Entries from July 2008

A few people apparently read my blog (this always suprises me!) and have asked about the detox diet so I thought I would provide an update now that I've ended week 2.  I'm sure this comes as no surprise, but I've broken the diet several times in the past 2 weeks.  It is surprisingly HARD to keep caffeine, alcohol, sugar, gluten and animal products out of your diet.  Here are a few observations from the experience so far:

1)  Eating out is nearly impossible.  Even trying to be 'good' one night, I ordered take out thai food and it came with egg.  No egg on the menu!  Pad Khee Mao was not meant to be wasted so I ate it anyway.

2)  We had friends in town and went for Italian at Bizzarro.  Aside from a lettuce salad, there were no options in our diet so I opted for a vegetarian pasta dish.  If I was breaking the diet, I may as well have wine, so I drank that too!

3)  I try to consider myself vegan when I eat out, but that doesn't always work.  Traditional soy sauce has gluten so I know I've broken the diet a few times on this alone.  It's shocking how certain restaurants are so vegan unfriendly.  But props to Cafe Venus.  They make an awesome tofu scramble and even offer vegan bread.  (unfortunately that has gluten-see, this isn't easy!)

4)  I must confess to having wine (a lot) at Lily's birthday party.  I got into the Lay's potato chips and you know, they ARE on the diet.  Just potatoes, vegetable oil and salt.  Personally, I think they shold be marketed as 'natural'.  Even Michael Pollen would approve - he recommends no more than 5 ingredients in his book 'In Defense of Food'.

5)  That same night I got into a cupcake.  Wow - it was good!  After eating very little fat and no sugar for almost 2 weeks, it tasted really good.

6)  The only diet 'rule' I haven't broken is caffeine.  That was hard the first few days, but not a problem at all now.  I'm not sure if I'll go back after this week.

7)  Even with some minor rule breaking, I have a lot more energy and feel much better eating all the fruits and veggies so I'm going to try to relax the diet and stick to some of the principles even after the end of this week.  I've cut out much of the 'crap' in my diet so I'm hoping my pants get a little looser too!

I went for a facial at Gene Juarez last week and the aesthetician recommended trying a detox diet.  She said I would be shocked by how much it would clear up my skin so I figured I'd try one.  I did a little research on the web and ran across Oprah's 21 day cleanse.  It seemed simple and not one of those crazy plans where you just drink liquid.  I just needed to eliminate caffeine, alcohol, animal products, sugar and gluten for 21 days.

Well, it's day 3 and the whole thing has been eye opening already.  Richard agreed to try this with me so we went shopping at whole foods the night before we started.  It's shocking how hidden ingredients like sugar and gluten are in food.  'You mean I can't have ketchup w/ my potatoes'? Richard asked in shock.  'No, honey, sugar.'  We did find sugar free ketchup which isn't quite the same but it does taste like real tomatoes.

So far the hardest part has been giving up caffeine.  I really am going through withdrawl in the mornings, with the headache to prove it.  Our vegan dinners have been amazingly good and this has been a great opportunity for us to use our CSA farm produce share and take advantage of all the fresh fruits and veggies available in Seattle in the summer.  I faced my first real challenge eating lunch out today.  There was probably palm sugar or something in my curried rice noodles but I did the best I could.  Tomorrow I'll face an even tougher challenge as we're having Confab at our place and it usually involves wine.  We'll see how long this lasts...

Richard and I just returned from a weekend in Portland where our goal was to visit wineries until we found a spot for our wedding.  Fortunately, stop #1 proved to be the perfect place so we saved some gas money and our livers from wine tasting.  We signed the contract on Saturday night and got to enjoy the rest of the weekend in Portland.  We picked out our wedding bands at Margulis, purchased some Himalyan salt blocks at The Meadow and enjoyed a run on the Leif Erickson trail. 

Today is our 1 year and 2 month pre-wedding anniversary!  The date has been set for 9-6-09.

I really wanted to like this race.  A few years ago I paced the second half of the marathon and felt bad for those who ran the whole thing.  There were a lot of hills and even one within the last half mile.  I remember commenting on the course just before a guy behind us threw up.

This year the course had been altered to run across 520 and a few of us were jazzed about that.  From the elevation map, the east rise of 520 looked to be the longest hill so I thought they finally had a winner of a course. I was dead WRONG.  Apparently there are some pretty nasty hills in Bellevue (I run up Kamber once a week and these are much worse) and I faced them starting in mile 6.

The day (June 29, 2008) was exceptionally warm.  I don't fault the organizers for that but because of their poor planning, the race start was delayed at least 15 minutes.   Those 15 minutes matter as the sun is beating down and warming up the asphalt.  The problem was clearly the logistics of transporting people from the finish line in Bellevue to Seattle.  I'm not sure if transporting family had anything to do with that, but I really can't believe the race committee allowed family on the busses when they had no prior experience with transporting people.  I anticipated this would be a problem and arranged for my own transportation. (Thanks Richard!)  There were athletes late to the start and some missed the start.  The race committee offered to donate half the money for those who missed the start to a local charity, which I find offensive. They (the race committee) should refund the athletes who missed their race as a result instead of just donating money for them.

As if it couldn't get much worse than warm weather and a hilly course, the water stops were a mess.  Several of them were not prepared for the crowd and I hear one even ran out of cups.  I know preparing for the rush of people is difficult and the day was hot, but I think better planning and preparation could go into training the volunteers.  I do thank the volunteers who were there since I know it's not easy!

My last complaint (and I swear I'm done!) is that the event was planned to conflict with the Shore Run, an annual event with a history much longer than the Seafair marathon.  Next year, I'm running the shore run!