This is my first ever cleansing fast, and today is day 12.  I have learned so much about myself doing this – I heartily recommend a fast for getting control over your eating and cleaning the toxins out of your body.  (Although some people shouldn’t fast – for example those who take Coumadin or blood pressure medication)

I read the book Clean: The Revolutionary Program to Restore the Body’s Natural Ability to Heal Itself and got further inspired to give it a try when several of my friends reported that they were doing it and were very happy with how they felt and the results they achieved.

To start, the book is not laid out very well – I kept wishing that he’d get to the point of exactly how to do the Clean program. But there’s the rub – he sells the fiber powders and supplements that you need for the cleanse. It isn’t required that you buy their supplements – as you’ll find out if you join (yes, you have to join – but it’s free) the Clean website and check out their forums. Some are doing the web version of Clean (and bought the supplements from them) and some are doing the book version (and bought their own products.)

I’m doing the book version.  Here’s what you do:

The diet is an anti-allergic three week diet meant to quiet your system and clean out all its toxins. (I’m only doing two weeks due to an upcoming trip.) Hence it is high fiber (you add a fiber powder to your shakes) and mostly whole food. The main restrictions are no dairy, soy, wheat, corn, oats, sugar, caffeine,  and alcohol. You keep to a 12 hour overnight fast: if you eat dinner at 7:00 pm, no more food until 7:00 am. Lemon water on rising and before bed.

Breakfast is a fruit shake.  I like pineapple, apple, celery, blackberries, flax seed, chia seed and walnuts all mixed in the Vita-Mix blender with some herbal tea. I love the Vita-Mix (it and my KitchenAid professional stand mixer were the two non-negotiable items I had to bring when we moved here) because it can grind through nuts and seed with ease. Each shake gets 2 tablespoons of fiber powder, too.

Lunch is a small whole food meal. Those who eat meat might have a small piece of chicken. I usually have a bowl of peruano beans topped with cut up avocado and a bunch of carrot sticks.

Dinner is a vegetable juice or shake. The program doesn’t want you to eat tomatoes, so it is a bit hard to make a V-8 juice clone, but I combine carrots, celery, cucumber, jicama, almonds, cabbage, spinach, etc. with more herbal tea and the fiber powder to make a dinner shake.

You may think that doesn’t sound like much food but I have been completely satisfied and am not ravenous when the next meal comes around. I have been eating between 1,200 and 1,400 calories a day and feel like my nutrition is in the right area. The nutrition info below is from the online tracking program I use at Live Strong. I like their site for tracking my weight and calories… they also have a nice support forum. This is just an example of one day’s food.  

I like my protein to be in the 10-20% of calories range, on the day illustrated below my protein intake was 11.18%. (If you are wondering why I am an advocate of eating a lower protein diet, you might want to read The China Study for more information.)

In addition to the fiber, the program wants you to:

• Take a milk thistle supplement – for liver health
• Eat a piece of raw garlic or garlic supplement
• Take 1-2 tablespoons of olive oil before be each night
• Do at least 1/2 hour of light exercise a day
• Exfoliate your skin when showering

I have lost 7 pounds so far – but I just wish I could explain how good I feel and how well I’m sleeping. When I started the program I thought it would be a worthwhile ordeal, and instead it is something I am thoroughly enjoying!  How strange is that!

If you are considering doing a cleansing fast, I would highly recommend this one.

We hadn't even realized there was salitre here - look what the painters found!

Salitre is a fact of life in the tropics.  When we moved here we had very little idea what it takes to deal with salitre in a climate like ours.

What is it?  It is the powdery stain that leaches through the paint – basically salts moving out of the mortar and concrete through moisture.  Sometimes the moisture is coming from a leak – and sometimes it is from the humidity, rain, or groundwater seeping up.

This patch isn't too bad. It is much more obvious on dark colors.

If you move to the tropics and think that the only time you are going to need to paint is when you’re redecorating, you’ll have a bit of a surprise in store for you!  I’m sure new construction has less, but it is just a part of life for everyone here.  

Salitre is called "wall cancer" for a reason.

For example, four years ago we bought our house and had the entire house painted.  It had some existing salitre and unfortunately since we were newbies we didn’t make sure the painter followed proper salitre protocol. (He said he did, but…) Within months salitre was visible again in a few places.  What did we do?  What most people do here.  We ignored it or put a cabinet in front of it, of course!

I think there was some kind of painted border in this room at one time. This room had a patch of visible salitre about 1 foot by 4 feet.... but when the painters started scraping, what a mess! Henry is checking out the dusty floor.

But after two years we couldn’t ignore it any more.  Out came the paintbrushes and salitre repair kit!  Here’s what you do:

• Scrape the area with a spatula until you are not able to remove any more paint.
• Paint the area with muriatic acid, taking care to not put your nose too close.  Wear gloves!
• Let it dry
• Wash the area with water to remove the acid
• Let it dry
• Paint with sealer
• Paint with paint

It’s kind of a hassle but pretty important.  We have professional painters here now, and their procedure is a bit different.  They scrape the area down entirely and then they sand, patch with their special mix, seal the entire room with sealer, and then paint.

We’re having the exterior and the living room, dining room, and stairway painted right now, four years after the last full paint job.  It’s going to look beautiful.  But I’m under no illusions that we’ll get more than four years out of this paint job just because it’s such a fine job.  In México, I think there should be a saying that “Nothing is certain but death, taxes, and salitre.”

Necessity is the mother of invention!

It is late October and that means that snowbirds and folks who like to get out of the heat for part of the summer are returning. (I was going to say returning in droves but to use it with snowbirds seemed wrong… I would have to use flock…. oh, forget it!)

Anyway, on many aisles at the grocery store – every time I walk on the malecón – pretty much everywhere – I am greeting someone who has been away. It’s a wonderful time of year, really. It’s still hot – in the 90’s – every day, but there is a bit of coolness on the breeze every once in a while that just makes you smile.  And you smile and think to yourself “Here comes perfection.” For the next seven or eight months, we will be livin’ the life here.  Everyone smiles from ear to ear once the winter arrives.

There are new street signs showing up around town... much nicer than the old ones!

There will be lots to do – starting with Dia de los Muertos, the next holiday coming up.  What fun we’re going to have!  Days hanging out under a palapa with friends. Nights at the Angela Peralta Theater.  Independent films on Tuesday nights. First Friday Art Walks.  The Marathon. It seems like in the winter there’s always something fun going on.   And I can’t forget Carnaval, and Moto Week, too.

If you have an iPad, you'll understand how excited I was when the iPad-only news aggregator Zite picked up my post on the Mazatlan Mercado!

But right now it is still kind of quiet.  The people who’ve returned are getting settled again, getting their groceries and greeting neighbors.  It’s good.

Us?  We’ve been here right along.  But finally we are repainting our house pretty much from top to bottom.  Paint in this climate doesn’t last as long as you’d like… ours needed it again after three years and we stretched it to four. In a few days it will all be over and we’ll stand here and say “yep, it doesn’t get any better than this.” How could it? When you have new paint, perfect weather, two sweet dogs and each other?