The CLIMAX!

Well it's been a while since I've posted...

I've just started a new job ... mid-cleanse!

I decided to modify the cleanse somewhat... due to total lack of will power on my part, protein cravings (are they real or in my mind?) and feeling sick at the idea of forcing down just one more slimey shake....

Proper version: 3 shakes and 5 lots of herbs and 2 austere meals a day (so called alkalising meals)

My version: 3 shakes and 3 lots of herbs and 2 pretty tasty meals... mostly consisting of veg and salad with nice dressings, tahini tastic, hummus, also some dried fruit (you have to try dried figs with a dollop of light tahini on the top... totally addictive... ) some nuts and seeds along the way, lots of engevita yeast flakes as well (nutritional yeast flakes you can get in any health food shop) which have some protein in and taste a bit cheesy too...

finely julienned courgettes with sundried tomatoes, fresh basil and garlic dressing and a liberal sprinkling of cheesy flakes.... pretty tasty I reckon.

I've also been having organic virgin coconut oil which I'll write more about later...

SO now it's Easter weekend and being the mad woman that I am, I've decided whilst everyone else is gorging their faces on chocie. I'm embarking on a 3 day fast as the climax of my cleanse...

now this is the modified version as the full program ends with a 7day fast, but to be honest with daily tolls of living, I just did'nt feel up to the full on cleanse... and you have to trust your instincts with these things...

So last night I had the so called "Last supper" (was not intended to be the same day that Jesus had his as my house mate pointed out to me but I did feel pious all the same!)

Now I'm not starving myself I have to say... fresh fruit and veg juice feature as well as stock made from the throw away scrag ends of my juiced veg with the pulp of said veg chucked in for good measure.... then strained of with a sieve into a bowl....

made a very respectable tasty stock that's for sure.

I'm actually amazed how many times I've been for GIGANTIC poos today already when I'm not eating anything...
quite an eye opener I can tell you...

It's been fairly easy to do today to be honest... not really hungry ...so full of fluids and shakes... and it somehow feels really right and good to be letting my body have a bit of a break from this constant barage of stuff I chuck into it (however healthy)

Again realising the emotional crutch that food is in my life and I know I'm not alone here...

The sunshine and beautiful blossoms on the trees are really helping my feeling of speing cleaning from the inside and out pretty well.....

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Juicyous Maximus...

It's stylishly simple and it's all MINE!!!!

I celebrate the day I decided to take the plunge and buy this great kitchen friend.

Ok at great expense, but I don't have an ipod... or a telly

so I just watch the pretty coloured fruit and veg go in and come out again into delectable nourishing juices!

Being a creature who hates waste, I juiced a load of pears this morning (mmm pear and ginger juice straight from the fruit to my mouth!) and so I made some 'sweat treats' (to fill my empty soul!) with the left over pulp....

pear and orange balls:

pear pulp
orange zest
dessicated coconut
ground almonds
soaked sultanas

I've no idea on quantities... I just made it up as I went along...

squidge it all up and roll into balls and roll in more of the coconut...
I baked mine for a little while as the mixture was a bit dry so I've got lovely toasted mini macaroons ... not really necessary if you get the consistency right...
go on have an experiment!

Tried and tested by my house mate and they got the thumbs up...

Soul(o) Food...

Yesterday I munched on my evening meal of raw courgette spagetti (made with a special saladacco tool - www.fresh-network.com) hummus, onion, basil dressing with lemon juice garlic and olive oil with some steamed spinach on the side. Very tasty indeed...

I ate it so fast though... almost obsessively rather than enjoying each mouthful and really savouring it... gave myself stomach ache but still the emotional me wasn't satisfied... I then went ferreting around for something sweet... a total habit of eating sweet things after a meal... not because I need it or even want it that much... especially with gripy tum.

So I had a couple of apricots with tahini... not so sinful I know...

But it really made me think about the social aspect of eating that's really missing from my diet at the moment.

Appart from doing a cleanse that's fairly isolating in itself (unless you're doing it with someone)
and as I'm catering for one at the moment, all my meals I prepare for myself and eat alone...
ahhhhh poor me.

This is a double edged sword, as it's great to have the freedom to eat when and what I want...no compromises, which leaves me free to merrily experiment on myself with my research into food and nutrition. It does however leave a bit of a gap... that sense of sharing and family and community spirit which is important on so many levels, and is I feel an equally important part of a nutritious diet....

so in the mean time I will commune with my dried apricots and other sweet treats to nourish my soul!

Note to Self...

Evacuate bowels BEFORE leaving the house....

cleansing update...

Just a quickie on the cleansing front....

last thursday was the fisrt day I've actually felt a bit like my old self again which was a relief!

