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| O'Shea "Ice Cube" Jackson has nothing on my family pics. |
Day 41 (of 45). Picture Day. Four-plus more days to go! I remember back
when I hit the 30-day mark, thinking that there was no way I could stick it out
for this long. And…here we are! I celebrated crossing over the 40-day mark this
morning by cleaning out some of the junk mail in my inbox. As of this morning,
I will no longer be receiving regular emails from Casual Male XL, Destination
XL, Living XL, or Weight Watchers. It’s well past time to discontinue my
e-subscriptions, I think! By God’s grace, I’m never, ever going back to any of
those places again.
This weekend, my wife’s family got together for family
picture day. I can’t remember a family picture session that I didn’t absolutely
dread, so this one has to have been the first. Mentally, whenever I knew we
were taking family pictures, I would tell myself that I had to lose weight
before the Big Day. I think I would start out with a healthy meal choice or
two, that day, before giving it all up by eating a whole pot of something for
dinner to make up for my lack of food the rest of the day. That would go on for
about a week before I just gave up trying to do anything. The end results were,
shall we say, less than ideal.
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| The "before" family pics. |
I had to come to a realization about myself last year, and
it came when I was sifting through pictures of myself. I always thought that
everyone else looked exactly how they look in pictures, but for some reason I
looked fatter than I actually was. Maybe it was the way I held my head that
somehow brought my extra chins out? Do you hold your chin up, like a thug in a
mugshot? Or do you hold it down, like a stalker in a mugshot? Either way, I
could never get it quite right. [Maybe I just needed to get arrested more
often?]
After years of avoiding the camera, and being mad at my wife
for posting pictures with me in them on Facebook, I’m actually eager to get in
front of somebody’s iPhone and pose. I want to memorialize this time in as many
pictures as I can, as clear reminders to myself for later on, when it gets
tougher for me to remember that there’s a chronic overeater locked deep inside
of me, trying desperately to re-gain control of my subconscious.
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| The "after" family pics. Now I'm *truly* happy! |
Oh, and running. Not on the treadmill – REAL running. I went
outside for a four-mile jaunt Sunday afternoon, and I remembered very quickly
why I missed the feeling of being out in the open air. It’s sooo much easier to
keep yourself going when you have physical markers ahead of you. Even better
when the road is fairly flat! My route yesterday took me along a couple of
hilly places, which actually seemed much steeper than they actually were when I
got there. (Isn’t that always the way it goes?)
Also, I’m definitely going to have to get used to running
with this new body. I think I can push myself at a much faster pace than I’m
used to going. At one point near the end of the run, I encountered one of the
last hills. I decided that, rather than slowing down as I went up the hill,
that I was going to all-out sprint up the hill. Ya know what? After I made it
over the hill I wasn’t even breathing all that hard! Then, at the end of my
run, I did another all-out sprint. This was nearly four miles into it all, and
I still felt like there was plently left in the tank. I thought to myself, “Humph!
That means I could have been going faster all this time!” Trying out this new
theory today before we leave. [UPDATE: The second run wasn’t as good as the
first run, mainly because I had a little bit of tendinitis in my knees. Which
is never fun. I did manage to run the first three miles without stopping
(albeit very, very slowly), which is a victory of sorts.]
The battle against Fat Me resumes in earnest on Saturday,
with a pretty large test. My wife is planning a 40th birthday party
for me, one about which I know absolutely no details, other than that it lasts
from 7 to 10 that evening. Special occasions like this have traditionally been
easy justifications for me to forget everything I had been doing to lose weight
and just stuff myself silly in the name of a good time.
This time, however, I have help. I’m transitioning away from
juicing with a daily fruit smoothie and lots of raw veggies, as well as a neat
little system I found completely by accident, called Lean Habits. Basically, it’s
four core principles that you’re supposed to work on one at a time in order to
promote fat loss and keep people like me in control of their eating habits
until it becomes natural not to eat poorly, or overeat. These principles will
help me to avoid eating mindlessly, or just because I feel like I’m “starving”
(which is usually just a sign for me to drink more water anyway).
