As some of you might remember, last year I spent three weeks on a Very Special Diet. You can call it a diet if you like, or a detox, or a total lapse of culinary sanity. You can repeat that part about THREE WEEKS, which is 21 days, which is a really long time to spend taking supplements and drinking smoothies and eating nothing but raw and steamed vegetables, fruits, and lean proteins. You can say a lot of things, and I will nod at most of them. All I remember is that at the end of those three weeks, I felt better than I’d ever felt in my life. So I’m doing it again.

Unlike last time, I’m going to keep track of what I do and how I do it this time around, to give you a better idea of how it works and whether it might work for you. That means if you’ve got any stomach or digestive problems, maybe you’ll find something in this to make it work. Or maybe you’ll decide to do just this very diet/detox/big batch of crazy yourself.

Of course, right before I started, I had my final meal (cooked by my dear friend Alan, and I think he put enough butter on my steak to not only last me three weeks but to honor this blog fully, since there won’t be any butter on this pages for many, many days). And I had to go ahead and torture myself by looking at a cookbook that I’d never bothered to peruse in depth – one of the fantastic “cuisines of the world” bargains I found at Borders, out in front, published in the UK and sold here for next to nada. I brought the Jewish cooking book with me up to Berkeley so my mom could see it, and lo and behold are there some amazing looking recipes in there – vegetarian chopped liver, bulgarian cucumber and walnut appetizer, mint and parsley tahini salad, smoky aubergine and pepper salad, and Libyan spicy pumpkin dip. And that’s just in the first few pages of recipes! Are you dying for me to try any of these?

Sadly, none of this is food I can eat for three weeks but this time I’m going about the diet and the re-entry differently: How do I want to structure my real diet when I get back to the “real” world? Which of these will work for me, and how I can incorporate them so that I stick to a healthier (for me and my restrictions) diet on a regular basis, while not feeling like I’m at steamed vegetable boot camp for the rest of my life? Can I find a routine if I don’t have strong structure like this diet going on? And how can I bring butter back without falling off my newly streamlined wagon? Chances are, you’ll see some of these recipes and others before April is over.

So tomorrow, when you see me posting about whole foods supplements and piles of steamed greens with lemon AND NO BUTTER TO BE SEEN ANYWHERE, it’s not an April Fool’s Day joke. It’s day one. And there will be 20 more to go.

Note: If you decide to follow along at home, and you’re in the Orange County/Los Angeles area, call up my friend Dr. Rudy Amicay and tell him I sent you. He’ll help you through it – I’m just here to give you my experience, and maybe some recipes along the way!

This entry was posted on Monday, March 31st, 2008 at 21:32 and is filed under IBS, detox, health, personal, standard process. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.