Cleanse Day 1

The first day of the cleanse was a success!

I feel pretty good. I have a little bit of a headache and, I won’t lie to you, I’m kind of hungry. But overall, I think it was pretty successful.

I am using a modified version of the Whole Living 2012 Action Plan Challenge. I am modifying it to fit a) my tastes and b) my commitment levels (both financially and in time). For instance, I will not be making the beet soup that takes four hours, even if it is super healthy looking. I’d rather just eat some beets and go on my way.

Here are the fundamentals of the cleanse: eat a lot of fruits and vegetables. Eat some oils with omega 3, including nuts and seeds. DO NOT eat/consume sugar, gluten, caffeine, alcohol or animal products.

There are a lot of foods that are particularly good for cleansing and detoxing. I’m trying to eat those foods almost without exception. Here is a list of the cleansing foods:

So the Whole Living Challenge suggests starting the day with a cup of hot water with lemon, so I did that. It was nice and refreshing. I don’t have a caffeine addiction, nor do I drink coffee, so I liked the hot water in the morning. I wonder if for coffee drinkers it would have been a rude awakening (or NOT-awakening hehe). Then I set out to make breakfast.

The thing I am noticing already about this program is that I am spending insane amounts of my day in the kitchen. Normally, when I “cook” I don’t do things that require a lot of prep work. I throw some tofu in the over and let it roast for 20 minutes. I throw some salad on a plate and pour on some bottled dressing and go on my way. All this chopping and mixing for this in depth recipes I can already predict will get old. But, the results (today at least) were pretty cool.

The cleanse recommends having juice or a smoothie for breakfast, because liquids are easier to digest (obviously) and it’s a nice way to ease your system into the day. It offers a few recipe suggestions and I chose the one that looked the most appetizing: Grapefruit-Carrot Juice. It is really simple, which I also liked about the recipe going into it. It is simple: 2 grapefruits, 5 whole carrots and an inch of ginger. You just chop them all up and put them through a juicer, which out of kismet and because we are kindred spirits, my roommate had on hand. Although I think if you added a little bit of water (maybe 1/4 cup), it would work in a blender too. (Provided the blender is strong enough to puree carrots.) In the future I think I might put the glass in the refrigerator for a little while before serving the juice because it was a little warm. But it turned out pretty tasty and it looked very good, in my biased opinion:

The rest of the day went well, too, but I think breakfast was my greatest achievement. Lunch was a really good salad/slaw thing that I will probably post some other time. Dinner was not so great. I roasted some cauliflower with garlic and red peppers and it was intensely bland. Blandness is something that is going to be a problem for me over the next two weeks, that’s pretty clear already.

Throughout the day, I didn’t get as much work done as I wanted to. Mostly I think I was distracted thinking about food and cooking. I was surprised though, because I thought I would be exhausted and I wasn’t. I’m supposed to get 7.5 hours of sleep per night minimum, and that might be a challenge. Overall though, I think I will be really happy with this cleanse idea.