Earn your body’s forgiveness in just two weeks
By Dr Goodweather (as imagined by Adam Bannister)
Tinnitus, twitches, hiccups, itches, pins and needles, in-growing toenails, self-loathing, the vague, uneasy feeling that you’ve left the oven on and cancer are all classic symptoms of toxins in your body. Even if you suffer none of these afflictions, summer is on the horizon and I’d hazard that your weakness for chocolate cake, double lattes and sauvignon blanc has left you bloated and bikini-shy.
So put down that bagel, fatty, and de-clutter your body of its accumulated sins. Follow my bikini-ready detox diet to radiate your skin, spring-clean your insides and turn heads on the beach.
‘Having it all’ doesn’t leave you much time to plan your diet. Sure, you have time to take the kids to school in the morning and shatter the glass ceiling in the afternoon, but it’s no surprise you can’t quite find the time to calculate the GI index of a broccoli and arugula soup. Find time.
The science is in the metaphor. I’ve got science literally coming out of my ears (a useful channel for flushing out toxin particles, incidentally, so don’t wear headphones during this diet) – and I’m armed with the Dr prefix and sciencey-sounding jargon to prove it.
There’s nothing healthier than fruit and veg, so it follows that a diet consisting of nothing else can only be good for you. Think about it. Spring 2012 is all about juiced yogaberries (yogaberries grown only in Thailand’s Phu Phan Mountains during Loy Krathong or the Festival of Floating Bowls and must be harvested with your feet).
Try my fish-oil smoothie. And sample the MellowLOVE™, a concoction of purely green ingredients conjured by one Gwyneth Paltrow, whose metamorphosis into nutritional sage (itself a powerful de-pollutant) attests to the myriad transferrable skills of acting and celebrity-dom. Writing in her newsletter Goop, The Seer of Smoothies counsels that it’s not just what you eat, it’s also how you eat: “Remember to chew your juices – sip, enjoy and no gulping.”
An effective laxative, fruit will also help shift decaying material in your intestine. Wise Gwyneth, whose resolve was strengthened by her obese experience in Shallow Hal, wouldn’t walk down the red carpet with an intestine full of faeces – and neither, navigating the aisles of Aldi, should you.
A month on from attending my Toxins Re-Juiced retreats (only £999) people report feeling re-energised – proof that meats, breads, wheats and dairy are all highly toxic. Scare stories that blame fatigue, headaches, nausea and dizziness arising from the juice diet on the omission of key food groups are wrong; it’s the toxins kicking and screaming as they’re dragged out of you. If a criminal resists arrest then you might have an officer with a bloody nose, but you’ve still taken a thug off the street.
Start each day with a teaspoon of grape seed oil to lubricate the intestinal walls and kick-start the enzymatic processes. It’s also important to get horizontal for an hour following your breakfast of oregano and thyme salad, buckwheat muffins or seaweed porridge. Sit or stand up straight and those invaluable detoxifiers will pass right through without doing their job. Try to create a spa environment in your kitchen. If there is a picture of some pebbles on the wall, even better.
For mid-morning snacks – between 10:30am and 11am is the optimum time for your biorhythms – dose yourself with seeds, nuts and berries. Rule of thumb: if you can’t imagine a rabbit or squirrel eating it, it’s off the menu (not including the obese squirrels of Greenwich Park who dine only on Pret a Manger).
It’s sometimes hard finding ingredients prescribed in detox plans. That’s why I’m offering you a wide selection of toxin-phobic fish. Any of African butter catfish, barcheek goby, cutlips minnow, gilt-head bream, hardhead catfish, Patagonian toothfish, Ridged-eye flounder or tub gurnard is fine (all available from your local Londis).
Tofu, pulses, soya and raw vegetable salads make you feel hugely virtuous – along with smugness a very detoxifying emotion. Quinoa – pronounced Keen-wah – is uber zeitgeist. In fact… blue green algae, pirulina, chard… if you haven’t heard of it, don’t know how to pronounce it or didn’t know it was edible – chances are, it’s detox-facilitating.
And make sure everything is organic as it’s better for your insides. You can’t spell organic without organ – think about it. Before mankind invented chemicals in the 1850s everything was organic and people lived to 100 and beyond.
This diet is super effective during a full moon. Binding to the metals, toxins are literally wrenched through your pores by the moon’s magnetic pull.
Your organs don’t sleep, so they need rearming with detoxifiers while you do. Set your alarm to go off every hour and take a teaspoon of cottage cheese (full fat is fine on the weekends when your body absorbs fewer calories). Alternatively, wear a nose drip.
Drinks
Drink precisely 8.4 litres of room-temperature, alkaline water a day. Ice cubes are a toxin’s best friend and acid – think acid rain, acid house, acid indigestion, when someone says something ‘acidly’ – is self-evidently a Bad Thing.
Some say the bottled water industry is a racket. But drinking lots of water, through which the brain transmits electricity, improves mental performance. And don’t believe that you can get water from the foods we eat. Try wringing a pork chop into a bowl and tell me you want to drink that.
Fizzy soft drinks and wine will have caused a pile-up of pepsitides and vinotoxins in your cardiopulmonary receptors, which disrupts thirst signals to your brain. Try out the Hydracoach intelligent water bottle, “the world’s first interactive water bottle “, which monitors your intake and gives your brain a rest from telling you when you’re thirsty.
Rule of thumb: if anything tastes surprisingly nice during the two weeks’ detox – you’ve probably cheated.
The ostensible author of this article is entirely fictional but not all the prescriptions are. Gwyneth Paltrow really did advise Goop readers not to gulp their smoothies. A detox article in the Daily Mail really did claim that fruit “will help shift some of the 3-4kg of decayed material in the average intestine.” A wellness resource really did suggest that tinnitus was caused, not by exposure to loud noise over many years, but yes, you guessed it, a “build-up of toxins”. Read Dr Ben Goldacre and Sense About Science for no-nonsense debunking of detox therapies and other pseudoscience.
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Ahaha “If you feel faint, eat a 1cm cube of cheese”, you got that one from The Devil Wears Prada, right?
Ah, so many of these crash diets and detoxes are so silly, but even sillier are those who believe they’ll work.
Was it not The Daily Mail that also posited that “too much fruit is bad for you” ? …