DAY 30: My last day of detox! This morning I had some blood taken for a cholesterol test, and right now I’m preparing my last salt-free detox meal: marinated baked tilapia with brown rice and a mixed spring greens salad. Tonight I’m planning to have a big juicy steak and drink some beer!

So, how do I feel after 30 days of clean living? I feel pretty good, and am probably as healthy as I’ve ever been in my life, although I didn’t experience the almost supernatural level of physical wellbeing that I was vaguely hoping for. My energy level is consistently high throughout the day, compared with the peaks and troughs associated with “normal” living, and my general mood is more even, but I still don’t enjoy going to the gym very much, and I still find it very hard to get out of bed in the morning!

Both my average blood pressure and weight are a little lower than usual, but the change is not very dramatic; my average blood pressure during the detox was 123/72, compared to an average of 129/79 over 2004, whereas my average weight during the detox was 165.5 lbs, against a 2004 average of 167.8 lbs.

One good thing this experience has definitely given me is an improved relationship with food; I’ve had to think very hard about what I’m eating and how to prepare it in order to make vaguely enjoyable meals that comply with the dietary restrictions, and have learnt a few useful culinary tricks along the way, such as how to make a half-decent salad dressing, how to make a black bean soup and how to select and cook fresh fish from the local fishmonger. I also bought a $20 rice cooker, which made life much easier, and “re-learnt” a few things I’d forgotten, such as how good fruit, nuts and honey can taste.

Here’s a typical days menu:

Breakfast: Diced organic melon, pear and kiwi fruit, with sheep and goat’s milk yoghurt, raisins, walnuts, almonds, shredded coconut and honey (the breakfasts were delicious and easily my favourite meal of the day, although they were somewhat time consuming to prepare).

Lunch: “Make it up as you go along” black bean, chilli and roasted vegetable soup with rice cakes (if I never see another rice cake in my life, that’ll be fine with me).

Dinner: Pan seared pepper and coriander encrusted tuna steak with brown rice and mixed green salad.

Snacks, beverages etc.: Dried apricots, carob-coated almonds (these were a life-saver), fennel tea or lemon and ginger tea with honey.

So, overall it was a very positive and interesting experience (not to mention a good way to save money on going out!). I’ll hopefully also be able to make some small permanent changes to make my diet healthier, but I’m definitely looking forward to returning to normality!

Less than 48 hours of my 30-day detox programme to go! I’m not sure yet what I’m going to consume to reward myself this Friday night, but it’ll almost certainly include beef in some form — probably either a steak or a cheeseburger — and some beer.

I haven’t really missed any particular food or drink specifically, but what I have really missed is freedom of choice — the freedom to eat whatever seems good at the time, or the freedom to eat in restaurants and bars with friends.

The diet on this detox programme was so restrictive that it was pretty much impossible to eat out; the only time I managed it was at a raw foods restaurant called Quintessence, where the food is 100% vegan, organic, kosher, and “raw” (i.e. never heated above 118 degrees fahrenheit), and even there the restriction on salt resulted in a very limited and rather uninspiring choice.

I’ll post a more detailed post-detox report on Friday…

All-Day drink licenses available: As of today, pubs and bars in England and Wales can apply for licenses to stay open and sell alcohol for up to 24 hours per day (Scotland’s licensing laws have been less restrictive for some time). It’s about time, I say.

Finally, the ridiculous anachronistic hangover of English pubs sounding the bell for “time” at 11pm will be consigned to the dustbin of history where it belongs.

This is a very controversial move by the Labour government, with various hysterical law enforcement and health experts warning that Britain’s binge drinking culture, already the worst in Europe (and possibly the World?) will spiral even further out of control. Exactly the same scare stories we heard when “all-day drinking” was introduced — almost entirely without incident — in 1988.

Personally I think that this hugely welcome and long overdue deregulation will have the opposite effect; by removing the pointless drinking deadline, people will drink more slowly, and the intensity of the current 11pm flashpoint — where the pubs are emptied and the streets are suddenly full of people that have all drunk 6-10 pints in the space of a couple of hours — will be significantly minimized.

