I just led a great group of women, in all stages of health and life, through my 7-Day Nutrition Designed Spring Detox & Wellness Reset. Literally, it just ended yesterday.
I wanted to do a quick review of it all. Mostly to share with you that I, your faithful and highly educated nutritionist, still learns so much, things I never expected to, even from a brief week long program that I created and have done multiple times before.
Winter is a wonderful and magical time. It filled with family time, snowy-days, holidays after holidays, and warming, delicious, comforting food. The flip side of this means short and cold days, many of which are spent indoors without sunlight and less active movement, traveling and lots and lots of heavy food and beverages. So as much as I do love it, I always seem to eagerly welcome the spring time in, especially in the past 4 years since moving from Southern California to Colorado.
This spring I was more than ready to start my 7-day cleanse. Our body is amazing and it does a great job and unloading the toxins in our body. But in the modern times of the world we live in now, where environmental pollutions are all around us, toxins in our cleaning and beauty supplies, and more, our liver and bodies sometimes need a gentle nudge to detox optimally. If you’ve not done my cleanse before, I ask you to eliminate the “Big 5” as I call them: dairy, gluten, caffeine, refined sugar and alcohol, for 7 days. Yup, that’s it! Everything else is game. We focus on seasonal habits, shifts and foods. I send daily emails to motivate and encourage. Plus, there’s a private Facebook group and course where I do live trainings and keep in touch with you and all your questions and more.
I was so encouraged by the women doing this, many felt better after just 1 day. While it took a few others 2 or 3 days to feel good without the caffeine. For myself, I found I was a little bit in both groups. And towards the end everyone felt better, stronger and leaner. A few people even weighed in and lost anywhere between 4-6 pounds!
Now, I am generally not a huge fan of the scale and weighing in, or losing weight fast. But to me this is a testament that even eating a nourishing number of calories and whole foods (no deprivation, juicing or liquid cleanses here) can do for someone.
Having gone through my own spring and fall detox programs multiple times, this is the third year I am doing these, and I do them myself with every group, (I stick to the philosophy that I will NEVER ask you to do something that I myself haven’t done) I have never done this and not learned something new!
This time I learned how emotionally attached I am to my cup of joe! SO much so that the first few days my husband made comments about how quiet I seemed or how I seemed a little down or blue. I mean I knew I was struggling with it, but I didn’t know it was THAT apparent. So I did a bit more meditating and journaling than normal, trying to figure out what that cup of coffee, or lack that of, was trying to teach me. And I hate to disappoint, but the realization is that I still don’t know the answer to that question. But I do know that anything that has that large of a hold on me, needs to be further analyzed and probably even eliminated from my life. So, I have few rules around coffee for the next few weeks to continue my analytical process of figuring this out. And I know you are curious as to what they are, so here it goes:
No coffee first thing in the morning upon waking. I will drink my 12-16 ounces of warm water with lemon first thing, go tongue scrap, make breakfast and then, only then will I even consider making my 1 cup of coffee.
It will be special, and delicious coffee, filled with nourishing herbs like reishi or ashwagandha or he shou wu, and more good stuff.
I will stick to 1 cup of coffee and drink it mindfully, stopping anytime I feel like I am done or it no longer is serving me.
That’s it for now. If you are curious about this week-long, full body, mind and spirit seasonally-based reset I have the 50+ page 7-Day Spring Detox & Wellness Reset Guidebook up on my shop page, and you can do it anytime you wish! Cheers! And happy Spring!