Day 2 of the 7-day cleanse

This post is going to describe how I endured Day 1 and what is coming on Day 2.

First, I drank two teas instead of two half cup coffees that I usually down. The tea didn’t really help keeping my concentration going, but it did help me stay awake. The downside: a terrible headache from 6 pm until I went to sleep. Second problem was that, I had dinner around 8:30pm, so I had to wait 12 hours before my morning smoothie, which worsened the headache. I was hungry, on and off but kept going strong. On the other hand, the energy balls were delicious!

Workout

I tried a new fitness studio near work today. It was no crazy workout but I popped one energy ball at 5 and it kept me going until 6:30 pm. I ran 7 minutes on the treadmill, 5 on the crossfit machine and did 3 sets each of legs, arms, back and thigh exercises. My muscles hurt like crazy yesterday but I’m feeling great today! I’m going back to the gym today and I’m going to try spending more time on the cardio. Let’s see how that works out!

Breakfast

Today’s smoothie consisted of greens, avocado, banana and berries. I totally forgot to add chia and the protein powder. Surprisingly, it wasn’t disgusting but not that great either. I bought more mixed berries to try to make better smoothies from tomorrow onwards.

Snack

Two more energy balls today, before the work out and sunflower seeds for the mid-morning snack.

Lunch

I heated up some canned lentil soup yesterday for dinner and brought some to work for lunch. I added some salt, pepper and cilantro to make it tastier.

Dinner

Tonight I plan to make soup out of carrots and broccoli. This one isn’t canned, so I have to make it from scratch.

Weight Loss

Since Saturday, I lost 0.4 pounds and my weight is now 139.6lbs. 

Day 1 of the 7-day cleanse

I picked Tuesday as Day 1 because I had leftover food from the weekend to eat on Monday. And I do NOT want to postpone to NEXT Monday. Trust me, I have done this in the past. At the moment, there are three problems – the first one is the voice inside my head. It reminds me of the taste of fries and fried stuff with ketchup. I need some way to tune it out. Secondly, I share an office with a coworker who lunches at the desk, which means I can smell delicious things, but I can’t eat them. I’ve decided to take a walk during his lunch break. Let’s see how that works out. The third and the most difficult problem to face is caffeine. It is NOT allowed on the clean diet. I’m an engineer who has to think and work for 9 hours a day. Without my morning cup of coffee, I’m not sure how much my work is going to be affected. I will find out today and if I cannot avoid, I will go buy some mate tea, which is a caffeine substitute.

Tweaks: I made some minor tweaks to the list of allowed foods – so it is not extreme. I’m allowing bananas and peanut butter, both foods on the “exclude list”. I assumed, in small quantities these foods are ok and I definitely need that sugar from bananas to begin my day.

Breakfast

Bananas, Berries, Chia and Arugula shake – It was disgusting. First mouthful was bearable but half glass down, it was downright terrible. I’m considering switching to baby spinach, which is comparatively tasteless. I added 5 mg of vanilla flavored protein powder, so I skipped the stevia and the smoothie was still sweet.

Snack

I made some energy balls in the morning that consist of 1 cup each of almonds, cashews, raisins, dates and 1 tbsp. of peanut butter. I put all the ingredients (except the peanut butter) in the food processor to get a chunky nut mixture, into which I later incorporated 1 tbsp of peanut butter. It is delicious. But whether it is filling, is to be found.

I have a bag of sunflower seeds at my desk – my second snack. They are the backup for days I forget to make a snack or wake up late.

Lunch

Lunch is a salad with stir fried broccoli, carrots, feta cheese and mykoprotein. They are tossed together with olive oil, salt and oregano.

Dinner

For dinner I was planning a lentil soup, with onions, leeks and carrots.

