Detox: Days 6 and 7 and lessons learned

I know it’s been a while, but here are the last two days of our detox. In case you can’t tell, I wasn’t terribly inspired by this diet nor did I experience any amazing changes – probably because I eat a strictly vegetarian diet that’s relatively low in dairy to start with.

Photo of cucumber avocado soup from www.aapplemint.com

Detox: Day 5

I will finish up my posts on detox before this week is over!

Day 5 was last Friday and it was fairly similar to most of the days the preceded it:

Quinoa with oranges, butternut squash, chickpeas, and arugula from www.veggienumnum.com

• 7 am: Pint of room temperature water with juice of half a lemon
• 8 am: Mug of herbal tea
• 10 am: Mango, peach, and blackberry smoothie
• 11:30 am: 8 oz glass of coconut water
• 1:30 pm: Sambar with brown rice; spiced kale and lentils (both of these are South Indian dishes)
• 4 pm: Handful of almonds
• 8 pm: Orange-scented quinoa with roasted butternut squash, chickpeas, oranges, and arugula
• This dish was based on this recipe - I made a few minor changes to adjust it to our tastes.  It was one of my favorite things I've made in a long while.  The oranges were such a brilliant addition and their sweetness, combined with that of the squash, was a nice counterpoint to the peppery arugula.

Our meals on Friday were pretty much what we would have eaten on any other day.  Perhaps I would have put feta cheese in our dinner, but it really wasn't necessary, and I think it may have actually detracted from the other flavors.  As you can probably tell, I had started to embrace this detox diet as the week went on.  But let me not speak too soon as days 6 and 7 have yet to be chronicled...

Detox: Day 4

I'm a few days behind!  Thursday was Day 4 of our Detox diet and it was actually one of the better food days.  I had to modify the times because I had to be at work early.

Detox: Day 3

I'm a day late on this one - oops! I can't even remember what I had for lunch on Day 3 (Wednesday) so it was either totally unmemorable or my memory is going - perhaps it's a little of both.

So here's Wednesday's rundown:

• 7 am: Pint of room temperature water with juice of half a lemon
• 8 am: Mug of herbal tea10 am: Raspberry and rice milk smoothie made exactly according to the recipe on Goop - obviously I had a lot of raspberries.  Believe me, we're tired of this one, too.
• 11:30 am - 8 ounce glass of coconut water
• 1:30 pm - Ginger-lemongrass-coconut soup with shiitake mushrooms and mizuna
• This was a riff on my recipe for hot and sour coconut-lemongrass soup (minus the hot - no chilies allowed this week.  Bummer.)  The broth for this was really tasty but the mizuna was completely the wrong green for this soup.  I ate all the mizuna out of the soup and then ate the mushrooms and soup. Not the most enjoyable experience but the second half was way better than the first.
• 4:00 pm: handful of blackberries
• 7:30 pm: Quinoa with breakfast radishes, green beans, and red wine vinaigrette
• This was a modified version of this dish, which I've been making for a few months now and is one of our favorites.  I didn't pickle the radishes because I had bought beautiful breakfast radishes from the Madura Farms stand at the Union Square Greenmarket
• 8:00 pm: Polenta with Tristar strawberries and balsamic vinegar
• Yeah, we had dessert, what's Gwyneth going to do about it?  I bought a big basket of small, bright right, juicy, strawberries at the market and I wanted to do something more with them than just eat them raw.  I contemplated a quinoa pudding but there's only so much quinoa one can eat in a given week.  The polenta was from Cayuga organics and the sweet corn flavor went perfectly with the super sweet strawberries.  I didn't add a drop of sugar - the berries had plenty in them. I topped off the whole thing with sliced strawberries and a drizzle of high quality balsamic vinegar. I'm not sure if we loved it because it was really good or because we hadn't eaten anything remotely sweet all week, but, whatever the reason, it was wonderful.

The first few days of this diet were totally torturous, but now that it's Friday, I'm not tempted by other foods the way I was on Monday (I came home and had a showdown with a box of rosemary crackers, thankfully I, and not the crackers, won). I'm also thinking differently about how I eat and what changes I can make to my diet to make it healthier. 

• I've decided to use quinoa in place of couscous - it's much better for you and it has virtually the same texture as couscous, so why not go with the high-protein option?
• I've also decided to minimize the amount of pasta we eat (not that we eat that much, but I know that come summer, I will use it as a vehicle for the wonderful produce from the market, as I do nearly every summer) and only use really high quality pasta if and when we do eat it.
• As much as I love cheese, I realized this week that I often add it to dishes and it's really not necessary. Yesterday we had a spinach/mushroom/quinoa dish to which I normally would have added a few shavings of parmesan cheese, but the dish didn't suffer without it. I figure those few shavings on most dishes will add up and leave me for the better.

There are a few other things I'm considering, but all of the above are simple changes that aren't really radical or drastic and are very easy to implement, and more importantly, won't really alter the taste of or make me think my meals are boring.

And with that, I'm off to drink my lemon water!

