The Unintentional Nine Bean Soup Cleanse

This summer I'll be 50! Wow, now being able to admit my real age was one hurdle to jump. But I managed to get over it, pun intended, thanks to on-line dating where brutal honesty is a sport. But that's another article. As it goes, a lifetime of injuries and assorted self-inflicted abuse of my body, although sometimes a lot of fun, has caught up to me. I'm simply too chubby to run ahead of it.

In the last year I've discovered the pain I felt in my joints wasn't the result of injury. That is thanks to a winter getaway at a remote lake house, which should have been romantic, but he and I learned our rather low level of compatibility in a hurry. But that's another article, too. We ate fresh whole food, with few carbs, prepared by us … well, me. A few days in, I noticed I no longer felt stiff and rusty in every joint, just like the Tin Man of The Wizard of Oz. In the middle of the night I was thirsty and poured myself a tall glass of cold milk. You see, I avoided drinking the water as I suspected the water lines had been chemically treated to prevent freezing. The next morning I woke up stiff like Tin Man again. It was the milk. Sure enough, I read there is protein in cow's milk that we, especially when older, cannot digest. It causes inflammation in our joints. So dairy is out, except yogurt, a little butter, and a splash of moo in my morning coffee.

This past year my excema has been off the charts. It hasn't been so bad since I was a child. Once off milk, that cleared almost completely. But I wanted to eliminate it. Not a big wheat eater anyway, I completely nixed wheat pasta and bread from my diet. My excema cleared. I live with teens and often cook, so at times I do fall off the wagon. Within a day, the excema starts back.

Now that the price of red meat has gone up drastically, I buy far less. With my cutbacks in meat, dairy and wheat, I find my diet is a little restricting. I decided to add something I don't normally reach for. In the pantry I found a bin of nine bean soup mix. I cooked up one cup of beans with a bunch of veggies and a cupful of leftover chicken pieces. It gave me a whole pot of soup. And two bowls is what I ate the first day of the cleanse I didn't know I had just put myself on. Plus lots of cold water. I spent the day spring cleaning in the yard, trying to keep my mind off snacking. Oh I was glad to be close to home. By late afternoon I suddenly felt ill, like I was about to expel the alien inside but unsure from which orifice. My belly swelled. I had felt this before. My mind flashed back fifteen years to my first cleanse, the first of many times I paid $30 or more for a boxed cleansing kit.

I can attest, folks, you can save your money and feel like a million dollars. Go for the nine bean soup. Day one was something else, but by day two I was stepping more lightly, feeling lifted of a burden, the burden that was lining my intestines and dragging me down, causing me to crave the junky carbs. Jack and the Beanstalk is on to something. We'll reach the sky with beans and lots of water.

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