Detox is a Word

My life is all sorted: I’m starting a juice detox diet. Spell check just claimed that detox isn’t a real word, well how wrong is that? I’m going to do the Carol Vorderman one, because I bought the book a few years ago. It’s a great read and there are lots of   coloured pictures of drinks that make giving up food almost seem attractive. And Carol Vorderman is so good at Sudoku that she must know what she’s doing, even if I despise healthy sexy slim women in general.

The idea came to me last week when this friend of mine called over. We try to meet once a week and take time out to work on the novels that we are both not writing. This means a lot of sticky cream buns and café lattes are consumed. We spend an hour discussing how our week has been so incredibly busy that there’s no way we could have written even a page of our novels, we bitch about any mutual friends, saying what bitches they are and five minutes before she leaves we come up with a plan as to how we really will get writing this week.

She brings the buns, normally a big bag of them. I remind her that there are only the two of us not writing novels but she reminds me that I have a whole heap of kids who will eat them when they get back from school. I say things like ‘you’ll be popular in this house’, but actually she isn’t, as I always manage to finish off the buns in the time between her leaving and the kids getting home.

So I was asking her last week did she think that her bringing cake but never eating it and me eating too much of it had anything to do with the fact that she is a little slip of a thing, whilst I have become a fat person trapped in the body of an obese person. She thinks there actually is a link there, and that my weight could in some way be related to my diet. She told me that years ago she was quite a bit heavier (you know when skinny girls say they ‘had a lot of weight on’ they mean they went up to a size 8 once) and that she did this juice detox and that after that she started eating healthy and feeling great about herself and has never looked back.

So there you go. I’m all set. I was going to start last week, on that day actually, but I already had a stuffed chicken in the oven. The following day there were some overripe bananas in the fruit bowl and with the recession and all that, I decided to make a banana and walnut bread, which unfortunately, I had to eat the whole thing myself as one of my kids has a nut allergy and the others don’t like bananas. Then there were relatives’ home from America who I cooked for and I felt it would be rude if I didn’t go all out and make the apple pie, scones and all the trimmings. The stress of not being able to start my juice diet led me to drink, so the following night I downed a bottle of red. I thought it would be good to have it out of the house anyways before I begin.

Now it’s the weekend. You can’t detox on a weekend. There’s a garden fete I have to go to that will involve a cake stall, there are pizza delivery companies that need to be supported in times of recession and the sun is shining. You can’t detox on a hot day because if you did that you couldn’t have an ice cream.

So I’m starting Monday. Well no, hang on. Monday is the last parent committee meeting before the summer and that’s the night we all get invited by the school principal for a glass of wine and finger food, so no, Monday’s out. Tuesday. I’ll start Tuesday if I'm not meeting someone for lunch. 

I've looked it up in the dictionary. Detox is a word, maybe only a word...