Tinder and Blind

Nothing like a best mate..

It’s Sunday morning and I wake up with a festival hangover and the realisation that I have six days until two of my best friends tie the knot. Do I get emosh at the thought of these two very important people in my life spending their lives in marital bliss? Well, of course.. but this also means I have five days to squeeze into a bridesmaid dress I had made a size smaller than me.

What was I thinking?

“Oh I’ve got loads of time to drop a dress size, so can you make it smaller?” I asked as the dressmaker sucked me in and stuck pins through the silk.
“Remember we can’t add material, we’ll be cutting it off so you really can’t put any weight on if you want me to make this dress smaller” she replied.
Pff, duh, of course I’ll lose an inch in two and a half months, easy! Plus this is an incentive for me to have to lose weight. Of course I won’t be attending two booze fuelled festivals, a BBQ, copious amounts of dinner events, post work drinks in the sun, client breakfasts, or lunches.

Well I wasn’t planning on it, but it happened.

Extreme measures now need to be taken. So as I’m lying in bed I flick through next week’s work and personal diary with bated breath and see I don’t have any planned food engagements until Wednesday night; a three course dinner at the Hurlingham Club with clients, then date night at STK on Thursday.. so I have the first part of the week to work with.

What do I do? I run- yes, literally run four miles from my house to The Juice Well in Soho, through a major storm might I add. I arrive at the immaculate store on Peter Street, made up of high tech fridges which house bottles of colourful liquid. After talking to an expert nutritionist and juicemaster I’m told all juices are cold pressed, meaning they retain all nutrients, unlike traditional juicers which just extract the juice and taste nice. I’m told I can either do an intense green cleanse or a rainbow cleanse.

My breakfast and lunches

The green is made up of 6 bottles containing just 753 calories between them. This is a leaner, more challenging cleanse with a huge hit of chlorophyll which is deeply cleansing and detoxifying.
The combined daily intake of these 6 juices deliver more than 100% RDA of 19 vital vitamins & minerals and also contains 96% RDA of soluble fibre.

I couldn’t hack just 753 calories a day so I bought one day’s worth of the rainbow cleanse for £36 after being told that having a cleanse with as many pigments of the fruit & vegetable rainbow ensures you are getting the broadest nutrient dense cleanse possible.
The combined daily intake of these juices is 1090 calories & they deliver more than 100% RDA of 23 vital vitamins & minerals. There is also plenty of soluble fibre.

My plan? Split them across three days, replacing my breakfast and lunches with juice and having a proper meal for dinner. This is also because I’m doing around an hour of exercise a day and I still need to fuel my little muscles.

So I buy the rainbow cleanse, but I’m also starving so I buy  ‘The Daddy’ smoothie as my first meal of the day while I’m there, for another £6.

The Daddy Smoothie

That smoothie lasts me an hour and a half as I battle through the rain again and plonk myself on a tube seat home. At around 8pm I venture downstairs and am faced with a cooked roast chicken in the kitchen just staring at me, while my housemates have had a roasted feast. I close my eyes, open the fridge and pluck out a bottle of total green cleanse. Mmm dinner.

Last night’s dinner

That was yesterday.

This morning I wake up feeling ridiculously tired, eyes heavy and head light. I struggle to get dressed without collapsing onto my bed about six times. That could just be the extended festival hangover. I grab my bag of juice out of the fridge and start off with a bottle of reverse osmosis water (filtered, cleanest, most pure form of water there is, appaz) before cracking open a ‘Hunger Buster’ charcoal juice when I get on the tube. The black drink certainly attracts a few stares, along with a knowing glance from a skinny blonde who has most definitely done a juice detox, or twelve.

Hunger Buster

That lasts me ages and is actually quite nice, and before I know it it’s 11am and  I’m due juice number two ‘Bodyguard’. Unfortunately Whitney doesn’t blast out upon opening, but my reaction to the taste did require a minder. Extremely tangy and eye squinting. I could definitely taste sweet potato and lime, I prefer my sweet potatoes in the form of fries, from Hawksmoor.

Bodyguard

This one takes me two and a half hours to finish. Meanwhile at work I have already had a conversation with a client and called her the wrong name, three times. This is someone I’ve worked with for a year. Talk about juice brain.

