I am not a vegan… and not a vegetarian. I don’t have any strange eating habits .

But I have been a milk drinking, cheese eating dairy lover since I was a small child. I grew up drinking milk every single day in my breakfast cereal and as a snack after school and the drink served with dinner.

A while ago I cut out most of my milk drinking and replaced it with Soy milk. Of course now I am told that soy milk MIGHT be bad… mostly it’s one famous doctor who says soy milk is bad, and even though I have not seen any concrete evidence, the anti-soymilk campaign moves onward. That’s okay, because Almond milk tastes great and so does Oat milk… but I’m sure someone is already writing me an email to tell me the evils of these milks also.

*UPDATE:  I am watching my carbs, so I now drink unsweetened Almond Milk.  It’s yummy.

WARNING: 

What I want to tell you is shocking…

I had no idea. Honestly. And I like to think that I am “in the know” about a lot of things.

Yes… I did know that dairy is loaded with fat and cholesterol. That is why I limited my intake of it, reasonably.

About a week ago my wife said she had been talking to a friend of her’s and that the two of them had decided to go a week off of dairy. They wanted to know if I would join them.

She had some printed pages that touted all the health benefits, but without a moment’s hesitation, I agreed to join them.

I grabbed the best dairy free cookbook I could find. (I needed the recipes to be easy to make, and Danielle Walker did just that)  and I was ready to begin.  Of course I ate a good deal of dairy on the weekend leading up to the Monday we began the 7 days of no dairy.

I wondered how great would I feel after a week of no dairy? Or perhaps nothing would seem different and 8 days later I would be enjoying a piece of cheese.

Mmmmm  Cheese….

BOY WAS I WRONG

Giving up dairy was about as hard as I expected for the first couple of days. By the end of day two I was feeling pretty ill, which is out of the norm for me. Honestly, ever since I flipped my life upside down with the law of attraction I have become a high energy and healthy kind of guy.  The kind of guy who always feels great.

Day three, instead of rolling out of bed with enthusiasm and excitement for the day ahead, I woke up feeling more tired than I was when I went to bed.

In fact, I felt groggy and brain foggy all day.

I’ll skip the day-to-day play-by-play, and tell you that for seven days straight I have felt terrible, in different ways. I can’t concentrate… I am experiencing headaches, which is something I never have.

I don’t have the deep down energy, and I tire easily. My stomach is bloated and I am retaining water.

My skin has broken out in three different kinds of rashes in three different places on my body. In general I am itchy… and honestly I am cranky. Strange emotions are coming up… anxiety and anger, which I have not felt in many… many years.

I am even late on the 11 cent sale I promised all of you…. because of this brain fog and lack of energy.

Long story short, going off dairy cold turkey causes the body to go into a detox. When I search online I find claims that going off dairy for one week will cause an entire gallon of mucus to exit your body. Obviously, things are not always pretty.

Today it is 10 days later, and I don’t have any desire to go back. Food tastes great without dairy. It seems that at the 10 day mark, for me at least, the cravings have mostly subsided.

Check out the HUGE list of Dairy Free Foods on Amazon.  It’s crazy.

Seriously….

My body never went through this kind of hell when I quit smoking. Sure, I have cravings… and it was difficult… but I didn’t get bad breath, skin rashes, headaches, lack of energy, bloating, water retention, and a host of other not-so-pleasant physical problems.

The only craving I have is for cheese. I LOVED CHEESE. Now I know why…

THIS IS GOING TO BLOW YOU AWAY

Cheese is actually physically addictive… no kidding. I must have missed the Surgeon Generals Warning label on the block of cheese.

YOU WONT BELIEVE WHAT DRUG IS INSIDE CHEESE!!!

