Detox: all about the juice

They don’t call me Juicy Lucy for nothing.

The last five days have consisted of purely liquid lunches (and breakfasts, and dinners) – and not the decadent, can’t-walk-in-a-straight-line-once-you’ve-finished-them kind.

The cleanse part of the program involves consuming five “meals” a day: vegetable juice for breakfast and mid-morning; soup at lunch and dinner; and a smoothie mid-afternoon. All are made by Anni and hand delivered to your door. Along with this, you drink warm lemon water first thing in the morning, a lot of herbal tea and at least two litres of water.

Of all this, the soups in particular have been a revelation: thick, spicy, flavoursome. I love soup anyway and this has given me great ideas for flavour combinations. Because the idea is to cut out salt, the flavour comes from herbs and spices; and the taste of ginger, cumin or coriander only enhances the flavour of the tomato, beetroot, carrot, pepper and other base ingredients. The soups change daily and this, along with the fact that I’m allowed to heat them, has made them the uncontested food highlight of each of the five days.

And by “food highlight” I do of course mean “overall highlight” because something that has really been hammered home to me throughout this whole process is quite what an important place good food has in my life. Not only is the relationship between food, physical energy levels, sleeping patterns, focus and mood much stronger than I had really realised previously, the psychological impact of eating food I enjoy is huge for me.

Food and sleep have become my drugs of choice. I am so rock n’roll.

Without wanting to sound too evangelical (and please don’t call me Gwyneth), I am really amazed by how much better I feel since I’ve started doing this. My skin is softer; my eyes are brighter and less puffy; I wake up more easily and can go an entire day without yawning. My mind is sharper; and now that the period of turbulent emotions seems to have passed I am making better decisions, focusing more easily, less troubled and preoccupied than usual. I feel lighter, more playful; I have more appetite.

Which is good because tomorrow I’m back on solid foods and the prospect of eating avocado and nuts in my salad is the source of great anticipation. I’ll probably pass out the day I’m finally allowed a burger.

Detox: the fluctuations

Pre-tox (aka the period of blissful ignorance)

This is the gradual weaning-off period, where over the course of four days you try to prepare your body for the barrage of nutrients it’s going to be ingesting – and more importantly for the absence of all the crap it’s used to.

Day 1 saw me drink my last cup of coffee with ceremonial deliberation and hold a kind of impromptu hen party with Rasha (a lot of beer; no male strippers) to say goodbye to my old habits.

Days 2-4 involved a gradual reduction of all the food and drink that needed to be cut during the detox, which I undertook with all the nonchalance of one destined to be felled by hubris. Thai beef curry …who needs you? Bread and peanut butter? I laugh in your face. Chorizo and batata? I could give you up anytime.

I am now seeing so many batata carts as I walk around the city, I suspect they might be a mirage. Meanwhile my poor bemused colleagues have got used to my plaintive face as I ask to inhale their open jars of peanut butter and steaming cups of coffee, treating me with the cautious sympathy you would reserve for someone who’s just on the brink of losing the plot.

Days 1-4 (aka the period where pride comes before a fall)

The first day of the proper detox program I admit felt easy. The way the program is structured means that you eat regularly, so unlike a lot of dieting or even fasting, hunger pangs are not really part of your experience. Breakfast is a mixture of fruit supplemented by vegetable juice (prepared by Anni and delivered to your door); you snack mid-morning – fruit or nuts; lunch (also with vegetable juice) is a salad with some protein; mid-afternoon you drink another juice, this time sweet; dinner is another salad. You are encouraged to vary the fruit and veg you consume, as you will be getting different vitamins from each item. You are also advised to eat organic food, as an essential part of the detox is eliminating any chemical residue from pesticides.  

All went well until the evening, when I decided to go for a walk. In 30 minutes of meandering through Cairo’s streets, you would imagine I would have encountered enough to keep my mind off food.

You would be wrong.

I walked past the Yemeni restaurant, Hardees, Pizza Hut, shops selling nuts, shops selling sweets. They might as well have been calling me by name. Before long, I had Yemeni bread, curly fries and pieces of baklawa dancing along the street next to me. I’m telling you, those carbohydrates know how to move. They are funky. Were they real? I was certainly in no position to judge.

