Since Thursday evening's events I have been doing a lot of thinking.
I cannot, on my budget, make my smoothie detox work. A suggestion was made to me that evening that I try a raw food detox, particularly Natalia Rose's Raw Food Detox Diet. This was luckily one of the many books which I had purchased when I began to further my education of nutrition but had yet to read.
I pulled it off of the shelf and started reading. There are 5 steps in the detoxification process, as outlined my Ms. Rose, and Thursday evening I read the intro and step 1. At this point I was in agreement with much of what she had to say and was on board to try this detox starting Saturday morning.
Friday morning I had ingredients to make one more smoothie batch & had planned on grocery shopping after I finished work so I could get materials for supper & the weekend. This smoothie was supposed to make 2 quarts but only made 20 oz!! This isn't even enough for lunch - I couldn't squeeze breakfast out of this too.
It was then that I decided to suck it up. I had a bowl of steel-cut oatmeal and took the smoothie with me for lunch (as well as 8 oz of a smoothie which I had leftover from a small supplemental smoothie I made the night before.)
**This next section is quite candid, please do not read if you do not want to know too much information.**
As this is a learning process for me & perhaps many of you who are going to embark on such a journey I am going to be utterly honest about how this food reacted with my body.
I have eaten this oatmeal many times before I started my cleanse and have never had problems. But after 4 days of nothing but pureed fruits & greens my body was not prepared for what then entered. Oatmeal is quite heavy and I felt weighed down all morning. My stomach felt agitated and by noon, my bowels were in disagreement.
I have not had a BM since Monday morning & now my body clearly wanted to pass this oatmeal through. After agitation all day I had my first BM Friday afternoon. I had not been in discomfort at all this week by not having a BM, rather my body had no need to pass anything as the smoothies become mostly juices after blending. "Real food" seemed to be the issue and my body is going to need to become accustomed to processing this once again.
*** You queasy folks may pick up reading again.***
During work on Friday I had time to finish reading The Raw Food Detox Diet. Please do not get the impression that I am not doing my job - Friday was an exception, to say the least, to what is normally a rather crazy and busy schedule.
About the book:
What I read in this book was an extreme view of how to eat and care for one's body.
Part 2 covers "quick exit combinations" which teach how we should eat food in order of how quickly it exits our body and tells us that we should never combine starches, animal products, nuts/seeds/dried fruits, & fresh fruits in the same meal - or even within 3 hours of each other. And most importantly we are never to eat fruit unless we have a completely empty stomach.
Part 3 was still extreme.
Part 4 was the doozy! Ms. Rose discusses a crucial part of detoxification - "taking out the garbage." This, I simply could not get behind. She suggests everything from colonic hydration (look it up), enemas, brushing our skin, bouncing on trampolines, standing on our head, and sweating as means of ridding our body of toxins.
Can you imagine how my life would appear:
friend: "Hey, do you want to catch a movie in an hour?"
me: "I would love to, but I am in the middle of brushing off some toxins & I am scheduled for my monthly colonic in 45 minutes."
friend: "Well, why don't we just catch a show later?"
me: "I don't know. I haven't had any time to jump on my trampoline yet today & I still need to spend some time inverted. Do you think the movie would be the same if I were upside-down?"
Folks, this is really where the woman lost me. She is not the first to suggest cleaning the colon as part of the detoxification process - in fact, many others suggest this, or even consider it necessary. However, I cannot bring myself to administer an enema or even worse, to allow someone to give me a colonic!
So, I did finish reading the book (which includes recipes & a weekly meal plan for 5 different levels of preparedness.) I was ready to try to do the detox, without bowel cleansing, until I read the meals.
Did I mention that I was a picky eater? The pickiest!
By the end of the afternoon I had given up. I feel confident that I gave my body 72+ hours of reprieve from processed foods & I still haven't had animal products since March 1st. I was ready to enter a normal lifestyle where I was simply a vegan without any crazy detox plans.
This is the point where I may have gone overboard. I have very little self-control when I comes to food. I am the type of person who goes out and buys a bag of chips but eats them in 2 days, instead of throughout the week. Or who buys some healthy almonds to save for little snacks between meals but ends up consuming them in one sitting in front of the TV. So, when I got home from work I dove right into some hummus which I had made last Saturday & enjoyed it with some red bell peppers - this was a nice snack.
But then I realized that I didn't have anything for supper. I didn't want to look through recipe books & didn't want to go shopping. I needed instant gratification & I was craving Mexican food.
So, that's what I did.
I did enjoy dinner, a veggie bean burrito sans cheese. It was great! But this was a little too much for my stomach to take on after 4 days of cleansing. My stomach ached.
This morning I had oatmeal. My stomach aches again.
One thing that Natalia Rose may have had right in her book was a suggestion to only eat fresh fruit in the morning. Fruit passes through the body quickly, is good for you, filled with water, & most of all - it's light. She suggests that we work gradually throughout the day putting heavier foods in as we go along. This seems like a good suggestion (or at least my stomach thinks so right now.) Perhaps it is just me coming off of the cleanse & having difficulties processing "regular" foods - but I think it might be something I try.
I have considered keeping up with the smoothies for lunch/mid-day meals but Ms. Rose warns us about combining fruit with any other items in our stomach because it ferments. You will have to read the book to understand fully. And now she has me worried about combining the fruits with greens in my smoothies.
