Diet another day: a January detox diary

The problem is not exactly my weight (73.8kg for 179cm). No, the problem is what the weight represents. Namely a glut of seasonal and pre-seasonal excesses, ranging from champagne to eggnog and from stilton to mince pies (with brandy butter or clotted cream – both would be greedy).

My better half has dug up online a Painless Detox Diet by naturopath Kate Troup. After all, why not? It would do us both the world of good. Besides, it only lasts seven days – could be a lot worse – and, crucially, it is painless (there is a clue in the title).

The aim of this diet is not to lose weight but to help the body rid itself of bad, bad toxins accumulated over too many weeks of culinary indulgence. The premise, which could be summed up as ‘everything that is good is bad’, is this: no caffeine, alcohol, dairy products, gluten, red meat, saturated fats, salt, sugar, processed foodstuffs, preservatives or additives. I should add ‘no fun’.

That leaves us with raw, steamed or boiled vegetables, grilled fish or organic chicken, boiled eggs, wheat-free bread, brown rice, lentils, tofu, soy milk and fruit. My relationship with that last one is bizarre: I don’t hate fruit, I even find most of them delicious, but I just never turn to them for a quick snack.

Above all, drinking water, and lots of it, is absolutely compulsory. Better still is to drink it at room temperature. Best of all – for its cleansing properties – is to have it lukewarm with a dash of lemon juice. In other words, a fingerbowl. This is going to be a long week.

Day one

No coffee for this health fanatic, no no no – warm water and lemon it is. It is bizarrely filling. Arrive at work; thankfully, the resident compulsive baker hasn’t brought anything in. Breakfast is soy yoghurt with a teeny-weeny drizzle of honey. Surely some mistake: it tastes nice. One litre of water later it’s lunchtime: boiled lentils with steamed broccoli. It tastes OK but looks revolting. Two mandarins in the course of the afternoon. Dinner is grilled fish fillets with steamed veg – the hardest thing to get over is the lack of seasoning. Weekly football practice goes surprisingly well.

Day two

Wake up less sleepy than usual; I put it down to simply not drinking. Same breakfast as yesterday. Lunch is raw carrot sticks and cauliflower florets with a hummus dip. Since garlic and onion are Ms Francis’s recommended seasonings, this one is high on garlic (sorry, colleagues). Something weird happens mid-afternoon: I crave the fruit on my desk. Well I never. For dinner, a brown rice and bean concoction which my wife cooks very deftly, managing to make it tasty in spite of the paucity of ingredients at our disposal.

Day three

Again, wake up feeling refreshed. Our Clooney-endorsed coffee machine doesn’t tempt me in the slightest. For breakfast, porridge – for the first time in my life – or at least a soy milk version thereof. It’s a bit on the hearty side; not gastronomic, that much is certain, but it’ll tie me up until lunch. Which consists of leftover rice and beans from the night before plus a hard-boiled egg. Later, we have grilled fish with veg once more (better than first time around), augmented by an abomination known as wheat-free pasta.

Day four

Not having been won over by porridge, I have a soy yoghurt and a piece of fruit. Lunch is an outrageously garlicky pot of hummus with raw carrots and cauliflower. This one slays vampires from afar; the taste stays with me for the whole afternoon. For dinner, low-fat Spanish omelette, using just egg, potato and onion. By then we’ve both had enough of eating under-seasoned dishes, and we give in to temptation by opting to sprinkle some salt on the omelette. For the sake of journalistic accuracy, I should add that we are, by now, both drinking cabernet. I could say that I quit quitting because after three days I had lost 2.2kg (surely that can’t be healthy?), but no – we were simply done dieting.

So that’s a fail, then. Maybe not of epic proportions, but a fail all the same. And yet I am feeling elated about the past three-and-a-half days. I now know that I can snack on fruit and not feel hungry. I also drink 2 litres of water a day without fail. I feel good about trying to find the balance between yummy-good and healthy-good. Above all, I didn’t drink a Hollywood cappuccino (that’s decaf and low-fat soy milk) – a drink I have been making fun of for years, and to which I came perilously close to giving a try. That has to be the greatest victory of all.