ExamineHealth

 
So the first day on the cleanse had some wins and some losses. All in all, it was a success.

One of the aspects of this program that is taking some getting used to is the preparation for all the meals. There are lots of grains and lots of beans. Both of which need to be soaked overnight before being cooked. This requires planning and forethought. Well, we succeeded in soaking the whole oat groats for our morning oatmeal, and it turned out fabulous. It was my first time eating whole oat groats, and they were delicious. Basically these are rolled oats, before they get rolled. Or steel cut oats, before they get chopped up.

I had a question about the requirement to use whole oat groats. I'm a big oatmeal fan and have been eating rolled oats for years. My question was what kind of nutrient damage is being done by simply flattening an oat groat? 

All of the same nutrients and components are still there, albeit squished together, right? I posted the question on Scott's member forum, which is a host of information on this cleanse, and within minutes Scott returned with an answer that I absolutely could not argue with. Basically, if you put a whole oat groat in the ground, it will sprout an oat plant. If you put rolled oats or steel cut oats in the ground, they will not. So something is being killed or removed during that process. Good enough for me.

Much of this program is related to keeping viable the living enzymes that exist in whole foods. This is the first step in digestion, as each food contains the enzymes needed to break down that food. That's why when you leave a tomato out on the counter for a few days, it will begin to break down. This is a critical component to our digestive processes as well, but when we mutilate and process these foods, these enzymes get exterminated and we lose that first step of digestion.

So, once the requisite soaking was performed, the whole oat groats cooked into an absolutely delicious oatmeal. We added raisins, chopped pecans, cinnamon, and bee pollen granules. The result was one of the most delicious bowls of oatmeal I've ever had. And we started with the most basic of the oat groats recipes also. There are other varieties that include slow cooking overnight or sprouting the groats before making the cereal. We'll be trying other takes on this grain before it's all said and done!

Once that digested a bit, we popped our first enzyme capsule. We're taking Source Naturals Daily Essential Enzymes. This particular brand didn't come on any special recommendation, but it was the first place winner in the 2004 VITY Awards, for what that's worth. Primarily I was looking for something with a variety of different enzymes. This one contains 8 different types of enzymes and seemed to get great reviews on Amazon. The serving size on the bottle says 1 capsule, but Scott recommended loading up on these pretty good, so we're going to take two a day. One morning and one afternoon.

One of the mantras of this program is "the three Rs" - Re-enzymize, Re-mineralize, and Re-bacterialize. With one R down, our next step was hydration. The recommendation here is half your body weight in ounces every day. This is about three quarts of water, which is pretty close to what Megan and I try to drink regularly anyway. Hydration is a vastly underestimated health practice. Water lubricates everything within your body and makes all your internal mechanisms work better. We use our Camelbak Better Bottles to keep track of how much water we've gotten down, making sure we get through at least 3 for the day. For this cleanse, we're trying to get as much lemon into our water as possible. Lemon is a great way to alkaline your body's PH, and it's also great for your liver. Squeezing a half a lemon into each water bottle gets you the benefits of the lemon juice.

On to re-mineralize. Time to crank up our new juicer for the first time. The protocol calls for between 12 and 32 ounces of fresh vegetable juice each day. This is where you're getting a lot of your minerals and chlorophyll. We purchased the Breville BJE200XL juicer from Amazon the other day. It's a centrifugal juicer, which is not the absolute best kind you can get. The dual-worm gear, low speed juicers are hands down the best way to go. The slow speed reduces oxidation, which allows the juice to last longer, and they generally create dryer pulp, which means you're getting more juice for your money. However, they cost 4 times the price of the juicer that we bought. Theoretically you will make that up in juicing efficiency over time, if you keep juicing. Since we didn't know if this was something we were going to love and keep doing all the time, or something that we just break out for cleanses, we elected to start with an entry-level machine, and if we like it, we can upgrade later.

Buying vegetables for juicing can be expensive. I've never seen so many vegetables get consumed so quickly. For our first batch of juice, we juiced about 5 large carrots, 1 cucumber and a half, and an entire bunch of celery. We added 3 quarters of an apple for some sweet flavor and a chunk of fresh ginger. Although I think that we went a little heavy on the ginger, the resulting drink was delicious and went down very easy. It's definitely a strong tasting drink, you can almost feel your body sucking up all those nutrients when you drink it. I could swear I got a little bit of a buzz off of it after downing the glass.

Shortly after that we popped our probiotic capsule. The third R, we're using Renew Life's Ultimate Flora which was recommended to us at our local Natural Grocers. We plan to supplement with natural probiotics from fermented foods, High Country Kombucha tea, and dried green superfoods (I just placed an order for Healthforce Nutritionals Vitamineral Green 4.8 - but it hasn't arrived yet). For now, we're using what we have, with the approach that you can't have too many good probiotics in you helping to keep your internal landscape friendly.

Lunch consisted of guacamole with fresh celery and bell pepper, and a salad. We were still kinda full from the juice, but this hit the spot. It was about this time that I realized we hadn't soaked the kidney beans for the chili that was scheduled for dinner. I haven't mentioned yet, but one of the reasons why we decided to go with this cleanse is that it has each meal spelled out, with recipes, for the entire 28 days. For our first venture, this was something that was really valuable to us. It's one thing to get a list of a bunch of things that you shouldn't be eating, and a bunch of things that you should be eating, but putting them together in a meal plan each day so that we don't have to think about it, but we don't end up just eating the same thing day in and day out, was a huge selling point. Being able to reference the book each trip to the grocery store to get specifically what we need is going to be huge.

So, the beans didn't get soaked, which means we weren't going to be able to put dinner together. We had leftover oat groats for dinner and chalked it up to inexperience. It's a good lesson to learn early, we'll have to be more diligent about what needs to be prepared when, so that we won't get caught in that trap again.

Tomorrow's breakfast calls for flourless toast and coconut butter for breakfast. Sounds delicious and easy, can't wait. Since we already have everything for the sweet potato chili that we were supposed to make tonight, we're soaking the beans now and are going to make it tomorrow night. We'll have to play catch up somewhere along the way.

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