Gosh! Has it been really almost 3 weeks that I haven't written a post?!
Well, Tom watched the movie "Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead" and introduced the idea to me to start a juice fast. I was not too excited about it, because I know how I feel when I am hungry. It's sort of the resemblance of Jackyl & Hyde. I get shaky, irritated, weak, and lightheaded when I don't eat and thinking about fasting for 10 days sounded horrible to me. But I am not a person to generally say no, so we started our Juice Fast last Tuesday. It went well for 2 days and at the end of the second day I came home, shaky, super irritated, hungry and with a horrible headache. The headaches started from the first day and continued until we introduced some solid food.
A juice fast consists of juices from all kinds of vegetables and fruits. I like the fruit juices but am a little hesitant when it comes to vegetable juices. It's not that I don't like vegetables, quite the contrary. We eat vegetables every day. Well, since we are eating only organic food, naturally we only buy organic vegetables and fruits. We now adjusted our juice fast after that second day to the following:
Breakfast - fruit juice at 9 a.m.
Lunch - slice of organic bread with some hummus
Afternoon snack - vegetable or fruit juice
Dinner - huge salad (organic)
For cravings - juices
This system seems to work really well and I am able to continue with this until our 10 days are over. Luckily this Friday we are officially done with our fast. I know that the essential fast juice, according the movie that inspired Tom does not allow any solid foods, but since we are not really trying to detox but lose weight we think that this works best for us.
Around dinner time it is the hardest! This week taught me a lot about my still unhealthy diet patterns. Here is an interesting aspect I learned about myself.
The weekends to me are relaxing, fun-filled and merely make up for the entire work week. We start our Saturday morning with our famous chocolate chip raspberry pancakes or a egg/bacon breakfast. On the weekends we just really let ourselves go. I think I have to admit but I am a emotional over-eater. I love to spend the weekends eating crap! Compared to a lot other people, crap is not fast food or greasy unhealthy things, but "soul food". Last weekend was a real struggle. We woke up and had to change our routine of gathering around the breakfast table to devour our pancakes. Instead we made a juice and that was it! How fulfilling...NOT!!
I also noticed when we had our first dinner, while I walked with my plate to the living room I chomped down 3 tortellinis. But my intentions were to enjoy my dinner and eat it consciously and enjoy every single bite. After I caught myself, I started to cut my tortellinis in three pieces and eating them very slowly. I think I am an over-eater!! Also, on some days when I just felt down or discouraged, I craved really unhealthy things..things that I haven't eaten for years.
Despite all this I lost 4 lbs and I feel great! In the beginning I was too weak to do anything! I couldn't even work out! After the second day I started working out at the gym again and I feel that I am getting more toned. I even fit into my old dresses! Yay! I hope by Friday I will lose some more weight.
The reason I was not writing more post on here, was mainly that we got so used to eating organic and it is not a challenge for us anymore. We really enjoy eating organic and have made it our regular diet. Yes, there are the occasional non-organic foods like bbq we attend or some dining-out but generally we make health-conscious decisions. I think this part helped us to get by with this juice fast as far as we did or still doing. I am not craving sweets and have not put any sugar in my body for the past week (besides fruit sugar).
We talked about doing a juice fast every month for one week. We both don't like the pure juice diet but it surely is beneficial and healthy. Well, this is just a short update and I will try to post more often, but I think I am going to minimize my posts.
After all a healthy adult should be eating 70-90% of fruits & vegetables a day! Crazy? Yes. Doable? Absolutely!
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