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- Herausgeber: Geddes and Grosset
- Kategorie: Ratgeber
- Sprache: Englisch
Outlines a plan for a healthy diet to help you feel refreshed and better
Das E-Book Detox wird angeboten von Geddes and Grosset und wurde mit folgenden Begriffen kategorisiert:
Eating, Diet, recipes, detox, health and fitness
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
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Contents
Introduction
HOW are you? Before you say ‘Fine thanks’, think for a moment. How are you really? When you wake up in the mornings, do you long to roll over and grab another three hours’ sleep? Do you look in the mirror and wonder where that fresh, taut-skinned youth has gone? Do you suck on coffee after coffee all day long yet still feel irritable and exhausted?Are you, in short, sick and fed-up of feeling sick and fed-up?
If this is you, you are not alone. A large proportion of us feel this way: prey to minor niggling health problems – from bad hair to bloating to biting people’s heads off because they’re standing between us and the fizzy drinks machine – yet not suffering from a serious medical complaint. Scratch the surface and most of us feel permanently slightly off-colour but not quite sure where we’re going wrong.
Is it the stress at work? The car fumes in the atmosphere? The preservatives in our food?
Well yes, it’s all of those things. Add in too many cups of coffee, a few sessions in a smoky pub, too many late nights and little or no aerobic exercise and you have a foolproof recipe for continued underperformance in the health department.
So what to do, bar booking yourself into a health spa for the next five years?
Dare you consider a detox?
Before you slam the book shut at the very mention of the d-word, be assured that it needn’t involve an ill-advised three-day crash diet featuring colonic irrigation or a celebrity-endorsed herbal drink that smells like compost and costs half a month’s wages for a two-week supply. Your doctor would be appalled – and so would your body.
A proper detox is no more and no less than a healthy, natural diet designed to enhance your body’s healthy, natural functions. It means saying goodbye to the toxic substances we think help us get through the day, the caffeine, nicotine and sugar, which actually make us feel worse in the long run; and a big hello to fresh fruit and vegetables, lots of water, whole and organic foods, all topped up with a bit of exercise and a regulated sleep pattern.
Easy! And the results speak for themselves. Within days you’ll feel refreshed, your energy levels will have increased, your skin will become clearer, your hair glossier and stronger, and your moods highly improved.
And you won’t be hungry or forced to drink twig tea once.
Think about it. If your car was rattling to bits and refusing to start in the mornings, you’d take it straight in for a service.
Perhaps it’s time to do the same thing for yourself.
On Your Marks ...
WHAT is a detox? Think of a detox as a spring clean of your body: a serious clear-out of all the junk and toxins you’ve accumulated over the last few months, or even years.Follow even a short-term detox plan, the Weekend Refresher for instance, and you will feel instantly lighter, have more energy and look better, just as your house does when you finally get around to hauling your old books down to the charity shop, streamlining your wardrobe and giving every corner a serious dusting down.
What you find when you organize your home is that you want to keep it that way. You find yourself adopting tidier habits and developing a newfound desire to keep everything in order.
The same thing will happen with the detox diet.
Once you start to feel the benefits of weaning yourself from caffeine and junk food, and start to enjoy whole natural foods and moderate regular exercise, not to mention the beautifying effects, you will want to keep things this way.
A detox will improve your well-being in the short term but, if you adopt its lessons of clean living, it could do wonders for your long-term health and fitness too.
How does it work?
If you put the right fuel in your car, it works perfectly. If you put in diesel by mistake, it stops. The same goes for your body. Feed it exactly what it needs and it will do its absolute best by you. Feed it rubbish and it will be too preoccupied trying to digest the latest delivery of refined carbohydrates and sugars to put in any repair and maintenance work.A proper detox diet doesn’t just help the body speed up its waste disposal capabilities, it also provides all the vitamins and nutrients the body needs to repair and strengthen itself.
