7 Day Detoxification

In my previous post, I talked about how I gained weight and started to lose it again. Recently, my weight stabilized around 81kg, still 6kg short of my target of 75 kg.

So what is a good way to start getting rid of excessive weight again? I thought I'd start with detoxification, which is another, more difficult word for cleansing the body of all the rubbish that has accumulated there for the past days, months and years.

So on 31/10 I started following the free 7 days raw vegan detox program from http://www.therawdivas.com/7daydetox/index.php. Well, the site is actually for women and has quite a lot of ads and commercial stuff. But I thought, what the heck, I just follow the free program and buy nothing :)

The program is basically about eating only raw fruit and vegetables and drinking a lot of water. Inspired by Steve Pavlina of http://www.stevepavlina.com/, I decided to just do this experiment and see how it will work out for me!

In this post I am going to update you on my experiences during these 7 days:

Day 1 (31/10): Weight 81.5 kg. The detox started with a day of fasting: from Thursday evening to Friday evening. I am quite used to fasting, because I observe the Baha’i 19-day-long fast every March, but this fast turned out a lot easier because you can drink as much as you want! I finished the day with a whole melon and a pineapple. Indeed, after a day of fasting, the food is not just delicious, I felt I could taste it with every fiber of my body :)

Day 2 (1/11): Weight 80 kg. The idea is that you don’t eat early in the morning, but wait until you get really hungry. And so I did, helped by the fact that I had to feed Anne Sophie and that she and I went to the market in Leiden to get the fruit and the green stuff :). After coming home I ate some fruit and went to fix the lamps in our hall (something I had been postponing for months), and got really hungry by the end of the afternoon. Luda made a huge green salad, and we ate it for dinner, except that she ate it with bread and cheese and ham, while I just had some olives. By the end of the evening I got an enormous craving for some substance, and I confess I eventually got myself some bread with cheese and ham :)

Day 3 (2/11): Weight 79.2 kg. I got up at 6:00 in the morning and drank a lot of water and ate some fruit. At about 11:00, Anne Sophie and I went for a 15-km walk, whereby I carried her in a baby-carrier. It was a beautiful cold sunny day, and I used my Nordic walking poles for the first time! We went to the De Horsten estate, and the autumn colors were amazing. I drank water and some freshly pressed orange juice and ate a banana, while Anne Sophie was devouring her rice cookies. My calorie meter showed that I spent 900 kcal in 3,5 hours, which was quite good. At home, there was again a feast of fruit and green staff, but still I craved for some solid food, so eventually I ate a couple of spoons of Anne Sophie’s potatos. So, again I failed a little, but I was still quite satisfied with my progress!

Day 4 (3/11): Weight 79.3 kg. It is a Monday, and I biked to work as usual. I brought with me lots of veggies (paprikas, carrots, tomato and half a cucumber) and fruit (apple, mandarins, kiwi, two pears and even a melon). Well, I ate the vegetables, but I only ate half the fruit. So, I had to carry the melon back home, on my back :) By the end of the workday, I developed some headache, but it surprisingly disappeared as I was biking back home! At home there was a usual combination of salad and fruit and raisins to still my craving for sugar. It seems that evenings are a lot more difficult to endure than the mornings and the afternoons. Also I get much more tired in the evening, and fall asleep early, even earlier than Anne Sophie!

Day 5 (4/11): Weight 78.3 kg. Today is my 35th birthday! What a great thing to be able to spend your birthday without cakes and sweets and overeating, just feeding on natural green and fruit staff! I took a day off to spend my birthday with my family. The three of us went for a bike ride, and in the evening we went to Roberta to celebrate the Baha'i 19-Day Feast! This day went surprisingly well! I didn't have any cravings for solid food and was even able to withstand the delicious cake at Roberta's! Today I also did my first experiment with green smoothies. The first one (apple, cucumber, coriander, ginger, and lemon juice), which I made for lunch, was really great! Luda enjoyed it too! The second one (cucumber, dill, parsley, paprika, lettuce) was disappointing, I guess because it was vegetagle-only and I still need to get used to it. Because we gave up our TV-subscription, I didn't have to hear or watch any news on the US presidential elections! All in all, it was a great day!

