Zero Shakes at a Time - Day 10: Don't Try This at Home

Clearly I am a victim of divine intervention. Or perhaps diabolic intervention. Either way to be thwarted in my efforts to purify my confused and poorly wired physical infrastructure is both a relief and a disappointment.

The high school kid in me is like "cool! I didn't wanna do this stupid cleanse anyway it was like my parents made me do it and if I didn't they weren't gonna buy me a car for graduation, which like totally sucked!" There is some psychological irony in imagining that the diet and the cleanse were a parental requirement, as my mother was a card-carrying but also meticulously well-managed anorexic - she weighed about 75 lbs when she passed away - and eventually my father more or less got on board however his motivations for eating less were actually to get my mother to eat more. When they went out, which they did frequently in their late seventies, they would always split something, which was my dad's way of getting my mom to eat, even though he would have been far happier with a full club sandwich than a half. So before my mom slipped into complete dementia and my Dad was just beginning to slip into full time grumpmentia, they both railed on me for being fat, and this was way before I started toting a bowling ball under my T-shirt. So for them to threaten to withhold some lavish prize in order to get me to lose weight, though very far-fetched in high school (I was a bean pole) would have been prime psychological fodder for Tuesday afternoon therapy in more recent years.

So while the high school kid gloats on his weasly avoidance of what would have been a very painful and miserable three weeks of privation, the overweight 57 yr-old feels cheated out of an opportunity to not only lose a little weight but, if you buy the promise of the premise behind The Clean Program, feel good in the process(see Day 3 or 4 when the prospect of losing the incessant ringing in my ears along with the ability to piss like a 12-year old was promise enough). "Damn the back surgery!" shouts the aging overweight ski bum. Because, if I've neglected to mention, STOPPING THE CLEANSE HAS ALL BUT ELIMINATED THE FOOT PAIN! Or, stated more precisely, by ceasing to load myself up with anti-toxins the pain medication is working again. I can't say I am where I was before I started the cleanse but I am much improved. So, if we believe the scientific method, evidence would indicate that The Clean Program is probably not prescribed for folks taking opioid medications for chronic pain. And I am living proof.

So now I am back on the "elimination" diet, which is probably the worst name for a diet I have ever heard because it sounds like the participant is going to spend most of their time on the can. Speaking from experience such is not the case. So my guess is they are referring to all the foods you must eliminate from your diet, which as I've mentioned before isn't so much of a stretch for us because we already eat like monks.

So, tomorrow starts a new blog: Day 1 of The Elimination Diet. Oh frabjous day callous callay you chortle in your joy!!