This entire process is about learning & trying new things and I am well on my way.
I cannot, on my budget, make my smoothie detox work. A suggestion was made to me that evening that I try a raw food detox, particularly Natalia Rose's Raw Food Detox Diet. This was luckily one of the many books which I had purchased when I began to further my education of nutrition but had yet to read.
I pulled it off of the shelf and started reading. There are 5 steps in the detoxification process, as outlined my Ms. Rose, and Thursday evening I read the intro and step 1. At this point I was in agreement with much of what she had to say and was on board to try this detox starting Saturday morning.
Friday morning I had ingredients to make one more smoothie batch & had planned on grocery shopping after I finished work so I could get materials for supper & the weekend. This smoothie was supposed to make 2 quarts but only made 20 oz!! This isn't even enough for lunch - I couldn't squeeze breakfast out of this too.
It was then that I decided to suck it up. I had a bowl of steel-cut oatmeal and took the smoothie with me for lunch (as well as 8 oz of a smoothie which I had leftover from a small supplemental smoothie I made the night before.)
**This next section is quite candid, please do not read if you do not want to know too much information.**
As this is a learning process for me & perhaps many of you who are going to embark on such a journey I am going to be utterly honest about how this food reacted with my body.
I have eaten this oatmeal many times before I started my cleanse and have never had problems. But after 4 days of nothing but pureed fruits & greens my body was not prepared for what then entered. Oatmeal is quite heavy and I felt weighed down all morning. My stomach felt agitated and by noon, my bowels were in disagreement.
I have not had a BM since Monday morning & now my body clearly wanted to pass this oatmeal through. After agitation all day I had my first BM Friday afternoon. I had not been in discomfort at all this week by not having a BM, rather my body had no need to pass anything as the smoothies become mostly juices after blending. "Real food" seemed to be the issue and my body is going to need to become accustomed to processing this once again.
*** You queasy folks may pick up reading again.***
During work on Friday I had time to finish reading The Raw Food Detox Diet. Please do not get the impression that I am not doing my job - Friday was an exception, to say the least, to what is normally a rather crazy and busy schedule.
About the book:
What I read in this book was an extreme view of how to eat and care for one's body.
Part 2 covers "quick exit combinations" which teach how we should eat food in order of how quickly it exits our body and tells us that we should never combine starches, animal products, nuts/seeds/dried fruits, & fresh fruits in the same meal - or even within 3 hours of each other. And most importantly we are never to eat fruit unless we have a completely empty stomach.
Part 3 was still extreme.
Part 4 was the doozy! Ms. Rose discusses a crucial part of detoxification - "taking out the garbage." This, I simply could not get behind. She suggests everything from colonic hydration (look it up), enemas, brushing our skin, bouncing on trampolines, standing on our head, and sweating as means of ridding our body of toxins.
Can you imagine how my life would appear:
friend: "Hey, do you want to catch a movie in an hour?"
me: "I would love to, but I am in the middle of brushing off some toxins & I am scheduled for my monthly colonic in 45 minutes."
friend: "Well, why don't we just catch a show later?"
me: "I don't know. I haven't had any time to jump on my trampoline yet today & I still need to spend some time inverted. Do you think the movie would be the same if I were upside-down?"
Folks, this is really where the woman lost me. She is not the first to suggest cleaning the colon as part of the detoxification process - in fact, many others suggest this, or even consider it necessary. However, I cannot bring myself to administer an enema or even worse, to allow someone to give me a colonic!
So, I did finish reading the book (which includes recipes & a weekly meal plan for 5 different levels of preparedness.) I was ready to try to do the detox, without bowel cleansing, until I read the meals.
Did I mention that I was a picky eater? The pickiest!
By the end of the afternoon I had given up. I feel confident that I gave my body 72+ hours of reprieve from processed foods & I still haven't had animal products since March 1st. I was ready to enter a normal lifestyle where I was simply a vegan without any crazy detox plans.
This is the point where I may have gone overboard. I have very little self-control when I comes to food. I am the type of person who goes out and buys a bag of chips but eats them in 2 days, instead of throughout the week. Or who buys some healthy almonds to save for little snacks between meals but ends up consuming them in one sitting in front of the TV. So, when I got home from work I dove right into some hummus which I had made last Saturday & enjoyed it with some red bell peppers - this was a nice snack.
But then I realized that I didn't have anything for supper. I didn't want to look through recipe books & didn't want to go shopping. I needed instant gratification & I was craving Mexican food.
So, that's what I did.
I did enjoy dinner, a veggie bean burrito sans cheese. It was great! But this was a little too much for my stomach to take on after 4 days of cleansing. My stomach ached.
This morning I had oatmeal. My stomach aches again.
One thing that Natalia Rose may have had right in her book was a suggestion to only eat fresh fruit in the morning. Fruit passes through the body quickly, is good for you, filled with water, & most of all - it's light. She suggests that we work gradually throughout the day putting heavier foods in as we go along. This seems like a good suggestion (or at least my stomach thinks so right now.) Perhaps it is just me coming off of the cleanse & having difficulties processing "regular" foods - but I think it might be something I try.
I have considered keeping up with the smoothies for lunch/mid-day meals but Ms. Rose warns us about combining fruit with any other items in our stomach because it ferments. You will have to read the book to understand fully. And now she has me worried about combining the fruits with greens in my smoothies.
This entire process is about learning & trying new things and I am well on my way.
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