The liver is of particular importance, being the organ that extracts toxins such as chemical additives, drugs and alcohol from our food and drink and either breaks them down into less harmful substances, stores them or eliminates them.
If it is too busy processing toxic waste, it cannot attend to one of its other main functions – releasing energy. Which is why, when you’re suffering from a hangover, you feel extremely lethargic, and why a heavy meal leaves you listless.
If the liver ends up having to store too many unusable toxins over too long a period of time, then you risk liver damage – a medical condition that will affect your whole bodily system, given how central to your health this major organ is.
So take good care of it. The liver is refreshed by fruit and vegetables, worn out by red wine and slabs of fatty beef. A more detailed account of the liver and its functions can be found later in the book.
The kidneys are also crucial in that they process fluids and flush out toxins. You need to drink at least two litres of water a day, three if you work in an office with air conditioning, have central heating at home or do regular exercise which makes you sweat. The athlete Liz McColgan carries a bottle of water with her all the time, sipping at it every time she remembers. Try to get into the habit of doing this too. If you find water too boring, add a dash of lemon juice or some sugar-free cordial but plain old tap water is best.
Drinking plenty of water can also help to prevent kidney stones, one of the most common renal problems in the UK, affecting more than 40,000 people a year.
What will it do for me?
Initially, you may find that a detox diet makes you feel even worse!Those who drink a lot of tea and coffee may experience mild headaches over the first day or two without it. You may also feel quite tired as your body has become so dependent on artificial stimulants, but this will pass quickly too, leaving you with more energy than you had before. Other early symptoms include a coated tongue and bad breath; these are simply manifestations of your body’s cleansing process and are short-lived. You may also feel slightly irritable to begin with, which is why it is always best to begin your detox over a weekend or holiday.
Soon you will begin to feel more energized, less prone to mood swings, and find it easier both to drop off to sleep at night and get up in the morning.
Your bowel movements will also become more regular, thanks to a sufficient intake of fibre and fluid (constipation is often caused by mild dehydration).
Longer term effects include a clearer complexion.
If you are prone to ‘congestion’ around the nostrils, caused by blocked pores, you may well find that this clears up. Your skin will feel smoother and less dry as your circulation improves, which will also make your hair and nails stronger and healthier.
Detoxing may also help you if you are trying to conceive, as it will get your body into the best possible working order. Smoking and drinking and eating junk food is off limits when you are pregnant and the same applies at the pre-pregnancy stage.
In the even longer term you may lose weight. Not in the boom and bust way of crash dieting but as part of the gradual process of your body finding its ideal weight – called the ‘set point’ by dieticians. Though it takes a while, the good news is that weight lost gradually is more likely to stay off – most sudden weight losses are simply caused by a lack of water and weight is quickly regained. Weight lost slowly is much more likely to be a loss of actual fat.
You may even be able to say goodbye to cellulite, that much maligned ‘orange peel’ skin to which women in particular, even slim, fit women, are almost universally prey to. When your body is working at maximum efficiency, it takes care of everything, even those little fat pockets tucked in beside your hips.
Get Set ...
Changing your diet takes a bit of forethought, which is about more than putting different things in your trolley the next time you’re in the supermarket.Firstly, you have to be motivated. Forcing yourself to crunch down on greens without any real notion of what you hope to achieve is a recipe for disaster – you’ll be back on the Big Macs before you can say knife.
Secondly, you want to know what you’re doing and why. Take time to plan what you will be eating in the next week. Think about why you are doing this and what you hope to achieve. Make your goals positive: the reason ‘so that I stop feeling so awful’ is hardly going motivate you on a wet Wednesday afternoon in November.
Consider what you’ll achieve with all this newfound energy – maybe you can improve your performance at work and get a promotion. If you’re stuck in a rut and want to break the deadlock, attending to your physical health is one of the best ways to get kick the process into gear. It’s amazing what the head can achieve if the body is in good mettle.
