The Juice Still Pours: Day Five of Ten
Hello all, and welcome to another rousing tale of what I'm not eating today. Oddly, this is getting easier. I'm not sure if the decreased hunger is a good or bad sign, though, as it may mean simply that my metabolism is slowing down to conserve calories. I always considered this possibility, but figured that ten days couldn't really mess anything up that badly. I was never really looking to lose more than about 15 pounds anyway, and the essential purpose of the fast in the first place was to see if I were capable of fairly radical behavior change.
Let me explain a bit: my girlfriend and I have a diet that is probably about 80% vegetarian to begin with. Mine is closer to pescatarian/vegan, in that I eat mostly plant foods with several weekly servings of fish or shellfish, whereas she has an attachment to dairy products that I don't share. Knowing how animals are treated in factory farms (horrible beyond measure), she tries to keep her animal product purchasing decisions ethical, buying from producers who use local and sustainable farms as their suppliers. Every once in a while we'll pig out on the local Indian buffet, including the chicken that was probably bought from one of the evil farms mentioned above, but nobody's perfect and it's generally best not to get too preachy about these things, anyway. It just makes everyone think that you're superior and obnoxious.
So why am I doing a juice cleanse? Last semester, due to scheduling difficulties and an upper arm injury that I sustained, I quit going to the gym altogether. Given that I'm a student and that all of my jobs are sedentary academic jobs, and given that I love to drink beer like it's oxygen, I started to gain more weight that I'm comfortable with. I'm not technically overweight, and only have been once ever in my life. Nevertheless, motivated by plain vanity or a legitimate desire for self-improvement (you pick it), I've decided that I would like my 17-year-old waistline back and a body that is generally fit and athletic. This takes a lot of work at 38, and I thought that a juice fast might be one way of both getting started and testing to see if I have the discipline for any kind of sustained change. So there will be no tales of how I lost 30 pounds in ten days, because if I lost 30 pounds I would look as if I belonged in a cancer ward. This is simply about losing some belly fat and segueing back into a healthy lifestyle that features regular sleep, reduced caffeine intake, moderate alcohol consumption, and regular exercise.
A second reason is that I have three weeks off between semesters. With some travel mixed into see the respective families, I usually spend much of this time drinking beer and playing PS3 continually until five in the morning. So we're reverse-engineering the plan from previous years, to see if I can come back from the holidays in better, not worse, shape than when I left. On that note...
1:30 pm: 20 ounces of juice, mostly tomato with two carrots, seasoned with some worcestershire and black pepper. It's going to be a tomato-based few days, as (see yesterday's post), as I bought a box of blemished/soft tomatoes from the local produce shop that don't have a lot of time left in this world, and, lest I not get my three bucks worth out of the purchase, I have to juice as many of them as possible before the reminder gets thrown out.
7:00 pm: Following ten mile walk/hike to my university and back, 20 ounces of tomato, radish, carrot, green onion and spinach juice, followed by a pint of sparkling water with lime. As a way of being less wasteful, Rachel's going to put the leftover pulp and skin from the juicer into some lentils for her dinner, to see how well it works. Composting in the side garden was another idea, but the dogs will inevitably just get in there and eat it, and a lot of human produce ranges from vaguely upsetting to mildly toxic for them, so that's a no-go. took second walk of roughly two miles with Rachel and the dogs around 9pm.
12:00 midnight: About 12-14 ounces of the same juice listed above (leftovers from earlier). I'm noticing considerably less hunger in the pm hours in particular, and really only finished the juice because I wasn't sure how well it would keep uncovered in the refrigerator. Since few temptations seem to lie between me and bed in an hour or so, we will consider day five successfully completed.
Totals: Five days, 64 miles walked.
Let me explain a bit: my girlfriend and I have a diet that is probably about 80% vegetarian to begin with. Mine is closer to pescatarian/vegan, in that I eat mostly plant foods with several weekly servings of fish or shellfish, whereas she has an attachment to dairy products that I don't share. Knowing how animals are treated in factory farms (horrible beyond measure), she tries to keep her animal product purchasing decisions ethical, buying from producers who use local and sustainable farms as their suppliers. Every once in a while we'll pig out on the local Indian buffet, including the chicken that was probably bought from one of the evil farms mentioned above, but nobody's perfect and it's generally best not to get too preachy about these things, anyway. It just makes everyone think that you're superior and obnoxious.
So why am I doing a juice cleanse? Last semester, due to scheduling difficulties and an upper arm injury that I sustained, I quit going to the gym altogether. Given that I'm a student and that all of my jobs are sedentary academic jobs, and given that I love to drink beer like it's oxygen, I started to gain more weight that I'm comfortable with. I'm not technically overweight, and only have been once ever in my life. Nevertheless, motivated by plain vanity or a legitimate desire for self-improvement (you pick it), I've decided that I would like my 17-year-old waistline back and a body that is generally fit and athletic. This takes a lot of work at 38, and I thought that a juice fast might be one way of both getting started and testing to see if I have the discipline for any kind of sustained change. So there will be no tales of how I lost 30 pounds in ten days, because if I lost 30 pounds I would look as if I belonged in a cancer ward. This is simply about losing some belly fat and segueing back into a healthy lifestyle that features regular sleep, reduced caffeine intake, moderate alcohol consumption, and regular exercise.
A second reason is that I have three weeks off between semesters. With some travel mixed into see the respective families, I usually spend much of this time drinking beer and playing PS3 continually until five in the morning. So we're reverse-engineering the plan from previous years, to see if I can come back from the holidays in better, not worse, shape than when I left. On that note...
1:30 pm: 20 ounces of juice, mostly tomato with two carrots, seasoned with some worcestershire and black pepper. It's going to be a tomato-based few days, as (see yesterday's post), as I bought a box of blemished/soft tomatoes from the local produce shop that don't have a lot of time left in this world, and, lest I not get my three bucks worth out of the purchase, I have to juice as many of them as possible before the reminder gets thrown out.
7:00 pm: Following ten mile walk/hike to my university and back, 20 ounces of tomato, radish, carrot, green onion and spinach juice, followed by a pint of sparkling water with lime. As a way of being less wasteful, Rachel's going to put the leftover pulp and skin from the juicer into some lentils for her dinner, to see how well it works. Composting in the side garden was another idea, but the dogs will inevitably just get in there and eat it, and a lot of human produce ranges from vaguely upsetting to mildly toxic for them, so that's a no-go. took second walk of roughly two miles with Rachel and the dogs around 9pm.
12:00 midnight: About 12-14 ounces of the same juice listed above (leftovers from earlier). I'm noticing considerably less hunger in the pm hours in particular, and really only finished the juice because I wasn't sure how well it would keep uncovered in the refrigerator. Since few temptations seem to lie between me and bed in an hour or so, we will consider day five successfully completed.
Totals: Five days, 64 miles walked.
posted by JPS at 1/05/2012 01:52:00 PM
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