The Rose Cleanse - Days 6 + 7 - and Carob-Maca Swirl Banana Soft Serve

My cleanse ended on Sunday, pretty much the way it started: juice all day, and a light, well-combined dinner.

In this case, dinner was a fresh beet slaw and field greens salad followed by organic buckwheat soba noodles tossed with raw marinated portabello mushrooms. Followed by...dessert.

OK, I know. I should have waited until Monday to make frozen banana soft serve. But since when was I a stickler for food rules? And besides, I just completed a seven day cleanse. I earned it.

Enter the trusty Omega 8005 juicer. All washed up from earlier-in-the-day's Pure Veg Green Juice (cucumber-celery-lemon-kale), the Omega was primed and ready to handle a frozen banana with The Blank. (The Blank is a mesh-free attachment that comes with single gear juicers to produce nut butter or soft serve from the end where, normally, pulp is ejected.)

And so, I present to you my Carob-Maca Swirl Frozen Banana Soft Serve. With Blueberries! Ahhh, bliss.

Carob-Maca Swirl Banana Soft Serve

1 large frozen banana
1 scant teaspoon maca powder
1 heaping teaspoon raw carob powder
1-2 handfuls fresh blueberries (optional)

Break the banana into four pieces. With the juicer off and the blank installed, put one piece of banana in the feed tube, followed by one third the maca and carob. Repeat, turning the juicer on when the feed tube is filled and finishing with banana. Run everything through to make soft serve. Mash-stir with fork to combine and swirl, then mix in fresh blueberries or other fruit if desired.

NOTE: If you don't have a single gear juicer [Omega 8005, 8006 or Champion style], you can make frozen banana soft serve in a blender. Be prepared to turn it on and off frequently, however, as you will need press the ingredients down with a wooden spoon between whizzes until it all catches and swirls together.

3-Day Mini Cleanse

Here in Western Massachusetts, January is the coldest month of winter. Yes, we had one blissful, delicious forty degree day last week. Felt like Heaven. Otherwise, temperatures have not risen much above freezing since Christmas. All just to say there's been lots of bundling up and staying in going on. (Aside: gotta love those prepositions - am I right, people?!)

Anyway, as chilly weather drives us inside, this seems to me like the perfect time to "just say no" to the temptation of dense, heavy foods and lighten up my diet for a few days. So, today I began a 3-day mini-cleanse.

What is a mini-cleanse? Well, it's just a relaxed, short-term program that gives the digestive organs a break for most of the day. My plan looks something like this:

Upon Arising: 10 oz water with lemon and MSM (boosts detox by donating precious sulfur ions)
Breakfast: fresh pressed vegetable juice with apple or other fruit to sweeten
Snack: Herb tea (gotta have that warmth!) and water
Lunch: Green Smoothie of choice or another juice
Snack: herb tea or lemon-water with MSM
Dinner: Raw Salad with choice of: seed cheese, raw goat cheese or baked sweet potato
After Dinner: herb tea

Today, my mini-cleanse meals featured a superb carrot-beet-dandelion greens juice and an outrageously tasty red grapefruit-blueberry smoothie (thank you, Cathy!), both left over from the weekend. (That was easy!)

Dinner will be a fresh sprout salad (homegrown lentil and alfalfa-clover sprouts plus locally grown sunflower greens) with red onion, raw feta cheese and organic black olives. Dressed with Jordan's famous lime-pink pepper dressing. I feel so nourished by my dear friends and family. Thank you all!

What's great about a mini-cleanse:
It's easy.
It gives your digestive organs a break.
It boosts detox.
It doesn't last too long! (Did I mention it's easy?)
It's delicious and satisfying.
At the end, you'll feel way better than when you started!

Sounds good to me. Will keep you posted on days 2 and 3!

In light and lightness,
Diana

Would You Like Antioxidants With That?

I'm writing from the hospital where my mother has been in intensive care for the past two-plus weeks. It's a cruel irony that after finally completing a 6-month course of chemotherapy for lymphoma, she is now fighting another issue: widespread lung inflammation due to either complications from the chemo or "radiation relapse" pneumonitis or some pneumonia-type infection - the doctors aren't sure.

As it becomes harder for her to breathe on her own, Mom's treatment has required the addition of oxygen, given via either breathing tube or face mask or nasal canula, with or without assisted pressure.

