Mind & Body Cleanse Day Three

Making a detox work for you is the key to sticking to it.

I woke up full of beans, I mean literally full of beans. No jumping out of bed feeling refreshed and full of life, I just felt full, not in the least bit hungry. I was worried that the intake of beans might have an embarrassing effect, but I expect due to the fact that they weren’t eaten with meat or anything noxious the effect was minimal.

I did the skin brushing and remembered just how good it feels, this was something I used to do every day for a long time, until like most of the regimes I start, I dropped it for no apparent reason, I just got bored with it. The skin brushing really helps to get the lymph moving and helps to eliminate the toxins.
Talking of eliminating toxins, my nose seems to be the exit route, it was still red and no amount of concealer hid the fact that Rudolf was in town.

I can’t be a slave to a detox programme when I’ve got to leave the house early and go to meetings, so juicing first thing in the morning is out for me. It’s not the juicing as such it’s the cleaning and clearing up that takes time. I’m not normally an early riser because I work late at night; I get more achieved when everyone goes to bed, getting up extra early to juice isn’t going to happen.

After a mug of warm water and lemon I dashed out the door to an early CEW mentoring event. Thankfully there was a selection of herb teas and as I never normally eat the croissants on offer it wasn’t a problem to go without. What surprised me was that when I normally go to these breakfast meetings my tummy rumbles through the whole hour’s presentation, often sounding like an extra-terrestrial trying to communicate with earth. But being full of beans I didn’t make a sound, no grumbling at all, what a bonus.

Tip of the day: Make the detox work for you, adapt but don’t cheat!

After the presentation I had tea with a friend and didn’t feel the least bit of envy as she tucked into a toasted tea cake while I sipped my camomile tea. I’m sure it was because it didn’t have any smell, the only time I have thought about not being able to eat something is when I can smell it, roast chicken is a killer. A telephone conversation with Mr M went like this, “we could have met for lunch but you can’t eat anything”. If you are doing a detox and want to carry on having a ‘normal’ life you have to make it work, so I was determined to find something on a menu that I could eat. Looking down the menu in Cote everything sounded so delicious and totally out of bounds, but a chicken and walnut salad without the chicken sounded pretty good. Explaining that I wanted this without the chicken, but with extra avocado and olives, I thought would be easier than asking them to make up a totally new salad, I’m not sure that ordering off menu is done in Cote. The French waitress did not look impressed; when I told her I was on a strict detox programme she gave me a sympathetic smile that said you stupid woman. Do the French detox?

The salad was delicious and again I managed to eat without envy, but when I got home I suddenly felt starving, really hungry. I had soaked some jumbo oats with cinnamon in Kalo coconut milk the night before; the intention was to have this for breakfast, a bowl of oats and a handful of blueberries curbed any craving for anything sweet and stopped the hunger pangs as an afternoon snack.

Late afternoon I juiced apples and pears with cinnamon and ginger, I couldn’t face anymore green and I guess more fruit probably wasn’t the best thing to have but it was what I wanted. Another helping of roasted butter beans this time from a tin (close your eyes Chris and skip this bit) meant that I wasn’t hungry at all in the evening. Again I’m not sure that I have got the concept of the detox quite right, it’s probably not a good idea to have oats and then beans and nothing green, but I had green at lunchtime, that counts doesn’t it?

In the afternoon I became aware of my head, I know it’s been there for 52 years and with a red flashing nose I can’t have missed it, but it felt thick and slightly headachy, not a throbbing headache but thick, that’s the best way to describe it, a bit like having a drink the night before but not too much, you are just aware that you had a drink. I kept up the fluids, water and tea but it didn’t go away.

By 10.00pm I was flagging and thought I should go to bed but Mr M had the TV on, and after the depressing News came Weight Loss Ward, if I thought the news was depressing the sight of so many overweight people queuing up for surgery was horrific. Really horrific, how can people let themselves get to such a size, it was sad as well, I can’t imagine living inside a body that completely rules your life and stops you doing so many things, and all self-inflicted. If anything was going to keep me on this programme watching this would. Brilliant timing by ITV1, it really showed that psychology has as much to do with being overweight as over eating. Your mind is in control of your eating whether good or bad.

By the time I got to bed I was so wide awake I couldn’t sleep, my head was buzzing and I couldn’t switch my brain off at all, I guess it was all those toxins rushing to my nose, I turned off the alarm as I didn’t have any early meetings.