Eat it up, yum!

This week, I started an herbal detox by a company called Wild Rose that restricts all dairy, fermented products, sugar, processed foods, flour of any kind and tropical fruit in your diet. There is a series of herbal supplements to take in addition to the dietary restrictions that supposedly flush our your system and aid in the elimination of toxins from the bloodstream. Wild Rose recommends organic food and free-range wherever possible. I am not taking the herbal supplements yet and will probably just do the food restrictions for 12 days in an attempt to clean out my digestive tract that constantly becomes gummed-up with flour, sugars and other difficult-to-digest foods. The detox is about creative cooking and not depriving yourself.

Having once believed detoxes to be hokey and more unhealthy than actually good for you, I did a bit more research. I can't exactly say that I liked what I came up with because some of the facts about food were quite shocking. In 1958, only a few known food additives existed and only a mere 419 pounds were added to our food chain annually in North America. Today there are over 3 million additives (almost 2 billion pounds) added to our food chain each year, and this number appears to be growing. Therefore, there is a strong need to systematically cleanse the body: digestive tract, colon, liver, lymphatic system and kidneys. Does cleansing sound less hokey yet?

So, you might be wondering what it is that you CAN eat during the detox. All kinds of yummy things in fact. You do not need to starve yourself, like on one of those cabbage juice cleanses. Those sound a bit ridiculous to an active person like myself, who could not do a fast because my calorie expenditure is too great. Anyways, what you can eat are baked stuffed apples, with tahini, cinnamon and almonds! Homemade guacamole on rice cakes! Curried spinach soup! Chicken paprika with basmati rice and broccoli! Homemade eggplant dip with peppers!

This detox originally started as being about me, my health, my diet, my...waistline (haha)...but then it became about something greater. I thought about how some might view this diet as "boring" or "restricting" and quickly realized that there are people around the world, in India for example, who eat the same rice & bean dish every day, when they can afford that. 95% of the world's population eats these sorts of grains, vegetables and poultry every day. In a culture that prides itself on variety, it is easy to forget that very healthy individuals around the world have consistently cooked with the same food staples to meet dietary needs for hundreds of years and sometimes lived well into their hundreds.

It's about mindful consuming, evil consumerism and just generally being aware.

Wish me luck!