LittleJoe

Juice fast: done (early). But...

Well, I'd planned to do the fast through Wed, 27Apr. I ended it last night. I miss real workouts and there's too much yard work and other physical activity that I need to do.

I lost several pounds, learned that I can consume a number of plants that I'd either not tried before (fennel for one) or had written off as nasty tasting (beets, especially). BUT, I'm not done with juicing.

We'd already been juicing carrots. Now I'm juicing all kinds of things and plan to do juice for breakfast and as a pre-workout light meal when I get home in the evenings. Lunch and dinner will be more normal vegan fare: mainly vegetables, with some beans or whole grains at times.

And now... time for the first cup of coffee in over a week :-D

Cheers

10-day juice fast: Day 6

Saturday was too busy to blog ...more on that in a bit, but here's the weigh-in recap:

Weight 146.4 ...so after being up .2 pounds on Friday morning (day 5 of juice fast), I was down 2.2 pounds on Saturday morning (day 6). But I then went "off the wagon". Read on...

A neighbor friend of ours was going to be moving out in a month and was going to rent her house. Turns out that on Thursday evening she found some renters who needed to move in this weekend. So instead of taking her time moving her stuff over the coming weeks, our neighbor had to suddenly get everything packed up, the house cleaned, and be out in time for the renters to come in. So Shirley and I went over and spent most of Saturday loading boxes and furniture into a POD (moving /storage container).

After an hour or so, I started to feel a little faint every time I bent over. Soooo... I popped over to our own house (diagonally across the street) and cheated on the juice fast. I had a couple of scoops of Vega Whole Food Health Optimizer (vegan nutrition powder), blended up with an orange, a banana, some hemp protein powder, and water. A couple of hours later I had another scoop of the Vega powder with water. Then later that night I "gorged" on a sweet potato and then the ultimate sin: I had 2 beers. OK, they weren't really beers, 'cause they were lite beers ;) ...at another neighbor's (our neighbors rock).

Overall the nutrition intake was still overwhelmingly fresh fruit and vegetables. And I felt much more capable of doing physical labor after grabbing some protein.

The plan now is to finish the rest of the 10 days with veggie and fruit juice, and supplementing with a little Vega powder so I can do more physical activity.

Cheers

10-day juice fast: Day 5

Weight: 148.6 pounds ...That's up .2 pounds. Interesting. We'll see what tomorrow brings.

This evening was actually the first time over the past 5 days that I was thinking a little about food. Specifically, Thai food, since often on Friday or Saturday evening we'll go to a Thai restaurant for dinner. It wasn't really a craving so much as just the head feeling like weekend should mean going to dinner somewhere.

Energy is absolutely fine.

I donated blood today; the bloodmobile comes to the office every 3 months and today was the day. They always do a free cholesterol screening when I donate, so this time I'll be especially curious to see if there's a change - should have results available (via automated phone and online) in a couple of days.

OK ...Time for bed. Lots to do tomorrow... including picking up another 25lb bag of organic juicing carrots. Just about through the whole thing! And of course, I'm also blasting through an insane amount of other produce. On the bright side, nothing's going to waste, and I'm getting nutrients from a lot more foods than normal.

Cheers

10-day juice fast: Day 4

Was too busy Thursday to blog, so summarizing the day now (Friday morning).

Weight: 148.4 pounds. Still going in the right direction :)

Energy is finally about normal. Didn't have time to work out, so will need to be sure to do that tonight.

We went to our weekly Thursday evening gathering of Drinking Liberally. The establishment at which we meet has no pure juice (it all has sugar added), so I had 3 glasses of unsweetened iced tea. Mistake! Normally I could down an espresso at 10pm and go to bed and have no problem sleeping. But now that I've been off coffee all week and thereby horribly deficient on caffeine ;) ...when I went to bed I was just laying there, mind happily bouncing around. I slept off and on through the night, but not my normal sound sleep. Oh, and I have noticed that since I'm downing so much juice and water, I end up getting up once or twice during the night to pee. So when I'm done with the fast, I'll add sleeping through the night without the bladder wanting to burst - to the list of other things to which I'll look forward: a cup of coffee, a glass of wine or beer, lower cost of food.

Overall, it's going quite well. I'd heard before that the hardest days are the first 2 or 3 days, and that has definitley been my experience as well.

Cheers.

