I had been chronicling the ups and downs of my 10-day cleanse (mostly downs), when it occurred to me that the main reason I don’t really ever feel like writing about it is because I’m doing a lot of complaining and navel gazing.  Which is fine in my own head, but completely useless out in the world.

So I thought I’d change my approach*.  Instead of lots of rambling about how this all makes me feel, I thought I’d just give a brief description of how I feel physically, maybe a little emotionally, and then provide a damn recipe that might be helpful for someone who actually wants to do a cleanse.  If nothing else, the productivity will help with the self-pity.  Always does.

Day 4 was another day of exhaustion.  A mild bit of depression.  That could be a number of things.  But I really didn’t feel like doing anything.  Very low energy, and my body still ached all over.  Digestion seems to be moving along quite well, but I’m not really feeling A-1-top-o-the-world-fit-as-a-fiddle good right now.

Others have assured me that the aching is part of detox and will pass.  I hope they are right.  It can be very distracting when I’m trying to sleep.

One thing I mentioned before that has been very helpful in getting through the past few days is being able to fall back on snacks of quinoa and ghee.  I like this in the morning for breakfast (after I’ve downed the nasty liver flush and tea, waited an hour, had some fruit, and waited a while more, per instructions) and at times when I’m just hungry and feeling lazy.  The ghee has a nice flavor and smell and helps add some depth to the quinoa, as well as some much needed fat.  The quinoa is an interesting mix of fluffy like rice or couscous, “poppy” on the teeth like fish roe, and a little nutty like a grain (which it is).  I like it very much and will continue to eat it once my flavorless life is over…

So here is a recipe for both cooked quinoa and for ghee.  The ghee is nice on anything and for those not cleansing, it can be used to cook with as well!

On to day 5!

Cheers.

Homemade Ghee

1-2 pounds unsalted butter (for the cleanse, the butter should be organic)

A pot or large saute pan, a fine strainer, and a jar or other airtight container for storage.

Heat the butter in the pot or saute pan over medium heat until butter is melted.  Continue to let melted butter bubble – undisturbed! – until it stops.  This can be a little tricky.  The butter will foam up and that foam will stay on the top while the water continues to cook out of the oil.  The foam (and the bits on the bottom) are the milk solids, which will be taken out later, so it’s best to disturb them as little as possible (hence, no stirring).  You can move a bit of the foam back to see the liquid underneath and make sure it’s not browning (which can be delicious, but it’s not what you are going for here).  Really, if you keep the heat hot enough to keep the butter bubbling, but not at full heat (unless you have a really weak stove), it should be fine.  The easiest way to know it’s done is that it will stop making noise.  That seems odd, but as the water releases, it makes a kind of gurgly noise.  When there is no more water, it will stop.  It will also pretty much stop bubbling.

Strain the liquid through the strainer into a container.  This liquid will be freaking hot!  So be careful.  The strainer, if it’s fine enough, will catch all the milk solids.  I like to strain mine into a big Pyrex, let it cool, and then pour that off into a jar.  That way the little sneaky solids that got through will mostly stay in the bottom of the Pyrex, if you’re careful.

You can store this stuff on the counter and it will keep for quite a while.  You’ll know if it’s gone bad for sure!

Steamed Quinoa

Equal parts quinoa and water (for the cleanse, quinoa should be organic)

Medium sized pot or rice cooker, fine strainer

Measure out the amount of quinoa you want to make and put into a fine strainer.  Rinse quinoa well.**  Put in pot and add the same volume of water.  Bring to a boil.  Cover and turn down to just a simmer (like you’d do with rice).  Cook for 15 minutes.

With a rice cooker, make the quinoa exactly as you would with rice.  This is a nice option because you can add spices to the quinoa while it’s cooking.  You could do the same with the pot as well.  Unless you’re as lazy as I am.

*BTW, I just changed the wording of that sentence so I wouldn’t have to look up how to spell the word “tack.”
**If you buy your quinoa at the co-op and don’t rinse it well enough, you’ll get a sand surprise when you eat it!

I realized today, that when out of my element, I tend to lean heavily on what I know.  That makes sense – when traveling, routine is key to maintaining sanity and things like brushing teeth, having a cup of tea, reading before bed can seem like lifesavers.  So maybe it’s not surprising that a dramatic shift in diet would cause a similar flight to things known.

For instance, I made a gigantic pot of mung beans.  They aren’t very interesting to eat because I haven’t taught myself how to cook this way yet, but there is a lot of them and I can eat them.  I have also make entire boxes of quinoa for the past couple of days.  Before the introduction of the avocado, I was pretty much subsisting off mung beans and quinoa in various combinations.  If it sounds incredibly boring, it is.  But there’s a reason for it.  It’s what I could eat and what I knew I could eat.  I didn’t have to worry about trying to make up anything new while also in a state of semi-panic over having an incredibly restricted diet.

This meal, however dull, is reliable.  There are no surprises in my mung beans and quinoa – it is consistently blander than I would like every single time.  But it also stops me from being hungry, which is my real fear.  And so, there is comfort in that.

The next two days are the weekend for me and I am planning on venturing out and making some new things to eat.  I have a whole bag of greens in the fridge and I am pretty much out of cooked quinoa.  After three days, I’m over the culture shock of this new territory – time to leave the hostel and take a look outside.

Cheers.

Some relatively interesting things have happened.  I’ve started aching all over.  Not like I’m sore from exercise (I am decidedly not) and not quite like aching like the flu.  The only thing that I can think of that comes close is the way I felt when I had to take vocodin for two weeks after a surgery.  By the second week, I’d wake up from a drug-induced sleep and feel achy and as though I wanted to stretch out of my skin.  It feels like that now.  Not excruciatingly painful (I’m able to work just fine), but it is uncomfortable and makes it hard to sleep.  Which, ironically, is all I really want to do.

