Photo of cucumber avocado soup from www.aapplemint.com
Here’s what we had:
- 7 am: Pint of room temperature water with juice of half a lemon
- 8 am: Mug of herbal tea
- 10 am: Peach, mango, blackberry, and coconut smoothie - we're shaking things up here!
- 11:30 am: 8 ounce glass of coconut water
- 1:30 pm: Raw vegetables - breakfast radishes, green beans, carrots, sugar snap peas - with white bean-ginger-carrot dip
- The dip was good, but the raw vegetables got old after a while. There is only so much crudite one can eat.
- 4 pm: Beet, apple, carrot, and ginger juice
- The recipe made a LOT of this and we each had about 3 pints of it. Actually, only I did, because Matt couldn't deal with drinking so much liquid.
- 7 pm: granola
- What?!?! This isn't part of the diet. We know. We were en route to Lincoln Center and realized we were going to be starving all night if we didn't eat something, so we got a bag of Bear Naked granola and made half of it our dinner. It didn't contain any forbidden ingredients so we figured it was ok to eat for dinner instead of the prescribed cucumber avocado soup.
- 7 am: Pint of room temperature water with juice of half a lemon
- 8 am: Mug of herbal tea
- 10 am: Blackberry coconut smoothie
- 11:30 am: 8 ounce glass of coconut water
- 1:30 pm: Cucumber avocado soup
- Not bad for what it was, but this was definitely not a satisfying meal. It would have been fine as an appetizer, but not as our entire lunch. Matt actually frowned the whole time he ate it. :(
- 4 pm: almonds and pumpkin seeds
- 7 pm: Neapolitan pizza, beer, and strawberry-rhubarb crumble
- Oh that's right, we stopped our detox diet early. We were totally over the unsatisfying foods of the last two days and we were planning to watch the rubber game of the Subway Series, and it's our tradition to watch baseball on Sunday nights and occassionally have pizza and beer with it. And what better night than the first Subway Series of 2010 and in celebration of our diet being over? Let me tell you, that may have been the best pizza of recent memory because it contained all forbidden items - white flour, gluten, tomatoes, and cheese. Tasty, tasty, forbidden foods.
I mentioned a few things earlier, but here’s what I took from this week-long detox:
- Eat more whole grains. Sure, white rice and white flour (hello pizza and baked goods!) are tasty, but for daily eating, whole grains are probably the way to go. Whole wheat products like bulgur, barley, faro, and freekeh are excellent options, as are brown rice and quinoa, both of which are gluten free. Couscous, unless it’s whole wheat, is essentially pasta – not the best option.
- Eat less gluten. I have to say that I didn’t feel any difference by cutting out gluten, but I’m sure that there’s probably some health benefit to cutting down on the amount of gluten I eat. This is not to say that pizza and pasta are out of the picture, but rather that when I choose to use grains as an accompaniment for a meal, quinoa and brown rice are good options.
- Eat more leafy greens. No matter what season it is, leafy greens are always available in NYC, and I need to eat more of them, especially since I have a tendency to be borderline anemic. I don’t need to sell you on why leafy greens are good for you. They make a great base for lentil salads and you can add them to pretty much any vegetable/grain dish without detracting from the other ingredients – in fact, it will probably be for the better.
- Eat more regularly throughout the day. I have a bad habit of not eating anything until 1 pm and then not eating anything until dinner at 7:30 or 8 pm, and I’m pretty sure my body doesn’t like that. While I did this diet, I had a smoothie every morning, lunch, an afternoon snack, and dinner. I noticed that I ate smaller portions because I wasn’t starving at mealtimes.
While this detox diet didn’t produce miraculous results, I did lose maybe 1 or 2 pounds (most likely from the fact that I ate throughout the day) and I definitely learned a few lessons that I will incorporate into my everyday diet. So at the end of the day, it was in fact good for something - it made me more aware of what I put in my body, and I'm better off for it.
