Gallbladder Cleanse
I struggle with a lot of digestive issues. I’m allergic to diary (yes, I have tried lactaid) and my body hates gluten, sugar, and fried foods – so pretty much anything that would be at the Minnesota State Fair. A year ago, I did an intense six week cleanse with a strict diet and natural medicines that got it in really good shape, but unfortunately, things gradually shifted back and now I’m experiencing digestive pain again. The past couple weeks, I had been feeling pretty crappy. I was nauseous and feverish for no reason, and just felt all around awful. I went to my natural health doctor- Dr. Chris Lilja – and he recommended cleansing again. There’s no way in heck I would ever do that six week cleanse again- it was hell – so he suggested trying out a few smaller things. The first of which was a gallbladder cleanse, and let me tell you, it an experience.
Your Gallbladder helps store bile from the liver and breaks down fats during the digestion process. Sometimes, the bile can crystalize leaving small gallstones, so this cleanse is designed to help clean out gallstones and get the gallbladder happy again.
The cleanse technically lasts one evening. To prepare for it, we both stopped eating at noon and stopped drinking liquids at 6pm. At seven pm, the cleanse started. For the next several hours, we had a pattern. Drink a quarter cup of olive oil, chase it with a tablespoon of fresh lemon juice, then lay down on our right sides. Every fifteen minutes, the pattern repeated. The alarm would go off. We would cheers our coffee mugs of olive oil, chase it with lemon juice then lay down. This happened for the next several hours until we had each consumed one pint of olive oil. It was disgusting.
At first, the olive oil wasn’t so bad. I plugged my nose for a few and it just tasted like some creamy liquid. What was bad was the lemon juice. It was so tart and it would burn. Towards the end, I could barely keep it down. The best is when we both started burping – it felt heavy, like we were going to throw up, then it would burn worse than any acid reflux ever.
The directions then said to try and get some sleep, so we both took some melatonin and passed out. We were up and down all night, especially me. The cleans stated that around 2-3 am, we would most likely wake up with, “unmistakeable urge to use the toilet.” This didn’t happen to us until far far later, but for the night, we just did our best to sleep on our right sides and get some rest.
Now before you think we were silly to do this when we both had to work the next day, several people that completed this cleanse assured me we would be fine and it wasn’t that bad, so the next morning we rolled out of bed, of course feeling awful, and started our days.
My husband went to work, and I had several meetings and a photo shoot. It wasn’t long after I woke up that the urge came over me, and to put it delicately, I had to cancel everything except the photo shoot since most of my time was occupied in the restroom. The cleanse states “You may notice excrement in the toilet bowl that may look like small gall stones (or small pebbles), or be a sandy or greenish color. A greenish liquid or sludge-like excretion may also come out with your bowel movement,” and let’s just say the cleanse was right on.
My husband came home from work around noon and slept most of the day. He said he felt like he had the worst hangover in the world, like he just did a week in Vegas. We both tried to eat, but felt too sick. It was the worst start to a weekend ever, but at least we were in it together.
The great news is that Saturday we both woke up feeling very chipper, and my gallbladder feels much better than it did. There is a way to test for it, and let me tell you, this cleanse worked. If it hadn’t, I would have been pretty sad to go through all the things I went through.
If you are considering a gallbladder cleanse, even after reading this, PLEASE CONSULT YOUR NATURAL HEALTH DOCTOR. This was an incredibly intense experience, and I’m not sure I would do it again, but I’m on a path with some other natural medications and will keep you all posted.
It’s funny how we take our health for granted. This cleanse definitely reminded me of how lucky I am to wake up most of my days feeling good.
I post personal things about my life on this blog once a week. They usually aren’t that graphic, but I want you to get to know me and more importantly, I want to get to know you. Drop me a line at angeladivinephotography@gmail.com if you want to chat about life and gallbladders.