I was getting really tired (literally) of tummy gripes and feeling tired all the time and lolling about the place with no motivation at all...

am back on form again now...

I'm cheating a bit with the eating including things like organic humous (oooh will burn in hell for that one!) and some tahini too...
feeling really drawn to fats/nuts since the rest of what I'm eating is veg!

also did think it was going to be a bit cheaper month to compensate for the expense of the cleanse, but the amount of veg I'm getting through I think I was sorely mistaken!

Got my super juicer today and my first bag juicing fruit and veg from farmaround.co.uk today so I'm off to the Kitchen to experiment!

Alfalfa Srouts.... are they really so healthy????

Along the way, my research has uncovered this interesting fact:

That the mighty alfalfa sprout - that any self respecting health food nut would be happy to sprinkle liberally on their salads or stuff in their wholemeal pitta bread sandwhiches - is not as good for us as we are led to believe....

I first came upon this info in the great "Nourishing Traditions" by Sally Fallon as mentioned in my previous post. There it mentions that these innocent looking sprouts have been shown to "inhibit the immune system and contribute to inflammatory arthritis and lupus"...
This is seems is caused by an amino acid called canavanine....

I also found some information about this at another amazing website I found

www.beyondveg.com

the following excerpt is from the article comparing the virtues of raw and cooked foods..... "Alfalfa sprouts contain approximately 1.5% canavanine, a substance which, when fed to monkeys, causes a severe lupus erythematosus-like syndrome. (In humans, lupus is an autoimmune disease.) Canavanine is an analog for the amino acid arginine, and takes its place when incorporated into proteins. However, alfalfa that is cooked by autoclaving (i.e., subjected to pressure-cooking) doesn't induce this effect [Malinow 1982, Malinow 1984].

Note here that the monkeys were fed semi-purified diets, with a canavanine content of 1-2%, versus a typical canavanine content of 1.5% (dry weight--that is, when completely dehydrated) for alfalfa sprouts [Malinow 1982]. Thus, although it would be very difficult for a human to eat enough fresh alfalfa sprouts to ingest even 1% canavanine, individuals should be aware of the potential risks, and consume (or not consume) alfalfa sprouts accordingly. (In particular, those rawists who juice sprouts should probably strictly limit or avoid the consumption of alfalfa sprout juice, due to the concentration effect that results from juicing.)"

Food for thought eh!

makes you wonder what other super healthy things we blindly eat without questioning the validity of health claims.....

more of that to come....

Nourishing Traditions

I've been revisiting some of my past eating experiences during the last week or so... this cleanse advocates as much raw food as possible and It's been tempting to jump on the raw food bandwagon as I did a couple of years ago in an extreme way... there's something quite satisfying about being really disciplined and anal!

However thankfully I've become a bit more balenced since those days and can now see value in different theories and concepts and tend to take bits that make sense from all of them and leave the more 'fanatical' practices where they are.

Macrobiotics, another way of life that has some very interesting points to it (which I'm learning about on my cooking course) seems to be the total polar opposite of Raw food veganism...

So I returned to my much loved nutrition tomes that grace my book shelf that I return to again and again as well as the internet....

One such book is:

Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon with Mary G. Enig Ph.D. (a world renknowned expert on fats)

This is an amazing book full of useful and interesting facts, figures and recipes and has a very balenced approach to nutritition.

Sally Fallon founded the Weston A. Price Foundation amongst other things...Dr Weston Price is the famous dentist who conducted extensive research into the healthy teeth and bones of indigenous populations around the world and found a direct correlation between traditional diet and good health and strong bone structure vs the malformed teeth of the same cultures bought up with 'modern nutrition'

check out these links for more info

www.westonaprice.org
www.mercola.com/2001/jan/21/weston_price.htm



www.radiantlifecatalog.com/service/wisdom2.cfm
These pictures are from the above link...

Upper pictures) Young people born to parents who ate traditional nutrient-rich diets.

(Lower pictures) Children born to traditional people who had largely abandoned traditional foods for refined and processed foods.

Enema Queen!

I've done 4 enema's over the last couple of days...

I was lying on the bathroom floor, admininstering this morning looking out of the window up at the clouds floating past on the blue sky (amazingly!)

You see... enemas can be blissed out pleasane experiences!

I've been giving myself a hard time that all this cleansing business is taking up loads of time... but that's the whole point.

I was thinking it was something other than a worthy thing to do with my time, but it's quite the opposite..

I have now decided to relish the time I'm giving to myself to spring clean and make it a priority in my life rather than something I have to squeeze in around other things,

A time for me...

How nice!

