Why am I doing this to myself?

I could just say, “It was a health and fitness story idea assigned by my editor,” but it’s more than that. I want to get in touch with a part of my body that – more than most people – I ignore: my colon.

I hate the way society has become so comfortable with excretion. I don’t like talking about number twos. I don’t look at my own number twos. I can barely even read the book title “Everybody Poops” without profound distaste. Basically, I don’t like acknowledging that poop happens, that it even exists. And I guess I want to change that and loosen up a little.

I once sat in on a college psych class where the professor was talking about risk and reward and somehow shoehorned in the sentence “Don’t you just love that feeling when you take a great dump?” To be sure, I don’t want to go that far but I would like to experience some comfort with the ins and outs (mostly outs) of evacuation.

So I’m undergoing what’s known as “The Master Cleanse,” a diet that’s been around for some time and was recently popularized by none other than Beyonce Knowles.

The Master Cleanse involves a daily diet of approximately two liters of a concoction mixing water, lemon juice, maple syrup and cayenne pepper. Apart from more water, that’s all I’ll be allowed to consume for an entire week (although true adherents to the plan stick with it for 10 days). It’s essentially a fast, but the mixture provides some basic vitamins and caloric intake, too. So what’s that got to do with my butt?

Well, as one of the more unpleasant parts of the process, every night I have to drink some herbal laxative tea, to help purify my bowels, and then every morning I have to do what’s call “a salt water flush.” The salt water flush involves drinking a bunch of salt water, which my body will rapidly and perhaps violently expel.

It all sounds horrible, I know, but the weight loss is what I’m in it for, as well as the euphoria they say you experience around day three, along with added knowledge about what I should and shouldn’t be putting in my body, and, of course, a new found friendly familiarity with my backside, and what comes out of it. I’ll share it all with you, dear readers, my new and glorious potty mouth.