I’ve never placed much stock in “cleanses”. That’s what our liver and kidneys are for, right? I saw them as a manifestation of our Islamo-Judaeo-Christian belief in the dirtiness of our bodies, and the need to periodically punish them for their transgressive behaviour.
But a year-and-a-half ago, I got Covid (for the first time), and ever since, my digestive system has not been firing on all cylinders (I’ll spare you the details). Nothing serious, just noticeably a step down from its generally healthy state pre-Covid. Yet another Covid disruption.
My partner, Abby, who is more open-minded to cleansing than I am, began suggesting I do a cleanse. This would have never occurred to me. If I’m suffering from some ailment, my mind immediately goes to: “What can I add to my diet to address this problem?” But I realized that this is the exact opposite to how most of my contemporaries think about food: “What should I cut out?”
For someone who loves food as much as I, the thought of “taking away” is truly frightening. What if I discover that some beloved food is making me sick? What if – gasp – I can’t eat real, gluten-packed bread anymore? Would life still be worth living? I’d rather live on in blissful – if gassy – ignorance.
So it was with considerable reluctance that I tried to wrap my head around this concept of going on a cleanse. I knew I definitely did not want to do one of those extreme fasts, like the Master Cleanse (nothing but lemon juice, cayenne, and maple syrup for ten days). I occasionally skip breakfast (rebranded as “intermittent fasting” these days), and can see, as does science, some benefits from depriving yourself of food for short periods of time. But I know there’s not a lot of meat on these bones of mine, and I don’t think asking my high-metabolism body to burn these scarce reserves for a significant amount of time would do anything but harm. And I’d be as grumpy as hell to those unfortunate enough to cross my path.
So when Abby suggested a detox program that was about changing your diet, not cutting it back, a crack of acceptance opened in my previously closed mind. The program was based on the book, Hot Detox: A 21-Day Anti-Inflammatory Program to Heal Your Gut and Cleanse Your Body, by Julie Daniluk. She had done it before and said it was good. I read the intro chapters of the book, and it didn’t seem that bad. I would have to give up caffeine, alcohol, wheat, dairy, and red meat, but at least the calories were still there. It looked like I would be eating a lot of coconut oil and turmeric, which are pretty tasty. My Covid-damaged gut seemed to need some help, and this book had “heal your gut” right in the title. I was ready to try something new, so agreed to join Abby for a three-week January cruise with this diet. I insisted on referring to it as a “detox”, though, instead of a “cleanse”, thinking it sounded at least slightly more scientific that way.
After the traditional excesses of Christmas and New Year’s, I was actually looking forward to hitting Julie’s diet. Staring my three-week sobriety bravely in the eye, I declared to Abby, “I’m going to get drunk on health!”
“My body is a temple,” she replied, giving me her best impression of a Buddhist statue in a serene meditation pose.
On the first morning of the detox, Abby whipped up some banana pecan muffins for breakfast. I quickly realized that having little carbohydrate packages like these on hand was going to be critical to my emotional well-being for the next three weeks. That afternoon, I went to a friend’s house, without having eaten an adequate lunch, and, proving my point, was cranky the whole visit. On the way home, I stretched the spirit of the diet, if not the exact rules, by buying a bag of Tostidos at the local dep. I knew we had some guacamole at home, and couldn’t think of how else to eat it.
The next day, we had some friends over for dinner. Normally, a potluck dinner party during a detox is a bad idea, but these friends’ regular diet is “cleaner” than even our cleanse, and the salad they brought over fit perfectly into our new purity. The only lapse was that they also brought some homemade hard apple cider, made from apples that grew on their farm, which I picked, so I couldn’t say no to a sampling (or two) of that.
I only committed two more heresies against the no alcohol injunction for the rest of the detox. Once was when Abby came home from visiting a friend and admitted to drinking some Sortilège – a liqueur made from Canadian whisky and maple syrup. I had to immediately right this imbalance, by mixing my maple syrup with a generous pour of some brandy on hand and drinking it down; it was my obligation as a Canadian.
The other instance was when I was invited to the birthday party of a Ukrainian friend. Not only was a bottle of fake Champagne involved, but also a vast spread of traditional dishes, many of which – cheese, cured meats, ham, sour cream – fell well outside Julie’s limits.
This violation was made even worse by the fact that it fell right smack dab in the heart of the detox: a three day period during which we were supposed to let nothing but drinks and soft, pureed vegetables pass our lips. This was the sacred inner sacrum of the diet. But I chose to defile it with klobasa, brie, bubbly wine, and Olivye salad (a mayo-heavy potato salad made with ham and eggs).
Why? Because I considered my relationship to this family, who fled Ukraine at the outset of the Russian invasion, to be more important than my silly, self-inflicted diet experiment. I didn’t want to dishonour all the work his mother had put into this meal by being picky. (It also felt really good to eat a square meal!)
That night, I allowed myself one further exception. I went to see a movie with a friend at Lansdowne. I virtuously avoided any popcorn or soda, or the usual beer either before or after the show. Then I walked the short distance down to the Rideau canal, which had just opened for the first time in two years for skating (see my previous piece, How I Learned to Love Winter, for more on this). But before I even strapped on my skates, I got in line for a Beavertail – Ottawa’s iconic flat fried pastry. You can buy these things at various outlets in the region year round, but nothing matches a Beavertail on a cold Ottawa evening, with the way the squeeze of lemon quickly freezes in the windchill, and your teeth have to crunch through the ice before tasting the sweet and sour fried delight.
I never thought twice about getting that Beavertail, delivered to me by a cheery teenager, just as I had done when I worked a winter there some 30 years ago, because I knew how fleeting this chance would be. The weather forecast predicted another warm-up in a couple of days, which would force the skateway to close again. And the forecast for future years – delivered by climate scientists – was one of rapidly decreasing opportunities for outdoor skating and Beavertail crunching in the cold. It was practically my duty to eat that Beavertail, and try to sear this moment into my memory one more time, before all possibilities of it pass from this Earth. No detox was going to stand in the way of that.
Other than these digressions, I showed admirable fealty to the Hot Detox diet. Well, except for the dark chocolate I would often turn to after meals, to give my body that little treat it craved. Julie never mentioned cane sugar in any of her recipes, but she did include honey in some, and cocoa in others, so I figured: close enough.
Stay tuned for Part 2, coming next week…
The suspense of waiting for part 2 is worse than waiting to find out who killed J.R. ....
I dunno, seems like a lot of exceptions ...