I look around and see all the frantic activity going on and no one makes proper time for themselves. We're all too busy trying to please other people, our bosses, friends, family... all those people who have 'expectations' of us and we're so busy worrying about meeting those expectations, we forget about what we expect from ourselves...

What are our boundaries?
Do we have any?

THought not....

That's been a big lesson for me... working as a complimentary therapist you have to be so careful not to take on other people's crap...

not only for professional carers though... we all allow our boundaries to be breached on so many levels...

Part of doing a cleanse is to let go of all the old crap (literally) that weighs us down ... all those emotions and thoughts that are stored in the memories of every cell in our body...

Scary stuff eh!

There are a couple of great books that have really helped me recently.... (don't be put off by the dreaded 'G' word.... )
be open and who knows what amazing things might happen.

How d'you Juice with no Juicer???

What a labour of love!!!

Yesterday my belly was feeling a bit weird.

I refered to Richard Anderson's cleanse book to make sure I wasn't damaging myself in anyway, and it seems its quite normal to have reactions and a sign that you're body is in need of a good clean out!

Anyone I know would probably say... yes but you're so healthy blah blah... and I am, but I can feel that's there's lots of toxic residue in my body from most of my life before I became more healthy...

So am sticking with it... it was suggested in the book that I need to increase the amount of 'elecrolytes'... essential minerals such as sodium, magnesium, calcium, potassium etc from an organic source ie vegetable as oppose to rocks..., ie from fresh juices... so until my juicer arrives I decided to be a bit inventive...

I had some rocket in the fridge from the farmers market, so chucked that in the blender with some water... grated a carrot and chucked that in, whizzed it all up and then strained off the juice! Voila! some scary green juice...

It actually tasted pretty foul.... really green tasting, so put some fresh ginger juice and some lemon juice in to make it a bit more palatable....

Actually felt loads better from it too...

Just ordered a bag of juicable fruit and veg (the juicing module) from
www.farmaround.co.uk
which I get next tuesday...

more positive today.

ps... to make Ginger Juice:

Grate some ginger and then squeeze in your hand.
It's amazing how much juice comes out... then you don't have to worry about the horrible fibrousy bits...
Also really nice to add to soups at the end of cooking.

Top Enema Tips!

Success!

Slept through the night with no crazy movements so felt inspired to create some of my own!

Dusted off my enema bag and away I went...

filled a big jug with a mix of boiled filtered water and cold filtered water so roughly body temp...

Great tip is to lie on your right side on the floor with pillows and blankets etc if you can be arsed (no pun intended)
The descending colon which will have first contact with the water runs down the left side of your body so this side position helps the water flow properly,
I've tried before lying on my back and the water ends up going all over the place and I had no trouble this time.

What you need to do is hang the enema bag up somewhere ... not too high, maybe 3 or 4 feet off the ground ... I used the handle of the shower door ... you also need a jug filled with water, and a bowl to catch the drips.

That's it!

Once you've set up your bag, poured some water through, tested the tap / valve position at the end of the tube...rub a little oil on the rectum attachement that's screwed onto the end of the tube (I used avocado oil because that's what I had on hand but any natural vegetabel oil will do)
Put a little of the oil lube on your bum hole and then slide the tip into your bum... sounds gross I know but honestly you hardly feel it... it's so tiny... when you compare it to the size of poo!

Then you turn the tap on and breath deeply and relax and allow the water to flow up your bowels...
you can massage up the left side and down the right side of your abdomen to encourage the water to move up your colon.

Then when the bag is empty, take the tip out of your bum and rest it in the bowl and try and retain the fluid for as long as possible.... (I only manage a couple of mins at the mo!) then dash to the loo and WOOOOOOOOOSH!

I then did another one straight afterwards.....

both times 1 pint of water each...

You can order enema bags at

www.wholisticresearch.com

along with a whole batch of other interesting bits and bobs!

4, 5 & 6...

Well its been a few days since I posted something...

its been a bit of tumultuous ride so far...
felt quite inspired on Friday and got up really early and did some yoga... making me want to be more intune with myself on all levels doing this cleanse as you become more and more aware of every sensation in your body and thought in your mind.

Went for a run and met my friend who gave me a beautiful painting she made for me for my room.
You can see her blog at

www.rediscoveringavalon.blogspot.com

Thankyou lovely Beth for your divine inspiration.... you are a goddess angel and my room is transformed by your amazing energy you unleashed on that painting!

The hardest thing about this cleanse has got to be working out the timings of taking all the jollop with the right gaps inbetween and fitting in your food too....

if you want to learn more about the program I'm doing go here:

http://www.ariseandshine.com/




What i did do though is to order a manual juicer (until I get more funds and by the Rolls Royce of Single Auger Juicers: the Oscar VitalMax) and also an enema bag to get that colon moving!