Other people who have done this have told me that days two three and four are the hardest.  I am hoping that holds true for me as well.

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I made another food discovery today.  Avocado.  Oh my lord are those things delicious!  I took another box of quinoa and mung beans (bleh) for lunch yesterday but I also took a perfectly ripe avocado and a tomato from our garden and added them.  The quinoa and mung beans worked nicely for bulk (they are almost flavorless, despite having added four or five times the amount of spice I would have normally added – ahhh the power of salt!) and the avocado satisfied my want to eat something.  I did miss adding salt, but the little green fruit proved to be quite tasty on her own and I am grateful.  Both that I decided to eat one yesterday and that I bought a bag of four.  The Farmer’s Market near work is tomorrow and I think getting ingredients to make guacamole is in order.  If only there were chips.  I wonder what happens when you dry out boiled mung beans in the oven…

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The crabbiness factor has gone down a bit, although this morning I walked into a door jamb in my sleepiness and seriously considered driving my fist into it for a split second.  Fortunately, I haven’t felt this same hostility toward other people.  At work in the evening, I actually found myself in a fairly good mood and wanting to be social, which was a surprise.  I was expecting this process to make me more hermit-like, but weird muscle cramping aside, so far I seem pretty happy.

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Onward to day three.  I’m very curious about the weekend and what will happen when I don’t have the built in distraction of 10 hours a day at work.

Until tomorrow.

Cheers.

*This is 110% Modern Jackass, but I’ve been wondering if the pain is being caused by the lack of salt in what I’m eating.  It doesn’t seem highly likely that it would be so bad so quickly, but then, who knows.  Salt is the one thing I really don’t worry about eating, because I have low blood pressure.  I don’t think I eat excessive amounts of salt (my husband would probably disagree), but I don’t skip it if I want it.  My step-mother had to go through dialysis (here comes the Modern Jackass part!) and would cramp, especially in her legs, during treatment.  The remedy was to put salt back into her body.  Completely ridiculous self-diagnosis, but it’s the only thing I can think of for the way I’m feeling.

But preparing vegetables requires thought and planning, neither of which I am terribly good at…no, that’s not true.  Neither of which I am terribly fond of when it comes to work lunch time.  At work, I want to just eat crap.  Whatever crap is available.  I want to be able to just eat stuff.  Without consideration.  Often without being hungry.

Today at work, walking around the store, I realized how often I do that.  How many opportunities there are for me to do that.  Mindless consumption.  Eating without thinking.  Which is both overindulgent and enjoymentless.  It’s impossible to really enjoy something if you are not aware that it is with you.  That it is being consumed.  Yes it’s true, I love to eat.  But what I really love to do is consume.  Not taste, not experience.  Or more accurately, I experience the consumption (mostly) but not much of anything else.

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This morning I discovered what I think will be a saving grace of this whole process – quinoa with ghee.  I love having breakfast and eating the quinoa hot with some ghee over it makes me feel fairly satisfied, although I have felt inclined to make up in volume what is lacking in flavor.  The quinoa itself is a little bit sweet and the ghee adds a richness to it that doesn’t quite make up for the lack of salt, but there is a depth there that is pleasant and makes it very likable.  I’ve read about layering flavors in food (I believe this is a technique used particularly in Indian cooking, but probably many other types of cooking as well) and stripping back to very basic ingredients without being able to lean on old standbys (like salt – which right now actually seems like it would be very salty) the “layering” idea now makes a lot of sense.  It’s not just a combination of flavor that is desirable, but a complexity.  Layer after layer, rather than just a mishmash.

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I spent the better part of my conversational time at work complaining about what I couldn’t eat.  I’m sure I’ll get over that fairly quickly.  I’m sure my coworkers hope so.

Until tomorrow.

Cheers.

And then there is the whole idea of “cleaning” the inside of the body with food.  Restrictive diet.  Very restrictive diet.  I’m really not about that.

So the question here is – why?  Why am I set on doing a 10-day food cleanse diet, when I pretty much hate both the idea of “cleanse” and “diet?”

And the answer…is mostly just because I want to see if I can.  No.  That’s not true.  I want to see if I will.  I am 44 – I’ve had a lifetime already of seeing if I “can” do things.  I’ve been proving to myself, over and over, that all things are possible for me.  The only time I can ever say that I’ve failed at anything has been when I quit.  The gap for me these days is not the (I now realize) relatively small distance between my current abilities and my future abilities, but the wide expanse between thinking about doing something and actually doing it.  So I want to see if I will do this.

And my initial reaction, when I seriously considered the idea of going 10 days without being able to eat whatever I wanted, was something closer to abject terror than I really care to admit.  It took about five minutes of reflection (possibly not even that much) to realize how insane that was.  In a life-span of 44 years, 10 days is nothing.  I was afraid of 10 days.  And not even 10 days of hard labor or even 10 days of no food.  Just 10 days of not being able to mindlessly shove whatever I wanted into my pie hole.

So it’s been decided.  I’m doing this cleanse (shudder) for the next 10 days.  No salt, no sugar, no dairy, no animals…no lots of things.  And I’m going to blog about it.  Honestly.  Probably whinily.  Because I’m a baby when it comes to this kind of thing.  No telling what it’ll be like around here for a while.  I’m told that day 6 things start to turn around.  Man that seems like a long time from now.

Cheers.