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Cleanse your system Health & Fitness

By CATHERINE FAHY
Advocate, Thursday, January 25, 2007
Article Launched: 01/25/2007 10:02:25 AM EST

In December, when I went to my doctor with concerns about the vague malaise and uncommon lethargy I was feeling, she prescribed a cleanse.

This wasn't entirely foreign to me; I'd tried various short-term cleanses in the past, some at the advice of friends, others with boxes of pills and powders from health food stores but never with great success.

So when I went to see nutritionist Maureen Stewart in Shelburne, I was looking forward to doing it right this time.

My particular cleanse, based on dietitian Teri Kerr's book "The Ultimate Detox Diet," is a two-week plant-based diet that eliminates sugar, caffeine, alcohol, grains and dairy products. That means no morning coffee, no glass of red wine with dinner, no sandwich at lunch and no pasta for dinner. Though initially daunting, with a little planning and a lot (I repeat, A LOT) of willpower, I'm sticking to it and, five days in, feeling a lot better.

That's not counting two days of a splitting headache from caffeine withdrawal and a sinking feeling of disappointment at the thought of what I couldn't eat for dinner. Nevertheless, it would be hard to deny that I'm sleeping better and feeling more clear-headed and energized. It's also positively uncanny how even-tempered and unruffled I am.

After shopping Friday afternoon for a cartload of organic fruits and vegetables, herbs and spices, nuts, legumes, fish and tofu, I officially started cleansing Saturday morning with a shake consisting of a quarter-sized slice of unpeeled fresh ginger; half a squeezed lemon; one peeled orange or half a grapefruit; grape, pomegranate or cranberry juice; a dash of cayenne pepper; a tablespoon of flaxseed oil; and a banana, berries or some other fruit.

The first morning I went way too heavy on the ginger and cayenne pepper and had to choke it down but now that I've switched to blueberry juice and added more banana, I could see drinking this unusual concoction every morning.

As the basis of the cleanse, the shake is filling and surprisingly energizing with other benefits like antioxidants, liver detoxification, better digestion and better metabolism, to name just a few.

Lunch and dinner are a bit more challenging, but basically involve some mix of a rainbow of fruits and vegetables, with nuts thrown in for snacking. Among the better things I've made so far from a list of suggested recipes in Kerr's book are a lemon and parsley black-eyed pea salad, sauteed kale and carrots in a creamy tahini sauce, Indian lentil stew and a tofu vegetable stir-fry. I'm definitely not starving.

Nation-wide in recent months, there seems to be more of a focus on healthy eating, no doubt as a result of rising obesity in adults and children and research that increasingly proves the long-term health damage of poor eating habits.

In The Advocate's calendar alone last week, for example, there were three entries related to healthy eating, including a nutritional consultant speaking at the College Club in Lenox and dietitian Margaret Tash offering advice to shoppers at Wild Oats in Williamstown.

Tash, a co-op member, has spent two decades counseling people to eat better.

"We're really talking about whole fruits, whole grains and water, lots of water. People never drink enough water," she said last Saturday at one of the cafe tables in Wild Oats.

Though she is a proponent of short-term elimination diets like mine, her focus is guiding people through the gradual process of developing life-long healthy eating habits. She counsels clients to buy whole wheat bread, for instance, but said unfortunately most people's taste buds have adapted to refined white flour, which is made from grains stripped of nutrients.

"We have to retrain our tastebuds to eat what our bodies need," Tash said. "If it doesn't have the words 'whole wheat' in front of it, it's white."

Every grocery store now has whole wheat bread, and most also have a selection of healthier, less processed food, plus a spattering of organic fruits and vegetables in the produce aisle. Tash said as more people recognize the benefit of whole, unprocessed food, the balance will shift.

"As we create that demand, we as consumers have the power to ask for those things. We're fighting decades of a certain way of thinking," she said.

Still, she said many people just don't make the connection between eating simple meals and feeling better. Or focusing on the fat and calories in food rather than quality.

"It's like if you always put a little water in with your gas, (your car) is going to run, but not as well," she said.

Jeff Potter, editor and publisher of the Shelburne Falls Independent, is somewhat of an evangelist after enrolling in one of Stewart's four-week cleansing workshops. When he dragged himself to the first session, half and hour late and looking like death warmed over, he said he felt like his life was a runaway train.

"I would routinely eat coffee ice cream with fake chocolate sprinkles for lunch. I had any number of awful things I would pick for breakfast and at best I was pumping myself full of lots of cholesterol," Potter said this week.

But after experiencing the same miserable symptoms of caffeine withdrawal that I had, he woke up from a nap a one day early in the cleanse feeling clear and refreshed.

"It just kind of snaps away, almost instantaneously," he said. "It was almost like rebooting your computer. It really forced me to stop and look at every thing."

Now, Potter said he's eating a little more realistically, with an occasional donut or cookie, but still no red meat, very little chicken and lots of greens like kale. He said eating better has helped his wife, Susi, with her chronic pain.

"We're not as rigorous as we were when we had to report back, but pretty much everything is organic now," he said.

Aside from being interested in the way different foods affect my body, I also believe if we all thought more about what we ate, how it made us feel and where it came from, we'd not only have better health, but a more positive impact on the environment.

There's no denying that our increasingly processed and industrialized food supply is not environmentally sustainable and is far removed from traditional diets with very little processed food and lots of fruits and vegetables.

I'm also aware of what I eat because of the increasingly inhumane way animals raised for conventional food are treated. In the book "Fast Food Nation," author Eric Schlosser points out how ironic it is that people shower their pets with presents at Christmas but don't think of the conditions their Christmas ham was raised in.

I mean, who wants to drink milk and eat meat from animals raised inhumanely and pumped full of growth hormones and antibiotics or vegetables doused in fungicides and pesticides?

Of course, that doesn't mean I won't welcome lasagna back into my diet, but I'll do it with moderation and a lot of thought for where each ingredient comes from, how it was produced and how it affects my health.

Catherine Fahy is The Advocate's arts editor. She can be reached at 413-663-7942, ext. 234, or cfahy@advocateweekly.com.