Or maybe you want to be more toned and glowing, to recapture some of that long lost pzazz. Maybe you’ve got a major holiday coming up, a significant anniversary, or you just want to find out what you’re like when you’re being all you can be.
It’s exciting, it’s a journey. So make plans.
1 Planning
Have you ever noticed how wonderful newspapers and magazines manage to make diets look? A mouthwatering illustration of beautifully blanched prawns nestling on a bed of lettuce hearts and ripe watermelon served with a dressing of organic bio-yoghurt is enough to make anyone want to count calories.But if you’ve actually tried one of these diets you will know how complicated and expensive they can be. Eating poached wild salmon for breakfast and fresh fruit salad for lunch would make dieting almost a pleasure but who can afford, both in terms of time and money, such extravagance?
The fact is that most of us are overweight because we choose food according to price and the time it takes to prepare. But with a bit of planning, we can change all this. Our mothers and grandmothers, born in an age prior to the mass-marketing of cheap food when frozen pizza and oven chips weren’t an option, had to plan how to make the weekly provisions stretch round the table. And so can we.
For instance, if you’re going to make salad one lunchtime, plan to have salad again with your evening meal and use the remaining lettuce and tomatoes to spruce up a sandwich for lunch the next day. If you are making crudités, use up the remaining celery and carrot in a soup, or buy a juicer and have the rest at breakfast.
Resist the temptation to buy several bags of apples and oranges in one go, and get into the habit of buying smaller amounts more regularly instead. That way, you always have fresh produce and avoid rotting fruit bowl syndrome. If it looks like you’ve bought too much, mix up a fruit salad or stew the apples and pears and eat them with breakfast cereal.
The best way to plan is to sit down with a pen and paper before you do your shopping and not just construct a list, but also outline exactly what meals you are going to make, and on what days you are going to make them. This might kill mealtime spontaneity but it also cuts out that oh-my-god-what’s-for-dinnertype stress.
Choose easy meals for late nights and more complicated ones for when you have time to spare. Cook in advance and store meal-sized portions in the freezer. Try to avoid slipping ready-meals into your supermarket trolley ‘just in case’. If you’ve got time to wrench a frozen lasagne from its packaging and put it in the microwave, you’ve probably got time to boil up a little wholewheat pasta while you chop up and sauté an onion, add in some tomatoes, pesto and chopped pepper and season to taste.
Not only is it more satisfying to eat something you have cooked with your own fair hand, it is also much better for you. Even supposedly healthy option pre-cooked foods are packed with salt and sugar and preservatives to make them last and to improve the taste. It may look like a genuine Margarita pizza but be assured, if it comes with its own pre-sealed, microwave-friendly container, it is a feat of chemical engineering rather than culinary art.
Finally, don’t forget about herbs and spices, which are a much healthier way of adding taste to a dish than salt. Fresh is by far the best so, if you have a windowsill to spare, why not buy a selection of herb plants so that you always have what you need to hand? Chives, coriander, basil and parsley will cover most eventualities. When using fresh, you need – as a general rule of thumb – about twice the amount you need of dried, which is always more concentrated. When compiling a stock cupboard, buy seasonings as required rather than investing in a whole range, many of which you may never use.
2 Going seasonal ... and organic
Thanks to a huge improvement in transport and refrigeration technology we can enjoy the taste of summer strawberries when snow is lying on the ground, or bite into a mango, which is as juicy and fresh as when it was picked, 3000 miles away.But is this necessarily a good thing?
Most good chefs, for instance, abhor cooking with foodstuffs that are out of season, because frozen foods lack the texture and taste of fresh, and tinned or dried foods are, in haute cuisine terms, a non-starter. They want vegetables that are straight out of the soil and fish that was bought at the harbour that very morning. In short, they want it seasonal and will go so far as to tailor their menus to suit.