Day 6 (5/11): Weight 78.2 kg. I woke up at about 6am and felt really great, light and clear! Am I past the withdrawal syndrome stage? Let's hope so. My weight seems to be going down steadily, which is great! The important thing is not to kick back to overeating after the detox ends tomorrow. I didn't eat much during the day, just two paprika's and three banana's, which was a mistake. Even though I ate two delicious salads at home in the evening, lovingly prepared by Luda, I still felt quite feeble and low energy. Also I couldn't resist the temptation of eating a couple of spoons of Anne Sophie's mushrooms with potatos.

Day 7 (6/11): Weight 78.1 kg. I had some wild dreams tonight that people started giving baha'i Ruhi courses about environment and healthy way of life in large numbers :) I woke up at quarter to 6, but didn't feel quite well. The shower and the bike ride through the mist and drizzle to work, however, made me feel a lot better! I gave a fruit party at work in the morning to celebrate my birthday of 2 days ago. It was mostly fruit, but also carrots, and some fresh organic juices. This was quite different from the usual birthday cakes in our office. Today is the last day of this detox. I am really happy about this experience, even though I did make a couple of minor slips here and there. I lost quite a lot of weight (between 2 and 3 kg), and it feels like my taste and other senses and even feelings have sharpened. The big question now is how to proceed further tomorrow, when I can eat whatever I want. I still need to think about it, and I'll keep you posted about that!

This is my weight chart from the Hacker's Diet website for these 7 days:

Gaining and Losing Weight

When at the age of 25 I moved to Holland in August 1999, I weighed about 72 kilo. It was a perfect weight for my height of 178 cm, and I was quite fit and healthy!

8.5 years later, at the start of 2008, my weight was over 86 kilo :( , and I didn't feel good about it at all. So what happened in those years that made me gain almost 15 kilo, almost 2 kilo per year? I guess it was the usual combination of much less movement than before, too much car driving, too much tasty food, work stress, etc.

Think about it this way: According to John Walker in his most entertaining and insightful free book The Hacker's Diet, there are about 3500 kcal in a pound of fat. For the sake of simplicity, let's say that 1 pound = 1/2 kilo. Then we can say that to gain 1 kilo of extra weight we need an excess of 7000 kcal, and for 2 kilo's this amounts to 14000 kcal. Now let's divide this amount by the number of days in a year (365 days), and we can conclude that to gain 2 kilo of extra weight in one year, we just need 40 extra kcal per day. And what's 40 kcal? It's almost nothing. Even an apple contains more energy than that, not to mention cola, meat, cookies, sweets, etc.

Well the good news is that to lose 2 kilo of fat in one year, we just need a deficit of 40 kcal a day! Well, first off course you need to reach the ballance between your intake of energy and expenditure thereof. If you consume exactly the same amount of calories as you spend, your weight will be stable. This point is often hard to reach, but if you do, then to lose weight you just need to lessen your intake of food by a relatively small amount of calories.

Well, that was the theory and you can read about it in the above mentioned book. So did I in the spring of this year. I found it a great read, full of insight and inspiration. My first step after reading the book was to start monitor my daily weight. I log my weight every morning, using this online tool from the same author: http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/online/hdo.html. The tool calculates weighed average of my weight over the last 20 days or so and presents many useful graphs. This is my weight history graph over the last few month, starting from the end of july when I just returned from my trip to India:


The red curve is my average weight. (The sharp fall at the beginning of this curve is due to the fact that I lost some 3 kilo during my trip to India.) The little diamonds are my actual daily weight measurements, and the green vertical lines show the difference between the actual and the average. As long as your actual is under the average (red curve), you will be loosing weight. You can see that the actuals can fluctuate a lot. This can be due to all kinds of things: how much you ate the day before, the amount of water in your body at that moment, etc. The important thing is the red curve, because it averages out all those fluctuations and tell you the real truth about your weight.