Detox: Day 2

Day 2 (Tuesday) started out pretty good but ended with a whimper (from me). Here’s what I had:

Broccoli and arugula soup - photo from www.goop.com

• 7 am: Pint of room temperature water with juice of half a lemon
• 8 am: Mug of herbal tea
• 10 am: Raspberry and rice milk smoothie made exactly according to the recipe on Goop (subbed raspberries for blueberries and rice milk for almond milk)
• 12:30 pm: Salad of market greens, burpless cucumber, avocado, and carrot ginger dressing 
• I ate this at 12:30 because I had meetings all afternoon and wouldn’t have been able to eat it at 1:30 as per annoying Gwyneth (although she does grant us permission to adjust times according to our schedules!)
•  This was really good although I would have preferred a little more substance. I’ve actually made this ginger-carrot dressing before (for use with an Asian slaw with red and green cabbage, edamame, carrots, and lotus root) and I love it, so it made this salad deeelicious. The market greens were really tender and flavorful and the burpless cucumber (which cost an exorbitant $5/lb) was unbelievably crisp and also really flavorful. And who doesn’t love avocado!

• 2 pm: 8 ounce glass of coconut water
• 4 pm: Handful of pumpkin and sunflower seeds
•  7 pm: Broccoli-arugula soup with young garlic and poached artichoke with lemon-young garlic vinaigrette
• I’m not going to lie – I didn’t like either of these. The soup was ok, but nothing I would ever eat again, and the artichoke and vinaigrette both came out poorly because I was desperate to make something to go with the soup and, not being able to use things I would normally use (wine, mustard, mayonnaise, oh mayonnaise), I made a crappy vinaigrette and I also overcooked the artichokes. It was a pathetic dinner of green failure. OK, I shouldn’t be so harsh on the soup. It was ok. Definitely better than the terrible artichoke and vinaigrette.

Today’s menu is better, and I’m making something for dinner that I’ve made before (and really like). I have to omit a key ingredient – feta cheese – but I think it will still taste good.

What I’m struggling with the most is all the temptation around me – food smells when I walk by restaurants (namely pizzerias, and, lucky me, there’s one located right next to my subway stop near home and the one I get off at to go to work), photos on food blogs, and news of upcoming food events. I should probably just tune out of Twitter and Serious Eats, but then I would feel totally out of the loop until my return to normalcy next Monday, and I’m not ok with that. What’s keeping me sane (and on the wagon) is that Matt is doing this with me – I have to be accountable to him and I feel more reason to stay committed to this plan than if I were doing it alone.

Detox: Day 1

Over the weekend, I took a good look at the 7-day plan on Goop and I made a whole bunch of changes - namely, switching out chicken and salmon for quinoa and lentils as well as switching up the order of the days and making a few changes to the suggested items.  (This was mostly based on the fact that I need to be up at 5 am on Saturday and in good condition to sing - and sound good - in Prospect Park at 7 am, and that was likely not going to be feasible if I was subsisting on liquids alone the day before.  It was also based on the fact that the foods listed were awfully bland and I'm used to eating very flavorful and spiced foods, so steamed greens weren't going to cut it for me.)

Here's what I (actually, we) ate yesterday (Day 1).  Recipes for the items in italics are coming soon.

 Blueberry almond smoothie - photo from www.goop.com

• 7 am: Pint of room temperature water with juice of half a lemon
• 8 am: Mug of herbal tea (we're drinking Trader Joe's organic Renew tea, which is made with hibiscus, rosehips, licorice root, lemon peel, peppermint, nettle leaf, apple, and strawberry leaf - according to the box, it contains "a special blend of caffeine free organic herbs that help aid with digestion.  Hibiscus helps detoxify while nettle leaf has natural anti-inflammatory properties."
• 10 am: Blueberry and almond smoothie made exactly according to the recipe on Goop
• 1/2 cup blueberries
• 1 1/2 cups almond milk
• 1 scoop protein powder (we used the simplest one they had at GNC)
• 1 tablespoon greens + probiotics powder (we used Vitamin Shoppe's BioGreens)
• 11:30 am: 8 ounce glass of coconut water
• 1:30 pm: Lentils with sherry vinegar, parsley, and mizuna (replaces Goop's salmon with greens)
• 4 pm: Super greens juice made almost exactly according to the recipe on Goop.  We don't have a juicer so I used the blender and added about 1/2 cup of water to get everything moving.  This came out extremely thick and sludgy so we diluted it with water before drinking it.  It still looked like swamp sludge but it actually didn't taste all that bad.
• 1 cup tightly packed kale leaves (I also used the upper portion of the stems)
• 4 stalks celery (I hate celery but amazingly I couldn't taste it in this drink)
• 1 1/2 pears, cored
• 1" piece of fresh ginger (I left the skin on)
• 1 lemon, zest and pith removed (I used a whole lemon because I don't know how to read directions
• 7 pm: Herbed quinoa with balsamic beets, beet greens, and maple-coriander roasted squash

And that's it.  It was actually a ton of food and I still feel really full (at 7 am on Tuesday).  That greens juice was a beast - I'm sure if I made it in a juicer, it would have come out differently, but it ended up being about 20 ounces of sludge and then I diluted it with an equal amount of water, so it took a long time to drink and it really filled me up.  I also drank lots of water - I didn't really keep track, but it was definitely more than 8 8-ounce glasses over the course of the day.

Day 2 is a little more austere so let's see how I feel later today...