Post-juice remorse

I spent roughly two months juicing. The main staples of my diet were a very robust green juice, a carrot & orange juice, and a beet juice that sometimes had blueberries mixed in. The chronicle can be found in this blog.

I stopped juicing about two months ago. Ish.

If you do a juice fast, you eventually need to ask yourself: What comes after? It's the only part I didn't really think through. I returned to eating in a similar (though not identical) way that I had before I started the juice fast. I kept drinking juice, just less of it. Pressures from within (such as laziness, force of habit, cravings for junk, etc) and without (other people pressuring me to compromise, nagging me about cost and hassle, telling me it's not healthy to continue, etc) basically led me to eat like everyone else does again. What I need to be clear about is that we're not talking about an all-junk diet here: Basic meat, vegetables, grains/wheat, a bit of coffee now and then, a bit of soda now and then. Certainly not an Olympic athlete's diet, but no worse than the average Canadian.

So... since I stopped my juice fast, I've experienced these things:

- Exhaustion. I have to take a nap every single afternoon.
- Irritability. I'm like 200% more of a bitch.
- I wake up feeling crappy every single day.
- Weight gain. And I mean a lot of it.
- Depression.
- Impotence*.
- Disorientation and "foggy-headedness."

The moral of the story is: I can only go by how I feel, and that's always the final authority and decider. And how do I feel? Terrible. Fat, dull, lazy, and stupid. And when I was juicing, I felt great. I felt like I was relaxed and clear-minded. I felt happy. I felt like I was finally healthy and balanced. And when I stopped, I did it wrong. I didn't have a really solid exit plan and I let other people convince me I was doing something bad to myself that needed correcting with a "normal" diet of sugar, fat, salt, wheat, dairy, and caffeine. And the lion's share of blame is on me, because I know better.

So I'm going back to it for a month or so while I figure out my post-fast diet (I appreciate suggestions, but please be aware that I probably won't follow them as I'm conducting my own research at the moment. :)). The bottom line is that, even though lots of people keep telling me how I "need" to be eating and not just juicing, I feel like crap when I'm not juicing. People who told me I "have to" go back to the "normal" way of eating to be healthy were wrong. I shouldn't have stopped juicing. It worked. I have a lot of friends who sermonize about how I'm supposed to be "living," but my juice diet is the only lifestyle change I adopted which actually delivered on its promise.

I'll keep those of you who are interested updated right here.

*Not that you really need to hear this, but there are people reading this blog who are looking for frank and blunt explanations of what happens, so I felt I should be honest

I love a good juice pun

I have learned

If you mix beet and blueberry juice together and spill it on something, don't bother wiping or trying to wash it. It's gone, man.

Pics of green and orange

So I got a bunch of groceries and here's what I came up with.

Start with this: Two heads of romaine lettuce, two apples, a lime and a half (I had a leftover), two cucumbers, a big bunch of cilantro, five stalks of celery. There's a bunch of spinach too, but it wouldn't fit in the bowl.

This was an unusually big batch, but that's fine. I usually don't make enough. Anyhow, that pile (without spinach) turned into this. Roughly 8-9 cups.

The problem with my juicer is it tends to shred spinach and spit it out in the pulp hopper instead of really juicing it. So for that I take the juice and mix it up in the blender with the spinach.

And when the spinach was sufficiently shredded, I ended up with this much juice/smoothie/whatever you wanna call it:

Those of you who follow this blog will know how crazy I am for carrot juice, so I couldn't deny myself a batch of that.

Underneath those carrots are two peeled oranges (here they are without the carrot canopy).

And that ended with this much carrot juice (with a tiny bit of ginger added).

On a side note, the green juice was the best I've ever made. I went through 2/3 of it tonight just because I couldn't get enough (the lime and cilantro made it irresistible). I've finally perfected that recipe and I'm going to keep using it, though I may alternate spinach with kale and bok choy. There's actually a danger of something bad happening (I forget what it is) if you just keep drinking the same green leafy stuff over and over and over, so I mix it up a bit. Never the less, I think the green juice is the hardest to get "just so" and now I think I've hit the perfect balance. I'm pleased. And full of juice.

On limes

In Canada, where I'm from, lemons don't taste that good. I can tell you this because I've been to the Caribbean where the lemons are sweet and you could eat them right off the tree. Not so up here in the Great White North. They're bitter and just plain harsh. I much prefer limes, which are also rather bitter but I like the taste more.

So tonight when I was making a big jar of carrot juice, I added three limes. I would normally add three oranges, but decided to try limes instead. I can tell you with certainty that three is too many. It was the limey-est carrot juice I've ever thought possible. Still tasty, but the only real flavor in it was lime.

That's what this blog is all about: Burning my tongue off with lime juice so you don't have to.

Chlorpropham can suck it

There and back again

As I mentioned in my previous post, I was called away suddenly and unexpectedly to Toronto for a few days. I had to leave in a hurry and it was completely impractical to take my juicer with me for a dozen reasons or more. It brought my juice fast to a rapid conclusion, but I thought I could at least survive on the standard fare you find in restaurants and whatever for a few days. Boy was I wrong.

This is a really interesting discovery for me, because you go into a juice fast with a lot of little voices in your head. Some of them lie to you and tell you that juicing will solve all your problems forever. Others tell you that you won't make it because you're weak and a slave to your cravings. And yet others tell you something that's even more disturbing: That this isn't real. That, despite that you logically piece together in your head from what you know about how food works, the whole juice fast is a stupid sham and you'll experience no real benefits or changes and you'll be embarrassed in front of all your friends when you don't drop a single pound and then go right back to eating pizza and root beer four times a day. Naturally, not all the voices you hear in your head can be telling you the truth... but there are some voices you hope are wrong more than others.

The voice which told me juicing isn't going to produce change is the really scary one. You don't want to drink carrots and beets and kale for weeks on end to find out that, when the playing field is level, your body slides right back into its old bad habits. And so, for me, it was a victory when (as I said) the absence of juice made me crave it... desperately. I found myself thinking about it constantly. I was imagining the taste of kale and cucumber in my mouth, even when I was trying to focus elsewhere. My brain was sending me constant signals telling me "I want more of what you were doing." It's not just that my body is covered in hives (it is) or that my fatigue levels are crippling (they are) or that my breath and body smell terrible (they do), but the part which makes this trip the hardest is, ironically, kind of an awesome thing to discover: I want to drink that juice. My entire body wants it. And so, as I return home today, I know that there will be no struggle when I re-enter the routine of juice fasting. Quite the contrary, in fact: My body and brain can't seem to wait.