11:30am
The stupidest thing I’ve done all year, and maybe ever, is agree to a diet cleanse. Three days, claims my mother’s magazine, on a vegan-ish diet with lots of vitamins, will help your body prepare for/recover from Christmas indulgence. Good idea, I thought, because I plan to indulge. So from today until the end of Wednesday will – unless I give up, which is looking likely – consist of kale and chickpeas.
I’m not bothered about the kale, actually. Well I made a spinach smoothie earlier and it looked like the Wicked Witch of the West, but generally I am open to clean and/or vegan recipes. When you have IBS, you kind of have to be. So making superfood porridge ain’t a problem.
The problem is that nowhere in this diet is caffeine.
Nowhere.
Not a bean nor a teabag.
None.
And it is Monday morning, and I slept as well as I usually do, which is to say not a lot, and if this were a normal day I would be caressing a mug of Nescafe or brewing a decent tea. By decent tea, by the way, I don’t mean mint tea. I do not like mint tea. I love black tea, I’ve tried matcha and it’s nice, I love rooibos. I tend to go with coffee more, because it tastes wonderful, but my philosophy is that one should always have a hot beverage at one’s desk. Also, one of my clients is a tea bar so I’ve accidentally become a tea snob with a well-stocked cupboard.
Unfortunately, the cleanse calls for mint tea.
Wait.
I just reread the page and matcha is allowed. If I had local access to a hip tea or coffee place, I’d be dancing – matcha contains as much caffeine as coffee with the added bonus of being literally green. But I live in a town whose main beverage place is Starbucks, so I’m going to sit with the headache of a caffeine-deprived millennial and get on with some work.
I think I’ll live blog this every time I’m tempted to inhale coffee granules.
I’m dying.
4pm
I cheated.
First it was just scanning the menu and snacking on ingredients, but I began to realise that the only people who can legitimately do cleanses are those with very little else to do. I’m not saying that they’re sad, lonely people, I mean, they must literally have nothing on. I had lunch, which was this actually very nice chickpea and spices soup thing, then walked to the post office to send an order. By the time I was home I thought I was probably dying, so I ate. Then I did Headspace and practically fell asleep. The reason I eat the way I normally do is because I actually get hungry. So I thought ‘why am I being cruel to my body? It is hungry and clearly more caffeine-dependent than I ever realised, and maybe I can work on that in time, but it is Monday and I have shit to do’. And I made a coffee.
It is amazing. Not as amazing as the peanut butter-oatcake sandwich that accompanied it though. I don’t want to puke any more!
I might continue this through to Wednesday, just to see. But I’m still going to snack, and I’m not going to stop eating carbohydrates (seriously in what world is it okay to eat soup with no accompanying carbohydrates? I could be hit by a bus tomorrow).
Francesca's Thoughts 