Now, this tool is really easy to use: you just log your weight daily and the tool does the rest!

As you can see, I've been losing weight for a couple of months, but in the last couple of weeks I've gained some weight and gone from the average of 80.5 kilo to 80.9 kilo.

By the way, you can always see my latest average weith in the right side bar of this blog, under my profile.

So, how did I lose more than 5 kilo since the start of the year? Well, firstly just monitoring your weight as above makes you aware of your weight and of how it is affected by the things you eat and exercise you do. And because I watch my progress daily, I am inspired and encouraged to manage my weight so that that red curve goes down.

Secondly, I lost 3 kilo in India, mostly due to the very streneous mountain hikes we did in the Himalaya. And even though we ate quite a lot of food, if you walk up and down in the mountains for 6 hours a day, you will lose weight I assure you!

Thirdly, I decided to bike to work and back every day, unless I have a meeting with a customer. I wrote about this in more detail in this post: http://lublenok.blogspot.com/2008/09/keeping-fit-and-alpe-dhuez.html. This gives me 20 km (some 50 minutes) of biking hard almost every weekday, which is a great exercise. I log my bike times at http://www.logyourrun.com/. This is for example the graph of my daily bike distances for the last 3 months:



Also I do a daily 10-15 minutes exercise program from the same book by John Walker: http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/e4/exercise.html. It is a program of five simple exercises: bends, sit ups, leg lifts, push ups, run & jump. You can start at a level you are comfortable with and work your way up the ladder. The blue marks on the graph above indicate what level I did that day. I am currently at level 26 out of 48.

Additionally, I walk and bike regularly together with Anne Sophie, which is also a good and very pleasurable exercise!

But lately I've again gained some weight, so I decided to try out something new! Read about it in my next post!

Anne Sophie is 1 year old!

Time flies and last week our dearest Anne Sophie turned 1 year old! Celebrations lasted 4 days and started on Thursday September 18, her actual birth date. Dad took the afternoon off and went for a long walk with Anne Sophie to the De Horsten estate. In the evening, about the time of the actual birth (19:35), the three of us went to the pond in Leidschenhage for a small birthday picnic by the fountain.


The next day, Anne Sophie was receiving a company of our good Russian-speaking friends. We had a great time together. But when dad went to put the tired baby-girl to bed, he accidentally himself fell asleep, which did not prevent the guests from enjoying the rest of the party :)

The following day we got a visit from Katja, Ronny and their 10-month old son Zhenya, as well as their two nieces. The kids were having a great time, especially they enjoyed playing football, or rather headball, with a balloon. The game went like this: the fathers would hold the babies in their hands and would let them pass the balloon to each other by hitting it with their heads. This gave rise to lots of excitement and laughter.

On Sunday morning, dad and Anne Sophie again went to De Horsten for about 3 hours. They found some very fine mushrooms, of which mom made a very delicious soup! In the afternoon, we got another birthday visit, this time from Ira and her 6-month-old son Lucca. We ended up singing Russian songs from our youth, letting the children play and enjoy each other's company.

On a different note, in the past few weeks we've been walking and biking a lot. Anne Sophie really enjoys both, and seems very busy watching things as we are passing by and trying to make sense of them. She is now actively trying walking, by holding on to different objects in the room, mostly the couches. But she is still afraid to take that first step with nothing to hold on to.

Dad, that is me, has been reading several books on child development. But mom says: just go and play with your kid, for by the time you finish those books, she'll be a grown-up :) Well, dad's way of doing things is that he first reads how to do something and then does it. The problem is that this reading may indeed last forever and result in nothing practical :) The books are really good and I'll talk about them in a different post!

Keeping fit and Alpe d'Huez

One of the important aspects of our lives is our health and physical condition. Many people almost totally neglect their health by consuming unhealthy foods and indulging in unhealthy habits like drinking, smoking, watching too much TV, etc. Others seem to go into another extreme and are often (almost) obsessed with low-calorie foods, exercise, body shape, beauty products, etc. It is not always easy to find your own middle way of keeping a healthy body, without sliding away into one of those extremes.