10-day juice fast: Day 3

Weight this morning: 148.8 pounds. Lowest in many, many years.

Crazy day at work - and on the commute home. Gotta admit, a drink (not fruit juice) sounds kinda good. But I'll settle for a healthy alternative after I post.

No more headache today and the energy is fine. It is definitely helping now that I'm taking a bit more juice to work and can have some every 2-3 hours. I'll have to measure how much I'm bringing in the morning and post that. I just juice up a bunch of fruit and veggies, pour it into a couple of containers, and add some ice cubes to each to keep it cold for several hours.

The pic above is the stuff I juiced up for breakfast and lunch...parsley, cilantro, carrot, cucumber, celery, apple, pear, ginger, collard, lemon, tomato. I'm really plowing through the produce. I don't think my bank account could handle doing this forever! Gosh, and only the carrots and one or two other things are organic. I'd love to be doing all organic, but there's no way we could afford that right now. Nonetheless, I'm confident that I'm still getting FAR more nutrients than I would normally be ingesting, and far less of the fat and other things that are harder for the body to process. And that's the idea :)

10-day juice fast: Day 2

Definitely feeling better today. Only the slightest hint of headache, so I suspect the coffee withdrawl will be done by tomorrow. Weight this morning: 151.0 pounds ...down .6 lb. Too soon to say if that's water weight, fat, or just crapping out weight. We'll see what the weight & body fat percent is at the end of the 10 days.

Toughest thing so far is just keeping enough fruits and veggies on hand - and enough variety - to keep a guess of a balanced intake of nutrients. In no particular order, between yesterday and today I've consumed juice of: carrot, celery, beet, ginger, orange, apple, fennel, parsley, cilantro, pear, radish, spinach, cucumber, zucchini, lemon, lime, tomato ...probably leaving something out of that list, but I'm definitely getting variety!

I was too tired yesterday to workout and ended up taking a nap for about an hour instead. This evening I did a mild workout: a little over a mile on the treadmill, followed by some kettlebell swings and pullups. Hopefully tomorrow I'll be up to full or near full energy.

Three main thoughts at this point:

1. I'm getting my nutrients from a much broader spectrum of plants than I normally do
2. All this juice and water means a lot of peeing (aside from drinking 2-3 quarts of juice each day, I'm downing at least 1/2 gallon of water to keep things flushing)
3. I'm already looking forward to that first cup of coffee after the fast :)

Cheers!

10-day juice fast: Day 1

Today I've started a 10-day juice fast. That means that for 10 days I plan to drink as much as I want of the juices of fruits and vegetables, but I won't eat any solid food. It also means that I will abstain from coffee and alcohol.

Goal: General detox and just to see what happens.

So. This morning I weighed in at 151.6 pounds (I'm a runt of a guy - 5' 4", so while I'm not obese, I could stand to dump about 10 pounds of fat). There's a fair bit of calories in fruit, so hopefully I won't gain weight! I've been vegan (diet of plant-based food only) for a couple of years, so I don't expect that this will be too difficult.

I'd been thinking about some type of cleansing diet for a while, and after we recently watched a DVD of Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead by Joe Cross, I bought a Breville JE98XL juicer, a bunch of fruit and veggies, and got started.

The film mentions the Reboot Your Life website, so I popped there. There's some info there and one can sign up for a daily email while doing one of the programs (I did, but only so I could see more of the site). There's no fee. But all I really cared about was recipes for some of the combinations that Joe Cross or others had tried. I'm really liking the suggestion from several of the recipes to add a piece of ginger root to the mix.

So how's it going now that it's evening on the 1st day?

1. hunger's not been a problem. If hungry, just drink juice. Easy
2. no coffee has been a problem. I'm pretty much a 2-cup-a day guy, and by afternoon was getting a nasty headache. I wussed out when I got home and popped a couple of Advil. In order to still enjoy a dark, hot, brewed beverage, I'm drinking Kaffree Roma, which is definitely not coffee but is still good
3. I didn't work out today. I plan to tomorrow. I've been doing P90X almost daily for almost a year. During this fast I plan to just walk/run on the treadmill, and do pushups / pullups / kettlebell swings / jumpbox jumps. I'll see how the energy feels and adapt as needed

I'll be blogging each day, posting at least a brief blurb about how I'm feeling, current weight, favorite juice combos, etc. And now ...I think a cup of Kaffree Roma. Cheers :)