Detox Day 5: Why It's So Hard to Eat Clean

Day 5 with no sugar, caffeine, grains, alcohol, animal products, or processed food*

It hasn't really been as hard as I thought it would be, once I got over the hump**

I actually do feel awesome***


* Truth: I did break down and buy some packaged all-natural guacamole and some natural sweet potato chips. And I used some pre-cooked lentils in a package from Trader Joe's. Sure, I could have made those things, but...

** ...it is really really REALLY HARD to cook every single thing you eat. To chop, prepare, cook, and clean up for everything that you consume. The restrictions haven't been as hard for me as the cooking has been. I needed some crunch. It turns out that pretty much everything in the menu plan for the first week is roughly the texture of baby food, especially in the leftovers format that I thought would help me out by preparing big batches and saving it for a future lunch or dinner. All that tasty-but-mushy food put me over the edge. I bought the sweet potato chips, and the guac to go with them. No regrets.

***I really do feel awesome, overall, if you don't count the fact that I am hungry all day, and my stomach growls a bit at night. This is primarily due to the fact that I DO NOT WANT TO MAKE ANY MORE THINGS TO EAT. Being a little hungry is good for me. It's a pretty rare occurrence. I feel a little hungry, and a whole lot of Better. Better sleep, better skin, better joints. I feel lighter and less tense than I have in a very long time. I've slept soundly the last 2 nights in a row, which is pretty rare for me. I think I've also been more productive at work. An unexpected side benefit.

Aside from the cooking, cleaning, and mild pangs of hunger, the only real downside I can see to eating this way long term is that it is an awkward pain in the neck if you ever like to eat with people other than yourself. I've been invited out to eat or drink a couple of times this week, and both times I've had to meander around this pretentious-sounding "I'm doing a detox" crap. And today I'm taking my office team out for fancy cupcakes to celebrate our fantastic intern's last day, and I'll be sipping a lemon water while the ladies relish their pillowy clouds of chocolate and magic. So that sucks.

The randomest lunch ever, while my co-workers enjoy a free buffet at an event.

Once this whole detox deal has wrapped, my task is to find a way to have more balance and more discipline (and more cupcakes) within a (mostly) clean shopping list. Health is crucial, but food can be a communal, celebratory key to a joyful life. Especially when there is room for the occasional latte or frosting-topped confection.

Delicious Grain Free Baking Failure

Let's be honest: Grain is delicious. I love grain. Fried Rice, Corn chips, Bread, Pasta, Biscuits, everything inside and around every Burrito I've ever loved. Grains are everywhere and in everything. Everything pre-made. Just about everything you can "whip up" on the cheap. Try finding a grain-free, vegetarian microwavable entree. Not just gluten-free - GRAIN free. Paleo adherents have their meat. Vegans have pasta, polenta, and rice. Grain-free vegetarians have most of the produce aisle and the dairy case. Thank heavens for pastured eggs and the total lack of convicting conscience about cheese, or I seriously think I would have chewed my arm off a long time ago.

Anyhoooo, when people ask me how the grain-free thing is going, I usually say something like "It's hard, and I cheat a lot". Which is true. I do. I have polenta one night, veggie gyoza the next, just a "handful" of chips with the guac. Just "half a spoon" of rice in my Chipotle burrito bowl. I've turned down cookies, bagels, bread, pasta, and cake almost every time I've been tempted by it. I've tried to scoot by with nibbles and cheats.

But you know what?

I FEEL CRAPPY EVERY SINGLE TIME. Tired, achy, broken-out, creaky-jointed, bloated and overall gross. Every time. I keep telling myself that this bite will be the last one, but it hasn't held yet.

Until maybe today.

It just so happens that my dear Hubs has gotten on a baking kick. And out of the blue, he decided to start baking bread and to try to perfect Challah. What? Only my favorite kind of bread in the history of bread thankyouverymuch. Not only that, but his first loaf (of bread, ever) turned out like this:

Perfect. Golden brown on top, beautiful butter yellow on the inside, and that marvelous doughy goodness that lets you tear hunks off with your hands and eat them all carnivorously.

And I ate some. And I felt crappy.

Undeterred, I ate another steaming slab of the second loaf he baked last night, complete with butter dripping warm from the crusty fringe. And then I ate another. And then I felt, SURPRISE!, really disgusting for the rest of the night and most of today.