After that low point, things stabilised.

There are definitely worse things to be eating every day than fresh fruit and vegetables. And once you know that salad is basically all you’ll be eating for three weeks, it turns out you become a lot more creative about what you put into it. You discover combinations you had never realised would be so delicious – like strawberries and basil, delectable when eaten together. You also learn weird and wonderful facts with which to dazzle others in the future (ahem). Whoever knew for example there were so many different kinds of lettuce, and that some of them could be almost creamy in texture or have bright red stalks?

The most immediate, and most welcome, surprise was how much and how well I started sleeping. Having struggled to fall asleep unless absolutely exhausted for all of my adult life, I suddenly found myself sleeping easily and deeply – and for long, long periods. It was almost as though a switch had been flipped in my body, telling it that now was the time to catch up on the 15-year sleep debt it’s been walking around with. And now my body just wants to sleep all the time – although when I’m awake I feel more alert than I have in ages.

Days 4-8 (aka the period where I just don’t know what’s going on)

After a few days of essentially hibernating at home, it became necessary to interact with the real world – and not just by going to work. There were birthday parties to go to, friends to see, things I needed to take part in.

I rarely think of myself as having a will of iron, but really after this period they will have to name a new house after me in Game of Thrones.

Test number one – work event at the GrEEK Campus, hosted by Abraaj. Voya and I enter a room in which there are probably more glasses of wine and juice than there are people. “Mmmm, imported beer” Voya effuses, while I sip my water and try not to look like Scrooge. Later as we leave, Voya eschewing the free food in a gesture of solidarity, the manager of the GrEEK Campus comes running after us to ask why we are leaving before we’ve eaten. I growl inwardly.

Test number two – Rasha’s (first) birthday party, at her house. I arrive with my large salad and start munching it while we await the birthday girl and everyone else awaits pizza. People keep asking me, innocently, why I’m dieting and I keep trying to explain that it’s a detox intended to increase energy. I sense that my constant yawning is not helping my cause. My friends are kind people but they can’t resist waving pizza, luxury chocolate cake and beer under my nose gleefully. “Trust me – I’m a doctor” Wael says, eyes gleaming.  

Test number three – Rasha’s (second) birthday party, a salsa night. This night is essentially a blur of faces and hugs, the occasional drink being waved at me in friendly deliberate provocation. I start crying for no discernible reason as I’m getting ready to leave. Strange times.

The see-sawing emotions and the craving for sleep as if it’s an incredible drug continue for days, accompanied by vivid, perplexing dreams. I honestly can’t remember my sleep being this refreshing and restorative since I was a child and when awake I find I’m much more capable of focusing and remembering information than usual. Whatever is going on in my head, it’s clear that there is some deep processing taking place, as my mind and emotions try to sort out my feelings about incidents old and new.  

Detox: the decision

I’ve decided to go on a detox.

I like to think of my relationship with food as a love affair. There is passion, yearning when I am deprived of a food I’m craving, intense satisfaction when the desire is fulfilled, the occasional bad experience that shakes me to my core, making me wonder if I’ll ever enjoy food again…and then before I know it I’m back in the saddle, feasting once more.

But lately, the relationship has been turning sour. I first noticed it during Ramadan, when daily fasting plays havoc with my body anyway. It got me thinking about how much what we do (or don’t) feed ourselves affects our every waking moment. It occurred to me that I couldn’t remember the last time I felt truly energised, nor could I shake the feeling that a general inertia, or sluggishness, interspersed with occasional mania, was the normal state of being not just for me but for many of the people I know. The feeling that every activity was an effort to be psyched up for, physically and mentally, and that a nap would always be welcome. A feeling that I’m certain I’m not supposed to be experiencing with such regularity this side of fifty.

Like many people, I consider myself healthy. Healthy enough, anyway. I eat vegetables. I go to the gym. I dance. I don’t binge eat Lindt chocolate bunnies (except at Easter).

But I hardly ever get enough sleep. 2am on a weeknight is not a rarity for me, or anyone in Cairo – truly the city that never sleeps. My days and nights are constantly crammed with activities. My time is badly organised. Otlob (Egypt’s online food delivery service) is both my best friend and my worst enemy; I order from it every day. I consume a lot of caffeine – sometimes more than six cups of tea and coffee in a day. Finally able to shake the shisha addiction I acquired shortly after arriving here five years ago, I started smoking the occasional cigarette as a substitute. So nights spent with friends who smoke (many – this is also the city that never breathes clean air) quickly turned into beer and cigarettes for all.