In fact, fears that people will go on 24 hour binges seem to be almost entirely unfounded, since pretty much all the pub landlords surveyed so far have said that they will probably only open up for a an extra hour or two at weekends, since 24 hour opening isn’t economically viable anyway.

And this is basically democracy working properly for a change; most people want licensing laws to be relaxed. According to CAMRA (the Campaign for Real Ale) survey, 7 out of 10 Britons want a relaxation of licensing laws that were originally introduced in 1872 to clamp down on “gin palaces,” were extended during the First World War to help maintain wartime productivity, and have been tinkered with on a piecemeal basis ever since.

Finally, it’s “time, gentlemen, please!” for stupidly restrictive licensing laws.

Today is Day 15 of my 30-day detox — I’m exactly half way through.

I’m still not feeling radically different… I’m beginning to think that my normal lifestyle isn’t so toxic after all!

One serious and two humorous (and quite possibly offensive — you have been warned!) links to share:

Gore Vidal Interview

Robert Knight of WBAI radio interviews Gore Vidal, one of the most intelligent and sensible American political commentators over many decades (thanks to George W. for this one): gore_vidal-wbai-robert_knight-jan-20-2005.mp3

London Underground

A very funny and angry song about striking London Underground tube drivers. You can also buy a whole CD by these two doctors, and all of the proceeds go to Macmillan Cancer Relief; go to AmateurTransplants.com (as an aside, I have to say that, from the perspective of an former resident but intermittent visitor to London over the last 5 years or so, public transport in the capital seems to have improved somewhat). Warning: The song contains a LOT of strong language, and is not for the easily offended (thanks to Sebastian B. for this): LondonUnderground.mp3

Viral VW advertisement

This is either a parody or a viral advertisement from Volkswagen, but it’s as funny as it is tasteless — the filename gives you a clue as to the topical content. Again, this is not for the easily offended (thanks to Scyld B. for this). vw-suicide-bomber

Today is day 12 of my 30-day detox (for details about the detox programme itself, see previous entry, A Clean Start), and so far it’s been fairly unproblematic; I haven’t experienced any huge cravings or withdrawal-type symptoms (such as the anticipated caffeine withdrawal headaches) whatsoever.

My only real complaints are that the diet is both time-consuming — I seem to be spending most of my time either shopping, cooking, eating or cleaning-up at the moment — and quite boring.

Of all the things I’m avoiding on this programme, salt is probably the most inconvenient; it’s in pretty much any processed food product with more than one ingredient, even those from the nearby heath food store (where I suspect I’m single-handedly putting the proprietor’s children through college).

I’ve noticed a few changes in my overall health and well-being, although nothing very dramatic so far… Both my energy level and general mood are much more consistent and even throughout the day, without any significant highs or lows, and I probably have slightly more energy in total than usual. My blood pressure is somewhat variable, ranging from levels that are higher than usual (134/79) to the lowest reading I’ve had in 4 years (108/57). My weight has also been fluctuating between 165 lbs and 168 lbs — again, on the low side of normal.

I’ll reach the halfway point this Thursday; hopefully there are more improvements to come!

I was starting to think winter wasn’t going to happen in New York this year, but we’re getting the first storm of the season today — it is DUMPING snow, forecasts for up to 3 feet in the city alone!

Time to get the snowboarding gear out, I think…

And since I don’t have health insurance at the moment, I finally bought a snowboarding helmet (alas, too late to avoid last year’s St. Valentine’s Day Massacre and resulting facial injuries).

This helmet is pretty cool though — it’s a R.E.D. Audio HiFi, and has built-in headphones for listening to tunes “on the lifts”!

Today I finished reading (with some regret) Jonathan Lethem’s Fortress of Solitude, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

It’s a sprawling epic covering 30-some years of a guy’s life that somehow blends the grittily realistic description of a white kid growing up with a single and distant parent in ostensibly black 70’s Brooklyn, with the magical realism of his comic book superpowers! A bit like a cross between Richard Ford and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, if you can imagine such a thing.

I’m not going to review the book here, as that’s been done plenty of times already (just try Googling it), but part of the appeal of the book for me was that the main protagonist, Dylan Ebdus, grew up around the same time as I did, in the neighbourhood that I currently live in; like Motherless Brooklyn (the other book of Lethem’s that I enjoyed), the bulk of this story is set in Brooklyn’s Boerum Hill, just a few blocks north of where I’m sitting right now.