But it doesn't have to be this way. There is hope.

Thanks to a review in my dear Whole Living magazine, I made an Amazon impulse buy a few weeks ago and brought this little beauty into my life:

La Tartine Gourmande - Recipes for an Inspired Life by Beatrice Peltre. Friends, this is a beautifully photographed, delightfully written cookbook that just might change my life. Not only are most of the dozens of recipes vegetarian, they are ALSO mostly grain-free. A vegetarian, grain-free French cookbook. Be still my heart.

I have taken this book into bed with me to read while I fall asleep. I read the recipes with a glimmer of wonder and excitement. I mapped out a plan to bake something. Something savory and biscuit-like. I choose these delightful Cumin and Parsley-Flavored Cheese Gougeres:

Oh. Yum.

They are made with Quinoa flour, which turns out to be hella spendy. So I turn to my mega-bag of plain old quinoa from CostCo (We pretty much live in the suburbs now, so we shop at Mega Marts. I choose not to feel bad about this).

A few pulses in the coffee/spice grinder....

And viola! Quinoa flour:

Ok, so technically the recipe does have a little corn starch in it. But Geez Oh Pete! Try finding anything that even slightly resembles a biscuit that does not have any grain of any kind. I dare you.

After a pretty simple set of mixing, pouring, and piping steps and a mere 20 minutes in the oven, I pulled out these little babies:

Notice their distinct lack of "Puff". Hmm. Well, they smelled pretty awesome, and tasted like a digestible dream. And do you know the best part about mynewbestfriend French cookbook? It recommends you eat your Gougeres warm out of the oven with a glass of Champagne:

In fact, I'm noshing some un-puffs and sipping some sparkling white wine from good ole' Trader Jacques' right now.

There may be hope for this food deal yet.

10 Good Things About Today

1. I finally made the grain-free Coconut Chocolate cookies, and they were incredible. Good breakfast.

 2. We spotted "Not So Wee" Snapping Turtle at the lake on our walk. "Wee" and "Frickin' Huge" must have been somewhere in the deep end.

 3. Every single log in the grimy, slimy little lake looks like this on a warm day.

 4. The lake path itself is pretty if you don't look directly into the water.

 5. Ducklings!!

 6. It was a beautiful, sunny, warm and breezy day for a long walk. And this is what "our neighborhood" looks like.

 7. I made this omelet salad thing from my new French cookbook for lunch, and it was crazygood.

 8. The beans have finally sprouted!

 9. Some timid signs of life finally poking through in my Peony pots.

 10. It's still light enough in the evenings to take a late nap in the sunshine after a long day of cooking and outdoorsyness.

January Gray Hair Update, very late

Hooray hooray, we're just a week away from internet at home! That means much more timely updates and regular blog postings. January is almost over, and I'm just now finally getting a good pic of me and the gray update. Les took this picture of me outside the NC Museum of Art (a surprisingly AWESOME free museum with a whole room full of Rodins. Swoon.) last week.

As you can see, I've got a lovely stripe and cascade of hombre-hued gray goin' on. I like it. BTW, did you see that Kelly Osbourne has dyed her hair gray? On purpose? I had read a few months ago that some big-time fashion blogger in her 20s has started dying her hair platinum silver, and that celebrities and wanna-bes across the US have followed her lead. Whatever. I can't even get on board with a trend like that, because mine is 100% natural. Maybe by next year you'll be able to buy "Chrome" or "Aluminum" colored hair dye at Target! Be on the lookout!

And just in case you don't read the AugBlog (written by G3 Editor-in-Chief Auggie), here's a repeat of the snap I took of the Editor and myself in the car last week. So you can get an idea of how the gray is weaving its way into my bangs and stuff.

The grain-free diet is going pretty well so far. If by "well" I mean that I am hungry all the stinkin' time but feel so so soooooo much better. I tried to "untest" both wheat and rice last week, and the results were not pretty. Literally. My face broke out and the GI issues returned immediately. Looks like I'm going to be a paleo-vegetarian. Hm. Maybe I could write a cookbook?

The new apartment will be much more amenable to cooking, and I am super psyched to try some new recipes. Follow along as I try to get all the nutrients I need on a crazy-restricted diet! Whoo-hoo!

