40 Day Detox

It’s day five and I’m still not getting results. Today my weight went up by 1.1kg to 70.9kg. I wouldn’t have minded this as long as it was a gain in muscle. But this again was not the case. My Body Fat went up 1.3% to 19.4%, Body Water went down to 55.4% and Body Muscle went down 0.6% to 42.0%. 

Albert Einstein on Insanity

Albert Einstein defined Insanity as “Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” I don’t want to be classed as being insane so today I decided to not exercise on an empty stomach at all and see what would happen if I exercised later in the day after fuelling my body with food first. 

I started my day with a double lime and honey hot drink, followed by muesli with fromage frais, a handful of nuts, a handful of blueberries, a handful of blackberries, a handful of green grapes and a teaspoon of honey. 

I use Sainsbury’s Be Good to Yourself Natural Normandy Fromage Frais. Per 100g it contains 50 kcal; Protein 8.0g; Carbohydrate 4.2g; and Fat 0.1g. Its Protein to Carbohydrate to Fat ratio is better than 100ml of Cravendale skimmed milk which contains 37 kcal; Protein 3.6kg; Carbohydrate: 4.9g; Fat 0.3g. It’s also better than 100g of Sainsbury’s Be Good to Yourself Natural Probiotic Yogurt which has 55 kcal; Protein 5.6g; Carbohydrate 8.0g; Fat 0.1g. Higher protein content is also the reason I’ve started to consume Sainsbury’s Be Good to Yourself British Natural Cottage Cheese before going to bed. It contains 75 kcal; Protein 10.8g; Carbohydrate 4.6g; and Fat 1.5g. So when I want to consume more protein I go for cottage cheese and fromage frais, and when I want to fuel or refuel my muscles with carbohydrates as well as get some protein I will consume milk and yogurt close to workouts. 

Blueberries

Blueberries have the highest antioxidant capacity of all fresh fruit which has many benefits including boosting your immune system and fighting the aging process by neutralising free radicals. Blackberries are also high in antioxidants. They can also apparently help relieve diarrhoea and intestinal inflammation. If only I had known this the other day when I first started drinking protein shakes. The morning after my first protein shake I suffered from what is affectionately called the “protein shake shits”. Anyways, I digress, back to the health benefits of my breakfast. Ah yes, grapes. Grapes can help fight heart disease. It’s the reason why French people get away with their high fat diets and yet not suffer from as much heart disease as say Americans and Brits. It’s due to their high consumption of grapes and wine (which is made of grapes). 

As I didn’t do a long workout on an empty stomach this morning I had more energy than on previous days and managed to get a blog post up by 3pm.  I then ate one peanut butter on multiseed toast and an avocado with peanut butter (strange mix I know) to fuel me for my workout. I figured my body would need some time to process the food before being of benefit so went shopping for groceries as we had started to run out of fruit for juicing and other wholesome stuff. I’m quite surprised by how much food I have managed to get through in less then a week since starting this detox. Maybe that’s why I’m getting fatter? 

My Route Around Valentines Park, Ilford

By the time I got home it had been over an hour since my pre-workout snack and I was feeling hungry again. So I ate a banana and munched on a handful of almonds as I made my way to the gym. My performance in the gym was by far the best it had been to date. I went past the 100 mark and did 110 Lat Pull Down’s and 110 Crunches in the first set. My second and third sets were also improvements from the previous days in these two exercises. I struggle most with Dips and Chest Press. The most dips I’ve managed so far is 30 since the beginning of the detox and on the chest press I only managed 40 reps in the first set. But overall I was pleased with my performance. I also beat my walking record by 23 seconds, completing my two laps in 1 hour 1 minute and 35 seconds. I’ve mapped out my route on Map My Run. Turns out in total I’m walking 7.14km. It’s therefore taking me 13:52 minutes to walk a mile. That’s 1.92 m/s. 

Brown male with a beard = Islamic terrorist

When I returned to the gym to get on the cross trainer there was an orthodox Jewish girl on it surrounded by other Jewish kids and adults. While I waited, I wrote down my latest walking record on a piece of paper and I noticed some of the Jewish adults looking at me in a suspicious kind of way. It was hot, I was tired and well, I just didn’t want any trouble. I’ve been in similar situations before. 

Thirteen years ago one January afternoon, I was stood outside King Solomon High School waiting for a lift from some work colleagues. I was doing one of the most boring jobs in the world: stocktaking. (Listen up kids, this is what happens when you rebel against the system and quit education – you end up doing shitty jobs. So don’t do it. Learn from my mistake. Figure out what you want in life early on and just get on with it. Have some dreams and make them happen. Leave the philosophising to me).