The Clean Journey

Hey, look – a blog entry after so long (Pausing for the applause to die down). I’m just here to document what could be a detox journey to weight loss, a positive body image and a healthy mind. Since most of us have a body image complex (including yours truly) and it’s a life long struggle to keep living up to our own expectations – meanwhile battering our body for no fault of its own. It’s not easy but I’ve decided to shelve away some anger and sorrow resulting from thinking about my body and try being positive and do something good for a while. I hence decided this year to try Dr. Alejandro Junger’s Clean Program. It is always an inertia that is stopping us from achieving our weight goals – it is “Tomorrow I will eat healthy”, “I’m too tired for a workout today” or “Just a last piece of pizza”. And the clean program is just a precursor to my underlying problems – kicking some bad habits.  

What is Clean?

I heard about clean from tp, who sent me the eBook and encouraged me to start thinking about a serious detox. It is basically a 21 day cleanse that helps detox the body and help with natural healing process. In the book, Dr. Junger talks about how western medicine does not treat the cause of a diseases, it just strives to make the symptoms go away. Not blaming medicine, but that is exactly what people want – they just want their pain gone. Nobody is interested in a detailed analysis of their disease, nor interest in finding out the cause. All the food we eat is directly affecting our physical and mental health. Physically, the more we eat processed foods, the more work for the gut to break down substances and digest. Basically, I am now giving my gut a well-deserved timeout.

Why now?

I’m beginning my 7 day pre-cleanse as a test of will power. I don’t want to commit to a 21 day cleanse without experiencing a trial and knowing what to expect. Also, now would be the worst time to detox, because a trip to india is coming up next month. A trip to home means LOTS of spicy home food and LOTS of spicy junk and spicy street food. Everything with spice. Throw in a festival and a wedding in the mix, it’s a crazy amount of bad, spicy, bad-for-the-gut food. That’s just like cleaning your house to make it dirty right after. Moreover, Tp was also interested in doing the 21 day cleanse, so it’s better doing it together, so we can support and motivate each other. I have decided to track my clean diet – recipes, workouts and cheats (I hope to keep that minimal), so it will help me motivate myself.

Weight Loss

One week of clean is not for weight loss, it is too short and I want to keep it easy for the first time. I’m still just documenting my weight for documentation sake. I now weight 140 lbs (I’m 1.64m), measured one day before starting the clean program. 

Man's Obsession with Speed

Ever wondered why man is obsessed with speed? Wait, what? Man isn’t obsessed with speed – it’s just a phase – every man grows out of it and becomes a suburban dad who teaches his daughters to drive slowly. Well, when we zoom out and look at the big picture – the first automobile that travelled at 16kmph and around 125 years later, our fastest speed is – prepare to drop your jaws - 440kmph!! [If you haven't dropped your jaws, here’s a little historical time reference –The wheel was invented around 4500BCE - so it took forever to go from wheel to slow-ass automobile] So, here’s where we conclude that man indeed is obsessed with speed.

 It must have all started with his own two feet – He realized that he can run faster than some wild animals chasing him and sought out to find what all creatures he can outrun (that’s a part of bloody history interlaced with stupidity we don’t want to discuss). Running races with fellow humans began as an ego boost. Lets take a break and image prehistoric man say this in Barney Stinson*'s voice:

And along with technology racing started getting out of hand – Tour de France, NASCAR, Formula 1, etc. As man began to understand physics better – his need to be a better, nay superior human being started growing stronger. Wow, the things we do for an ego boost.

Although we can travel faster than anybody could ever imagine in the last century, we still want to travel faster than we now can. How much faster can we travel before we start travelling through time? Is that our ultimate goal – to become time travelers? Or to apparate – which can be really useful to magically flit out of embarrassing situations or those of criminal kind – Holy f**k! The smarter we get, the more evil we become!! (Or is it just me? :-O) 

Now may be the time to plunge head-first into some possibilities of travelling at the speed of light. FTL (Faster than light) is not an alien** term for physicists and space travel enthusiasts. Travelling at FTL, although still possible to achieve – could take us many more years to physically implement. Accelerating masses such as whole space shuttles to achieve speeds to 300,000,000 kmph is more than a bit of a challenge. [For reference – ISS orbits at 7700 kmph] It is going to interesting to wait for scientists to try to achieve FTL speeds and then we can race through space and break more records and warp time?
       

