Mmmm . . . detox

I found my way into the Raw Diva’s 7-Day Detox a couple of weeks ago. For a few (not very convincing) reasons, I didn’t start right away. But I appointed last Wednesday the day I was going to start. Wednesday was great, I water fasted and felt light and free and happy and a little hungry but powerful and clear. And Wednesday night I broke my fast with melon, as recommended. And I felt perfect! And then later that night, I ordered room service, and ate decidedly non-detox-friendly cooked food. Fine, I thought. I woke up Thursday and started again. Water fast. Yay! Break the fast with a green smoothie. Smooth sailing! Pack my lunch for the next day! Eat my delicious organic grapefruits for breakfast on Friday! I feel so great that I have to punctuate everything with exclamation points! And then. I had admitted to myself that I need to steer clear of the catering tent at lunch, but found myself having a conversation with my boss, walking over there. And all of a sudden, I’m standing in front of a buffet of yummy-smelling cooked food, and all of the raw-goodness that I’d built up over a couple of days seemingly evaporated, and I was having this out of body experience watching myself eat the pasta, not wanting to eat the pasta, but still doing it. (NB – my food / eating issues extend way beyond raw vs cooked, of this I am entirely aware. Not right for this post, but later on at some point).

After a weekend of more cooked food (if I ever doubted my addiction to them, I sure don’t now), I re-committed to the detox on Sunday night. It’s now Tuesday night, and I’m beyond grateful that I’m still working it. I’ll let you know how it goes.

As promised – my forays into green smoothies with no blender! At home, I have the all-powerful VitaMix, and I love the smoothies. They were all fruit or fruit/nut milk combinations, as the idea of adding greens into my fruit made me want to barf.

But as I’ve been reading and reading and reading some more about the goodness of green smoothies, I found some willingness to try them out. Side note – I hadn’t had NEARLY as much resistance to juicing greens, I’d been happily (if infrequently) doing that for months and months. Anyway. Everything I know about smoothies requires a blender, right? Hence, the “smooth” part of “smoothie”. I’m sure that I could have found a relatively inexpensive standard blender, but I was more concerned about the precious real estate it would take up in my luggage when I moved onto the next location.

I’m not sure where exactly I read it, but the idea of an immersion – or stick – blender came up. Now that I can easily toss into my luggage. Back I went to Galleria, and bought an inexpensive immersion blender and excellent knife. By the way, the immersion blender is exactly the same as the one I have at home except that it has a European plug at the end, not a US one. I then biked over to IKEA (much much much farther than expected), and bought some nice-sized Tupperware containers that I can blend my smoothies in. And Voila! Smoothie without the blender. Well, at least without traditional blender.

The immersion blender works fine. Not perfect, takes a bit longer and I haven’t been able to get anything totally smooth, but chunky is ok for me right now. AND, I love me some green smoothie. I’ve been making the smoothie at night, putting it in my adorable red thermos, and taking it to work the next day. Yes, I know, I’d be better off making it fresh, but for now this works for me. What I have noticed, which possibly everyone else in the raw world knows, is that letting the smoothie sit for 12 hours makes it get very VERY thick. So I’ve learned to make it quite a bit more liquidy than I might actually want at the time of preparation. Tonight’s smoothie for tomorrow is bananas, dates, romaine.

Rock on with your raw selves,
Marissa