Monday, January 28, 2008

Detoxing

Lately, I've been feeling like a woman in her late 80's as opposed to a woman in her early 30's. All of my joints & legs have been achy, I feel bloated, fatigued, and a bit gummed up at the works. Granted I've been sick since December (I'm finally over that), and off & on my diet for the past few months, which I'm sure has thrown a curve ball at my body into thinking "What the hell are you doing?" The recent 20 lbs. I lost, I can happily say I've maintained at keeping off and I've been pretty good about going to the gym regularly. Unfortunately, the gym gets harder and harder, the more my body aches, especially in the joints. Jake (the awesome personal trainer boyfriend) wants me to get checked for arthritis. I laughed and said, I'm too young to have arthritis, but he thwarted that idea with the fact that you can be any age to have arthritis (boo). I assure you I will get a full physical and have my blood & joints checked out...however, I put all my symptoms into the computer, and everything points to liver function. If it was just one joint or my hands, it could be thought of as arthritis, but the fact that all my joints are sore and achy, points to another culprit. Turns out that when your body is overloaded with free-radicals, the toxins settle in the joints causing pain &/or discomfort. You also get a bloating around your upper midsection and even though you may get a regular 8 hours of sleep, you're still fatigued. This is all because my lovely little liver (which I actually do get checked annually with the rest of my blood work) is a bit overloaded from fatty foods, chemicals & anything else that's unnatural that goes through my bod. So now what? Well, I continued to do my research and found a detox diet that's recommended by The Medical Review Board. It's pretty straight forward and simple: 2 weeks of eating fruits, veggies, nuts, & whole grains, while avoiding gluten, sugar, dairy, meat, alcohol, coffee, & any chemicals (no additives, preservatives or artificial sweeteners). Basically I'm going Vegan w/no gluten. So I called up the lovely Vegan Opera Diva (her blog is in my blogroll) and asked for her help. Who better to learn about this healthy style of eating than from a practicing Vegan that is a shining example of health. So we met up on Saturday and she showed me around "Whole Foods Market" pointing out ways to eat clean and get one 's protein on a meat-free diet. So now I've got a lovely array of beans, lentils, nuts, & quinoa (a high protein grain), plus a brown rice protein powder that my diet recommends. Then yesterday I went to the grocery store and finished stocking the fridge with tons of veggies & fruits to last me all week. I even cooked a lovely chunky vegetable soup last night. It smelled so good, that I had to beat the boys away in order to have something to eat during the week. I'm also making a nice southwest black bean soup (which is slow cooking in the crockpot at home this very minute.) Tonight I think I'm going to make curried lentils to have over quinoa for dinner, perhaps with a nice mixed green salad on the side. So you see, this is really more of an adventure in eating. Lots of new recipes to try while cleaning up the insides of my bod...I can't wait to have my spicy veggie soup for lunch, I've been looking forward to it since smelling it cook last night. I'll also continue to update this post throughout the day to let you know how the diet's going, what I've consumed so far, and how I'm feeling:

7:00 a.m. - 1/2 lemon squeezed into warm water & 3 heaping tsp. of ground flaxseed in a glass of water
(drinking ground flaxseed is going to take some getting used to)

8:45 a.m. - Pear smoothie made with vanilla rice milk & brown rice protein powder & 500mg vitamin C w/glass of water (I cut the pear into pieces & froze it last night so that the smoothie would be nice and cold w/o having to dilute it with ice...it was a bit chalky, but all in all not too bad.)

10:00 a.m. - Green Tea (so far I've had to go pee at least 4 times so far and I feel the 5th trip coming on...haha, guess I'm really flushing out the system. I'm also already getting hungry for my snack, hmmm, nuts or hummus with veggies? I'll let you know what I decide later)

10:45 p.m. - Organic Hummus w/baby carrots & 200 mg CoQ10 (Mmm...good choice, hits the spot. I'm amazed how good everything tastes and smells. Perhaps my body was craving this healthy goodness. It's nice to sit here at my desk and enjoy every taste and smell of the food I'm eating. The carrots seem to taste extra sweet, and the hummus is just so flavorful. I actually had to go out of my way to find this organic hummus...I was completely floored when I read that the regular hummus that I used to buy contained modified corn starch [boo], how could they? Talk about bad for the bod! Anything that's modified, concentrated or enriched has no place in my diet, nor should it in anyone's, talk about caking up the arteries.)

12:45 p.m. - 15 Walnut halves & Glass of water (quick protein before the gym)

3:00 p.m. - Bowl of spicy, chunky vegetable soup, a multi-vitamin for her, and 250 mg of Milk Thistle w/2 glasses water (that's right I finally got to eat my yummy veggie soup, it was not only delicious and satisfying, it was really filling).

7:00 p.m. - Curried lentils over quinoa & Pear cider + Dandelion Root (this was suprisingly good...granted I had to call a friend and get her recipe for making curried lentils...it turned out really nice, even Jake liked it)

9:00 p.m. - Fresh Pink Grapefruit & 1200 mg Calcium w/D

10:30 p.m. - Glass of water w/3 heaping tsp. ground flaxseed (blech)

*Exercise (still trying to take care of all that jiggles):

1 hour of Dance Evolution at Crunch (this was a goofy fun dance class that had us doing everything from Elvis Presley to Thriller to Baby's got Back...lol)

3 sets of 10 push ups, 3 sets of 20 crunches, 3 sets of 25 tricep ext., & 3 sets of 20 side rows.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Wow, talk about a radical change! You are very brave...it would be really tough for me to change all of that, even at the prompting of my joints. :-) Go, you.

Sounds like you're enjoying the change though. I'll be interested to see how it goes; hopefully it'll do the trick and you won't even have to think about arthritis.