The Downward Spiral of 2008 , Part II: Broken Heart, Broken Cleanze

“Love on the Rocks
Ain’t no big surprise
Just pour me a drink
And I’ll tell you some lies.”
-Neil Diamond

The pasta was so satisfying and filling, you wouldn’t believe. The garlic bread was dripping with melted cheese. The wine was perfectly toxifying. The whole bottle. THAT’s how I broke my 100-day cleanze. I derailed on Day 68 in a magnificent burst of gluttony, the ‘worst’ possible way to exit a cleanze.

Surprisingly my splurge didn’t physically hurt, except for a little fuzziness the next morning. I generally have a digestive system like an ox that can handle just about anything without being too thrown off in the immediate moment. The food didn’t hurt, at least in the short term. No, it was the almost unthinkable lie lurking in my conscience that was the problem.

I must admit that this was not the first solid food I had ingested. I actually ate a week before on Day 63 of the cleanze. My then girlfriend wanted so badly to make me a nice Mediterranean salad that I said to myself: “You can do anything you want!”- the most widely used self-deception trick in the book! But seriously, one raw salad can be a part of the cleanze especially since it was such a special occasion. Cleanzing isn’t supposed to be about deprivation, and I felt I would have been depriving myself of a great life experience had I declined her wish. It was literally the first time I’ve ever experienced a girlfriend making me a meal. Thank goodness I did because it was gonna be the last time that happened for who knows how long, and certainly the only time with her! Just a side note for those of you keeping score: If I had continued on my cleanze as planned, that salad would not have constituted breaking the cleanze, in my eyes. But after my glorious performance on Day 68, I say in retrospect that I broke the cleanze on the 63rd day.

I was hardly so honest with myself at that moment though. The hypocrisy was so overwhelming that I chose not only to ignore it, but to lie to everyone that I saw at Sundance, including myself. “Yes, I’m on Day 70.” “Yes, I’m on Day 72. Yep! No solid food, only juice, tea and superfoods.” And I did it with a shit-eating grin. (pun intended) I remember interviewing Cassandra Hepburn for my video blog. She was so impressed, exclaiming, “Are you serious? You haven’t eaten food in 72 days?!?! Damn! You’re amazing!” Yes, I am! Especially when you count the 3 slices of pizza I secretly wolfed down last night out of site from Russia, my beautiful juice co-worker when I went on the run to get produce for the celebrity gifting suite juice bar. Yes, I am amazing. Amazingly hypocritical! Some Detox Cleanze guru… Here I am recommending to people to break the iZO Cleanze with vegan soup and a light salad, and I’m diving right into slabs of melted cheese, soaking in a whole bottle of wine at a time. This was way too mind-boggling to acknowledge as reality.

It was the pain of the breakup. Actually let me clarify that. It was the pain of the silence. That’s how she broke up with me. For five whole days, I didn’t hear a word from her. The second I landed in Salt Lake City, I couldn’t get her by phone, text, or email, whereas she had always responded right away. At first, I thought maybe something was wrong with her and left messages of concern. I kept it pretty tight under control without freaking out, but soon enough that genuine alarm for her well-being started to ring false and was replaced with an ever sinking feeling of panic and emptiness. I was dumbfounded, racking my brain, echoing over and over: “What happened? What went wrong? What did I DO WRONG?” Nothing. Just silence.

It certainly didn’t help that I was working 18-hour days. During the day I was hosting our juice bar and interviewing D-list celebrities at an overcrowded antique ski resort shop (Oy.), while taking a flood of orders and customer service calls for the iZO Cleanze. And by night, I was managing the kitchen cleanze production and deliveries in Los Angeles. To cap it all off, we couldn’t get a room in Park City, so each day Russia and I had to brave slipping and sliding over the Rockies from Salt Lake City in extreme blizzard conditions. My only saving grace the whole week was the DJ who was playing amazing music at the celebrity gift suite. My prize for enduring the week was when he let me download his entire music collection. He played a lot of The Strokes, this one in particular, ‘Hard to Explain’, perfectly captured our breakup in lyrics: “I like it right here but I cannot stay”. You could say that again.

Finally the deafening silence broke with an email from her. She said she didn’t want to be with someone who didn’t want her as much as she wanted them. It’s true, I had been communicating clearly that I was cautious and relatively unsure about the future, i.e. the truth as I saw it. But come on, we were going out for a mere 2 weeks, during which we had a romantic getaway weekend, and had seen each other several times. “Gimme a break! Baby, please! We’re moving fast, real fast! I’m just trying to be conscious and paced here.” While I personally think that kind of response should get you a medal, or at least some action on the playing field, that’s just not happening when there’s an ex-boyfriend kickin’ around.

Yes. The ex-boyfriend, with whom she had broken up a month before I came into the picture and with whom she had apparently not had any communication in the past two months, suddenly flew in from New York, got on his knees and weaponized marriage, snagging her with a ring around her finger. He was an even more powerful exec in the international film distribution world and promised a stable family life. Stability, that was a thing I certainly could not provide in the near future. BIG understatement. My unproven theory is that he had some eyes and ears on the ground at her work and was catching drift that she was buying plane tickets for some guy and realized that if he had any hope of getting her back again, he needed to act quickly and decisively. One punch was all he was gonna get. Man, what a punch it was. They were getting married next week. I was so knocked out.

I laughed. I HAD to laugh. It was funny. Ridiculously funny. Hysterical. And then a wave of peaceful acceptance, relief, and gratitude swept over me. Thank the Universe I had not stood in the way of this obviously inevitable union. They were meant to be together. They were literally each other’s professional doppleganger. Due to my ex-girlfriend’s crack decision-making, a two year relationship was compressed into one month and we were all spared the pain of a long, drawn out drama where my heart would of lost tremendous trust in the world and her heart would have been torn to pieces. And her soon-to-be-husband got what he wanted and still managed to avoid a helluva good fight. Good for everyone!

Then, February. It was like I fell off a cliff. The void in my heart was vast and seemingly endless. I realized for the first time what I had been depriving myself of for the last 18 years: deep intimacy. The second I was given a taste, it was ripped away from me. My heart missed.

The business wasn’t doing great at this point either. Catalyzed by the predictable yet jarring absence of our presence in the February issue of Harper’s Bazaar, cleanze sales had fallen sharply. At the time of this writing, I have a real solid PR firm behind me so as to avoid discontinuity of presence in the public eye (Katy Saeger and Saeger Media Group), but at that point I was a one-man coup on the PR tip. The reality was that my tricks were too often few and far between. Furthermore, once the sugar-high rush of New Year’s resolutions had worn off, the stark fact was that it was winter and nothing was special anymore, except chocolate.

My business life mirrored my love life. As above, so below- another way of saying when the shit hits the fan, get out of the room cuz it’s gonna hit on every level possible. I broke.