After having tried the gym and jogging, I concluded that those are not for me. To be frank, I found both to be extremely boring and uninspiring. At a certain point I realized that what I need are some functional health activities which I can weave into my daily life and which I can use to support my other goals and priorities. I’ve chosen 2 activities that I enjoy very much: biking and walking. I’ll talk about walking in a separate post, but now let’s talk about biking.

Instead of driving, I bike some 10 km to work and back. I do this 4 to 5 times a week resulting in 80 to 100 km of quite strenuous biking per week. I reason that by biking to work I not only contribute to my personal health and enjoyment but also help reduce air pollution and traffic jams. Although in the beginning I had to force myself to get on the bike early in the morning each day, now it feels absolutely natural. Biking early in the morning through beautiful tree-lined alleys of Leidschendam and then a few kilometers along the Vliet (channel) is a most enjoyable experience. But being ambitious as I am, I try to bike as hard as I can. I now cover the distance from home to work in 20 to 23 minutes depending on the wind. Even on the pretty cold autumn mornings, I am sweating a lot as I arrive at work, but for me this is a small inconvenience compared to all the joys of bicycling.

A couple of times a week I also go for a bike ride with my now 1-year-old daughter Anne Sophie, and my wife Luda also sometimes joins us. Anne Sophie enjoys biking in her front seat (attached to my bicycle) immensely! She watches all the objects with intense interest: the trees, the cows, horses and sheep, the road lights, the passing vehicles, and even the stars! I often sing to her as we bike, and she is starting to "sing" along! This is a great way of spending time with your child!

To grow in any area of our life, we need challenges. So is it with biking as well. Fortunately, every year my employer, Delta-N, organizes a biking challenge in the French Alps. This year, at the end of August, we went to bike up Alpe d’Huez, one of the most famous climbs from Tour de France. While for some of my colleagues this was the second or even third time to climb Alpe d’Huez, this was my first time.

The long weekend in the Alps was fantastic: wonderful, sunny weather, majestic mountains, fine accommodation, great food. On Saturday morning we put on our gear to concur the climb of 14 km with an average gradient of 8% and 21 excruciating hairpin bends. It took me 2 hours 12 minutes to get there. It was hard, very hard indeed. The sweat was flooding and irritating my eyes, and I had to stop twice to get some rest. Yet the feeling of achievement on the top was overwhelming!

The descent down to the village was fantastic, with high speeds and magnificent views! After some energy drinks and energy-full food, some of us went to play in the small open-air swimming pool, and then on to a trampoline, ping pong, and some deep philosophical conversations.

This was a great, unforgettable experience of physical exertion, overcoming and achievement! I’d recommend it to anyone!

Crawling, brushing teeth, travelling

Things have been pretty hectic this summer, and daddy found no time to write up any decent story on behalf of Anne Sophie. We've been busy redecorating our apartment (now it is finally finished!), and dad was away for 3 weeks in Indian Himalayas, and there was something to do every evening (walking or biking with Anne Sophie, bathing her, etc.) and every weekend (visiting places). And even though we have given up our TV subscription and haven't watched any TV (and no olympics!), time is still a rare commodity.


Well, enough excuses, for today our Anne Sophie has turned 11 months old. She has learned and experienced many new things:

• She started to crawl. Her way of crawling is pretty peculiar, as she tries to crawl with both hands and both legs at the same time. But it works out quite well! And she can crawl very fast if she really wants to get something. On the other hand, she'd rather not crawl if she doesn't have to :).

  

• She achieved mastery in controlling her baby walker. She can stop and turn exactly where she wants, and she can step over thresholds, by lifting the walker a bit, to go from one room to another. But the use of baby walkers is actually discouraged, so we use it very sparingly.


• Anne Sophie also actively tries walking. While she still needs support, she vigorously makes steps in the direction she wants.


• One of her favorite activities is brushing her (steel only two) teeth with a baby brush. I guess she likes massaging her gums, where her other teeth should be coming out very soon.
  

