Day 3

I’d planned to sleep in again, but it didn’t quite work out that way. Starting at about 3am, my stomach was churning and woke me up, I went to the bathroom, and nothing. That wasn’t the case when I woke up again at 4:30, I passed a lot, and it wasn’t just lemonade. My stomach was really cramping up, and I started thinking “ah. This is why people quit.” I got up again at 5:20 and again passed a lot…this time, though it smelled metallic. Gross, I know, but I wonder if it wasn’t a bunch of iron from the iron pills I’d been taking that had clogged up my system. (Until about noon, I noticed a lingering metallic smell about myself. Strange, but it finally passed.) I stayed up and did the SWF, which didn’t take effect until 7:30 again! I decided then that I would sleep in more, and do the SWF right before I left for work so I wasn’t so tired.

After only getting about 4 solid hours of sleep the night before I was exhausted all day, but to be honest, I often get really tired after eating (even just a bowl of oatmeal) so it wasn’t worse than that, and I made it through.

That day was the first time I had to blatantly turn down food. I was in a two hour long lunch meeting, catered. About 15 people around me ate and enjoyed their food, which looked pretty good. We actually get really good catered lunches, whole grain bread and veggie sandwiches and salads, so I was sad I had to miss it. Only one person asked me what I was doing, not eating, and said “What, are you on some kind of diet?”…and I lied. I said my stomach was upset and I didn’t want to eat anything. I’ve gotten a lot of flack in the past for wanting to watch what I eat—people saying I’m not fat (I’m not! I know that! But still!) and I shouldn’t bother, so I lied. I didn’t want to go into why I was on what looked like an extreme weight loss diet, because then I’d have to go into why I was on the cleanse, and talking about my IBS isn’t something I do. No one else said anything, so I was free and clear, though I knew I won’t be able to keep quiet about this the whole next week. There were already three or four events planned that involved eating, so I was going to have to come out with it. I just wanted to be past the half-way point when I did it.

The rest of the day was pretty good, I didn’t really get hungry, and I was actually not jonesing for the cleanse juice, either. I know a lot of the people who do the cleanse get addicted to the juice, but I wasn’t feeling it, so I ended up just drinking more water and having more tea the rest of the day. Speaking of tea, I did go out with a friend that afternoon to grab tea, and I ended up getting a ginger citrus tea…hilariously this tasted almost exactly like the juice. The ginger was potent and hot and the citrus, well…it was good, but it wasn’t a big shift for the ol’ taste buds.

Walking home, I ended up passing an ice-cream truck (if you’re not familiar with NYC, ice cream trucks pick corners like prostitutes in the summer, you can’t walk more than a few blocks without running into one), and noticed all the people eating ice-cream cones. The most amazing part was that most of them looked sad and overweight and unhealthy and didn’t appear to be enjoying their ice-cream at all. It made me really rethink the deserts. I want something like that to be a treat, something that makes me so happy I can’t help but smile or have a spring in my step. I have had an affinity for sweets for a long time, but I realized how little I savored them, and I wanted that to change. That whole scene definitely shifted my thoughts on the matter.

Otherwise, the day was easy, drank some tea, off to bed.