Detox

I have certain long-term fitness goals. These goals are to get stronger, feel better overall, and lose the extra weight that my skin has had the difficult task of withholding for the better part of 16 years. To help me attain those goals, I joined a gym eight months ago. However, when I was two months in, I did not feel like I was making much progress. I was getting stronger, feeling better, but I was not losing any weight. After taking a hard look at my finances, I decided that I needed to procure a personal trainer. Thankfully, my gym offered a great staff of knowledgeable trainers. So I put my aggressive student loan pay-off schedule on suspension and got to work.My trainer's name is Ali. She does not dictate a bunch of exercises at me or put me down when the going gets tough. She understands my fitness goals and makes it a point to work with me to attain those goals. We have been training for almost six months now and the results were great. I write "were" because even though I am even stronger than before, my weight loss has plateaued.I am a person who gets discouraged from time to time. However, I am unable to dismiss these bouts of despondency. I dwell on them which, apparently, makes them worse. Ali realized this while I seemed to be upset over not being able to push myself as far as I wanted to during a workout. She inquired as to why I was so dejected. I proceeded to explain that my weight loss had stopped and I thought my level of activity was to blame. She heard this, told me to get out of my head (a difficult task for me), and finish up the workout. Next session she prompted me with a novel plan."I am going to have you do a week of detox." Honestly this was not great to hear. I did a chemical detox back in college when my roommate and I tried out this new "health" system he was selling. The only thing that was worse than the shakes were the awful drinks one had to imbibe between "meals." Sorry Allen, it just did not work for me. I stuck with that system for a week and in the end I lost about five pounds in water weight. So clearly I was not looking forward to Ali's plan. Thankfully, Ali is well versed in nutrition and understands how the human body processes food. She asked me to send her a picture and description of everything I ate and drank for a week. "Seemed simple enough," I thought. I was actually excited because I was finally able to get vindicated for the careful dietary choices I have made thus far. After that week, Ali was not so excited.Apparently my diet was fine. Well not fine, more like "needs improvement." My regular diet apparently was high in carbohydrates and low in vegetables (not a surprise to most of my family). Fats were OK, sugars were low, and caffeine was almost non-existent. As a result, my diet ranked higher than expected on the glycemic index. This was a surprise to me and I was eager to change that. Ali had a simple plan for me. She told me to eat all veg, all the time...more or less. Some veg was forbidden and I was allowed a very small amount of fruit. I was not confident that I could do what she was asking of me. But after reading the detox diet, I saw it was very accessible and became encouraged.So the night before the detox began, I went to my local natural food market and purchased just shy of $50 of organic vegetables and fruit. After I filled my refrigerator with the alien greens, I stood back, surveyed the scene, and steeled myself with, "It is only for a week. How hard could it be?"The Seven Day Detox Diet As you can see by following the link above, it is an interesting plan to follow. I estimated that I only ingested about 800-900 calories a day. Compared to my previous diet, that is a reduction of 1200 calories! Now even though the detox plan allows for a bit of variety, it was simpler and easier for me to just stick to a single method each day. This method is illustrated in the photos at the start of this post. That is what I ate for seven days. As I am writing this, I am snapping into my last raw green bell pepper on the last night of the diet (As a side note, have you ever tried eating a raw bell pepper like an apple? It is a lot of fun and is so much easier to eat without all that conventional prep work).At this point, one would expect me to bullet point my daily experiences with this detox, but that would be useless. You see what I ate; you have the plan in front of you. My experiences, as detailed as I could make them, would not prepare you for how your body would respond to the detox. I have learned tons about food and my body this past week, but above all else there is one main lesson.Everybody is unique. Now I know what you may be thinking, "That's just a clever way of saying that nobody is unique." That is not my intention. There is no way for one person to have the exact stimuli and consequences as another. It is impossible. This may not be what Ali wanted me to walk away with but too bad. I understand that I am not going to lose weight as quickly as some others. I am comfortable with the fact that I will not be the strongest person in the room. All I can do is give myself the healthiest body I deserve.It is survival of the fittest, and I plan on being pretty damn fit.