Probably the biggest challenge for me will be to eat 3 or 4
times a day without snacking. It is quite a change from the timeworn philosophy
of eating 5 or 6 small meals over the course of the day to keep your metabolism
stoked, which is what I was planning on doing. Georgie Fear, the creator of the
Lean Habits system, presents a ton of scientific evidence to support her
theories. Peer reviewed articles and the like. I’ve only read the preview so
far, but my copy of the book is waiting at home for when we arrive later today!
Well – it’s on to the FINAL INSTALLMENT of my Juicevember
Flashbacks for you! I will let you know a little more about what happened
immediately after the fast, as I transitioned over to solid foods, tomorrow.
Meanwhile, enjoy!
Since then, I have eaten a whole-food, plant-based diet and lost a total of 150 lbs. and counting. I hope you are able to benefit from my struggles. Enjoy, and feel free to leave a comment!
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| It's not officially Christmas until I've heard the first notes of this album. |
Juicevember 29th – Next Steps. Okay everyone – now that Thanksgiving is officially over it is now acceptable for you all to listen to Christmas music. For me, the holiday season doesn’t start until I hear those first few strains of Frank Sinatra’s iconic album: “I love those J-I-N-Geeee-L-Eeeee Bells, Oh!” And I can’t get through the season without hearing Donny Hathaway’s “This Christmas,” either. Among many other favorites, but now it’s okay to think about those great songs. Feel free to share your favorites in the comments section below!
Tree shopping with the family went about as smoothly as it ever has. Last year I know I spent like 20 minutes threading ten miles of twine through our tree and around our car doors, just to make sure the tree didn’t go flying off in the middle of I-70 or something. This year we found a place that took care of that part of it for us. What we didn’t remember from last year, however, was that our stand required a rather wide and deep hole to be drilled into the bottom of the tree trunk. My little corded Black and Decker wasn’t nearly enough for the job, so we had to break down and buy a new stand. I’m really looking forward to seeing my daughters’ delight as they decorate this year’s tree, and I’m counting down the days before my two-year-old daredevil of a daughter pulls it down, bulbs and all.
I can’t believe that November is almost over! I went shopping today for the ingredients for my first solid meals after Juicevember, and I’m excited to begin to live to eat. I’m planning on counting food preparation as joy, rather than rushing through that process to get to shoveling a buncha stuff into my pie-hole. Along with the vegetable soup I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I’ve got some sesame seeds to make my own tahini, and the ingredients for my own hummus. I had to special order chickpea miso for my cheese, so I’m holding off on that until that last key ingredient comes to our house. In the past, I would have gone forward with making the cheese without it, and believe me, I thought about doing just that when I realized that neither Whole Foods nor Lucky’s Market had the kind of miso I need for the cheese. However, I realized very quickly that there is absolutely no rush to turn the raw sunflower seeds into cheese, because they won’t go bad for awhile.
I sit here in utter amazement as I take stock of where I’ve come from since the beginning of the month. There is no way I could have made it through a month of juicing without the Holy Spirit guiding every step of my path, and there’s no reason for me not to rely on Him to get me through this transition to solids as well. Not to mention the fact that I’m coming up on a pretty hectic next few weeks of school, with exams to write and grade, and a couple of lengthy papers both to start and finish before Christmas rolls around. It would be extraordinarily easy to lapse back into eating out of convenience, and completely understandable as well. I’m going to take the feeling I have right now about my next meal, which is not soon (but that’s okay), and apply it to those many late nights in a row I will inevitably face. This, too, shall pass! #juiceon
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Tomorrow, it's "back to liiiiiife, back to real-uh-teeee," for all of you fans of Soul II Soul. Mental preparations for the coming school year, and the coming battle against my natural inclinations. Thanks for reading!
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