Zaheerjeel Ahmed

Anyways, back to the January of 1997. I was stood with an old school friend. My memory fails me as to who it was. I think it was either a friend called Zaheer or Nafeez (Oops I’ve just been informed that the fellow usual suspect was Sherjeel Ahmed, sorry Sherj!). Our colleagues were going to pick us up and we were going to head to somewhere in St Albans to stocktake a La Senza women’s lingerie store. Embarrassing? Yes… As I stood there I noticed the CCTV camera near the school gates move slowly from left to right and then focus on me. It felt like the Terminator rolling his head left and then right and then staring straight at me. Then I noticed the electronic school gates close. I think it was within 5 minutes I noticed a police car circling Fullwell Cross roundabout. I must have seen it go round and round at least 3-4 times. Neither of us had yet clocked on what was going on. 

I spy with my little eye something beginning with T and ending with T… (Click image for answer)

Within the next couple of minutes we were surrounded by four police cars and two police vans. Talk about excessive! When they parked up they screeched to a stop and jumped out of their cars – just as you see them do on The Bill and marched towards us. I wasn’t scared. No not all. I thought the situation was absolutely hilarious. You see this was back in 1997. This was pre-911, pre-7/7, pre-Jean Charles de Menezes. We bearded brown people weren’t yet fully embraced as the enemy within. Sure we could easily get locked up and be treated as guilty until proven innocent for accusations of domestic abuse – because that’s obviously what brown men with beards did to entertain themselves. But it took a couple of false flag operations the next four to eight years later for us to be put up onto the pedestal of the most wanted terrorist list. So being eighteen and a little naïve perhaps, I did the unthinkable. I had fun with it. 

They split us up and questioned us separately. One of the female police officers said to me: “What are you doing here?” I said, “I’m waiting to get picked up for work.” She then said, “What do you work as and where do you work?” With a grin on my face I said: “I am a terrorist and I work in a semtex factory.” WARNING: Do not try this at home! Leave such sarcasm with the Police to the professionals. I wasn’t shot in the head 7 times, or battened in the ribs, or handcuffed and flung into the back of a police van. On the contrary she responded with disarming embarrassment. Rather then getting me into an arm lock and throwing me to the floor they were completely embarrassed for being there and having to deal with us. She asked me a few more routine questions, mentioned that the school had noticed us behaving suspiciously outside the school and were simply doing their job. When it was clear to them that the school were just being paranoid and we were just two harmless brown blokes waiting to get picked up to go to work they apologised for inconveniencing us and let us be.

Beardos are not Terrorists

Those were the good old days when the Metropolitan Police Service asked questions first and acted later. Not like now. It’s unlikely that I would ever attempt to pull a stunt like that again in the current political climate. They’ve probably enacted laws now (thanks to my old schoolmate Lamine) giving the police the right to keep you locked up without any evidence for even whimpering such a thing! 

When I got to work I realised how lucky I might have been that they decided against searching me. I was carrying a book I was reading called “The Vanished Imam: Musa Al Sadr and the Shia of Lebanon”. 

How did I get onto that story? Oh yes, the Jewish girl and the cross trainer. Well I decided that I would not stand there and wait for it to become free. Consciously I thought to myself that I’m tired now, I can’t be bothered to wait and I’ll go home and make up the exercise by using my wife’s indoor bike for 30 minutes. That’s what I was thinking consciously. Subconsciously it seems a lot more was going on in the back of my mind! 

When I got home I drank freshly squeezed pear juice. In the previous days the citrus drinks didn’t seem to be doing the trick of stopping me from feeling exhausted. A few months back when I experimented with fresh juices post workout I did notice pear and apple juices doing the trick and making me feel energised again. So I thought I’d try that again. I also had a protein shake with skimmed milk. 

For our evening meal I made roast vegetables to go with the black-eyed beans my wife had made earlier. The roast included: two bell peppers, a carrot, an aubergine, two courgettes, three handfuls of okra, a handful of mushrooms, one large onion, 5 green chillies, some root ginger, 4 cloves of garlic a handful of fresh basil leaves, and seasoned with olive oil, sea salt and pepper. I also grated some mozzarella cheese on top. I’ve made this a couple of times before and it came out really nice. This time however it was ok, nothing special. Perhaps I cooked too many vegetables at the same time and failed to season it properly. I ate my evening meal with a glass of fresh carrot juice. 

I thought about getting on the bike and treating myself to half an hour in the tub to relax my aching muscles. But thinking about doing both activities was about as much energy I felt like investing in either activity. Instead I took a 5 minute shower, ate 5 tablespoons of cottage cheese and had an early night.