The Week After

The following days have been not that much different in terms of diet to the preceding four, I have however relaxed the rigour. It feels good to not be so intently concious of every food label I pick up.
I have eaten some fruit, but only English varieties like apples, pears and bilberries and a touch of honey which tasted way too sweet. I am eating some savoury foods like mayonnaise in moderation but have had no refined sugars in things such as cake, chocolate or biscuits. Avoiding these gluten free treats is quite an epic achievement for me.
Apart from the wedding day meal I have had half a square of chilli chocolate and no more. I can't face fizzy drinks at all and haven't actually wanted fruit juice at all, sticking to sparkling water in the pub and coconut water instead which is really refreshing and very low in natural sugars. I have had two glasses of elderberry wine which was gorgeous and pretty funny as I am now a complete lightweight, but otherwise I don't feel drawn to booze particularly. My digestion has been OK but its hard to say at this stage if the detox has truly worked or not. I have been living back where I was last year for 2 weeks and the diet there never agreed with me, so I'm waiting for things to settle and then see. I need to go back to see Ewa and get an update on what's improved if anything. If it really hasn't shifted, and I don't honestly expect a miracle cure, then another tack will have to be followed. I definiteley believe though that overeating any one thing for me is fatal. I realise that I have been overeating sugar for years and it has done me no good. I can bring it back in my diet now but aim to not actively seek it out. If I do this I will probably get the right amount. I need to see food now more as nourishment and not a source of oral pleasure primarily. I also recognise that sweet treats and snacking plugs emotional gaps rather than actually give my body what it needs. The key is certainly to enjoy my food and not get obsessed by diet and I'm hoping to be housed pretty soon and stop moving around as this has made planning and eating generally much harder. So there will be some more updates on the days after and thanks again to everyone for words of encouragement and interesting insights shared. 

Days 25 - 30 The Final Chapter.......Or is it?..................

