the bathroom photos. I promise to do them during the long weekend. Monday is a holiday and I have three days to myself. Bliss!

I woke up at 11.00

I have slept for 12 hours straight! My head feels clear! I have missed this so much!

Angelos will be back home from work in about an hour and we will go shopping for food (I host the big traditional lunch on Monday), and perhaps a few tshirts me thinks. Some shops still have clearance and I think perhaps I ought to go and have a look at the bargains ;) And I am aslo going to be extra sweet to A. and do all the things and rounds he wants, so that at the end of the shopping I will sweetly ask him to take me to the garden centre. I feel like planting lately! I feel Spring in the air.

Which is magnificent and scary. It has always been like this you know. March enters and the same feeling climbs at my head and occupies it for the first few days and then forms itself to a very specific thought that stresses me and makes me feel I wasted a good 4 - 5 months: In less than 4 months I will have to wear a bathing suit and hit the beach!

You know, weight has never kept me away from the beach. I am Greek. I am an aquarian. I need to be in the sea. My body needs it, my mind needs it, my soul needs it.

And for some funny reason, it is always horrible at the first few visits. But after the first horror, and after getting a bit tanned, I seem to forget all about my weight. After the first few swims, I almost feel like a normal person, no matter of the size of my fat suit.

So come March, since I remember myself, I begin to count the months to the first swim, count the excess of kilos, start doing the math. Divisions after divisions. So many kilos devided by so many months, oh I need to loose X kilos per month. So many kilos per month devided by 4 weeks a month, I need to lose Y kilos per week.

Then I do subtractions. If I have to lose X kilos per month, and I have a bad week and gain Z kilos, then my loss for that month will be X-Z. And I wont bore you more with my arithmetic skills, cos you get the point ;)

So much energy spent on just panicking and counting!!!

I want this to be the last March that I will be like this. I do not just want it. I have decided it. I am going on the detox on Tuesday. I know that some of you remember the hard detox I did last year before Amsterdam. Its the same thing. Extreme. But this detox has another task besides cleaning my insides. A more important one. It plays with the head. It brings up issues. It makes you see.

Unlike any other detox, this is scheduled for me by both my holistic med and my therapist. I found this out last night. See, my holistic med and my therapist are friends. Its funny really. I first met the holistic med. Who had his practice in a different part of Athens to my therapist. Then, I met my therapist. At some point after the first year, my therapist commented to me that I seem a lot stronger physically. I told him I saw my hol med again and he gave me a treatment. He asked me who he is. He said...but he is my friend and we work together sometimes!!!

So when the holistic designed this detox for me, he spoke with my therapist. And he gave him some hints. This is a cumulative torment for me ;)

Most of the detox you will find around gives you choise. There are NO foods, and there are YES foods. One can decide what's for dinner. One can decide what legumes to have for lunch. One can decide the fruit they fancy for breakie.

Not me. Not in this detox.

Last night, at the end of the session I told my therapist I am thinking of starting detox on Tuesday. I told him I have plans of indulgense for the long weekend. Chocolate sorbet. A gallon. Lamp chops. A kilo. And then Tuesday comes the cleanse.

He told me about him and yannis (the med) designing the detox together. He told me why. I got a bit angry at first for never have been told. Brat. lol. Then I got the concept. And felt thankful they care so much to spend the time together working for me! Princess. lol.

I can have as huge quantities as I want for lunch and dinner. Of the same food. With no spices. No salt. For 21 days. Have you any idea how boring this is?

The concept is simple. And now I am aware of it, I will go along and work with it.

For a palate hedonist and emotional eater like me, if you take away the plesure of taste, this is what happens: All issues that are covered with this pleasure, all the things I exchange or hide or deny or cover or trade with food, all of them arise.

The detox is designed to slow my internal process. Slow my digestion. Slow slow slow. Bring me down. Bring the core out. My experience so far with this detox (I have done it both in 2004 and 2005) is this:

First few days I am ravenous and eat huge quantities of rice and veggies for lunch and huge quantities of baked veggies and yoghurt for dinner. After a few days, I do not want to eat much. I am tired of the taste, I begin to dislike the food. Food becomes fuel and then a depression starts to appear. If only I knew the scheme....

The repetition of the same food has exactly this task. To help all the feelings subsided by the pleasure of a tasty meal resurface. Example:

Get back at 10 from a very stressful day at work. In the meantime, due to said stress and overworked weeks, there is a distance built from my basic needs. Like making love for instance. Instead of sitting down and think of this, recognising the need, I cook a delish dinner, eat it and moan, and get to bed for a very needed 6 hrs of sleep. So on and so forth.

Now I won't have this.And I will have to deal with the gaps. The holes. The missing things. Now I am aware I am going to take it one step deeper.

My boss is leaving on Monday. For business purposes. She will be traveling around Europe till March 19. Of course I have brought a lot of work to do at home. I have a plan. Noone knows about this. Not even my husband. I have done something. I booked tickets to Amsterdam yesterday. March 16 out, March 19 back. Without the boss around, a lot more work will be done. In a lot calmer way too. The tickets must be purchased on March 13. If by then the work is at the place I want it to be, then i will contact my boss and announce to her how far ahead in the project I've been, and announce her that I will take Thursday and Friday off. I will let her know how much I need the 4 days off, to be able to work refreshed and with recharged batteries after she is back. I have even contacted my husband's boss (with whom we have become friends all these years A works there) and told him to not schedule exams for A's driving students on these two days, 16 and 17 of march. I told him to keep this a secret. he agreed!

So now I am going to go shopping! Cos he, the man of this house, is back!