Detox ruined my life

Ok, I admit the title to be a bit dramatic, but a three week detox has certainly affected me a lot more than I thought it would.

My first shock was when after nearly two weeks, and having dinner guests over, hubs & I decided we would break the detox for one night –you know, in order not to be rude (ahem), we would have wine and dessert, and in exchange, extend the detox from 2 weeks to nearly 3.

And so we counted down the days to our first proper Saturday night dinner.

oh the shock and disappointment!

After the first glass of red wine we both got a massive headache. Try as we did to fight it by drinking more, the headache just continued through the night. After having a nice healthy dinner and (3 pieces of) sacher cake (which happens to be my favourite), we both went to bed disappointed, and grossed out.

Another five more days of detox to go, I was running out of ideas of what to eat. We all have habits and recipes we are used to eating, and unlike my husband, I was not putting too much effort into thinking new creative ways of eating nice with my new rules. While he came up with creative and tasty ways to eat healthy, when he wasn't around I was having rye toast with hummous and day dreaming about coffee and chocolate. I even bought myself a box of Ferrero Rocher to celebrate as soon as it was over.

And then the much awaited Friday night arrived, and we celebrated (the detox amongst many other exciting things that happened last week) by going out to a nice fancy Asian restaurant. We ordered the tasting menu: three courses and dessert, and I ordered my favorite celebratory aperitif: a kir royal (champagne and kassis, totally recommend it). The champagne tasted unusually bitter and not as nice as I remembered it. I barely drunk the wine (which meant my hubs got another headache the morning after,) and only ate about half of the meal, (the fact that I didn’t force myself to try to finish was already a significant change in my usual behavior.) This time we went home with no headache, but both felt heavy, our stomachs’ reacted aggressively to this change in diet (lets leave it at that shall we). Alas, even my Ferrero did not taste as sweet as I remembered them…

The next morning my first coffee awaited. I was so excited I even photographed it. It was bitter, and the milk heavy on my stomach, it did not feel nice, so much so that half way through I binned it and asked the hubs to make me another, smaller version, with less milk, to see if I’d dome something wrong and he might get it right. After three weeks of day dreaming about it, all I could say was

“it’s ok”

Then we had some pan tumaca, a typical Spanish breakfast that consists of wholewheat toast impregnated with a clove of garlic, olive oil, and tomato, covered with a thin slice of great quality Serrano ham that had been awaiting consumption since before the detox started. It was delicious, but again, a few minutes later we started feeling heavy and grossed out, our first piece of red meat did not go down too well. We came back home for lunch craving our diet, we wanted something that felt familiar to our stomachs: beans and tuna salad tasted like bliss.

That night we went out to a Vietnamese, and I found myself ordering a soup and some vegetables, I just didn’t want to go home feeling sick again. Some fruit for dessert. Who is this person?

Sunday we had our traditional home made pizza with the kids, it was delicious and we received no complains from our spoilt body. For dinner G cooked up our also traditional Sunday roast: tasty red meat with six different types of roasted vegetables, which I ate, but nowhere near as much as I used to. The bottle of fine red wine remained unfinished, a first, and we both went to bed looking forward to Monday, when we could stop celebrating and go back to our new healthy diet.

So we have decided to try to continue it during the week, breaking it for weekends (or date night). I don’t know how that will go down as I’ve never been good at middle grounds, but here’s to hoping.

By the way, the detox limited what we could eat, not how much, so apart from eating as much as I wanted, I also located the sweetest natural thing on this planet to replace chocolate: dates, and ate as many of them as I could, and still I lost 2 kgs (4.4 ounds). Thought this was worth mentioning.

I hope that I have somehow been able to convey the owe and shock this transformation has caused me.

PS we will continue the diet but having morning coffee, that was a deal breaker.

Post Data: I've received a few critical emails, so for those too lazy to go look at the original post with the details of the diet let me just clarify it is basically a NO CRAP ONLY HEALTHY STUFF DIET. so all you can eat vegetables, fruit, complex carbs, fish and olive oil.... I don't think there is a dr in the world that would disagree with cutting coke and donuts out.