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...