truth in advertising

the smiling lady
on the box of "Two Week Cleanse"
is a crock of sh-t.

I know what you're thinking! MamaKu used a bad word?!? How crude! How awful! How ...

Accurate.

Call it whatever non-expletive you choose - "Number Two," "BM, or (my personal favorite) "The Poopies," - my life is all about it these days, and my friend Caro is to blame.

Caro, who is older than I am but looks about a decade younger, occasionally does this fourteen-day nutritonal "program" and swears it makes her more alert, energetic, and all-around better than she felt previously. Since Caro is the perkiest person I know, this is saying a lot.

Anyway, between lots going on at work and home, I've been eating poorly, not exercising much, and sleeping even less. (Night being the best time to worry about pointless things.) I've got bags under my eyes big enough to carry an iPad in ... if I had an iPad. (I don't. But I wish I did. I thought I might win one in this contest on Facebook, but that turned out to be a hoax. But see what I mean? My mind is all over the place these days. I can't stay focused AT ALL.)

I tried drinking more coffee to stay alert, but all that did was give me the jitters. So dear Caro took one look at my sorry-old, baggy-eyed, shaky-handed self last week and said "Why don't you try 'The Cleanse?'" and directed me to the nutritionist who sells this stuff to women like me. He was nice enough, and had lots of degrees on his wall, and the plants in his zen-like waiting room were real and looked well-cared-for, so I thought "Why not?" and went home with a Spartan diet and a box containing four different bottles of pills made from various herbs and spices and complex instructions to take a certain number of certain pills at certain times of the day with plenty of water and (best of all) one glass of red wine every night.

(It was the wine that sold me, I think.)

The box that "The Cleanse" comes in looks promising enough. There is a picture on it of a happy, smiling woman with lustrous hair and glowing skin. Ostensibly this hair, skin, and overall aura of joy and contentment are the result her following all the instructions to a "T," so I followed suit. For the past three days, I have been popping little herbal pills and drinking lots of water and following my diet and enjoying my glass of wine every night and, truth be told, I actually feel pretty good.

Except for one thing. And I'm sure you've guessed what it is.

That lovely woman on "The Cleanse" box is only pictured from the waist up, and I'm reasonably certain that that, my friends, is because her other half is permanently parked on the potty. "The Cleanse," it turns out, is basically a full-on flushing of the gastro-intenstinal system that leaves users themselves flushing all day long. I won't go into the gory details, but I will say that my commute to and from work has become literally a race against time. I have harkened back to the days when my children were transitioning out of diapers, when I knew the exact location of every (clean) toilet along the routes of our daily routine.

I am "cleansing," all right.

Going back and re-reading the euphemistic fine print on the box-with-the-smiling-lady, I guess I should have been prepared for this. They do warn you, in oblique terms, what is about to happen. I guess I just didn't expect it to happen quite so ... ah ... powerfully. Y'know? Who ever has such high expectations for their own colon? I sure didn't.

So there you have it. Truth in advertising. A smile on the face and your tush on the toilet. Yin and Yang. Balance? I'm not sure. I actually do feel much better these days, and my system seems to be adjusting to and appreciating all the TLC I am offering up. I slept (almost) all the way through the night last night. (The cat jumped on my head at 3 am, but I was able to go back to sleep, which would not have happened last week.)

I've been productive at work, and nicer to my family.

I'm going to stick with "The Cleanse," and see what happens. Wish me luck, though.

I might need it.