For a shockingly long time, I've been adept at finding reasons to sip a couple of glasses of wine every day. Conviviality, curiosity, this column . . . whatever. Not any more. The millennium bug, I've discovered, is a nasty little creature that strikes the unwary after too many weeks of fancy food and drink - burrowing painfully into the pit of the stomach while simultaneously making the tongue resemble a strip of smelly old carpet. This detox thing demands investigation.
Spring-clean the system, you say? I am proceeding with caution. The last time a bout of clean living broke out in our household, the Inner-Cleansing Initiate rushed out and bought a juicer which was only used three times before it was consigned to the back of the cupboard, and eventually to a charity shop. (Be warned: these gadgets can be fiddly to use and a nightmare to clean.) I don't have the time, cash or commitment to check into a health farm and sign up for a full detox programme - despite the encouragement of PR executive Mary Finan, who swears by Champneys' rigorous 10-day fast. "It's absolutely fantastic. Your brain is razor-sharp, your breath smells like perfume, you don't need as much sleep and I found my productivity quadrupled," she reports - a scary statement from a woman who appears to operate in fifth gear all the time. No, I'm interested in easier options. Can anything be achieved at home over a day or two?
In her book Spring Clean Your System, Jane Garton, former editor of the leading health magazine Top Sante, provides three options - programmes to follow for a week, a weekend or a single day. "Weekend and one-day detoxes are great for breaking a cycle of binges, especially after a period of indulgence," she writes, reminding us that the benefits of giving the digestive system a short rest have been recognised in medical circles since the time of Hippocrates.
The first step, Garton stresses, is to get into a positive frame of mind. The detox process should be seen not as a painful penance but as an opportunity to kick-start the body's natural healing processes and generate new vitality. Choose a period when you're not likely to be under too much pressure, allowing plenty of time for relaxation - reading, listening to the radio, taking a gentle stroll, that sort of thing. Then stock up with everything you'll need for a diet of fruit juice, water, herbal tea, fresh fruit and vegetables.
In Detox Your Life, Jane Scrivner, cofounder of the British School of Complementary Therapy, suggests a seven-day detox programme as a starting point, ideally followed at some point by a full, 30-day detox diet - a reversal of the position adopted in her previous book, Detox Your- self, in which she insisted the "short detox" should not be attempted unless the full version had already been completed. Significantly for major wine enthusiasts - people like me who cheerfully knock back at least 14 glasses a week - she advises cutting back to half a glass a day during the week before the seven-day detox. (This, I fancy, could prove far more difficult than giving the stuff up altogether.) Caffeine-heads are similarly rationed, and anybody who eats less than two portions of fresh, raw fruit or vegetables a day, or who drinks less than four daily glasses of water, is advised to boost their intake by way of preparation for a regime of at least twice as much of both.
Scrivner's Seven-Day Detox plan prescribes the juices of two fruits only, plus loads of water, for the first two days, then three light meals during each of the remaining five. There are extensive lists of approved foods for these - mainly fruits, vegetables, nuts, fish. Included on the list of what you cannot have, you may be surprised to see tomatoes, bananas, oranges and spinach, besides baddies such as chocolate, sugar and alcohol.
Jane Garton also suggests a pre-detox period of cutting down on alcohol, caffeine, sugar, wheat, meat and dairy produce. As for smoking - don't even think about it. Her Weekend Detox is based on hot water with a squeeze of lemon first thing in the morning, fruits or juices for breakfast, a big salad for lunch, juice or herb tea in the afternoon and vegetables - raw, lightly steamed or stir-fried - for dinner. All interspersed with as much water as you can manage. The One-Day Detox advocates as much of one type of fruit or fruit juice as you like on a single day - again, diluted with plenty of water.
David Keane, who opened the Juice bar on South Great George's Street a few years ago, has advice that will surely soothe procrastinators. "Wait until the spring or early summer," he says. "A full-on detox in Ireland at this time of year isn't to be recommended." When the time is right, however, he reckons you can't beat a few glasses of wheatgrass juice to cleanse the system. Mixed green juice - spinach, parsley, fennel, cucumber and celery - is also high up on his list as a detox facilitator. "Juices like these are very easy to digest. Taken on an empty stomach, they'll go right through the system in 15 minutes."
Juice made before your very eyes is best, since the vitamin properties in fresh juice swiftly diminish as it oxidises. Nude, the new juice bar on Suffolk Street in Dublin, stipulates that its fresh fruit and veg concoctions (including The Cleanser and The Energiser) should be all drunk up within 45 minutes. But if you're not free to pop into a cool juice bar (or the Good Food Store in Ballsbridge, where they'll whizz up the mixture of your choice), and you're not yet ready to splash out on a home juicer, what's the answer?
A healthy blast of retail therapy, I suggest, like the one that has lined my fridge with strange bottles and cartons. Some of the pure vegetable and fruit juices on sale in supermarkets and health food shops taste unutterably vile, I have discovered. Some are bearable, and a few so amazingly delicious that I may struggle through two more whole days without a glass of vino. Could this be the beginning of a whole new life of purity and radiance? "Around this time of year hundreds of people come in asking about pure juices for detox," says Erica Murray of The Hopsack, the Rathmines health food store. "But only about one in 10 makes any long-term commitment to improving their diet and lifestyle." More proof that abstinence makes the heart grow fonder, I suppose. Raise a glass of whatever you like and drink to that.