Day 21, Sunday: In Which Our Heroine Crosses the Finish Line, and Keeps Running

THE FINISH LINE.

Breakfast: Two hardboiled eggs
Lunch: four slices turkey, pesto slathered on them, peppers
Snack 1: Apple with Bernadette's Paleo Fondue
Dinner: At Egan's. Steak with carrots, green beans, and salad
Snack 2: Cheese stick

Breakfast was dull but efficient. I can't recommend the turkey and pesto combo I had for lunch. I was not happy with it. The pesto is better on eggs, and the turkey is better with avocado. Peppers as usual were awesome. Green apple fondue was awesome. I clink an imaginary smoothie glass to Bernadette every time I eat it. Dinner at Egan's was easy and Detox-friendly. Everyone ordered dessert and Chris and I managed to resist. When I got home, I was still hungry, so I had a cheese stick.

On my last day on the Detox, one of my students who I hadn't seen all summer did a double-take and said, "Wow, you look great! Your skin!" I was very surprised and flattered. That's not why I did the Detox, but it's a nice perk! (Generally, the list of stuff I do to look better goes like this: bathe. Apply two-year-old drugstore mascara.) One of the things I notice when I'm eating whatever the hell I want is that I not only gain weight, I get kind of...puffy. I would not be surprised if there is some kind of systemic inflammation from eating sugar.

I finished the day before Labor Day, and I did a lot of thinking about how I felt about the work of this particular Detox, as compared to the one I did in April. In my yoga classes this week, I explored how work can be a degrading chore or uplifting LABOR that enriches our lives and is an expression and enhancement of our innate human dignity. For me, the first Detox was the former and this second one is the latter. The first one felt like a punishment, like something I HAD to do, like I had a serious flaw (inability to function well on the Standard American Diet, or SAD) and I had to compensate for it with strict discipline. This second one feels triumphant and joyful. I've had a blast planning my meals, doing the shopping, cooking, EATING, and writing about the experience for you and for myself. This isn't something that's a chore or a punishment. It's a reward. How lucky am I? In a world of heavily-conflicting dietary advice, I found a way of eating that makes me feel good! In a world of poison (sugar, simple carbohydrates, and advertising for sugar and carbohydrates), I have the discipline and resources to truly nourish myself and my hubby.

Okay, now that I'm done, what am I going to add back in?

Not fruit. It has become clear to me that I really do not do well on fruit. According to Gary Taubes, most modern fruit has been genetically engineered to be much sweeter than the fruit eaten by our early ancestors. I can barely handle the small green apple I eat daily--it tastes really sweet to me and I feel myself teetering on the edge of a crash after I eat it.

Not grains. I don't do well on wheat, corn (witness the corn chip disaster of Day 19), oats, rice, barley, etc. That includes quinoa! Geez, shouldn't quinoa be Detox-friendly? It has a really obscure name, so it must be healthy, right? Not for me.

Not much dairy. I'd like to experiment with raw dairy. I do okay with the occasional dollop of goat yogurt. I seem to be able to handle a small amount of cheese.

The thing I've missed most? Baked potato. My plan is to try a baked potato and see what happens.

But my main plan is to keep eating like this indefinitely. Will I be able to do that? I don't know. However, there are a few factors that make me think that I CAN, in fact, keep eating this way.

1. When I think about eating sugar or grains again, all I can think about is how once I eat them, I'm back on the roller coaster of cravings again. The limits of the Detox have really revealed to me how sick I feel when I eat sugar or grains. Or too much cheese. Or too many cured meats.

2. My husband is really supportive and participates with me. That means that he'll prepare Paleo-type stuff for dinner. And he'll eat Paleo-type stuff when I cook it. This is really important to me because we love to cook, we love to cook TOGETHER, and we try to eat dinner together every night.

3. Over the course of this Detox I've figured out many "hacks" to help me when I'm feeling cravings. Bernadette's fondue is great for sweet cravings. I never even ended up making Paleo Pancakes or Paleo banana bread, but I hear those are fantastic too.

