Cleansing?

So, as those of you I've seen lately know, I've gained a lot of weight in the past few years. Well, more to the point, I've gained a lot of weight since high school. At last count, it was close to 100 pounds that I've gained in the past 13 years... which doesn't sound so bad when you space it out like that, I guess. But the truth is, I gained most of that weight since H. moved in. I'm not blaming him - the only one who can make me do anything is me, right? But it's a fact, I've gained at least half of this weight since he moved in.
Most of it, I'm sure, is because of our diet. H. loves his candy, sweets, junk food. There's always Coca Cola in the house, always ice cream (although I did get him to switch to frozen yogourt), always beer and potato chips and those other bad, yet attractive, things. He's also European, and I don't know what it is about European guys, but they just LOVE their meat. I mean, I barely ever ate meat when I lived alone. I might have meat once or twice a week, tops. Now we eat it at every meal, and I don't like it.
Here's what a typical day looks like in terms of food:
Breakfast - sandwich (bread, meat, cheese) and a cup of coffee. Possibly from Starbucks, which means it's probably a cappuccino or macchiato instead of plain old coffee.
Snack - granola bar, more coffee, and if anything's lying around (half-empty bag of chips, cookies, etc) that'll probably get eaten too.
Lunch - sandwich (bread, meat, cheese)
Dinner - a typical dinner in our house? Frozen pizza, storebought sushi, pasta with ground beef, hamburger helper with veggie ground round. Little, if any, vegetables. Mix with beer.
After dinner - this is the biggest problem, I think. H. and I both snack until bedtime on chips, cheesies, candy, ice cream, and whatever else is available.

Right now, in my kitchen, there is a package of cinnamon buns, a bag of Italian hazelnut and chocolate cookies, a half-eaten bag of cheesies, a bag of blue corn tortilla chips, and a box of something called "breakfast chocolate" which H. says is like hard Nutella. Oh, and a jar of Nutella hidden in the back of the cupboard. And a big block of cheddar cheese, two or three different kinds of bread, two kinds of frozen yogourt, a bucket of "frozen mojito drink", and I'm sure there's some candy around here too.

Add to that the fact that neither H. or I is very active. We live what they call "sedentary lifestyles". We have a car, and we use that car whenever we can. To the grocery store. To the corner store. To the video store. A typical night finds H. in front of the computer, me in front of the tv, until we go to bed. Recently I've started going to the gym 3 times a week, which is good, but that's pretty much the ONLY exercise I get.

So that's why I'm fat. I've tried a bunch of things to lose weight - last year I walked 10km / day for a month, this year I did Slim Fast for a month as well, not to mention in the past when I'd tried The Zone, Atkins, diet pills - and nothing works. I can lose a few pounds, but nowhere near the close to 100 I'd LIKE to lose. My problem isn't willpower, I have lots of that. I'm a motivated person by nature. My problem is a lack of enthusiasm. I mean, I did Slim Fast steadily for a month, and lost 1 pound! I walked 10km every day and didn't lose anything! It's so very frustrating.

The only times I've lost weight are when I'm sick. In 2000 I caught a horrible flu and couldn't eat for, like, a week. For a couple days, the only thing I could stomach was water. I was in and out of consciousness, sweating like a pig, and... and I lost, like, 15 pounds. I wasn't fat then, but after losing the weight, people started telling me how good I looked. A friend of mine told me, years later, that he developed a serious crush on me around the same time. He said he didn't notice I'd lost weight... he just noticed I was beautiful. Hmmmm.
In 2005 I donated a kidney to my grandma. After surgery I was on a morphine drip, sliding in and out of consciousness for a day or two. I couldn't walk, or go to the bathroom, or anything. I definitely couldn't eat. For a few days I had water and clear broth, then moved up to popsicles and jello, and finally, on my last day in the hospital, I had some chicken soup. Why? Because I couldn't poop. One of the side effects of the anesthesia and the air they pumped through my body during surgery. I couldn't poop. It was painful. On the way home from the hospital, my mom's husband was hungry, so he stopped and bought a hamburger. Now, I love hamburgers, but this one? It smelled like shit. Like actual barnyard SHIT that had been out in the hot sun for a few days, swarming with flies. I vowed at that moment that I would never eat a hamburger again... and I didn't, until H. came along. But in the time between the operation and hooking up with my future husband, I lost close to 20lbs. After the surgery I had to take laxatives for a while, and I couldn't eat a full serving of food because my stomach had shrunk. I couldn't drink anything carbonated because my stomach was sensitive, so no beer or soda. I couldn't drink too much alcohol because it made me feel sick (with no happy drunkenness - just sick).
But when H. moved in, I wanted to show him I was a good partner. And he'd moved here from Sweden, you know, so I wanted to make a home for him. The first few months he was here, I made ham, pot roast, lasagne, meatballs, steak, fried chicken... I made any "home cooked meal" I could think of. And of course, all the recipes I used were for 4, 6, 8 people. And of course, there's only 2 of us, and I hate wasting food. And of course, the only real exercise we got was sex (sorry Dad).
Anyways. All this is leading to the point of this post... sorry it's taken so long to get there :) I've gained a lot of weight, and I know it's because I'm not living healthy. I've been going to the gym, like I said before, for a few months now. I've lost 2 pounds. Woo. So I remember a friend of mine, last year, doing this thing called the Bioxy cleanse. Then a few weeks ago, some other friends were talking about how, after a holiday, they cleansed all the bad stuff out of their bodies. I thought "maybe I should try this!" So I did some research, and while I'm still a bit leery of pills bought online, I found a site detailing how to create your own "cleanse diet".
So, for the next 5 days (starting today) I'm going to be following my own cleansing diet. Here are the rules I gathered from various websites:

• no red meat or dairy
• no caffeine or alcohol
• eat as many organic fruits and veggies (the more colourful the better) as you can
• take a multi-vitamin
• No processed foods (this means frozen meals, salad dressings, sauces, condiments, meats, or anything else that didn't grow that way)
• drink at least 8 glasses of water per day
• shower (and scrub well with a loofah) twice a day
• eat some kind of protein (white meat, tofu, eggs, nuts) at every meal, if you can.
  

It sounds like it might be a bit hard... I mean, I'm addicted to caffeine but even MORE addicted to dairy. But I'm gonna give it a try.

Yesterday, to start things off, I went to Planet Organic and bought berries, onions, broccoli, baby potatoes, corn, etc. Then H. and I went to Thrifty's and bought some fresh salmon for dinner. We had a wonderful meal of salmon, new potatoes, and garden salad (lettuce, cabbage, carrots). I thought I couldn't have any oils, so I squeezed lemon on the salad for flavour. Eeew. Glad to know I can at least make my own salad dressing :) For dessert we had some organic strawberries, and oh my god. They were the ripest, reddest, tastiest strawberries I've ever had in my life. Then we had some green tea and went to bed. I slept like a baby, but don't know if it was because of the food or because I was tired :)

So technically today is my first day of the cleanse, because yesterday I had a granola bar :) So I said I'd start today.

Breakfast: I woke up... not hungry. So I made some green tea, poured water in my bottle, and got ready for the morning. I forced myself to eat an orange (organic valencia from Planet Organic... once again, so tasty! I think I'd forgotten what an orange actually tastes like!) then got to work on household chores.
I thought about going to the gym, since I haven't gone in a few days, but all the websites I read said you should stay close to home for the first few days of the diet. So I think instead I'll get on the exercise bike.
How many calories are in a cup of green tea? Because I'm sure I'm gonna be substituting green tea for coffee. It appears to be 0. Well. Okay then.
It's almost 1pm, and the only calories I've ingested are from that valencia orange. I've had 2 cups of green tea, two bottles of water (close to a litre, I guess), and I'm not hungry. Maybe the caffeins in the tea is keeping me pepped, I don't know, but I feel like I have more energy than usual too. I've done the laundry, changed the bedding, cleaned the bathroom, done the dishes, and taken out the recycling. And spent a couple hours on this blog :) That's more than I usually do in a day, and like I said, it's not even 1:00.
Next on my agenda: figure out dinner. H. isn't doing this cleanse with me, but he IS subject to my dinners. I don't think we can afford fresh salmon for dinner every night, so tonight I'm gonna try to do something with tofu. My mom put me onto this website called Food Down Under, where you enter the ingredients you have, and it pops out a recipe for ya. I'm gonna see if they have much in the way of tofu recipes :)
My stomach is starting to growl now, but I don't know what to eat. That's going to be the biggest problem, I think... not knowing what to eat. But I'll figure something out.
Hopefully I'll remember to check back in at the end of the day.

LATER

we also got digital cable yesterday, so sticking close to home for a few days isn't so bad :)
For dinner we had some quinoa, curried tofu, and corn on the cob. A fully yellow meal. That wasn't on purpose, it just happened that way. As soon as dinner was finished, I started thinking about tomorrow's meals. What am I going to eat for breakfast? What about dinner? Food Down Under wasn't as good as I thought it would be. There were a tonne of redundant, repeated recipes, especially for things like curried tofu. So tomorrow, since poultry is allowed on this diet, I'm going to make turkey with lemon rice.

So on another topic.. I'm on Twitter, and I subscribe to Neil Gaiman's feed. That man writes SO MUCH! Not just Twitter, though - blogs, short stories, EVERYTHING. He's prolific. How does he do it? Confidence comes from success, I guess... but what about inspiration? Writing just seems so HARD these days. It's like I don't know where to begin. I put so much weight on the act of creation that I psych myself out.
Anyways... watermelon for dessert, maybe some more green tea, then bed. I'm sure I'll sleep peacefully tonight.