  

• "Reading" books is another favorite activity. This is also one of the easiest ways to calm her down - just give her a book! She grabs a book, often upside down :), turns pages, points with her finger at pictures and letters and even pretends that she is reading by saying things in her own language. I try to read her a story or two every evening before she goes to bed.

   

• Anne Sophie already has words for certain things, like "ku" or "quo" for a cow, horse, goat, deer or anything that looks like that; "mama" is usually a call for something that she badly wants like to eat or to get up; "baba" is for grandma; "tata" is for photos; she often says "papa" but I am not sure if she really means me :). She also says words that resemble Russian words for a bird, thanks, etc.


• She also started to travel around a bit. Last weekend we went to Brugge en Brussels to show grandma some fine places in Belgium. The main attraction that weekend was a huge flower carpet, made of fresh flowers on the main square in Brussels. Anne Sophie withstood the trip very well and seemed to enjoy it quite a bit, especially the children's playground and the swing in the park just across from the Royal Palace in Brussels. There were children of all kinds of backgrounds and languages playing together, and Anne Sophie was staring at them all the time with great interest!

   

That's it for now. Watch out for our new installments. And yes, I am still planning to pup up some video's on this blog!

Did you say "mama"?

Another month has passed by. Anne Sophie has been celebrating her 8 month (245 days) birthday today! It has been a wonderful day. Let me describe it to you in detail.


Anne Sophie woke up at about 6 o'clock in the morning, about the same time as papa. To let mama have some rest, we sneaked out of the bedroom and went to play in the living room. After waking up Anne Sophie is generally very good humored and she can play by herself for an hour or so. Papa used this opportunity to check the news and read a little. At about 7 o'clock, we went into the kitchen to do the dishes from the last night's 19 Day's Feast. Papa would do and dry the dishes, while Anne Sophie would watch him closely and wonder what he is doing. Then we went back to the living room to play and listen to a Russian-speaking radio station (by the way, Radio Svoboda is a very high quality radio station).

Because mama was still sweetly sleeping in her bed, we decided to go for a run together. The sun was shining, the birds were singing in the brisk Sunday morning air, and there were no people or cars to be seen. Papa was jogging and pushing a lightweight stroller, in which Anne Sophie was sitting and looking around. We jogged for about 45 minutes with two small breaks for Anne Sophie to watch the rabbits in park Schakenbosch. On the way back she fell asleep and slept until we got home, despite the occasional bumps in the road.

Then all three of us prayed together and had breakfast. After that papa had to go to a hardware store (which was luckily open on Sunday) to buy some stuff to finish the plumbing job that he had embarked on the day before but had not finished. After a couple of hours our new sink cabinet in the bathroom was finally installed and working! Anne Sophie would occasionaly come up with mama to see what dad was doing.

After lunch the three of us biked to the nearby town of Voorburg, where mama went to a flea market, while papa and daughter biked to a children farm (kinderboerderij) near the town center on the Vliet. There were all kinds of animals there: deer, sheep, goats, rabbits, Guinea pigs, roosters, chickens, and even peacocks. But our Anne Sophie was actually more interested in all the children running around and feeding the animals.

On the way back home, she fell asleep in her bike seat, and papa had to use his finger to cushion her head, to prevent it from bumping agains the handle bar. In fact, she enjoys biking very much!

After dinner we phoned aunt Lena and grandma Lora. Then Anne Sophie had an extra long bath, in which she played with all kinds of rubber toys. After the bath, papa gave her a massage, then mama breastfed her and put her to bed.


Papa played and sang some songs to her, red a story from a fairy-tale book and then finally both of them fell asleep :)


All in all, it has been a wonderful day!

Statistics:
- Height: unknown
- Weight: 8 kg

Oh, I almost forgot to tell you that now Anne Sophie often says "mamma", when she wants attention or some food. Shall we say that this was her first word?

First tooth and Swimming under water

Today our Anne Sophie is turning 7 months old! The months of her still very short life fly past very quickly, and we enjoy the many beautiful days and experiences that they bring to us:


Anne Sophie continues to grow as a joyful, smiling, curious, lovely little girl. In the past month, we have witnessed the following developments:

• She can now sit very well.
  