The paradox here is that oxygen, while necessary for life, is in itself a toxin that can damage the lungs. This is one reason why lung tissues are naturally loaded with antioxidants, particularly glutathione, a sulfur-containing compound made within the body to help protect cells and tissues from oxidative damage. Glutathione levels are low in people with inflamed lungs, beause the body uses up its stores trying to reverse the free radical damage ongoing from whatever is causing the inflammation.

Because oxygen causes inflammation and free radical damage to lung tissue, I thought it would make sense to give Mom antioxidants as part of her treatment. In other words, if you are knowingly creating a situation where oxidation is going to take place, boosting levels of ANTI-oxidants could counteract or prevent the damage.

I found a good deal of research to support this theory and shared it with my mother's doctors. Respectfully, they considered it before deciding for various reasons not to add any glutathione, acetylcysteine (a glutathione precursor), vitamin E or any other antioxidant to her protocol. I am sorry to report that her condition is not improving. I don't know if the antioxidants would have helped. At least I tried - with my mother's blessing, I might add. Sometimes when things get critical, people open to possibility. She was OK with me proposing this alternative idea to her medical caregivers.

Meanwhile, I've been trying to keep my own antioxidant intake high, considering I've been basically living at the hospital (a great place to get sick) since mid-May and am under increased emotional stress during this difficult time. To this end, I thought of bringing a ton of antioxidant supplements down here with me. But then I realized, instead of carrying around multiple bottles of this and that, why not focus on food?

Enter the local fruit stand, around the corner on 68th Street and 1st Avenue. Fresh berries galore are there for the taking; they make a wonderful breakfast with bananas and are one of the highest potency antioxidant foods to be found. I've partaken of golden raspberries, blueberries and strawberries so far.

I'm also trying to get a daily fresh veggie juice - available from the local juice bar or from the hospital cafeteria here at Memorial Sloan Kettering where they serve a tasty pineapple-cucumber-ginger elixir. (Very impressed to find fresh green juice here - overall, their caf is top notch.)

Delicious and affordable Indian food from Tawa, on 68th between 1st and York, provides great taste and protective curry spices. For $4.95 I get two curries of my choice along with rice (unfortunately white rice, something I don't generally eat but am allowing myself to enjoy as comfort food). Honestly, it's the best Indian food I've had since I lived in India back in 1987 - especially the palak paneer (spinach and fresh cultured, enzyme-containing cheese).

Green tea, dark chocolate and raw Sacred Chocolate are also helping me meet my antioxidant needs. I ran out of high ORAC goji berries a while ago...tossed with cashews, bee pollen and raw cacao they made a fabulous free-radical-busting trail mix.

I did bring one antioxidant supplement with me: Supertonic, a wonderful herbal product from Pioneer Nutritional Formulas that's packed with high potency adaptogenic Chinese and Ayurvedic herbs including turmeric, eleuthero, ashwagandha and shizandra.

So far, I am managing to stay healthy during this transition time. I love my mother so much. Bless her spirit and bless all of us, shining in brilliance, careening through the unpredictability, the joy, the pain and the beauty of a precious life on earth.

Summertime Blues

Summer has been flying by at a lazy, rain-drenched pace, and here it is late August already. The weather experts inform us this has been the wettest summer "on record" for Western Mass; now that's impressive! Lots of rain makes the sunny days all the more magical, and keeps the blueberries ripening on the bushes, somewhat past their expected expiration date I believe. Great news for all of us blueberry lovers!

This year on my birthday, which happened by chance to coincide with perfectly clear and sunny skies, I went blueberry picking for the first time in my life. What a thrill! Sure, I'd picked lots of those tiny, delicious wild blueberries in my day, the kind that grow low along trailside paths and such, but these were cultivated highbush berries, an entirely different animal. The bushes themselves average six feet in height, so they are tall and proud to be absolutely laden with deep blue fruits that hang down in small bunches, like grapes. My partner and I were each given a lightweight plastic pail on a long white nylon cord to hang around our necks, and with a bounce in our step, set forth upon the corridor of dreams.

Jaws open and uplifted like little birds to receive their mother's manna, we filled our mouths, bellies and, of course, our pails with fingerfulls and handfulls of the biggest, sweetest blueberries I've ever tasted. All warm from the sun, bursting with juice, smooth-skinned on the lips, tender to the bite and just barely tart on the pop... it was blueberry heaven! So many berries! In only one hour we picked NINE POUNDS!!! (And that's not counting all we could eat!) Now my freezer is full and my heart is glad, knowing there are many blueberry-kissed smoothies in store for future days, brightening the chill promise of winter.