Day 5-
Today's diet:
On waking: Hot water with a slice of lemon.
Breakfast: 1 slice of gluten-free toast with 2 boiled eggs. Green tea.
Morning snack: Raw celery and carrot sticks with hommus.
Lunch: Homemade vegetable and barley soup made with carrots, onions, garlic, chicken stock (homemade), broccoli, cauliflower, brussel sprouts, baby spinach, celery, organic pearly barley and salt.
Afternoon snack: Peppermint tea, a banana, about 20 almonds.
Dinner: Tandoori chicken with brown rice pilaf (brown rice, celery, carrot, spring onion, salt, garlic, lemon zest, toasted slivered almonds and coriander leaves).
After dinner snack: Lemon & Ginger tea with 1 tsp honey.
At least 2 litres of filtered water throughout the day.
Exercise: 1 and a half hour walk up and down a garden on a very steep hill.

Another decent sleep- about 8 and a half hours, only woke up a few times through the night but feeling much more rested and less irritable.

Today almost felt like a normal day's eating, if I had swapped coffee for green tea this morning and a cake or something sweet for the banana and almonds in the afternoon, this would be about what I might eat on a normal day. Of course, the bread wouldn't be gluten-free, and all of the vegies wouldn't normally be organic, nor would the chickens be free-range. Everything seems to taste better though, the carrots are sweeter, the bananas have a better texture and the chicken is really tasty. Or maybe it's my palate adjusting as Joshi said it would. I automatically took a small bit of jelly from my daughter when she tried to push it into my mouth this morning (she likes to share food) and it was awful! So sweet and it just tasted like chemicals. And that is the natural colours and flavours with reduced sugar jelly! Eck!

So today I'm thinking about what I need to buy in the grocery shop for next week and my attention has turned to the other side of the detox, namely detoxing your environment as much as possible. So this means always taking your shoes off when you enter your home, because of the lead and other noxious chemicals that you track into your house and disperse all over the place via your shoes. The next thing to look at are the chemicals you clean with. Joshi says that if your dish washing and clothes washing detergents are both biodegradable, your body will also be able to process them more readily. Using any number of toxic cleaning products just ensures that you will be breathing in or absorbing through your skin more and more chemicals that your body can't process. All perfumed room sprays are a total no-no. You also have to consider your make-up, shampoo & conditioner, toothpaste, deodorant, perfume and face & body creams.

After a quick assessment, I figure we're actually already doing pretty well in this area. We take our shoes off at the door. My husband does the dish washing and I do the laundry as a rule, and he insists on biodegradable, earth-friendly detergent, I am not quite so strict about the washing detergent but will get some environmentally-friendly powder next shop. We use white vinegar for cleaning and I've never been one to have a cupboard full of cleaning products, but I do use bleach to clean the bathroom, which is pretty nasty, so I might try to swap it. Apparently there isn't much you can't clean with bicarb soda, so I'll look into that. We don't use room perfumes and our beauty & hygiene products are pretty basic, I use good quality make-up and a moisturiser with sunscreen. Neither of us use deodorant, we do use good quality perfume and I don't want to change that, but I could look at changing my shampoo and conditioner and possibly toothpaste to something a bit less chemical. Will check out the options at the local organic shops and the supermarket...