This feels like Alcoholics Anonymous. My name is Lucy, and I am not as healthy as I think I am.

So, I decided to detox. I felt that I needed to do something radical, to shake myself out of at least some of the bad habits, or at least reduce the impact they were having on my life. I’m sick of feeling tired all the time, of catching colds that last for a month and of feeling that many of the things I most want to be doing (writing, new ideas for work projects, further education, conversations) have to be put off to some indefinite time in the future when I have enough energy to tackle them. I have had enough of feeling as though I am sleepwalking through my life.

And there are more tangible health worries. Watching friends who have faced cancer scares, some very serious. The fear of aging. The realisation that despite growing up in the English countryside, surrounded by cats and horses, I have somehow in the last few years developed an allergy to both. Noticing that the hayfever I’ve had since I was a child now causes me to wheeze when the pollen count is really high.

Knowing that I stood no chance of sticking to the detox plan if I embarked on it alone, and wanting the guidance of someone I could trust, I contacted Anni, the founder of Pure Scandic, who I had met socially and who I knew offered tailored juice cleanses and detox programs. She recommended a 19 day program: seven days of a raw fruit and vegetable diet either side of a five day juice cleanse. Cramming my body to capacity with nutrients and eliminating all the bad (but delicious) things. Supplementing all the fruit and veg with some protein, but eliminating all meat, alcohol, caffeine, processed carbohydrates, added salt and sugar.

So this is what lies ahead of me for the next (nearly) three weeks. It’s quite a feat for a girl who would happily live on sticky rice and koshary if left to her own devices. Let’s see how this goes!

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Woman versus rat

The following morning dawned bright and clear. The only thing occupying my mind was the desperate knowledge that I had to do whatever needed to be done to rid my house of the scourge of Kamikaze Rat.

So I went to speak to my bewaabs, to ask if they could call an extermination company to come over, remove Kamikaze Rat and make sure there were no other unwelcome guests lurking in the house.

They were perplexed, to say the least. Apparently the normal way of dealing with rats is not to demand exterminators come and spray poison around your house. It’s possible – possible – that I was a little hard to reason with at the time. I do remember being very shrill. But then I did have a rat hiding in my kitchen.

The exterminators arrived, carrying a container of innocuous-looking liquid poison to spray around the house and poisonous food to place in strategic locations. They assured me that any creature that imbibed these would be dead within a day.

It wouldn’t die in my walls I asked, concerned. The last thing I wanted was Kamikaze Rat exacting brutal revenge by dying in some hard-to-reach place, effectively taking us all down with him at the moment of his demise.

No no, they laughed. He’ll die in an open space. If he’s still here, you’ll stumble across him on the floor tomorrow morning. And we’ll come back and remove him, at no extra charge.

Wonderful.  

They then presented me with the bill. An extortionate 6000LE. My eyes literally boggled.

Now at this point you’re probably sighing in exasperation at how someone could possibly be so gullible as to believe that this bill could actually be accurate. You have every right to do this; I admit to being an idiot.

In my defence, my fitful sleep the night before had been punctuated by rat-filled dreams. I was seeing rats everywhere I looked. Every time I heard a noise, I jumped, expecting to see Kamikaze Rat flying towards me as he had the previous night. So it’s fair to say I was not at my strongest or my sharpest. Clearly the exterminators could see this and had decided to take full advantage of it.

What could I do? I didn’t have that kind of money on me. The most my bank would allow me to withdraw in a single day was 4000LE. I explained this to the exterminators, who I still had not worked out were crooks. I told them I could withdraw 4000LE then and they would have to come back and collect the rest from my bewaab on another day. They, obviously sensing a flaw in their plan, were reluctant to do this. Nevertheless, we all descended to the building’s entrance.

3m Mohamed, our head bewaab, is a benign and grandfatherly man if you are on his good side; a proper force to be reckoned with if you are not. I had seen him get angry with people before (namely young guys harassing me in the streets) and he’s really not someone you want to cross. I could see his face set into barely-contained anger when I told him the situation with the exterminators and what they were charging me.

