Travel With Mel

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!