This represents what I will be eating … er, drinking for 10 days. Actually, everything shown in this picture will only last a few days!
Today was my first day on a 10-day juice fast. No, this is not an April Fool’s joke. I am actually “eating” nothing but juice made from fresh vegetables and fruits for 10 days. For those who know me, this is fairly surprising. I am a healthy person, very rarely sick. Sure I could lose a little around the midsection, but I am not overweight. So why am I undertaking such a “drastic” endeavor? And why am I blogging about it?
My wife and I are very much into living a healthy lifestyle. We have done a lot of research over the years, but we’re always discovering more. Plus my sister is a strict vegan and she shares with us a lot of information as well. We were browsing Netflix last weekend and decided to watch the movie “Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead“. It is the documentary of a man who decides to do a 60-day juice fast in order to lose weight and cure his illness. Along the way he helps others as well. It is an inspiring movie and while we were already very familiar with the benefits of juicing, and have been juicing fairly regularly for about a year, we still learned a few new things.
One of the recommendations made in the movie is that we should maintain our bodies in a similar way that we maintain our cars. It was suggested that we should occasionally “reboot” our bodies by doing a juice fast and that healthy individuals should have no problem doing a 10-day juice fast. Being a technology professional, maybe it was simply the fact that the movie used the term “reboot” to drive the point home! But seriously, I think it was just the fact that I’ve been reflecting recently about where I am in my life and realized there are some things I need to put into order. Nothing big. Again, it’s not like I’m sick or overweight or experiencing any crisis. Something just clicked. If for no other reason, I simply want to test myself. Do I have enough self-discipline to control and defeat the urges of eating solid food? How far can I push the limits of my mental fortitude? If I can accomplish this, it will have been a nice exercise in self-control. Plus, I should be super-healthy after 10 days!
As with any exercise like this, it helps to be held accountable. What better way to be held accountable than to blog about it to the world? So for the next 10 days I will be keeping all of you informed of my progress and state-of-being. Without further ado, here is my report for day 1.
Leading up to the start of my fast, I really thought that I would not have too much of a problem with this. I’m not much of a sweets eater. I don’t snack on chips and such very often. While this isn’t exactly a good habit, I generally don’t eat breakfast very often. And if I do eat breakfast, it has been increasingly comprised of fresh juice that my wife has made. And all too often, because I am often so busy out servicing clients, I don’t eat lunch either. So for better or worse, I am fairly used to not eating most of the day. I can handle this, right?
So I start off the day around 8 AM with a glass of juice and pack some in a cooler because I have client appointments for the rest of the morning and early afternoon. About 10:30 AM my stomach is growling. I had forgotten one thing. When I do eat breakfast, I end up hungrier the rest of the day! Great. The good news is that by 11:00 AM I drank my mid-morning juice and felt a lot better. I actually wasn’t hungry by 1:00 PM when I drank my lunch juice. I had planned to drink a mid-afternoon juice, but I simply forgot! So I was pretty hungry around 5 PM for my dinner juice. Since I skipped a juice, I went ahead and made myself a post-dinner juice, which I am drinking now as I write.
I am surprised at how my mind wanders to craving food when I see it. I won’t say it was tough on day one to not eat food with my family at dinner time, but my mind was definitely craving it. So far I am able to keep myself satisfied by drinking juice so no big deal quite yet. We’ll see how day two goes.