{"id":10096,"date":"2010-07-05T12:32:56","date_gmt":"2010-07-05T16:32:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.nomeatathlete.com\/?p=10096"},"modified":"2019-11-06T12:12:20","modified_gmt":"2019-11-06T17:12:20","slug":"cleanse-failure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nomeatathlete.com\/cleanse-failure\/","title":{"rendered":"On Quitting, Failure, and Eating Solid Food"},"content":{"rendered":"

I caved. And I didn’t just go down, I went down in flames.<\/p>\n

\"2Just a few hours after I wrote about how hard, emotionally, it was to abstain from eating solid food<\/a>, it all became too hard.\u00a0 As I went to warm up yet another bowl of pureed green vegetable soup, my wife and sister poured themselves a glass of wine and cut up a loaf of French bread to dip in some herb-infused olive oil, and the temptation got the best of me.<\/p>\n

My wife did her best to keep me from making a rash decision, but I chased her around for a while and was eventually able to steal a piece of the bread. I smelled it, put it in my mouth but didn’t let go, and finally said to hell with the cleanse<\/a>.\u00a0 Down the hatch.<\/p>\n

And once the dam was broken and the cleanse ruined, I binged.<\/p>\n

Bread and oil (LOTS of bread and oil).\u00a0 A glass of wine.\u00a0 Some banana-nut granola that I had been craving.\u00a0 A stout.\u00a0 And two lentil sloppy joes.\u00a0 It was all so solid.\u00a0 So deliciously solid.<\/p>\n

And just like that, the seven-day liquid cleanse came to an abrupt end. After only two days.<\/p>\n

The Decision to Quit<\/h3>\n

I actually deliberated for a while before I ate that bread.\u00a0 I like to think that I’m reasonably strong-willed, but it was easy for me to decide that I’d rather accept failure than to go through the next five days of my life without solid food.<\/p>\n

What made the decision harder was that I had written about my cleanse on this blog.\u00a0 Not because the public failure would bother me—failing to qualify for Boston<\/a> in five consecutive races, after making it very clear to others that qualifying is your only goal, has a way of hardening you and squashing any fear of failure<\/a> you might have.<\/p>\n

But in this case, many more people than I expected had expressed interest in seeing the result of my experiment.\u00a0 I was a guinea pig, and I had the opportunity to publicly demonstrate the unbiased results (or lack thereof, if that were the case) of such a cleanse.<\/p>\n

In the end, the bread, oil, and wine won out.\u00a0 I figured I could use the opportunity to write about failure, what went wrong, and what I learned.<\/p>\n

Plus I could devour some wonderfully solid food and a few drinks. Win win win.<\/p>\n

Why I Couldn’t Finish the Cleanse<\/h3>\n

Let me first say that what follows are NOT excuses.\u00a0 Something else all those years of training to qualify for Boston taught me is that excuses suck. Take responsibility<\/em>. So while these are explanations, they’re all things that were within MY control, so I’m responsible for them.<\/p>\n

Everything I’ve learned about how to create change says that you’ve got to get leverage on yourself.\u00a0 Willpower will only get you so far; once that runs out it comes down to how much you actually want to succeed.<\/p>\n

My problem here, I think, was that I didn’t want it enough.\u00a0 It was an experiment, so the reward for finishing would have been mere knowledge.\u00a0 It’d have been far easier if I’d have convinced myself beforehand that a cleanse would give me more energy than I’d ever felt in my life.\u00a0 That’s a more exciting reward than just learning whether or not something works, and perhaps that would have been enough to get me through the tough times.<\/p>\n

The other reason I failed is that I was unprepared.\u00a0 Not in terms of planning the liquid “meals,” but in terms of knowing what to expect.\u00a0 Honestly, I thought the cleanse would be pretty easy: I know, from running, that I’m able to handle moderate physical discomfort for a long time. Getting past the mild hunger pangs was no problem.<\/p>\n

But I was not prepared to deal with the emotional difficulty of not eating<\/a>.\u00a0 As I wrote before I quit, you have no idea how comforting food is until you take it away.\u00a0 You’re left to deal with emotions that you normally bury with food, and I was shocked at how extremely difficult that proved to be.<\/p>\n

Lessons Learned<\/h3>\n

So even though the cleanse was technically a failure, it wasn’t a total waste.\u00a0 I learned three important things about food and about myself:<\/p>\n

    \n
  • I learned that food plays a huge role in our emotions, and that a cleanse like this is an emotional test as much as a physical one (and perhaps an opportunity to grow emotionally).<\/li>\n
  • I learned that green vegetable juice with a little bit of lime is a perfectly drinkable.\u00a0 In the past, I always felt the need to sweeten it with other fruit, but even after quitting the cleanse I’ve kept the vegetable juice as part of my morning routine.<\/li>\n
  • I learned that this is something I want to complete, and that when I attempt it again, I’ll have a better shot now that I know what to expect (and just how difficult it really is).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

    Thanks for all your encouragement, and I’m sorry if I let you down.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I caved. And I didn’t just go down, I went down in flames. Just a few hours after I wrote about how hard, emotionally, it was to abstain from eating solid food, it all became too hard.\u00a0 As I went to warm up yet another bowl of pureed green vegetable soup, my wife and sister […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":10099,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"wprm-recipe-roundup-name":"","wprm-recipe-roundup-description":"","_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-10096","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-motivation","8":"entry"},"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nOn Quitting, Failure, and Eating Solid Food | No Meat 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