4. I give myself permission to fall off the wagon for any reason I choose, from there not being anything else I can eat at a social engagement, to feeling like I really want a Brown Bonnet from Carvel. The looser I am, the easier it is for me to be disciplined.

Over the course of the Detox, dear Reader, I have tried to share what I was doing without being scoldy or preachy about what anybody else is eating. I do not respond well to scoldy preachiness myself. I can't stand those FaceBook memes with sanctimonious advice for living superimposed over a picture of a 20-year-old dancer in a bikini putting her leg behind her head. Particularly about diet, there is SO. MUCH. scoldy preachiness out there. This scoldiness doesn't help anybody!

Besides, as Hemingway says, "We are all apprentices in a craft where no-one ever becomes a master." He's referring to the Master Craft: Living. And what he's saying is that nobody knows shit. It doesn't matter if you meditate every day, or graduate from Harvard, or look really wise, or live in a big house, or live on the streets. Insert your own "it doesn't matter if...". It is terrifying and marvelous--nobody knows anything!

So look: I don't know anything. But I am pretty sure about the following:

1. The ONLY way to know whether or how much you would benefit from cutting sugar is to do it.

2. If you really want to do it, you can.

Thank you Diane Sanfilippo for creating the Detox and the excellent materials that make it easy to follow. And thank you, Gentle Reader, for reading and supporting me on my Detox. Mwah!

Day 11, Thursday: In Which I Feel Like an Over-Stuffed Sausage

This day was the day that my falling off the wagon blog went up. And I was shocked. SHOCKED, I tell you! At the responses to my dietary indiscretions. First of all, I was shocked that anyone is reading the blog. (Since then many of you have very kindly offered me compliments and encouragement. Thank you for reading!) Second, I was shocked that some people were outright gleeful at my fall off the wagon! (Okay, just two. One of them was my brother. And the other one was this idiot I know [cough JARED].) Others were sweetly sympathetic and suggested I try again in a couple of months. Which is very kind. But my feelings about it go like this: DISCIPLINE=GETTING BACK ON THE WAGON. Which implies that I will fall off it. When I start any practice, I allow for falling off the wagon, or I will go insane!

You've heard the saying, "perfect is the enemy of good"? Perfection is not a feature of any human endeavor or even a feature of reality. Practice doesn't make perfect for me. Instead, practicing stuff makes me better. I get more confident because I know I can overcome challenges. I get more patient because I know from practicing that everybody makes mistakes. I get nicer because I know what it's like to struggle. In my world, discipline is being okay with failing so that I can try again without feeling like a loser. Are you a person who responds well to self-excoriating internal exhortations like, "COME ON, you WUSS, can't go a single month without a cookie?! Get back on the wagon, pond scum!!!"? If so, hooray for you! That doesn't work for me. I have to treat myself like a very timid puppy.

Back to the business of the current day's dietary adventures. As you know, Wednesday I went to bed feeling like crap. I must admit that the bigass steak I hoovered up certainly played a role, although the idea of me being anything other than delighted by a bigass steak is incomprehensible. I was hoping that the dawn's early light would cleanse me of any lingering ill effects. No such luck--on this day I woke up feeling like an over-egged pudding. Like an over-stuffed sausage. Replete...with meat.

TOO MUCH MEAT. So I didn't eat breakfast till 11:00. As I may have mentioned, I prefer to eat at regular times. As you may have noticed, I almost never do. But my feeling is, if you're not hungry...don't eat. Unless you're going to teach a yoga class and won't be able to eat again till later. In that case, take a snack.

Breakfast: 2 eggs at 11:00
Lunch: Green apple with almond butter at like 2:30
Snack: half a cucumber with a slice of turkey at maybe 6:00
Dinner: sweet potato pancakes* from Diane's book, roasted brussels sprouts, roasted asparagus at 9:00ish.

This day was my experiment with eating very little meat on the Detox. And I did feel better, a very little better, at the end of this day. But not much. I just felt full all day. Is it possible that the Detox is somehow resetting how much I need to eat, and that my habits have simply not caught up with my new, smaller food intake needs? A girl can dream.