This whole neighbourhood has undergone significant gentrification over the last few decades, and this process is described in detail throughout the book:

“..there was no understanding until I saw it with my own eyes: impoverished Smith Street had been converted to an upscale playground.”

“The street would be barely recognizable for how chic it had become, except the Puerto Ricans and Dominicans had stuck around. They were refugees in their own land, seated on milk cartons sipping from paper bags, wheeling groceries home from Met Food, beckoning across the street from third floor sills, trying to pretend gentrification hadn’t landed like a bomb.”

The other thing I found interesting about the book is that it switches from a third-person to a first-person narrative about half-way through.

Anyway, I really enjoyed both books, so here are the “filthy lucre” commission links:

Finally, after an East Coast winter that’s been disturbingly mild (disturbing against the backdrop of Asian tsunamis, Ohio floods and California mudslides at least), it got appropriately cold today — the temperature in New York is predicted to drop down to -10 degrees Celsius today (14 Fahrenheit).

Today I embarked upon a comprehensive 30-day detoxification programme.

I’ve been toying with the idea of doing a “detox” for some time now, and the timimg seems particularly good right now; in addition to cleansing my body of both the excesses of the recent holiday period and a prior lifetime-to-date’s worth of accumulated toxins, January is typically a fairly quiet period socially, and it also seems like a good way to eke out my dwindling funds a little longer while I find another job! Plus, my friend Scyld is doing his second detox, and it seems like the kind of exercise that’s easier to do with a friend’s support.

Anyway, the programme I’m doing (at Scyld’s recommendation) is the “30-Day Ultimate Detox,” as prescribed in the books “Total Detox” and “Detox Yourself” by British author Jane Scrivner (filthy lucre links below):

The dietary part of the programme is very strict; alcohol, caffeine, sugar, salt, meat, dairy, eggs, bread, and chocolate are all strictly verboten, as are some more surprising foods such as avocados, bananas, lentils, mushrooms, oranges, peanuts, spinach and tomatoes.

The programme also includes “body” and “mind” components, with various prescriptions about exercise, breathing, exfoliation and positive thinking etc., although I will probably take a somewhat more liberal attitude towards these aspects of the programme.

Anyway, after acquiring most of the necessary supplies at great expense from the health food store earlier in the week and taking some reference measurements yesterday for weight and blood pressure (168.6 lbs & 128/81 mm Hg respectively), I finally started the programme this morning.

I started my day with a pint of hot water mixed with the juice of half a lemon, then had a breakfast of half a canteloupe melon with vanilla soy yoghurt, cranberries, almonds and honey, followed by garlic and kelp supplements in tablet form washed down with a glass of carrot juice. Apart from the carrot juice (which was gross) it was actually delicious, although technically the yoghurt wasn’t completely kosher because it contained cane juice. However, although tasty, breakfast wasn’t very filling, and I was hungry pretty much immediately afterwards.

Later in the day I went shopping with Scyld, who showed me how to make roasted veggies for lunch — potatoes, yams, parsnips, onions, beetroot and garlic, all drizzled in olive oil and herbs and roasted in the oven. They were pretty good, although they took a long time to cook.

For dinner, I had some tilapia baked in foil with an olive oil, lemon juice and herb marinade, along with my mandatory daily serving of short-grain brown rice and some spring mix salad with a simple olive oil and balsamic vinegar dressing.

For treats during the day, I’ve been eating carob-coated almonds with no added sugar… This is probably cheating, since they taste pretty sweet anyway, but I figure a few minor concessions at the start is OK.

On the whole, the first day on the detox hasn’t been too bad, and hopefully it will get progressively easier as I get more familiar with the preparation methods (although it’s definitely going to be much more time-consuming than my regular diet). I don’t really have any strong cravings or adverse reactions so far either, which is fortunate. Perhaps the very slightest hint of a caffeine withdrawal headache, and I perhaps feel a little more tired than usual for this time of night, but nothing problematic as yet.

Anyway, I’ll post further updates on how I get along in due course.