Detox

It's lent.

I know, I know. I've given some of you a hard time about your faith, and you have all been kind enough to take it with a sense of humor. I am not a religious person, and never felt "inspired" by God when I was growing up. Mom used to drag me to church every other Sunday, and I couldn't understand, if there was a God, why He would want me to be so bored for 2 hours on a perfectly good Sunday morning on His account. If He really was the one that made that bright, sunny day outside, then why did he want me standing in this dark church singing songs that sounded like moaning? I respect other people's religious beliefs, and I do think that it's nice that the church (or temple, or mosque, or whatever your place of worship) can be such a guiding force for people. As I so eloquently put it to Rocketpants, "I think it's cool that you... you know... like, love Jesus and stuff." I'm not so hot on the people who use their religion as an instrument of hate, but I know that they are in the minority.

But there are two things that I liked about the dose of religion I got growing up: Christmas (because I got presents and the week off of school), and Lent. For some reason, the idea of a period of reflection and giving up a luxury or a vice for really speaks to me. It gives you an opportunity to cleanse yourself of any bad jujies (whether physical or mental), while making you appreciate things that you might take for granted. So for reasons that have nothing to do with God or Jesus, I like to try to give something up every year for the 40+ days that just so happen to coincide with Lent. (I don't know why the Christians need to drag out the suffering, but it was explained to me this week that Lent does not actually include Holy Week, and therefore, when you give something up for Lent, you give it up for more like 46 days. Lame!) Anyway, saying that you've given something up for lent is somehow easier than explaining to people why you would quit something temporarily for any other reason. They tell you it's not necessary, and then they gloat when you're back to your old ways.

Last year I gave up reruns. I was successful, except for when I was sick... which happened to be much of Lent anyway. This year I decided to be a little more rigid. At new years, Princess did a 4-week detox during which she ate no wheat, sugar, caffeine, dairy, or meat. Watching her go through it, and talking through all the reasons she wasn't eating this and that made me look at my own diet and realize that it wasn't as clean as I would like to think. Most of the time, I don't eat processed grains like white flour, or white rice. But I was eating more and more sugar. I would come home from a workout starving, and go straight for mom's stash of cookies. If I was in a bad mood, I would eat pizza or macaroni and cheese, or something "bad" to make myself feel better. Whenever there were sweets in the kitchen at work, I was among the first to help myself. After long workouts, I would eat whatever I wanted as a "reward". I was drinking more and more "decaf" (which from Starbucks is more caffeinated than most regular coffees), and even regular coffees regularly. And then there was Disney, where I think that an overdose of high fructose corn syrup was responsible for my stomach problems over the next couple of days.

So for Lent, I designed my own little detox. It would go a little something like this:
No processed grains: meaning no white flour, no white rice, no white pasta, bread, or white anything. I don't usually eat that crap except when I eat out, so this means that I basically won't be able to eat any restaurant food for about 40 days.
No dairy: meaning that I'll have to use an alternative to my whey protein (hemp or flax will do). But the main challenge is NO CHEESE! Is life even worth living without cheese??? Actually, so far this has been the easiest to give up.
No caffeine: meaning no more Starbucks on the weekends (why even get out of bed then?!). Not even decaf. I'd noticed that when I drank a full strength coffee, even at 6:00 in the morning on a Sunday, I would go to bed at my usual 9:00 bedtime, but I wasn't able to sleep until 11 or 12. When I missed the umpteenth Monday swim workout in a row, I finally made the connection. And no more green tea either, unless it's decaf. I thought that this would be easy, but the first day that I switched out my regular green tea with red tea (all the antioxidants, and naturally caffeine free), I got the telltale headaches and slow-motion feeling of caffeine withdrawal. Who woulda' known?
And the mother of all challenges, No sugar: sugar is poison. It rots your teeth, messes with your insulin and glucose levels, makes you fat, screws with your brain chemistry, and makes you more susceptible to pretty much every illness under the sun. The problem? It's indispensable for endurance athletes. Not so much sucrose, but simple sugars. So the main challenge for this little experiment is finding alternatives to sports drinks and gels (or in my case, gum drops) with natural sugars in them (so far I've used dates, apples, bananas, grapes, and dried apricots). I am also doing my best to avoid "raw" sugars, and processed "natural" sugars because they are no different when inside your body than the plain old white stuff. (You can extract sugar from a sugarbeet, or you can extract it from grapes, process the hell out of it, and get basically the same thing with the same effects on the body, but the grape sugar can be labeled by the FDA as "natural flavors" rather than sugar. Yikes!) So I'm getting my sugar from fruits instead.

On Fat Tuesday after shoving two Cadbury Creme Eggs in my pie hole I got a base reading for my weight and body fat percentage (using one of those terribly inaccurate scales), and took some before pictures. We'll see on April 12 how it all turns out... Maybe I'll finally have that 6-pack I've been after my whole life???