The Coated Tongue

An oft-repeated mantra in the cleanse is “cleanse until the coating’s gone.” That is, the white mucus-y coating that will develop on your tongue, causing foul breath and a ‘less than fresh’ feeling. Some people have a slight one normally, but this gets more intense during the cleanse, then reduces until the day when you have the tongue of a newborn babe, according to the book and personal accounts online.

One cause of the coating could be dehydration, as noted here: < http://www.wrongdiagnosis.com/sym/white_tongue.htm > though everyone should be incorporating enough pure water (w/o salt or lemons) to combat this. It could also be Oral Thrush or the result of a weakened immune system, but their descriptions point to a long-term ailment that shouldn’t be brought on by the cleanse.

Here is one cleanse tongue blog page: < http://colorsonmymind.blogspot.com/2007/04/self-portrait-challenge-master-cleanse.html > to give you a picture, and some more insight. My tongue was not blotchy like this, and had at the 8-day point started to clear more evenly. I was also brushing my tongue daily. This didn’t remove the coating entirely, but if I hadn’t it would have been layered with gunk. Ew.

Something else to note is the color of the coating. I read one woman’s blog, and her tongue was brown for part of the cleanse. I don’t think I could have done it. As I was researching the tongue coating, I did come across a Chinese medicinal site with a tongue coating survey. Yes, indeed, a survey, complete with diagnosis based on your tongue coatings, spots, veins, and colors. Though I am not standing behind the validity of this survey, it is an interesting one. My diagnosis? A-ok. Check it if you want: < http://beyondwellbeing.com/herbs/tongue-diagnosis.shtml >

My boyfriend spoke with a nutritionist about the tongue coating, and she felt it was not necessarily a sympotom of removing toxins, and regardless of when one chooses to finish the cleanse, their tongue would clear back up after eating normally. I'm not about to challenge that, though I will note for the readers that she drinks a glass of the cleanse juice every morning for breakfast and thinks it's a good way of cleansing the body year-round.