Tim Robbins says going two weeks without solid food while on the master cleanse diet was a reset to his health.
The 67-year-old actor revealed on a new episode of podcast The Joe Rogan Experience that he performs a 14-day master cleanse a couple of times a year, consuming nothing but a mixture of lemon juice, cayenne pepper, and maple syrup.
Beyoncé famously did the master cleanse diet while preparing to play Deena in the 2006 adaptation of Dreamgirls.
"I just did 14 days where you don't eat a thing for 14 days, and it's amazing how great you feel at the end of it," The Shawshank Redemption star said around the two-hour mark of the video below.
“It's lemon juice, cayenne pepper, and maple syrup, and that'll get you through the day,” Robbins continued. “But every morning you're doing a purge. So you're cleaning all the poisons out. I do that a couple times a year.”
By the time the two weeks were up, Robbins had shed roughly 25 pounds, losing close to two pounds a day.
“There's no highs and lows like crashing after a big meal or caffeine bumps,” he said. “But [you’re] staying up until midnight. The energy’s fine and you’ll sleep less, too.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Robbins recalled his late mother, Mary Robbins, removing processed food from the family's diet in the late 1960s after reading a book called The Poisons in Our Food. After being diagnosed with cancer, Mary, who died in 2011 at 78 years old, declined chemotherapy but changed her diet instead.
“I've always had her as a kind of guidepost for my health,” Robbins explained. “She used to always say that ‘the body is a temple’ and that the body can heal anything."
