(Originally posted on the website Heron Flight)

“…because, when you get too hungry from not eating at all, you’ll be crazy by lunchtime and more likely to eat junk, like a cheese steak.”

As I wrote yesterday, I failed on the first two days of fasting for the detox program. More correctly, “we” were not able to make it through the whole weekend on green tea and water alone. We tried. We tried valiantly. We failed gracefully. (Again, more on the “we” another day.)

I say gracefully because we have salvaged the plan. I was going to fast with green tea again today until after work. But then decided that the other half of the “we” was correct in the quote above. I probably would have given in by lunchtime and ended up consuming a big ol’ cheese steak with considerable gusto… and not a small amount of guilt. Having made it mostly through each of the two days of the weekend before finally eating, some good most have been accomplished. So, we decided to continue with the last five days of the diet, which consist of eating mainly vegetables and fruit. We can have brown rice and most fruits and vegetables (no corn, no grapefruit). We can drink as much green tea and water as we wish. Primarily, what we cannot have is sugar, coffee, alcohol, oils (only 2 tablespoons of olive oil per day), nuts, dairy products, wheat, oats, and condiments. We can use salt, pepper and any other seasonings. That is what our diet will consist of for this week.

This is actually not such a hard thing. We have been deliberately trying to eat more vegetables and less meat, more fruits and less sugary snacks. We raided the cookbook section of Barnes and Nobles and came away with armfuls of vegetarian cookbooks. We have already experimented with several vegetarian dishes. (Have you ever had broccoli coleslaw in a spinach wrap with feta cheese and black olive spread? Ahhhhh! If I could only have cheese this week!) The snacks have been hard to cut down on. Eating less meat has not been. For a while now, I’ve been teetering on the edge of becoming a complete vegetarian. The detox program may just be the catalyst to pushing me over that edge. It did save me from inflicting a cheese steak upon myself at lunch today.

Several readers have asked for information on this detox diet. The book we have been reading is called “7-Day Detox Miracle” by Peter Bennett, Sara Faye, and Stephen Barrie. Click on the title to purchase the book from Amazon.com.