*This item will come up again later. Remember it.

Day 10, Wednesday: In Which Our Heroine Struggles with First World Problems

Okay, you know that the blog is about a week to ten days behind my life, right? So I can tell you that this day began a run of a feeling crappy that did not end for a week.

Feeling crappy is a common occurrence on the 21 Day Sugar Detox. Looking at the handbook last night (more on THAT in a couple of days), I was reminded of all the yuck-o feelings that can come up while detoxing. Headaches, muscle and joint pain, mood changes, diarrhea, nausea, foggy-headedness, fatigue, etc. "Why do it then?!" you may cry. Because it's a detox! Detoxing from heroin feels lousy too. Generally "by Week 2 you should begin to feel only positive changes," says Diane.

This...has not been the case for me. It wasn't the case the first time I did the Detox, and it hasn't now. You remember the train metaphor from yesterday? Generally, when I am well into the Detox, my trains run on time, but they come really quickly through the station, and the passengers bolt off the train. This metaphor is becoming unwieldy, but out of respect for your finer feelings, Gentle Reader, I shall persist in trying to use it instead of just saying what I mean which is that I get diarrhea. Oops! Cat's out of the bag. I also feel kind of foggy and cranky, all starting at the end of Week One and persisting for 7-10 days.

This is really disheartening. The Detox is so hard for me (I know this is a dumb first world complaint. Know what's hard? Starving to death in Africa. Or the USA. That's hard.) that it really bums me out to be putting in the time to clean up my diet only to feel worse than before. The first time around I almost called Diane's mother, one of my yoga students, and asked her to put me in touch with her. Who cares that Diane is a probably-very-busy NYT bestselling author? I wanted to talk to her about Number Two! She would probably not object, actually. There's a whole section in her book, Practical Paleo, about poop--what it looks like, what it should look like, how often, what texture, what you'll see if you have problem X or Y, etc. Who gives a crap? Diane does. However, I refrained, and soon enough, things (ahem) "cleared up" for me, and by the end of my first Detox, I felt great.

The meals I ate on this day, Day 10 of my second Detox, swung me right into the middle of Feelin' Shitty City. Is it because it was Week Two? Is it because these were not good choices for me even though they were Detox-approved? Who knows.

Breakfast: Turkey burger and kale.
Lunch: Smoked Salmon and goat cheese wrapped up in butter lettuce leaves.
Snack: Sauteed apples and nuts concoction.
Dinner: HUGE ASS steak and broccoli for dinner.

By the end of this day I felt like absolute crap.

Breakfast went well. My FB friend G.C. Aloha had given me a tip about getting the kale and turkey burger to finish cooking at the same time--put the kale in before the turkey burger. Duh! So I tried that and it went well. It was good.

Lunch was problematic. I have oodles of issues and strategies around dairy. I love it. As a kid I preferred drinking 2% milk to water. For many years I actually didn't feel that water could quench my thirst like milk could. I adore cheese, cream and butter. I really don't do well with full cow dairy. So I switched to goat dairy. I've ridden the goat dairy train a long way. But I so often feel lousy after goat dairy (might have something to do with the fact that I eat a TON at one sitting?) that I have concluded that at present, I can handle yogurt and that's it. The salmon tasted fantastic but I did not feel great after.

Snack was INCREDIBLY AWESOME. Here's what you do: sautee some chopped nuts in coconut oil with cinnamon, nutmeg, and salt. Put this concoction over the fruit of your choice. Add a dollop of goat yogurt if desired. EPIC WIN! On this day, I put the nuts over some apples that I had diced and also sauteed in butter with cinnamon, nutmeg and salt. It ended up tasting like apple pie. It was so intensely rich--and sweet!--that immediately afterward I had to lay down.