                                                       

*- If that name is unfamiliar, stop reading and return after watching 8 seasons of How I met your mother (season 9 is worth skipping).

**- pun intended  

{I have been meaning to ask tp to write something about his views on time travel and the origins of the universe - that would be part -2 of Man's obsession with speed - The Space Race}

Engineering or Evolution?

I have always wondered why evolution, that was so myriad and distinct to observe over the millennia, has not been happening noticeably to man since many centuries BC. Are we so supreme that there is no way to evolve any further? Or are we the end of the long chain of biological evolution that ends if humans die out? Or haven’t we been here long enough to evolve noticeably? That got me thinking about how far we have come since we were naked, club wielding, raw meat eaters to the sophisticated, multi-lingual, planet-colonizing nuclear war-gods? 

Engineering is the evolution that we have seen quantitatively since the beginning of mankind. The guy who invented the wheel must have showed off his supreme invention to his neighbors, sons and grandchildren. Say one out of the 50 (approximately, considering the sparse population of the stone-age and lack of birth control) people he shared DNA with, thought it was a fab idea and tried to sell it to others as his family heirloom? He must have learnt it, enslaved and started a mass production so he would trade the wheelbarrows to get himself exotic meats and even exotic hook-ups.

Maybe along the line, his descendants carried the gene of his father - the wheel inventor and he began using his cave to carve ideas and these crazy drawings lead on to more inventions. Somewhere at the same time when man was beginning to understand what we now called science, another man who couldn’t understand the eccentric man’s drawings but could have a grunting match with many tribes. Maybe his son sewed the threads of grunts together and developed a pre-historic language. Artists probably began to bourgeois at the same rate as science dudes and business men.

So we now have the crafty tradesmen (Homo Negotiatoris*), crazy science geniuses (Homo Physicus*) and lost-in-a-trance artsy hippies (Homo Artifex*). And while we moved on from the period of element worship and came closer to the birth of Christ, many civilizations from the east to the west started evolving into smarted human beings – with bigger brains, straighter spines and opposable thumbs. Language was becoming more solid and so was understanding of each other. This was probably around the time documentation began. Some Homos** (the ‘Sapiens’ kind) started writing down stuff when the gyros-eating guy started drawing triangles on the ground and a vagrant telling tales of his bath-tub revelations at the tavern, who for some reason started chanting numbers looking at his slice of pumpkin pie¹. 

The East, in fact was growing smarter too. Unaffected by the mighty wars plaguing the west, its population grew exponentially but unfortunately not its recognition in the advancements in fields like medicine and astronomy, due to their social stigma of crossing seas and many difficulties scaling the great mountains, traversing icy landscapes and trying not to get burned in the desert, all on the way. But early invaders came, discovered, conquered and profited from the peaceful easterners.

Man discovered more modern vocations – the linguists and the Physicus* started sharing DNA and writing machine language, paving way to computers and all modern gadgets. The Artifexs* and Physicus* fell in love and their offspring created strong bridges, mighty ships and steel skyscrapers.    

So, what I was trying to convey was – maybe this is the path that evolution is supposed to take. Maybe we will not physically grow wings and fly or grow gills and swim – but man is on the expressway to becoming a superior being – with abundant knowledge, ability to create ideas (are ideas created in the mind or randomly appear out of thin air and fall into the mind of the genius?) and he is no longer a mere part of the chain that ends when Homos** die out – rather a chain that will grow longer with clones or even artificially created beings that deliberately lengthen the chain of evolution and chart a new course in the what we believed was nature? Humans could be the nature a thousand years later. Peace out – with scary thoughts.    

* - Latin names to humor the author

** - Random jokes, also to humor the author

¹ - The author assumes it was pumpkin pie – no other pie is so boring it reminds one of numbers