40 Day Detox

I stayed around my parent’s house last night so I couldn’t weigh myself first thing in the morning. For breakfast I had a Pakistani Chaunsa mango. It was a poor specimen of a Chaunsa mango. It didn’t look too bad from the outside. It was the firmest in my dad’s fridge, but once sliced open it was a pale colour on the inside, as if it had been picked too early. It lacked a distinct flavour, and wasn’t juicy. Not a great Pakistani Chaunsa mango experience.  

The force is weak with you, old man

I came back home in the morning as I knew I would struggle to find food in my dad’s kitchen to eat that would fit my detox requirements, let alone be of liquid form. Though it seems the last few days I have unintentionally come off the liquid diet as I have increasingly been breaking the rules. Also I don’t feel so good. It seems an unhealthy approach to this detox diet. I went onto it as a kneejerk reaction to putting on body fat, undoing a week’s worth of effort in just one day. As the days went on I noticed waking up with a tingling feeling in my fingers. I was increasingly feeling weaker, as if the life force was being sucked out of me. I felt more vulnerable. When I walked around in the town to do shopping I felt wobbly and hazy in the head. My skin seems to have started to breakout in rashes and spots, and I think my immune system may have withered and feel as though I’m about to come down with something. Overall I have felt first hand how important a healthy diet is to feeling optimum, which I have increasingly been feeling prior to going onto a liquid only diet during the day. I think I could have improved on my liquid intake by having fruit and vegetable juices. However for most of the week I didn’t have anything in the flat to juice. In future if I decided to go down the liquid only route again I would plan for it and make sure I am taking in the nutrition (vitamins, minerals, protein, fat etc) that my body requires for optimum performance. There was at least one good thing that has come out of this experience: an increased intake of water which I think I need to do more of even when I do return to my previous detox diet. 

When I got home I weighed myself. I was dreading weighing myself as I snacked on a bit too many Haldiram’s Chana Dal. I must have consumed half a pack all by myself while watching Four Lions with my family. So I stood on the scales. My weight rose 0.4kg to 68.1kg… oh oh. This sounded real bad. Then I had to wait for the scales to work out my body fat readings… it was 17.2%. Phew! That was an increase of only 0.1%. Not as bad damage as I had thought! My body water and body muscle stayed constant at 56.0% and 43.1%. No decrease in muscle mass yet. This is quite surprising as it’s been a week since I’ve done a workout. When I first joined a gym about 12 years ago I remember I was skinny and wanted to get big. My fitness trainer advised me that it was only necessary to work a particular muscle once a week. The irony is, after I joined the gym, the workouts got me really hungry and as I didn’t know so much about food and nutrition I ended up putting on fat around my belly, and ever since then I’ve been trying to lose the belly fat! Crazy! 

Exercise can make you fat if you eat poorly after a workout

I hadn’t slept well at my dad’s place and felt like a zombie. I ate a couple of dates and went to bed. I still couldn’t sleep. Eventually I got up to make some quinoa with rice milk and blueberries. The quinoa pack was towards its last grains, so I drank mostly rice milk with a few grains of quinoa inside. Around the same time my wife made a vegetable fry up (tomatoes, onion, garlic and mushrooms) with wholemeal coucous. It looked and smelled too good to miss so I had some before going back to bed and finally managed to get some sleep. When I woke up a few hours later I had some apple and carrot soup my wife had made earlier. I picked a couple more dates too! It’s a real bad habit! I then had my first ever dandelion tea. It tasted meh. It tasted like someone had cut the grass in my dad’s back garden, stuffed the excess blades of grass in a tea bag and brewed it. It hardly had any flavour. Maybe it’s an acquired taste. But apparently it’s really good for you so worth giving it a go.  

Later in the evening my wife made a vegetable fry up again and some lentil soup. I put some buckwheat in the soup to get proteins from a more varied source. I made organic rice, spinach and tomato pasta to eat with the fry up. Later in the evening I snacked on a handful of nuts and seeds and some Iranian dates. I drank some caffeine free teas and finished off the apple and carrot soup. 

Orgainc wheat free pasta with vegetable fry-up