Lean and Hard

Thought I'd share this with you, since I'm irritated by the public's gullibility and attraction to fads.

New Republic - 6.21.13 by Judith Shulevitz

I think that people who use cleanses may have had rough anal periods (see Freud, Sigmund).” Cleanses and their cousins, colonics, have about as much medical merit, declared Gershon, as the acts of penance done by monks who’d “walk across Europe and hit themselves on the back to purge themselves of the plague.”

Joe Wilson

One afternoon last month, I made a nervous visit to the office of Ghiora Aharoni, an Israeli sculptor and architect of some renown. The awkward part was that I hadn’t come to interview him about his work. I was there to hear about his gut. He had just finished a 21-day cleanse, the kind with supplements, protein shakes, and endorsements by the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow. (It’s called the Clean Program.)1 I’d been sent to Aharoni, who turned out to be extremely gracious, by a mutual friend, Ruby Namdar, an Israeli novelist whose skeptical intelligence and Falstaffian appetites made him the last person I expected to find on a celebrity diet. Indeed, the day I learned he was on it—over a dinner of baby carrots—Ruby was very hungry and very grumpy and at a loss to explain why he was doing this to himself, other than that Aharoni had talked Ruby into joining him and three other friends in the enterprise.

I wondered, too. What draws sophisticated and healthy people like Aharoni’s friends to commercial quasi-fasts? Cleanses, whether they last a day, a weekend, or three weeks, and whether they consist exclusively of fruit and vegetable juices or just a severe restriction of solids, are quickly becoming a part of what you might call the cosmopolitan diet, consumed in the more urbane sectors of New York and Los Angeles and Austin or wherever you find Whole Foods–levels of gastronomic consciousness and sufficient disposable income. (A three-week supply of Clean Program products costs $425.) Ask around, and you’ll probably find you know someone who knows someone who’s done a cleanse of one kind or another: Blueprint, Life Juice, Master Cleanse,2 Organic Avenue.

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