Torn I suppose between the desire to protect me and the desire to not contradict me in front of the men, he waved at me to go and withdraw my money, standing between me and the exterminators so they couldn’t follow me. By the time I returned he was yelling down the phone at their supervisor, calling them thieves and criminals, deploring the fact that they would pull what was now quite clearly (even to me) a total scam. Calling me over, he said that because I had already agreed to pay 4000LE, there was nothing he could do to reduce that sum but that I was under no circumstances to pay anything more. He passed the money to the two men with a gesture of utter contempt, motioning for them to leave and never come back.

So all that was left for me to do now was start cleaning the parts of my house that were definitely rat-free and wait for Kamikaze Rat to show up like the protagonist of an Agatha Christie whodunit.

I went off and stocked up on cleaning materials as if there was an imminent mass Dettol shortage, as if I was planning to clean an entire school single-handedly, as if the zombie apocalypse was coming, as if….well, as if I was expecting to come across a dead rat in my house.

And for a solid three days, I cleaned feverishly. I slept on the sofa (rats dancing in my dreams), went to work, came home and cleaned until 4am every day for three days. Every morning and evening, miserable and exhausted, I entered my kitchen with trepidation, expecting to find Kamikaze Rat spread-eagled on the floor. Every time I felt the mixed relief and sense of impending doom at him not being there.

Relief because, really, who among us is strong enough to deal with the prospect of a dead rat in their kitchen with equanimity? Sense of impending doom because, by the morning of day 3, a really very bad smell had started to emanate from somewhere within the kitchen and curdle in the air.

Merde merde merde. Not only crooks but liars. Kamikaze Rat was clearly dead in a hidden part of my kitchen.

So I asked 3m Mohamed whether, if I called the exterminators to come back and remove the rat that evening, as they had promised, he would be around to make sure there were no further problems with them. He was with me, he said immediately, sitting up a little straighter in his chair and putting his hand over his heart in a gesture of solidarity.

I called the exterminators who, surprisingly, sounded delighted to hear from me. Of course they would be more than happy to come back and remove the rat, they said obsequiously… and collect the other 2000LE I owed them. One short, violent reply from me and the conversation was over.   

That evening I limped into my building, wan and pale in appearance, bedraggled in spirit. I was having problems remembering the last time I had eaten or slept properly. I could feel I was starting to resemble the man from the Pink Panther films that everyone believes has gone mad, hallucinating rats everywhere I looked. I had scrubbed my house so thoroughly with Dettol that you could smell it as soon as you exited the lift three floors down from my flat. Everywhere except the dreaded kitchen.

Please, I asked the bewaab on duty, please send someone upstairs with me. If I had to start hunting on my own for a dead rat in my kitchen, I would lose my mind. One look in my eyes must have told him I wasn’t exaggerating.

The two younger men he sent upstairs with me were teasing, jovial. They could not stop laughing for the whole time it took us to get to my flat – expansive laughter that made their bellies shake. 3m Mohamed, in outrage, had told people the story of the dishonest exterminators and now the whole building knew about it, united in anger (at the code of Egyptian hospitality having been broken; in the eyes of most of the people I meet in my building, I am effectively their guest) and, certainly in the case of these men, amusement at me having subjected myself to all this drama and expense. For a rat.

“If you want to spend 4000LE on a rat, I’ll bring you a rat”, one of them joked. “I’ll bring it, I’ll take it away and you can give me 4000LE”.

Inside, they plunged into the rancid stench of the kitchen and, a few minutes later, emerged. The dead body of Kamikaze Rat was wrapped in a black plastic bag, as they held him with a kind of solemnity.

Forget Agatha Christie; this was pure CSI. This was the rat who had aimed too high in his pursuit of glory. He had aimed to be Splinter, sensei to the geckoes perhaps. Or maybe he had had lofty ambitions of living in my kitchen and cooking delicious meals, like the rat from Ratatouille. Either way, like an aspiring actress whose dreams are corrupted by the sordid realities of life, he had sipped from the poisoned chalice of the con-artist exterminators and all his plans had turned to dust.