When New Plans Start Early

My year-long experiment will wrap up in February, and I feel like I've made some strides, but when I look back on the last 11 months, I see what looks like groundwork for a much bigger trajectory. I used to think that I was going to have to look a certain way or weigh a certain number in order to love and appreciate my body, but one strange thing that has happened over the course of this first year of G3 is that I noticed that the more I cared for my body, the more I loved it. I was doing the practical (eat healthy, eschew toxins, keep it simple), but I was feeling the ephemeral. An unexpected sense of well-being and acceptance that I expected to have to earn "the hard way". If you've known me a long time, you know that body-love seemed about as likely as a lottery jackpot.

But little by little, something started to change. I stopped grimacing in the mirror and loathing my gray hair and started actually loving it. I started looking at food as something to choose thoughtfully rather than a system of rewards or punishments ("I ate 3 cookies yesterday, so today it's spinach and veg broth for me..."). And I started feeling that my stuff was, miraculously, just stuff. And now that most of it has been packed in boxes for 2 months, I realized that I don't miss 85% of it. So when we move into our new place next month, I want to be super-hardcore and honest with the question "DID I MISS THIS?" and if I didn't, maybe I'll put it back in a box for a while, and ponder whether it's time for some stuff and I to part ways. We have 3 dozen boxes of unopened belongings, but we have somehow managed to scrape through almost 2 months without any of it. Hm.

Anyway, all of this has felt really really REALLY good. And exciting. So I didn't plan to give up on the blog or the goals when Feb. 22, 2012 rolls around. But my hair will be totally grayed out by then, so I won't need to worry about that part, so I was going to focus on the food. We'll have space for container gardens in our new place, and a much more cooking-friendly kitchen, so I was all jonesing to announce that 2012 G3 would be a Real Food Year. We'll just replace the gray of hair with the gray areas of knowing the best way to go about that.

But, as they say, life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.

And so, after suffering in silence for a few months, I finally went to the doctor about some persistent GI unpleasantness that I was SURE I could "healthy-eat" my way out of. But 4 months later, I had not succeeded, so I went to the doctor. And guess what? That was a really good idea. She recommended a very strict elimination diet to try to determine whether a late-flaring food sensitivity may be the culprit. So, for the last 4 days I have eaten veggies, nuts, eggs, fruit and some particular grains like quinoa and spelt. And do you know what? (I would NOT have believed it if it were not so dramatic) I feel SOOOOOOOOOOO much better, I can't even describe it.

Sure, it is a lot more work. But I was going to spend the whole next year un-processing food and learning to really embrace large armloads of produce, so it really feels like the boot in the pants I needed to jump start a clean start.

Grain-free is even more restricted than gluten-free, but after I've been on the strict diet for 2 weeks, I can try to add corn or oats or something back into my diet and see if I have any adverse affects. Honestly, I feel so much better after being so uncomfortable for so long, I'm not sure I even want to do the "untest".

What is different?

• GI symptoms have largely gone away
• After 4 days of anti-inflammatory food, I am wearing my "skinny jeans" for the first time in months without them feeling tight, and my muffin top has vanished. At least in these jeans.
• My skin is clearer
• My joints don't ache like an old lady
• Even my back and neck and legs feel, weirdly, less tight and more limber

I really REALLY hope that this is not all in my head. I still have some more medical tests to do to make sure that food sensitivities are really the only issue to deal with, but I am hopeful that eating "clean" will turn my digestive ship around.

Les and I bought this book to help me get started:

All the recipes in here are vegan and gluten free, so it's a good resource. I am not vegan, and she uses some grains that are technically gluten free but still on my "eliminate" list, but this book goes a long way towards getting me started with a new food plan.

Please remember that I'm not a doctor, and I'm not recommending a grain-free diet to anyone, and we haven't made many of the cookbook's recipes. I'm just sharing what's up with ME these days, and how it has helped me to follow my doctor's advice. Go to your doctor, and get her advice before doing anything that anybody mentions on this blog :)

So there you have it. I'm a grain-free vegetarian for the time being, and I'm about to start planning out a grander-than-practical container garden scheme, chucking out unneeded possessions, setting up a Cooking Kitchen, and re-teaching myself how to eat. And keeping the Grace always in focus. Oh, and trying to keep greening along the way.