Check this out:

So here is an excerpt from an article in the Orlando Sentinel July 13 2003:

Of all the potentially addicting foods, cheese may be the most complex. In research studies using vegan and vegetarian diets to control cholesterol or reduce body weight, most participants soon forget the lure of ice cream, sour cream, and even burgers and chicken. But for many people, the taste for cheese lingers on and on. Yes, 70 percent of its calories may come from waist-augmenting fat, and, ounce for ounce, it may harbor more cholesterol than a steak. But that cheese habit is tough to break.Why is cheese so addicting? Certainly not because of its aroma, which is perilously close to old socks. The first hint of a biochemical explanation came in 1981, when scientists at Wellcome Research Laboratories in Research Triangle Park, N.C., found a substance in dairy products that looked remarkably like morphine. After a complex series of tests, they determined that, surprisingly enough, it actually was morphine. By a fluke of nature, the enzymes that produce opiates are not confined to poppies — they also hide inside cows’ livers. So traces of morphine can pass into the animal’s bloodstream and end up in milk and milk products. The amounts are far too small to explain cheese’s appeal. But nonetheless, the discovery led scientists on their search for opiate compounds in dairy products.

And they found them. Opiates hide inside casein, the main dairy protein. As casein molecules are digested, they break apart to release tiny opiate molecules, called casomorphins. One of these compounds has about one-tenth the opiate strength of morphine. The especially addicting power of cheese may be due to the fact that the process of cheese-making removes water,lactose and whey proteins so that casein is concentrated. Scientists are now trying to tease out whether these opiate molecules work strictly within the digestive tract or whether they pass into the bloodstream and reach the brain directly.

(some paragraphs about chocolate addiction snipped)

The cheese industry is miles ahead of them, having gone to great lengths to identify people who are most vulnerable to addiction. It dubs them “cheese cravers,” and tracks their age, educational level and other demographics so as to target them with marketing strategies that are tough to ignore. With a $200 million annual research and marketing budget, the dairy industry is not content to have you just sprinkling a little mozzarella on your salad. It is looking for those Americans who will eat it straight out of the package, whatever the cost to their waistlines or cholesterol levels.

At a “Cheese Forum” held Dec. 5, 2000, Dick Cooper, the vice president of Cheese Marketing for Dairy Management Inc., laid out the industry’s scheme for identifying potential addicts and keeping them hooked. In his slide presentation, which was released to our organization under the Freedom of Information Act, he asked the question, “What do we want our marketing program to do?” and then gave the answer: “Trigger the cheese craving.” He described how, in a partnership with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the dairy industry launched Wendy’s Cheddar Lover’s Bacon Cheeseburger, which single-handedly pushed 2.25 million pounds of cheese during the promotion period. That works out to 380 tons of fat and 1.2 tons of pure cholesterol in the cheese alone. A similar promotion with Pizza Hut launched the “Ultimate Cheese Pizza,” which added an entire pound of cheese to a single pizza and sold five million pounds of it during a six-week promotion in 2000. The presentation concluded with a cartoon of a playground slide with a large spider web woven to trap children as they reached the bottom. The caption had one spider saying to another, “If we pull this off, we’ll eat like kings.”

I am sharing this with you because I care. I wish someone had told me how harsh detoxing could be.

I wish someone had told me how addictive Cheese can be.  Or even mentioned the morphine compound found inside.

I’m the kind of guy who turns down pain pills, even after a surgery…

I never knew I was ingesting Morphine with my cheese and crackers.

So if you decide to clean your body up… and want to cleanse yourself without all the horrible side-effects that I have had… you really need to READ THIS NOW.

Overwhelmingly I support the Master Cleanser if you want to purify your body.  (It’s just three bucks too!)

Me… I just made a split second decision to join my wife and her friend…  I decided to make myself the subject of an experiment if you will…

For those of you wondering about my wife and her friend. YES… they had a rough ride also, including migraine headaches (much worse than mine), irritability, skin breakouts (body acne), and emotional instability (although don’t tell my wife I pointed that out… at least not until she is over the detoxing)

And that is what they cared to share… most people are not as forthcoming with their dirty details like I am. What can I say… I try to live my life like an open book… for all to see, observe and hopefully learn from my mistakes.

Oh yes… there has been a positive thing about this diary detox so far…. I have lost 5 pounds even though I feel like I am eating more than usual, and my wife has lost 4 pounds.. her friend didn’t offer up any weight related conversation.

SO… if you want to go off dairy please don’t let this scare you. Instead, just do it slowly. If I had known then what I know now, I would have simply cut my intake of dairy items down over a 2 – 3 week period and went off it slowly.

Knowing what I know now… I just can’t bring myself to ingest anything dairy.

Wishing you the best day,