Been a while. Who missed me?
Yeah.
It's been an interesting couple of months. I re-upped for another year in (my suburban community near a great city). The other (person who does my job) quit, and the company took their time replacing her. But that replacement has provided me with the courage? strength? peer pressure? to make some big lifestyle changes. She's super active, 29, vegetarian. No, this does not end in us dating or me giving up meat. HELL. NO. (to the second, anyway.). But she's been shadowing me for the last 6 weeks while she gets up to speed, so we're spending a lot of intensive time together.
About a month ago I was feeling really shitty. I was eating another free hospital lunch and just felt bloated, salted, ill. CRAPPY. So the girl starts talking to me about doing a cleanse. My first reaction was: "STFU, hippie". But I listened and realized that perhaps it was the reset, the jumpstart I've been looking for. My 20th HS reunion is this September, and while I'd like to go I wasn't exactly feeling confident about it. I've been exercising a couple times per week but nothing that was making a difference. My diet was not matching the effort. She convinced me to read this:
The basic premise: our lifestyles expose us to toxins and we're not supporting our body's natural methods of getting rid of them. Simple enough, I guess. Some of it is too much for me: colonics, shots of olive oil, skin brushings, advocating blood tests to look for toxicity. The author is a noted cardiologist and the nutritional science is legit, but, um, no.
For me the key aspect was a nutritional cleanse. There's a period of elimination first: no dairy, booze, red meat, bananas, oranges, grapes, strawberries, peanuts, tomatoes, corn, refined sugars, wheat/gluten, caffeine, white rice, soy, etc. It's a fairly major adjustment for a guy eating processed foods. But I did it, mostly thanks to the natural peer pressure of having my coworker watching me eat lunch every day. It's not actually a calorie restriction diet, nor is it low fat. You can eat: vegetables, most fruits, chicken, turkey, beans, agave syrup, fish, quinoa, brown rice, almonds, nut milks (tasty!), avocado, coconut, olive oil, spices, vinegars. There's nothing wrong with spicy chicken and black beans with a side salad using olive oil and balsamic vinegar.
The main part is then 3 weeks: liquid breakfast (juice, smoothie, blended soup), solid food lunch off the elimination diet, liquid dinner, lots of water, 12 hour fast overnight, a couple snacks during the day if needed. The book has a ton of smoothie recipes. I chose not to go super hard core and juice, but that was mostly because I didn't feel like buying a juicer.
I'm on the last day. I haven't been perfect. I ate one of my kid's leftover potstickers. I had a couple M&Ms the other night. I ate a single tortilla chip on Cinco de Mayo. Some of my smoothies have been pre-made from Trader Joe's and use banana puree (banana causes mucous production - or something). The first week I was drinking almond milk that had evaporated cane syrup, which as it turns out is just sugar. But I've been at least 95% good, which resulted in a huge habit shift.
Back to regular food tomorrow, although I hope to continue a lot of the positive trends: the fasting, the liquid breakfast, trying to limit the processed foods and eat more things that I'm making, limiting salt. I've been able to fight off a lot of my carb cravings and REALLY want to keep that up. The results? Headaches are gone, energy level way up, sleeping better, less emotional stress, around 15 lbs. of weight loss. One of my crunchier friends told me "your energy is so much more positive". I haven't really been hungry, and in fact have learned that what we in the west perceive as hunger really isn't. It's habit.
Over the last 10 days I've also been doing Power 90, which was the first version of the As-Seen-On-TV P90X. It's not quite as crazy as P90X, but it's a hard workout and is 6 days/week. I can already feel changes.
Major lifestyle changes.
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