My bowels are all over the place right now though... got up 2 times in the night on Thurs for no. 2's and then was clocked up on friday ... then back in the flow on saturday!

stomach making wierd noises and I can literally feel stuff moving and shaking in there... feel a little bit freaked out as I'm not sure what I'm meant to be feeling and if its normal or not... not totally comfortable some of the time.

Today... Sunday is the first day I've got my head around the timings of the herbs and shake.
I'm half way though the day and I'm doing well so far... appart from the amount of stuff that's passing through me already...

am trying to post some images but something's happened to the upload function.. (no not of my bowel movements!...although I might if something really spectacular happens!


Richard Anderson's book...

Day two...

Felt a bit better today... have to start the day with a pretty gross 'shake' ... sadly not a yummy blend of fruit and yoghurt with a dash of honey.....

instead a gelatinous blend of physillium husks to get the bowels moving and hydrated bentonite clay to absorb toxic waste as it gets ejected from my cells....

Hoorah!

Hope it's worth it!

I have to have 3 of those a day...
Inbetween these I then take 5 x portions of herbal capsules spaced out throughout the day...

and then at some point i get to fit in a couple of 'alkaline forming' meals a day...
basically fresh fruit and veg in abundance.... really limited amount of grains as this slows down the whole cleansing process ... maybe once or twice a week... and even a limit of squashes/pumpkins for the same reason....

I'll fill you in tomorrow on some of my sample meals....

I tell you though I relish those meals inbetween all this other stuff, but to be fair the herbs and shake don't taste bad... it's just the discipline of having to take all these things throughout the day with 1 1/2 hours to 2 hours between them all.

Got up this morning for a crazy early morning swim at 7am with a friend who is coincidentally doing a liver flush at the moment... guess its the time of year for detoxing as its Lent and spring (incidentally the dates of Lent and Easter are based on Lunar cycles) so we started the day with a really interesting conversation about what we were hoping to pass from our botties! (her small green pellets, me black rubbery slime)

Day one of the cleanse...

Probably not the greatest idea, but started taking herbal jollop on a fast day...

Started off OK in the morning... began to feel a bit light headed as the day went on....

And then felt like total crap....

Ok I cheated a bit too... had an apple, carrot and some stewed pears... and a couple of ludicrously expensive juices from Fresh and Wild.... am awaiting the moment when I can buy my own wonder juicer ( at great expense) ... and I'm sure the moment is really really sooooon..... I hope so as it really winds me up buying them... and then collecting plastic cups which I then have to recycle (on my bike to Holloway recycling place as I live in glorious Hackney which is apparently too in debt to the local mafiosi to finance local plastic recycling schemes...)




http://www.recycleforlondon.com

Anyway I digress. Think it was a bit extreme taking the herbal potions for the first day and fasting.... probably went into a bit of a healing crisis.... really so tired and lethargic and a nerve under my right eye kept twitching...

had a salt bath and was in bed by 21.30... slept through til 7.....

The Spring Cleanse!

I'm embarking on a Spring Cleanse for my guts! After 6 months in the possesion of various bottles and tubs of herbal jollop, the time has come.

I've been fasting on the full moon and the new moon for the last 6 months as a really nice way to reconnect with the natural planetary cycles as well as with myself.... I was put onto this from the book "moon time" by Johanna Paungger and Thomas Poppe.

It's stated that a detoxification of the body on a new moon day will last a long time, and on the full moon, the body absorbs more... good and bad, therefore it's helpful to eat little or nothing on those days. Sometimes this can be a real challenge as it really makes you aware of food issues as well as the effects of things on your body and mind.

I'm generally trying to increase my spiritual awareness and I have to say I do feel more 'connected' on those fast days... when I'm not chewing at my hat... but really it's only a day every now and then... not such a big deal.

Also makes you appreciate how lucky we are to have such an abundance of everything ... I think everyone should go without something they really feel they need like TV, Music, Food, Company... so we can be in appreciate things a bit more... simple really.

more of those ruminations later....

back to the cleanse...

The Richard Anderson Cleanse was recommeded to me by a wonderful and special friend (thankyou East) and after reading most of Anderson's book "Cleanse and Purify thyself volume 1" it seemed like the right thing to do.

http://www.cleanse.net/newsite/index.html

It's quite pricey as you get it from the states, but I was lucky to get it via someone who was visiting the states which works out much cheaper (£100)

It's comparable to the Ejuva Cleanse (which I havn't tried) which is also really expensive but a disease preventing spring clean has got to be worth it!

How easy is it to spend £100 on a weekend out on the piss?

Priorities and Perspective I guess....