Today I found out what a total wimp I am. I was pretty cocky last night when I joined the throng of girls just out of yoga and aging, glam hippies at the local WholeFoods to pick up my stuff from my detox food list.
For those of you who don't know, I'm doing a detox for work. We do a lot of "walk a mile" research where we try to understand a person's life by getting into their shoes as much as possible. For the current project I'm working on, a detox was a great way to understand the person we are designing for. Because, as I learned today, there is a universe of difference between hearing about how to do a detox and ACTUALLY doing one.
One word to sum up day one: miserable. absolutely miserable. The food part wasn't too bad. Besides a lot of tastelessness and non-excitement leading up to each meal, the food really wasn't too bad. It felt good to eat "cleanly": non-gluten oats with rice milk and blackberries, avocado and tomato spinach salad for lunch, my almonds and apple for lunch and tilapia with brown rice for dinner were really not too bad. Utterly boring but not too bad. Pretty sure I know what it feels like now to being a camel and eat the same thing for every meal. Nothing tasted too different than the next thing so I realized I was eating for the sake of getting food inside my body.
The zinger was the zero coffee. NO ONE TOLD ME! good freaking grief. I now have a huge place in my heart for people trying to kick bad habits because the withdraw from caffeine today made me feel like a back-alley junkie. Sore muscles, unbelievable sleepiness, incredibly strong nausea and a skull-wide migraine-y headache that has lasted a full 24 hours (I started no caffeine yesterday but a headache was the only side effect until today.) At one point I felt like I had the flu: kinda of shivery, congested feeling and achey all over. Who even am I? and is there coffee rehab? And yes, I was grumpy and unsocial able.
(Dear person reading this, do not quit caffeine cold turkey EVER. Be sensible and lessen your intake over a span of two weeks. I found this out after a panicked browse through the ol' google archives.)
Going to bed early tonight after drinking a ton of water, both of which should help take the edge off.
I would ask that you pray for me/think of me but that I remember "oh right, this is self-inflicted."
And this is research. and I'm learning. But seriously: ouch.
Tomorrow I'll run to the grocery store to get a few of the items I glazed over yesterday thinking I was such a badass detoxifer that I wouldn't need them. Things like almond butter, allowable (unsweetened) juices, herbal tea, herbs and spices, mangos, prunes--things that will help spruce things up a little bit. (Which brings is another thing: detoxes ain't cheap yo. Spent $102 last night and still have some holes to fill in. don't do it unless you mean it.)
More tomorrow. 9 more days of this shiz!
