August 8, 2011
I’m preparing to complete a detox starting tomorrow. I completed two weeks of this detox at the end of June. I know that it is not difficult. The detox makes complete sense to me and the food that I can eat is easy to find. It’s not like a fast that I hear my friends completing. One where they drink only juice or some concoction of spices and water. I can’t see myself completing that type of a detox. I like my food too much!
I certainly can cut down on the amount of food that I eat in a day. With the detox that I followed in June, the same one that I’m going to start again tomorrow, I drank a smoothie for breakfast. For lunch, I ate specific food: chicken, turkey, wild fish, and certain vegetables and fruit. For supper, I had a smoothie or a bowl of soup. Sounds easy, right?
There is quite a list of food that I am to avoid, but nothing that isn’t easily replaced with the food that I can eat. Dairy, wheat, and sugar are three foods that I am to avoid as they are the most common allergens. I can do without these for a short time period. I know many people that have to avoid these permanently. They appear to be doing fine health-wise.
It does take more work to keep myself conscious of the food that I eat. My biggest problem is the amount of food that is available. Not just in my fridge, but in the stores, in the cafes, and even on the sidewalk now that it is summer time. Since I have to avoid certain food, I have to be very conscious of what I am eating, how much, and when. I can choose to eat my meal at supper rather than lunch. It is a flexible plan and I made full use of that flexibility when I completed the detox in June.
My main reason for completing this detox is to get control of the amount of food that I eat. I want to lose some weight as I want my organs to be healthy. I want to maintain my health as I grow older. I want to be able to move when I am older. I don’t want to be dealing with health problems due to poor dietary choices and weight gain.
When I completed the two-week detox in June, I felt great! I was able to continue choosing healthy choices for a few weeks after I completed the detox. I was conscious of my food choices. But as the month of July went on, I started to grab whatever was available to eat. This included fast food, and other nutritionally poor choices. This also meant that I was eating more than I really needed to sustain my body in a healthy manner.
My plan is to complete the detox with my daughter before she goes to a ten-week camp in British Columbia (B.C.). We have a little over a week before I drop her off at her camp. It will be too difficult for her to continue with the detox at camp, so she will choice carefully what she eats the first few days at camp. That will allow her body to slowly adapt to a wider variety of food again.
I will see if I can continue the detox on my vacation in B.C. If I can, then I’ll be able to complete a two-week, and possibly three-week, detox. I would really like to make that work. But I’m not going to demand too much out of myself while I am on the road. It is quite difficult to maintain proper dietary choices while traveling.
The recommendation is to complete a three-week detox on a yearly basis. I plan to complete a few two-week detoxes in order to work my way up to a three-week detox. I am hoping that each time I complete the two-week detox, my body will feel so good that I will want to continue to choose healthy food. If I find myself starting to eat too much fast food or too much convenience food, then I can complete another detox to help get myself back on track.
I will be sharing my detox progress through these blogs, so keep posted. The detox that I am using is found in the following book:
CLEAN: The Revolutionary Program to Restore the Body’s Natural Ability to Heal Itself, by Alejandro Junger, M.D. with Amely Greeven. Published by HarperOne in 2009.
Information about this book can be found at: http://www.cleanprogram.com/
Ms. Martha Urquhart 