2009: Year of the probiotics
Thursday, January 1, 2009 at 07:12PM I am typically not a violent person, but I think if given the chance, I'd like to bitch-slap the year 2008 around a little.
Let's all admit it: barring a couple of high points (Obama! and, um...Obama!), 2008 was a shit year. I can't pinpoint exactly what it was that made it so lame, but whatever it was, I don't seem to be alone in hating this particular Year of our Lord to death; in fact, a quick review of New Year's comments on Twitter and Facebook reveals that it seems the most popular sentiment (after the requisite "Happy New Year") is some variation of "Hey! Fuck off, 2008!"
(My favorite salute to the year's awfulness? "2008 sucked a bag of dicks." Uncouth, perhaps...but pretty accurate, assuming you find the prospect of fellating a large bag of dismembered penises as unappealing as I do.)
So why is this? What did 2008 do that was so god awful that it has us all so glad to see it go? Mercury in retrograde? Collective expiring patience for the Bush administration? Recession? Sarah Palin? I have no idea (though I'd love to rest it all on the shoulders of Sarah Palin, that boob). As for James and me, it was a combination of things that all just added up to a bunch of suck. We suffered financial setbacks, selling the newspaper, relationship challenges, deaths of family and pets, more financial setbacks, the tension of a pivotal presidential election we felt passionately about, still more financial setbacks, and the typical pressures of a young couple trying to live meaningful, interesting lives in the midst of greater suburbia. Oh, AND Warner Brothers postponed the release of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince from November 2008 until July of 2009. Assholes.
And all I know is that I feel the need to seriously purge 2008 from my system. I want to start fresh, on the "right foot" as opposed to this gimpy-ass clubfoot I've been hobbling around on. I want 2009 to kick 2008's ass in a big way. But mostly, I just want to FEEL GOOD in 2009.
So I'm doing a cleanse, hurray! And by hurray I mean "hurray," laden with heavy sarcasm and followed by that sad trumpet sound. Cleanses are neither easy nor fun. The one I'm doing requires me to radically reduce my sugar, caffeine, alcohol, dairy, gluten and yeast intake over the next 2-4 weeks and take a candida supplement to purge all the toxins and crap out of my system. This basically means I can't eat or drink much of anything that I love...but only for a few weeks. I can do that, right? RIGHT?! We shall see.
Why a cleanse, you ask? Am I entertaining my masochistic side? Turning all New Age cuckoo? Making yet another idiotic New Year's resolution I won't keep? No. I'm doing a cleanse because you are what you eat, and if you eat crap, you are crap, and there's a lot of crap out there, and I feel like crap. CRAP! I eat pretty well, but I do still eat a lot of pretty bad stuff (damn you, sweet tooth!), and some stuff out there is produced in a vat of LIES, foodstuffs masquerading as nutritious when it's really not (I'm looking at you, Vitamin Water)...and it all builds up in your system, and the more it builds up, the worse you feel, not just on a physical level, but on a mental and emotional level as well. Basically, our bodies are ecosystems, and we are not just the sum of our parts, but the parts as well. WON'T ANYONE THINK OF THE PARTS!?
So I'm cleansing. I've only just started this morning, so nothing major to report so far. But I'm struggling already with the no coffee part. BECAUSE DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH I LOVE COFFEE? I've officially been cleansing for less than 10 hours and already I'm grumpy to not have gotten my usual couple of cups this morning. Instead, I drank some rooibos tea (no caffeine, lots of antioxidants) and ate a bowl of plain oatmeal seasoned with just a dash of salt and cinnamon (herbs and spices are okay while cleansing, thank god). A sausage scramble, breakfast roll and cup of joe it was NOT.
Obviously I don't feel any different yet (except for the lack of caffeine), but supposedly the first week is the hardest, when you experience the "die-off." This is when all of the crap lurking around in your intestines and blood start to die due to deprivation of all that they love: sugar, yeast, wheat, processed and refined ingredients. Apparently they put up a hell of a fight, and the result is that you feel almost worse at first. But once the die-off tapers, I should notice a marked improvement in mental clarity and acuity, more energy, less soreness and indigestion, improved sleep, and fewer random ailments. I'm also hoping to gain the ability to fly and read minds.
So we'll see how this goes. Anybody out there have experience with doing a cleanse? Advice? Menu suggestions? Because so far the list of things I *can* eat makes me want to cry: rice, grains, beans, veggies, soy.
Also, when the hell is someone going to invent a chocolate Hostess Cupcake that's good for you? Somebody get on that. Shit.
View Printer Friendly Version
Email Article to Friend
Reader Comments (7)
Doing a cleanse? Seriously Malisams, the only people I've ever met who actually worked through a serious cleanse were (during and after) consistently irritable and visibly anemic.
Devoted cleansers can take months just to build up properly functioning gut flora again. That's the die-off you're talking about.
As far as blood goes, if there's stuff "lurking in there" it's not stuff that can be removed by not eating certain things. Removing blood contaminants requires chelation therapy, a dangerous procedure that is only performed by real doctors if you've got arsenic, mercury or lead intoxication.
Sorry to go on a rant, but even if it was actually healthy to deprive yourself of nutrients (it's not), you don't need it.
Yah and I can I just remind you about how you came to my wedding last summer, which totally DID NOT suck - so at least SOMETHING good happened. Maybe I was the only lucky one? :D
Now go drink some green tea and get on your elliptical.
PS oh and yeah! Vitamin Water FTL.
Jadenz: Your wedding WAS one of the few good things (my friend Gina's wedding being another, and the birth of my niece being yet another)...so yay! Thanks for the reminder.
Steve: I guess I should clarify...James and I talked about this, and I realized that perhaps "cleanse" is a misleading word. Certainly my comment that I'm hoping to purge blood toxins was. All I'm really doing is changing my diet some to include much less sugar and yeast and wheat. But I'm not eliminating them entirely from my diet. I just feel that my diet is out of balance -- too much of a couple things, not enough of a couple others -- so I'm just evaluating what I eat and changing a few things. Any elimination is only temporary, while the dietary habits will be permanent (eating less sugar, more gluten-free stuff). It's all about moderation from here on out. So I don't plan on starving myself of nutrients or going into anemic shock over anything. I just want to eat as healthily as I can.
And fuck it -- I'm going to have a small cup of coffee now. :)
Yeah, I hope my wedding made the list of awesomeness in 2008! :)
Girl, that goes without saying. YOU ON MY JOCKEY TEAM!
I can attest to the fact that our bodies are ecosystems, particularly if I haven't bothered to shower after a really stressful day. I swear that if I took a census of all of the proto-one cell organisms that spontaneously generate in my armpit hair over the course of a day, and each had their voter id card on Nov 4th, 2000, Al Gore would have won by a landslide.