Day 9-
Today's diet:
On waking: Hot water with a slice of lemon.
Breakfast: Wheat & yeast free muesli with honey and rice milk.
Morning snack: A banana, hommus and rice crackers, peppermint tea.
Lunch: Roast chicken with roast pumpkin, corn, beans & broccolini.
Afternoon snack: Peppermint tea.
Dinner: Fritata (for a family size- 5 eggs, chicken and chopped veg leftover from lunch, 1/4 cup of barley flour, a sprinkling of Parmesan cheese, salt & pepper) with salad (rocket, sheep's feta, grated carrot, grated beetroot & mayonnaise).
After dinner snack: Lemon & Ginger tea with 1 teaspoon of honey.
At least 2 litres of filtered water throughout the day.
Exercise: All day doing physical work around the house, yard & shed.
Sleep: About 8 and a half hours (YAY!!!).

Good day today, lots of sleep, but instead of feeling energetic I just feel like flat and lightheaded all day, strange, perhaps my body is unsure of what to do with all of that sleep. My husband's mother came over today to look after our daughter so that we could get a whole heap of work done outside and in the shed. She's a lovely lady and made us all a delicious roast chicken lunch. So good that this is food that I can eat and I don't have to make things too difficult when someone else cooks for me. I have a friend coming over tomorrow for the day and I'm not sure what to feed her at this point but it might be something like fried rice. Other than that, she'll just have to put up with healthy snacks like hommus with carrot & celery sticks.

I've been re-reading Joshi's Detox book and there are some truly disturbing facts about the freshness of the food we eat. Now, granted, he is writing with reference to the UK food industry, but I would not be surprised if the same sort of thing happens in Australia. Here are some of the most shocking:

- Apples and potatoes on the supermarket shelves may have been sitting in cold storage for up to a year.
- Carrots are often cooled in chlorinated water before being packed and stored for anywhere up to nine months.
- Lettuce & salad mix in the plastic bags are treated with a chlorine-based compound, to keep them looking fresh for up to 10 days and preserved using a process called 'modified atmosphere packaging' whereby the normal levels of oxygen and carbon-dioxide are altered to stop visible discolouration.
- Bananas can be picked in another country when they are far from ripe, transported and then exposed to ethylene gas at a later time to bring on the ripening process.
- Most tomatoes and cucumbers are grown hydroponically in rockwool, which is similar to roofing insulation. This means there is little nutritional value (or flavour) in them at all.
- Most of the produce in supermarkets is picked before it is ripe to ensure a longer shelf life.

Terrible! The thing is, by picking food before it is ripe, the nutritional value is severely depleted. Joshi says that there are more vitamins in 3 vine-ripened tomatoes than 20 which have been pre-packed after being picked up to six weeks before ripening.

So in the case of food, quality really is better than quantity. He suggests trying to buy bio-dynamic food where possible. We have a small bio-dynamic supermarket near us but the last time I went in there, I paid $5.80 for 3 lemons. So I'm going to look how many farmer's markets are around us. Fresh, grown locally, supporting farmers and you can ask them if things are chemically treated. Have found a couple of good websites for farmer's markets in and around Melbourne:
http://www.mfm.com.au/
http://www.vicfarmersmarkets.org.au/



I can't wait to be able to grow my own fruit and vegetables!