Days 25 - 30
I am once again rolling five days' experience into a block, partly due to my stone age laptop's interface with this neolithic wi-fi and also because you probably don't need a blow by blow account of every single day.
I am surprised to feel at this stage of the game some peaks and troughs of tiredness still. I believe this is chiefly governed by how much water I drink and not maintaining protein levels properly. I stress that this is what works for me, and you may be different. I already have certain food intolerances which make my diet convoluted at times. I have taken to carrying bags of nuts, almonds, cashews and walnuts mainly, around with me and rotating which ones I eat each day. I have been advised to avoid "mould" nuts and all dried fruits as "mould" carrying food stuffs but I have to be honest and say I am not entirely sure what this means. Something may be lost in translation from the Polish. I hope that the sugar detox may even improve my intolerancesin the longer term. Yeeha.
I now have a confession to make and am including it as an interesting (if only to me) insight into my own relationship with habits, cravings and my pleasure centres in my brain. About 10 days into this detox I had a tobacco relapse and have been smoking on and off throughout. Nooooooooooo! I hear you squeak. How unhealthy. How un-detoxy-acceptable in a health kind of a way. Yessssssssssss. I hear you and I will be getting back off them pronto. I can only put this down to a teenagery kind of a sulk about not having any "treat" (sweet) foods and feeling like I need to indulge a part of me that I can't put my finger on. The detox has made me realise that I don't need to indulge parts of me every bloomin day and what am I trying to comfort by doing that anyway? Its a misnoma as its not solving anything, comforting long term or nourishing my body to actually feel well. Going to stuff sugary snacks or slosh back wine or toot on a fag are all short term pleasure hits with no real substance. We all know this anyway. I am trying to take a longer term vision with food, looking at it over whole days or even weeks now to see if I can get the right nutrition in. I hasten to add I am not achieving this. However looking beyond "the next meal" can help to maintain energy over longer periods and make me feel more able to take on the day. At 36 I recognise and feel that I do not have the juice I had at 26 and better food stuffs will just help me truck on more efficiently without being frustrated at this. My energy levels can be very variable and bottom out sometimes so keeping things steady is important to me. Knocking out sugar, despite mid afternoon crashes from time to time, has given me a much steadier and more constant energy available throughout the day. The reason that I mention the smoking relapse is that normally when I do this it puts me back on a (double stupid points here) rota with my asthma inhaler. Over these three weeks I have not used it once despite smoking. It is summer and warm and dry, in the damp of winter it is always worse. I am not using this as carte blanche to now become a professional smoker, yet I cannot help but feel that something is happening regarding sugar here. Without sugar inhaler unnecessary. Why is this? The stomach and the lungs are linked in terms of wellbeing and problems in one area can fire off problems in another. What really are the knock on effects of sugar on other areas of the body? Can it really cause poorer breathing in an asthmatic or is that just crazy talk?
The final day of my detox was my friend's wedding and I had already decided to enjoy the wedding meal and one or two drinks. The savoury lunch tasted amazing as I had salad dressing and a carrot and rice concoction with raisins for the first time in a while. A friend made a lemon polenta cake and it was gluten free, so I cut a piece in half and caved in to that with a few strawberries. The hand fasting also finished with a glass of elderflower fizz.The glass of bubbles came first in the day's proceedings and did taste fantastic, the second half glass just tasted sweet and underwhelming. Throughout the day I felt up and down and kept dashing to the kitchen for water. I have drunk a lot of water throughout the detox and it has been important. I have dabbled with hot and cold showering in alternation and wanted to do body brushing. I am still without a permanent base to live, currently the showers where I am are broken, so this has not been possible to keep up but I would recommend it for anyone trying a similar detox for whatever reason to shift stuff on through.
The weddding day was long and there is always much socialising which is also tiring in a good way but the energy ups and downs were frustrating and didn't make me glad to be back on sweet stuff, although the flavours in the foods were hugely welcome. My excursions on the dance floor were brief and flaily but no real change there.......I am actually glad to not be drinking bitter herbs three times a day and sprinkling tintcures on my tongue. The herb tea had to be made up the night before carefully and covered. My last brew ended up with a bar of soap falling into it, evidence enough that I was done with that ritual.
I have decided to slowly re-introduce native fruits into my diet, like apples and pears and berries and a little honey. This morning I had bilberry gluten free flat breads (gorgeous) with fruit harvested on Dartmoor yesterday. I want to stay off refined sugar for longer. I would like to keep updating the blog for another month as to how I feel and also as to the outcome of my second meeting with Ewa to see if the parasite has cleared properly or not. I am fully open to referral to a tropical disease unit to see what is going on if not. Conventional medecine can be useful in equal measures and I am under no illusions as to this being a miracle cure. However my stomach has generally settled and does feel less like it directs my life which is a boon. I also felt at times that my energy on the detox may not be up to full power excerise but I went to the pool in Exeter on Friday and swam a mile comfortably so that was reassuring.
I have realised I can get by on less food generally and not panic. I still do not like to go for long periods food-less (ideally 8 hours maximum) so I am not sure I could ever fast effectively. However it is good to realise I can physically eat less and be fine, I just need to plan well. I am looking forward to the potential prospect of a base in September so I can take better control of my diet and hopefully make it less of a spiky, prominent feature of my life, just something I see to like everyone else. I do not give up things for Lent or Ramadan (although I believe my detox may have overlaid part of Ramadan) but it has been an experience and an adventure. At times it has been a very frustrating and emotional journey, quite literally feeling like death. The height of summer was certainly the time to crack on with it, but a July heatwave was not the easiest choice. The denial of what I thought was essential a really important journey. I invite anyone who says "I couldn't do without", (insert - tea/coffee in the morning, biscuit at 11am or whatever) to do just that. Being tied to things which we don't know for certain we will always have is not helpful. Everything in life moves, changes, grows and eventually dies. Letting go of things allows other things to move in and inhabit the space. It doesn't mean you can't maybe have those things back, but its fascinating to see what takes up the space instead......
I hope you have enjoyed bits of the blog so far and thank you to everyone who has got in touch and shared their thoughts and experiences with me. The blog will go on, for now, and so will I.

Days 22-25 Entering the Final Phase

So I am going to roll these days into one......I am brinking on the final phase of the detox. I am looking forward to fruit being back in the game. The bitter herbs are getting a little tired now, and the novelty of splashing tinctures has passed. There have been no major cravings and I got through my weekend of work where I average 13 hours a day, so that's good. I didn't bottom out like last weekend.
This morning (Day 25) I have a crasher of a headache but that could be the tiredness too. Otherwise my energy is doing OK. I will be interested to see Ewa again and find out which aspects of the detox have been successful. I will certainly be staying off the processed sugar for a while longer, although I will have a little of something on Saturday at my friend's wedding. Nothing major or vastly wild to report so I'm going to keep it short and ....ha ha sweet........