• She is getting her first little tooth, which is just barely showing at the moment, but is clearly touchable and can bite.
  
• Anne Sophie has been swimming under water with her dad, of which we also have some pictures.
  
• She talks quite a lot and sometimes she appears to sing.
  
• She smiles and laughs a lot!
  
• She likes to grab something and then use it on something else to see what the effects are of the interaction of two objects, in other words, she is heavily involved in her "scientific" experiments. :)
  
• She has been meeting children of about her age, but she does not seem to react to them the way she does towards adults (perhaps, they are just less interesting, because they barely move and almost never talk :)).
  
• She now reacts differently to different adults: to some she smiles, to others she cries.
  

I conclude with some statistics:

• Height: 65.5 cm
  
• Weight: 7.55 kg
  

Watch out for some video's in our next blog!

Meeting Jonathan

Apart from her weekly 30-minutes baby swimming class, Anne Sophie almost never meets her peers. This Easter weekend was very special, because all the way from Finland came Jonathan, a son of our good friends Helena & Jim Law, grandson of Roberta and Jim Law Sr. Jonathan is just 2.5 weeks older than Anne Sophie. Last Saturday the two kids had plenty of opportunity to play together as you can see on the photographs.


It was good to exchange experiences and ideas with Helena and Jim. We learned from Helena how to make a new kind of sling, which feels a lot more fun for Anne Sophie, now that she can sit and loves to watch what's going on around her. Jim reads to Jonathan in English from Dr. Seuss. We also read nursery rhymes to Anne Sophie, but Dr. Seuss sounds a lot more fun :) Helena also taught us some exercises from mother & child gynmastics class that she follows back in Finland. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find any such classes hier in Holland. But I'll ask around!

Planting Trees

Today our little daughter has turned 6 months old, an important milestone in our life! People who see her only occasionally remark on how fast she is changing. But to me the change is so gradual that I don't really seem to notice it. Only the photos and videos of the past few months reveal the actual pace of change. So I keep posting the new photos for all of you to see:

6 months

For those interested in statistics, Anne Sophie is now 7.1 kilo and 64 cm. She can roll over from her back to her tummy and can sit pretty well. She likes to play with her toys (and her toes :) ), but she still requires and enjoys the company of others. For as far as possible she takes part in all our activities, including going to visit friends and presiding at the table during the meals.

A few days ago, with the help of local municipality, we planted 4 alder trees (elzen, ольха) near to our home. We did this to celebrate Anne Sophie's birth, and we hope she will enjoy watching them grow as we enjoy watching her grow and develop!

Laughter Girl

Anne Sophie 4 to 5 months

Today Anne Sophie is turning 5 months old. Looking back I must say each of these 153 days spent with her has been a feast! Every day, as I am waking up, I think about her, say a little prayer for her, and wait for her to wake up in order to look into her smiling grey eyes, to give her a kiss and to hold her in my arms. Every day, coming home from work, I find myself smiling in anticipation to see her and be with her again. (Now as I read the above few lines, I realize that this sounds very much like being in love. Well, that's what it is: father's love for his baby daughter!)

Happy Parents

But am I really earnest about all this feast-thing? An opinion that I often hear (especially from those without children) is that being a parent is about hard work, sleepless nights, constant noise, no time for yourself, etc., with only occasional rewards. Well, this might hold true for some families. But my experience has so far been a very different one. It is true that these days I spent almost all of my free time with my baby. However, it's not becuase I have to, but because I want to :) Whatever I do, like changing diapers, bathing, baby-swimming, singing to put her to sleep, going for walks with her, playing or just watching her is highly enjoyable and makes me happy. I don't experience this as hard work, but rather as meaningful entertainment.

And what can be more gratifying than your child's happy smile? That's what Anne Sophie been doing for the last few weeks. She smiles at almost everyone who smiles at her. And now she is starting to laugh out loud!