Dinner rolled around and I was feeling kind of like "blerg" but I persevered with eating too much of the aforementioned big ass steak. Big mistake. After dinner I had to go lay on the couch with a cool washcloth on my forehead. My husband has a name for the hot, sweaty, swollen feeling you get from overeating. It appeared on the TV show "Friends" but Chris was saying it long before Joey Tribiani. He calls it "The Meat Sweats." Which, when you think about it, is a great name for a band.

Day 5, Friday: In Which I Cook Cow Black and Blue

Breakfast: Two hardboiled eggs. Are you as tired of reading that breakfast as I am of eating it? Here's the thing about hard-boiled eggs. They are not quick (takes about ten minutes), but they are easy. Pot of water on the stove, put in the eggs, you go jump in the shower while they cook. I actually really love hardboiled eggs, but I eat them a bit too much (in my experience, eating the same stuff all the time creates a sensitivity to it), plus I don't doll them up. Yes, this is again in violation of my own precepts about eating CUISINE, not food. Know what makes a hardboiled egg cuisine? This is the best, the best way to eat a hardboiled egg--PUT PESTO ON IT. Homemade pesto. More on that later. I'm sure the pesto hardboiled eggs will make it onto my detox before the end. They're epic. Really.

Lunch: Turkey burger with kale. I find myself feeling a little embarrassed to tell you guys about my turkey burger lunch. I am afraid you will find it...sad. Regardless, that's what I wanted to eat, so that's what I ate! And it was AWESOME. When I make TB with rainbow chard I can just put it into the pan and the TB and the chard get done at about the same time. The kale takes longer, so I take the turkey burger out and just wait for the kale to cook a little more. I'd rather have a lukewarm TB than al dente kale. I also had a half an avocado prepared in my favorite way: sliced, tons of lemon juice, liberal salt. Avocados are fabulously fatty. I remember reading somewhere several years ago that our bodies digest vegetables better when they are eaten with fat. No wonder so many cultures around the world combine fat with vegetables! So the great thing about eating an avocado with lemon is that the oil and vegetable are all in one--add lemon and viola! insta-salad.

Dinner: hoo-boy, this was a doozy. My husband is away this weekend (at summer camp. Really.) so just to spite him I had a steak (his favorite), and entire bag of baby spinach sauteed (which, as you might expect, cooked down to about a cup), and a yellow bell pepper. Sorry for the lurid quality of this photo. It's a shame--it makes that steak look crappy when it was FANTASTIC. Here's how I like my steak cooked: black and blue. Have you heard of that designation? It means charred on the outside and rare on the inside. Even though everyone in the restaurant business knows what it means, it can be hard to find a restaurant that actually cooks it that way. So really, the best steak I've ever had is at my house.

This brings me to another one of my personal dietary precepts: I like my plate to be one-third protein, one-third cooked vegetable, one-third raw vegetable. Chinese Medicine takes the premise that too much raw food puts a burden on your metabolism. According to this perspective, if you already have a weak metabolism, a raw diet is really not so good. Many of my yoga colleagues urge their students to eat raw. I think this is a lousy idea, a. because of what I just mentioned, and b. because I believe that if you're not a nutritionist you should avoid giving advice about nutrition. Just like if you're not a surgeon you should avoid performing surgery.

Late-night Indiscretion: I didn't fall off the wagon, but I ate this final item later than I wanted to. Probably not a good idea to have a milkshake before bed. And that's pretty much what I had. But it was a SUGAR DETOX milkshake! Wanna know what was in it? A frozen green-tipped banana. Probably 3 tablespoons of unsweetned cocoa powder. Handful of icecubes. Slug of coconut water. Tablespoonish of almond butter. SALT. Salt is THE. KEY. to a good smoothie, in my opinion. Just think about how many processed foods have oodles of salt in them! What makes a Snickers bar so freaking good is not just the sugar. It's the salt! So I salt my smoothies. With very fancy, high end Himalayan salt my dad brought me back from Europe. Mmmmm! Note: would I think this was good if I hadn't been sugar detoxing for the last few days? Probably not. So if you try it at home, don't think I'm crazy if it tastes like crapola to you. Just remind yourself that I'm not a nutritionist. Or a chef.