Days 20 and 21 - Cruise Control

Day 20
Felt pretty good today. Planned ahead food wise as I was out for most of the day. Finished up with a nice bivvie out in the wilds of outer Bath with my partner. It was strangely relaxing to not really take much food or worry about emergency bathroom moments. Just loads of water. No yearnings for sweet stuff, although I do still yearn after fruit and look forward to its return. Friends who have done the paleo diet say that it tastes really sweet after being without for some time and it will hopefully be enough to satisfy me once the official thirty days of detoxing are over.
This time period has made me have a real re-think about the sweet treats that I eat and why I indulge in them. It certainly fills both an emotional and a physical gap. Its also pretty lazy. I plan to stay off them for longer than my official 30 day detox. I plan to gradually re-introduce fruit and then honey and then go from there. Its true that in the longer term avoiding all savoury foods with sugar in would be a real challenge and re-shape many things like eating out and dinners with friends. Eating just whatever savouries you normally do will probably provide enough sugar if it has had any kind of processing however healthy it looks. My friend Simona is vegan and has emailed about her difficulties with finding food on the hop when she is hungry that is actually healthy. She said motorway services are particularly useless. I have really wondered (for those of us who are either car drivers or lift sharers which is most of us) where the wisdom lies on this. Driver's pit stops are simply laden with overpriced junk, sugary food and coffee. Cars weigh about a tonne and people jump in them to spin round often half asleep. Why are the main places to stock up for a reviving travel snack just filled with rubbish? Its ridiculous. They are certainly one of the easiest places for people to grab junk, particularly people on the move for work from salesmen to musicians.You have to do what I have termed the "Walk of Will", where you avoid eye contact with all sorts of brightly coloured tempting packages. Everyone deserves to be able to access healthy foods without this plethora of kak or paying 7 quid for a full plate of hot food at a services that is probably a baked potato and salad and won't do much for you either. Incidentally my sister's husband you can now buy pre-baked potatoes with toppings for re-heat. What planet Janet?

Day 21
Started the day with a river swim. What a winner. Pretty chilly by the time we hoisted out and the sun broke through to turn our fingers back from white to pink. Bit hungry but able to decamp to Bath for a bite to eat. Ate quite light with a bit of meat. Yesterday and today I found I got the 4pm energy dip. It seems directly proportional to how much meat and nuts I eat. I don't ever really buy meat and have not been endeared when I recently bought fish and chicken from a well know retailer. The fish was not fresh (that was when my housemates commented) and the chicken was off on its sell by when I opened it. I had bought it as it was organic, so not impressed. The fish I later discovered was also caught EITHER by "line, net or trawl". For anyone interested in fish issues The End of the Line documentray makes depressing viewing. Line catching is perceived as a good option. However the lines are miles long and baited at intervals. Sea faring birds such as the endangered albatross dive for the baits and get caught and die. Net catch hauls in a variety of unfortunate marine life, no matter what they say about sizes of net hole to let smaller fish out. I have witnessed this at grass roots level when I went out on a small traditional Sri Lankan fishing bought. We accidentally caught several things that were dead by the time entangled, one of them a beautiful Dragon Fish. Trawling as if anyone needs to know, uses huge metal rakes to literally scrape the sea bed bringing up everything in its way and leaving the equivalent of desertification on the ocean floor. So the idea that actually fish is a "healthy" option over red meat is deeply questionable for me. Just because we don't see fish in fields and they are not cute or furry it is still a very thorny ecological issue. I am trying to re think it at the moment although I don't eat alot of fish.
Food purchasing it seems to me is a real minefield. We are turned into scholars at the supermarket reading endless labels to avoid certain nasties or additives. We are faced with "local or global" food issues. I love rice but it travels thousands of miles to me around the world and I don't know much about workers rights in these countries or conditions in the paddy fields. Or environmental impacts. I read that it takes 140 litres of water to produce one cup of coffee grown to the new "full sun" more intensive method of farming. Higher yields are produced but at what cost? Shade grown coffee (literally utilising the shade from surrounding forest trees) is more sustainable, yet produces a lower yield. It supports more biodiversity. The coffee flavour is supposedly better too. Guatemala can be a good area for this and also for coffee dried on tables in the traditional style. Try to fins out where your coffee comes from and support traitional growing methods. Something else I have learned recently is that the western world's ongoing interest in buying quinoa has driven up prices in the countries where it naturally grows and now local people can't afford it. I believe as far as possible local is always best but sometimes just not achievable without huge effort and commitment. I fall short of the grade I know. Do we have the time or the patience to unpick these issues? Can we use more of our "wasted" space in cities to grow food. Personally I think we should look at going up. There is plenty of available wall space and for me vertical gardens in cities may be the future. Check out this website where walls are no barrier to greening. Patrick Blanc has got some very cool ideas. http://www.verticalgardenpatrickblanc.com/
I have certainly gone off the point about sugar, but my point is that f we had more fresh fruit and veg available to us that we could freely harvest around towns and cities without waiting a week for a veg box to arrive we could eat healthily on the hop and start to re-shape our eating habits..........