Unable to resist one parting rejoinder, the more talkative of the two men turned to me as they were leaving. Waving the corpse of Kamikaze Rat in front of me with obvious glee he murmured “You know, if you were in the army….you would be eating him for dinner!”

Morals of this story:
1) A nice bewaab is worth his weight in gold. 

2) A gecko cannot eat half a potato.

3) Keep your friends close. You never know when you might need them to come and battle ninja rats with you. 

Ratgate

“Lucy, you don’t think a gecko could eat all this, do you?”

It was a fairly innocuous question posed to me by my flatmate R one morning, as he proffered a half-eaten potato.

It was a question I had little trouble answering with a resounding negative, even halfway out the door on the way to work.

We were familiar with our house gecko, comfortable with him. He made occasional appearances, chilling in the bathroom sink, scooting across the floor in a flash if you returned home unexpectedly. Occasionally, late at night, you would look up to see him brooding on the ceiling.

He was an utterly familiar part of our day-to-day life, a known entity.

But, gazing on this potato, I knew immediately that we were dealing with something unknown and sinister. A force to be reckoned with.

I had, at this point, no idea of the extent to which my feelings of foreboding would be borne out by actual events.

A brief conversation confirmed that the culprit of this potato-theft must be either a cat or a rat. We live on the top floor of a 13-storey building - so our house attracts the heat - and R, a freelance journalist, often preferred to leave windows and doors open to cool everything down at night.

We prayed that our hungry visitor was a stray cat prowling around the rooftops in search of rogue potatoes to munch on. I recollect making a vague promise to myself that if any stray creatures turned up, I would find an alternative place to stay until they had been dealt with. R was going to Turkey for ten days; I couldn’t afford to take any chances.

Or so I thought.

R departed, and I spent Thursday evening at a friend’s house, returning to the flat on Friday late-afternoon. As I walked into the flat, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that the cupboard to the immediate right of our front door, filled with odds and ends that do not belong to us, was ajar. I thought little of it, and went to sit down in the large, open sitting/dining room which is the focal point and heart of our flat.

I took off my glasses, without which I am as good as blind. Lost in thought, I noticed a creature of indeterminate (but significant) size and shape run down the stairs to my left and jump into the cupboard, with its door standing ever so slightly ajar.

Merde.

Blind or not, I could see that our culprit bore the gait of either a rat or a ferret. It was larger than a mouse but smaller than a cat. It was brown. It was agile. It was here with me in the house while my flatmate was in Turkey for ten days.   

Merde.

Panic stricken, I called a friend, Crazy Salsa Dancer. My high pitched voice no doubt said it all. “Whatever you’re doing, please, you need to drop it and come and help me right now. There’s a creature in my house!”

For 45 minutes, I sat immobilized, my eyes glued to this cupboard.

To his credit, Crazy Salsa Dancer not only turned up but brought a friend. Together, the three of us circled the cupboard like reticent hyenas. Opening the door, the two of them started poking at a pile of sheets and towels with the long stick they had brought as a weapon. No response. They began berating me; clearly the creature had run away. I was adamant – I would not rest until I had searched through the whole cupboard to make sure there was nothing inside.

So we erected a barrier, consisting of an old mattress, outside the cupboard. We started removing old sheets and towels from inside.

One sheet …nothing.

Two sheets ….nothing.

Three sheets ….out jumped a kamikaze rat, teeth bared, eyes flashing fire. It’s hard to tell whether he was actually a black belt in karate or whether I just imagined it, but in any case he expertly ricocheted off the mattress and ran into the kitchen – while I, as if burned by fire, ran squealing into the hallway.

It took ten minutes to calm me down, by which point Kamikaze Rat was trapped in my kitchen. A fruitless search by the boys, with the long stick, proved that he had either escaped through a hole in the mosquito netting covering the kitchen window, or was still in hiding. They had to go.

We barricaded the kitchen door like the poor veterans of the First World War barricaded the trenches. Cushions, chairs, towels – everything you could think of to prevent a Rat Escape. And, it being now 10pm, I could think of nothing more productive to do than go out, get drunk and sleep on the sofa. So this is what I did. 

Gecko

The gecko and I
live harmoniously together
except when he jumps out of the rubbish bin
and scuttles across the floor
like a small
translucent
crocodile