My Detox: Eve of Day 1

Beginning a new journey..

I'm very excited.  It's January 2011, a new year, a fresh beginning.  It feels like the beginning of a new chapter.

Having delivered my beautiful second daughter just over one year ago, at the end of 2009, I spent most of 2010 nursing and totally sleep-deprived.  No one seems to talk about this, but the post-natal period can often times be much harder than the pre-natal period!  I was lucky with my body's reaction to the delivery of my second daughter (it was much more smooth than that of my first daughter's delivery), but nursing really takes a toll!  Your body is burning 500 - 600 extra calories to produce the milk.  That's comparable to running 5 - 6 miles per day.  Everyday.  No break.  For my second daughter, that was every day for 10 months.  And I have no memory of getting even 6 consecutive hours of sleep since my first daughter was born more than 3 years ago!

Since sleep regulates our bodies' rhythms, processes and systems, the lack of both sleep and consecutive hours of sleep can throw off many things.  In addition, the nursing is very demanding, and it felt draining.  As such, I found myself very out of touch with my body and craving tremendous amounts of meat.  I think I just needed the fat, calories, and whatever else meat offers that I couldn't get from my wanna-be vegetarian diet.  During the last couple of months of 2010, I probably ate an entire cow's worth of meat.  And I felt awful -- physically, energy-wise, emotionally...  I also felt guilty and sad about it.

So, for months during 2010, I've been dreaming of this day.  As I write this, it is Tuesday January 4, the eve before Day 1 of my detox experience.  Now that I'm no longer breastfeeding, now that my body feels a little more recovered from pregnancy / delivering / nursing, I'm ready to prepare for the next pregnancy!  =)  I know... crazy in some ways...  But I want to clean out my internal environment as aggressively (yet safely) as possible.

Who knows what is really true about detoxing.  There seems to be no unequivocal evidence to prove detox claims made by raw foodies.  There are just theories.  But I know that there's a lot of truth that can not be explained.  So, we have to rely on personal experience.  And we, at The S File, have been and continue to share ours, in case it inspires any healthy change in our readers.

Since my husband and I hope to experience a healthy pregnancy in 2011, I have limited amounts of time to detox.  With all that I've read, and with recently completing the book, Fetal Origins: How the First Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives, detoxing as aggressively but safely as possible before trying to get pregnant is important to me.  Check back here to follow the journey!

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• My Detox: Day 2
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• As Mom and Wife, Why I’ve been Exploring A Holistic Approach to Health…
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• The Raw Diet
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• The Raw Diet: One Year Later…
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