As well as tasting better, seasonal food is higher in nutrients. If you consider that a vegetable begins to lose nutrients as soon as it is harvested, then naturally the sooner it is on the table the better. If it has a lengthy plane journey ahead or a year to steep in sauce, then it is going to be all the poorer for it.
When shopping for fresh produce, choose items that are grown locally, is possible. The nearer its country of origin, the less distance it has had to travel. If you must buy preserved produce, choose frozen as it retains more vitamins than food preserved by any other method.
Choosing organic produce is an even better idea. Organic food is grown without recourse to the pesticides and hormones used to ensure that, for example, carrots are bright orange and have regular shape, and that dairy cows produce sufficient quantities of milk. The stuff you find in the organic range may be less aesthetically pleasing, but in terms of health benefits, it wins by a clear head. Eating organically, you will instantly decrease the amount of toxins you ingest because, no matter who how well processed, most non-organic foods contain chemical residues.
Supermarkets are increasingly responding to consumer demand by stocking wider ranges of organic produce although it still remains relatively expensive. However, as more and more people buy it, the price will naturally decrease.
Another way to ensure that your fruit and vegetables, milk, cheese, eggs, meat (and even wine) are organic, locally produced and bang on season is to subscribe to a local organic box scheme. For as little as five or six pounds, you can have a boxful of fresh produce delivered to your door from a local grower. Contact the Soil Association (www.soilassociation.org.uk) for details of schemes in your area.
Interestingly enough, many people who adopt a healthier lifestyle also adopt a healthier respect for the world around them, leading them towards fairly traded and organically grown foodstuffs. Yoga practitioners put this down to an increase in self-respect – the more you value yourself, the more inclined you are to value other people and other things.
3 Write it all down
One of the best ways to keep a good habit going is to keep a diary. It won’t win the Booker Prize, but it will help you stay on track.Buy a book especially for the purpose, rather than just scribbling your thoughts on a bit of paper while promising yourself to transcribe them into a book some time in the future – you won’t. And try to make an entry for every day.
Describe how you feel, both physically and emotionally, note what you eat, what exercise you’ve done, even if it was just a case of using the stairs instead of the lift. Every little bit counts, so write it all down. If you are feeling discouraged, pour it all out, using the diary as your outlet rather than resorting to the fish and chip shop.
Not only is this exercise very therapeutic, it will help you stay motivated. Do you really want to have to enter that you smoked five cigarettes, downed three gin and tonics and ate a take-away curry?
Many successful slimming clubs advocate weekly meetings and food diaries for exactly this reason. When you know you have someone or something to explain yourself to, it is amazing how strong-willed you can become.
A diary will also keep you focussed. Why are you doing this? And for whom? If your aim is to be trim and full of vitality for your summer holiday, remind yourself in words. Pen a little future fantasy involving a goodlooking you, a white beach and a lot of blue sky.
If you seriously want to get healthy, you’ll have to get moving. The good news for those who haven’t been running since they left school is that getting physically fit doesn’t require expensive gym membership or lung-busting slogs up steep hills at six o’clock in the morning. Food intolerances or food allergies, alongside Prada handbags and personal trainers, have become a very trendy thing to have. And it is hard not to think that, with all these famous people claiming gluten and dairy allergies, surely a fair proportion of us must have them too? Everyone experiences stress. Without it we would be so laid back we would hardly move, our lives would be at a standstill and we’d be incapable of reacting to danger (for example, jumping out of the way of a car that looks like it means to mow you down). If you have ever suffered from a hangover you will understand that detoxing is not without side effects. The morning after the night before finds your liver in a state of high industry. As it battles to expel its sudden burden of toxins, your body starts to show symptoms of this rapid detoxification process in the form of a coated tongue, a raging thirst, nausea, not to mention headaches, exhaustion and irritability. The initial detox diet is a seven-day plan, ideally beginning on a Saturday so that you have two days at your leisure to adjust to the new regime.
