The 2013 Food Lover's Cleanse Diary: Day 8
Sara Dickerman didn't just write the Food Lover's Cleanse--she's an active participant. Follow along with her every day as she reboots her diet. (No juice fasts allowed.)
The phone rang yesterday. "Do you guys want to come out with us and get some Chinese?" asked Curtis, the generous soul who cooked dinner last Saturday. I told him I'd love to, but...the cleanse. "Oh, yes," he said. "I keep forgetting that."
I love to say yes. It's kind of my thing. I will go swimming with you in Lake Washington long into the fall, and I will order the ant egg-and-cactus omelette when we're in Mexico City, and I will make gingerbread pancakes for my daughter's preschool. Dieting is hard because it forces you (and me) to say no. Not just no to things we might eat at home, but also no to drinks, no to meeting up for coffee and pastries, no to any number of salubrious social situations. It's that edge of the cleanse that makes me extremely uncomfortable.
Of course, there are ways to be flexible. If I weren't following the program to the letter, I could go out to Chinese and focus on fish soup and gai lan. I could meet up with the girls and have a single glass of champagne instead of three. I could, and in fact, did, join a breakfasting friend and order only green tea at the incredibly yummy Southern bakery-cafe on Capitol Hill.
All of this is to say some days are more of a grind than others, and yesterday was one of those. I applaud you all for sticking with your resolutions, and in the upcoming days, I'll talk a little more about how I plan to finish the program without diving right back into biscuits and gravy (or at least routine biscuits and gravy).
In the meantime, I shouldn't dismiss the nice details from yesterday. In the morning, mixed frozen blueberries into my hot cereal as it cooked; frozen berries lose their firmness, but they're still full of flavor and they tinted the breakfast a bewitchingly dark indigo. I like that little hint of sage in the oatmeal, too. Yesterday's dinner was a bit of a three-ring circus pan-wise (sorry about that!), but I really enjoyed the food. I just love me some Brussels sprouts, and I think sweet potatoes are so much more interesting with a heavy dose of chiles, cilantro, and lime juice. (My husband remained unconvinced. He really doesn't like cooked orange vegetables.) I struggled with my chicken skin, eating the fatty sage leaves that lay beneath it, but after toying with it for a while, finally pushed it to the side of the plate and said: Enough. And then I said "yes" to some nice chocolate bark.