Community Cleansing: Day 1

Well, hi there!

I told you I was terrible at blogging. Fortunately, I don't have an audience base yet, other than myself, so the only person I'm letting down is....myself. The problem is that I think I forget I even have the blog, after a few days. Anyway, enough about that, and more about how I remembered I had it again.

Have I mentioned that I live in a collective house? Well, I do. We do things like cook meals for each other, eat together, make silly jokes (sometimes on the line of 'that's inappropriate!'), have house meetings, go on 10 pm chocolate adventures.... Well, this time, one of our five members, Nina, piped up with an idea: going on a raw food cleanse. She shared with us the 21-day program developed by a young woman from Vancouver, called "Young and Raw". After much joking about the innuendo and slightly creepy connotations of the title (see: inappropriate jokes), 4 of us in the house decided to embark on the journey.

Basically, it's 3 weeks of eating entirely raw and vegan. It's not as boring as it sounds.You might ask, 'what do you eat?' Well, the meal plans are all laid out, so theoretically, all you have to do is follow the recipes for 3 weeks and you're golden. This is the basic structure of what you are supposed to eat in a day:

Lemon and water
Juice (home juiced veggie/fruit)
Smoothie
Lunch
Smoothie
Dinner
Tea/water

With a bit of tweaking here and there (we eliminated the juicing and added in a raw breakfast item, like granola or porridge), this is pretty much what we're doing. Well, so far. It's only Day One.

So it was this morning that I remembered, "oh yeah! I have a blog!" and I decided I would write about this experience. I've never 'cleansed' for this long, this intensely, so for me this will be an interesting exploration of food, health, and particularly emotional eating habits. I'll get to that later....

Of all days, Day One had to fall on the same day as that glorious, beautiful cycle of the moon decided to lay it's course on me. (Too much information? Oh, grow up everyone, it's just nature.) So today was...a bit of a struggle. I am a meat eater, a Type O+ blood type, so I generally need more animal protein than most, though I was a vegetarian and vegan for a number of years. However, during my "time", nothing looks more enticing than a hunk of animal. The combination of generally eating less, with also not eating meat, eggs, or any other large protein source, plus my body giving birth to its iron sources by the second, made for an.....interesting most of the day.

But, despite feeling faint and sleeping away a good chunk of the day, I admit I feel generally fantastic already. This morning, I made a smoothie for everyone with homemade almond milk, cucumber, lovage (I should probably explain this food, as spellcheck doesn't even recognize it), frozen berries, banana, and coconut water. My housemate Tanya made a quinoa porridge, and these two items together made for a very filling breakfast. For someone who has eggs every morning, this was a pleasant surprise (normally, a porridge breakfast fills me up for the first 20 minutes then proceeds to completely vanish from my system and I must find the most immediate source of animal within my reach).

I was preparing myself for this cleanse a couple of days early, by eating smaller portions, and also staying away from sugar and bread. So, my system was already starting to re-wire itself to not rely on empty, sugary carbs for the illusion of nourishment. For those of you thinking of cleansing in future, I would definitely recommend 'easing' into it. Don't indulge on fudge brownies and pizza the day before you start a cleanse, unless you want to create a living hell for yourself. For the next few hours, I did some stretching and voice work, and I found myself letting go of some bodily tensions and unnecessary emotional baggage (what we in our house call our emotional 'poo'). I then got exceedingly tired and faint, so I had a hot bath, then fell asleep for two hours.

Oh, and I had lunch somewhere in there. Lunch was an amazing salad prepared by Nina the night before. The meal plan calls for a very simple lettuce-y salad with not very much in it. I like to think of lettuce as 'crunchy water'. If I'm going to eat a salad, it's going to have kale, spinach, spicy greens, and all kinds of flavours. Which is what this salad was. And then I discovered, at the bottom of this leafy party, a treasure more exciting than rum to a pirate, the holy grail, the shining beacon, the archangel at the gates of Heaven: Avocado. A hallelujah chorus ensued.

 In addition to all the food we had to buy for this cleanse, I also went out and harvested a bunch of wild items at our neighbourhood food forest (yeah, that's right). These items generally have a much, much greater nutrition content than most produce you buy (especially at larger grocery stores), so I felt much more full eating this salad than I would have by eating the one in the recipe. I'll do another post about wild food later on, because I think it is really important for a cleanse like this.

After my nap, I prepared an amazing afternoon smoothie with a whackload of nettles, strawberries, Oregon grape, banana, almond milk and coconut water. It was very energizing (nettles have more iron than spinach), and kept me going for the rest of the day. I also found that snacking throughout the day helped me. Another piece of advice to people wanting to do this: don't starve yourself. That's not the point of a cleanse. You are making dramatic changes to what you are putting in your body, so be nice to yourself. Give yourself a break. If you're hungry, 'eat, eat, eat', as my Ukrainian Jewish grandmother would say. She would think this whole idea was meshuge anyway.

This brings me to a couple of interesting thoughts I had today. First of all, I think one should always ask oneself thoroughly, before beginning or even thinking about an endeavour like this, the question why. Why are you doing this cleanse? What do you want from it, really? Examining that is really, really important. For me, if there is any more than a shred of "to lose weight", I hesitate. In my mind, that can be a nice side effect, if you are carrying extra pounds that are weighing you down, but it should never, ever be a reason.

In my mind, the purpose of a cleanse is to reset your organs, to get the body's systems moving at their best, and to let go of some emotional patterns. It is an exploration, an examination of an emotional dependency on food, on specific foods like sugar, caffeine, and carbs that attempt to fill a bottomless pit. Anyone else eat when they're bored? If I'm working on a project, or avoiding something, I'll eat, check my email, futz around on Facebook, or watch a TV show. With eating, it's always bread, cheese, sugar, or caffeine. "Exciting" foods. Not boring old fruit or nuts or veggies. And you know what's funny? Rarely during those times am I actually hungry, even remotely. I'm hungry for something that no delicious buttery toast will ever give me. I'm searching for that "excitement" in my life, but if I'm not feeling motivated to embark on those things that truly excite me, I'll eat something that I find exciting to give me the temporary thrill. And then, ironically, with all of those foods I mentioned, after I eat them I have even less motivation to pursue projects, because I experience THE CRASH. So those foods that are supposed to give me the feeling of being excited ultimately make me feel depressed.

And here's the interested point: even after I've eaten a very nourishing meal, about 10 minutes later I'll feel a pang of hunger. I think, no, I can't be hungry, I just ate, and no it wasn't just a plate of celery. It was a full meal. But I closed my eyes, looked inward, and realized my body wasn't hungry. I feel the illusion of hunger, but it's not my body wanting more. It's my mind, my soul, wanting to be occupied and engaged. Either that, or cinnamon bun.

Funny though, after a couple of days of no sugar, and I don't crave it at all. Same with coffee or cheese. Yes, you have to replace those foods with other favourites, but perhaps they are healthier options like avocado. I find that after a couple of days, other items become the "exciting" foods, things that weren't that exciting before.

The moral of the story is, when you feel that pang of hunger, or feel the need for a 'snack', ask yourself, what do I really want? And do that instead.

Until Day Two,

Lisi