Always jumping in head first

Turns out this juice fasting thing isn't so simple.  I didn't expect it to be easy in some ways.  The hunger and such was expected.  But I didn't expect to dislike the juice so much.  Now, there are things you can do.  You can add apples and pears to anything and try to make anything taste at least drinkable.  But after experiencing it and doing a lot more reading, we've decided we did things a bit wrong.

When I decide to do something, I want to do it RIGHT NOW.  Whether it's buying nail polish or a new house, I want it when I want it.  If I decide to change my life, there's no time like the present, right?  Well, perhaps not with juice fasting.  We should have taken our time.  A phase in period is recommended, where you eat a totally or mostly plant based diet for a week or more before starting your fast. P'shaw, I don't need it.  Uh, wrong.  John ended up with a severe headache that wouldn't quit and I could barely drink the juice without vomiting.  It seems our systems were so used to processed crap and sugars that our bodies freaked out a little.  Nothing horrible, mind you, we didn't need medical attention or anything.  We did decide, however, to take a step back and reevaluate.

We did fast for 36 hours, during which I lost 4 pounds.  Four pounds in a day is crazy, even for someone my size, and I'm a big girl.  We also found an amazing breakfast drink, which I'll share now because even if you have no interest in juice fasting it's a delicious and super nutritious breakfast alternative.

6 carrots
1 large red pepper
1 lemon
2 large navel oranges


Holy yumminess!  I'm drinking it right now and mmmmmMMM!  It's the most beautiful bright orange and inspite of being mostly veggie juice, it tastes like fruit juice.  I'm not kidding, start drinking this for breakfast!

After a few hours of hashing it out, we decided to break our fast and to instead replace one meal a day with juice and totally change our diet otherwise.  We aren't going totally plant based as neither of us has any desire to be vegetarian or vegan, but we're done eating crap.  We also realized that juice fasting in the dead of winter in Kentucky is extremely expensive.  We intend to do at least a 3 day if not longer once the farmers markets open later this year.

We went through our pantry and threw away everything that was white or processed.  We kept a few things simply because we thought they "weren't that bad" and we aren't in the financial position to just throw away perfectly good food.  And don't worry, we're not throwing away good food, we're donating it.

I want to talk about one thing specifically.  Now, we only fasted for a little over one day, right?  You would think that nothing would have changed.  That's what we thought.  Wrong.  Last night we were hungry and one of the things we kept was some Ragu pasta sauce.  The ingredients weren't great but we only had one jar and figured we'd just never buy it again.  Holy crap.  It was revolting.  Just one day without refined sugars and that sauce tasted like someone had poured sugar on our spaghetti.  It was so gross I can't tell you.  It was all the proof I needed that the shit they are forcing down our throats is awful, deadly and criminal.   A bit later I walked into our bedroom and John was sitting there with a box of wheat thins and told me to eat one.  It tasted like a cookie, I kid you not.  We simply do not realize the amount of sugars that are contained in nearly everything we eat.  It's infuriating.

Good god I'm long winded.  Ok well I'm done for now.  The TL;DR is this.  We broke our fast but are changing our lives.  And between the calorie counting I was doing prior and this overhaul I weigh less than I have in years.  We have a long way to go but we're moving in the right direction!  I encourage anyone who stumbles on this to go through your cupboards and fridge and get rid of the garbage.  It shocking how little remains, but real food tastes so much better! (Except for Kale, screw that mess.)

Drink number one - It begins

Well, John and I have just finished drink number one.  I promised to tell the real story through every step of this journey, so here goes.

First, what we made.  Keep in mind that we're juicing for two, so if you try this recipe you'll have to cut it in half.  This is the Mean Green juice that Phil drinks if you watch the documentary Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead.

Mean Green for 2

8 stalks of Celery
8 Kale leaves (the recipe calls for more but our Kroger only had one bunch)
4 medium Green Apples
2 Cucumbers
1 Lemon
1 small piece of Ginger

We were eager to know how well our juicer would work.  We got 1.5 quarts from this recipe, which I think is quite good considering we didn't get much from the kale or the apples.  I didn't expect much from the Kale, since an auger juicer is much better for leafy greens but we couldn't afford that type.  I'm not sure about the apples.  They were small, and we have some larger ones to use next time. So we got about 3 servings, which I think is quite good.  Once we were finished running everything through the juicer, we got greedy and decided to try to run the pulp through again.  Don't do that.  Nothing broke, nothing went horribly wrong, but we ended up getting a lot of mushy crap in our juice.

Once we poured our drinks, I took a sip and nearly threw up.  I got a stringy piece of something and while I'm not a super squeamish person, weird texture is the one thing I can't deal with.  So I ran downstairs and strained my juice.  It was much easier to stomach the rest after that.  Don't get me wrong, it was still bad.  It was quite awful, actually.  I don't like vegetables. I just don't. I wasn't raised eating any fresh veggies and the ones I was forced to eat gagged me.  I like carrots, peas, and corn.  But in liquid form? Ugh.  But we both got the nastiness down and did a nice little fist pump to celebrate.  Now we're just sitting here waiting to see if it stays down.  I'm not so sure.

I can tell you I've never been so happy to brush my teeth.  I wanted that taste out of my mouth pronto.  I will probably be brushing a LOT.  We are definitely having a more fruit heavy drink next.  And I don't know if we'll be able to continue using kale.  For one thing, we bought our grocery store out of it and have used it all already.  Also, our machine didn't get much from it.  Third, it's horrible.  I expected it to be bad but it's really really nasty.  We'll be using spinach for our next green drink.

I'll check in later today with more news and to see how we fared throughout the day.  All I can say right now is that I'm thankful to have been a phenomenal beer chugger in my younger days, because that's the only way I got this one down.