Third juice is lunch, a ‘Green & Lean’ which I thought would be a winner as I’m partial to a green juice anyway. Not the case. Before opening it I take a walk to Topshop, and while walking through the handbag section, the smell of leather makes me think of cows, which leads me on to crave steak. I hurry through that section and buy myself a pair of shoes as a reward for not caving into anything apart from juice (and heels).

Green and Lean

This was another tangy one, lemon is basically what I could taste. In fact, three hours later and I still have about three sips left in the bottle. I should be on my fourth juice by now but I’m surprisingly full. Despite the steak image (medium rare fillet with béarnaise sauce accompanied by sweet potato fries and asparagus) not even thinking about that, not at all..

My mid morning snack

However, I promised myself a proper meal a day to help sustain myself so I’m going to have dinner but just need to take it easy seeing as I haven’t ingested solids since my post Lovebox munchies on Saturday night.

Tomorrow I have yoga at 7am and bootcamp at 6pm so I need to ensure my final day is stuck to without using calorie burn as an excuse.

Update tomorrow..

Tomorrow is today. Day 3

Last night was a mare. Remember how much I was looking forward to a meal for dinner last night? well, I was. I waited alllll day for a home cooked meal after my cousin invited the family over for dinner. We get to her house and she announces that they’ve all been out for the day and had a huge pub lunch, but that she had brought back the most amazing mushroom pie. Great news for my brother, not so great for me who can’t eat mushrooms without puking. So as I watch my brother eat his and my pie, I think this can only be a good thing, no carbs. Instead, my cousin makes me a fruit platter of strawberries, raspberries, apple and grapes. I eat my ‘dinner’ while my brother fully lols at the situation. I get home and sleep, surprisingly fulfilled.

Got up at 6am for my yoga class this morning, walked past various food establishments towards Regents Park including the aptly named ‘EAT’ which I nodded at and thought to myself ‘I know, I know, I’m mental’. After an energetic yoga class (I swear you’re not supposed to break a sweat) I arrived into work around 9am for my first juice of the day: ‘Deep Purple’ aka beetroot, carrot and cucumber juice. All I could taste was beetroot and it left me with some sexy (not) stained lips.

I then had a lot of work to do so didn’t have time to think about food until around midday when I cracked open my final juice of the course; a spicy gazpacho little number, tasted wellll nice! I really wanted to heat it up and have it as soup because it tasted like I should be having it with crusty bread. Alas no, it was in it’s bottle and I sipped around a quarter of it before feeling a bit nauseous. I also feel weirdly bloated seeing as I haven’t eaten anything in three days.

Realising I have bootcamp after work and I really don’t want to get injured or collapse due to lack of energy, I ventured out to Leon (via Ted Baker) and picked up a tomato, feta and lentil salad. Everything I have been reading has said to avoid dairy during and after a juice cleanse, of course I didn’t register this information into my brain until my first bite of feta. Too late. Yolo.

I then had solid back to back meetings for three hours. One client wanted to go out to soak up the sun: ‘Tanisha, let’s go to the pub for our meeting, it’s too sunny to be inside’. Great.. pub=wine. Know what I did? I’m so bloody proud of myself for this.. I took him to his pub and I ordered myself a green tea. GO ME. AND I even left the amaretto biscuit on the saucer like a poor little loner.

Venturing back to the office after my meetings and again I’m very aware I haven’t had any protein intake. Bootcamp is bloody hard work; weights, cardio, kettlebells for a solid hour and I really don’t want to be stupid and injure myself from lack of strength and consequently have to wheel down the aisle in front of the bride on Saturday. With this in mind, on my way back to the office I drop into Itsu and grab a salmon and tuna tartar for a pure protein hit. Even if psychologically that makes me feel better, I’ve done it and I can’t blame my juice on any injuries!

Tonight will be a protein shake after bootcamp and then straight to bed.

So, after having two meals a day replaced by juice (kinda), I can honestly say I didn’t feel ravenous over the last three days.  I didn’t have any chocolate cravings but I think that was down to me being really busy with work and not having time to reach for biscuits. Bearing in mind day 1 was on an extreme hangover, so I couldn’t tell the difference if I was hanging or hungry.

I don’t think I could hack a full blown juice detox though, two meal replacements has been enough and although I have lost 4lbs in this time, I’m still bloody bloated. Spanx for Saturday it is.