have ceased.

One last note: I pooped red.  I wonder if the Russians have the same problem. I will have to ask my friend Boris.