All-Juiced 7th - FLASHBACK: The Road Home.

Day 38 (of 45) - "Now THERE's a man that knows how to EAT!"

No, I wasn't binge-ing at the local Chinese buffet. Just juicing.

These are words I've been used to hearing in a much different context than I heard in the checkout line at the grocery store today. All my life, that would have been uttered by someone who was witnessing one of my epic throwdowns at an AYCE Chinese buffet, or what I could do with 10 bucks and the McDonald's Dollar Menu. Today, though, was a completely different, much less shameful, story.

I was stocking up for juices and I had a colorful array of fruits and veggies lined up on the conveyor belt, ready to slide their way through the cashier's guiding hands. The guy before me had just finished putting his bright yellow plastic bags into his cart when he shot a casual glance over to my food and blurted out the sentence above like a five-year-old with no filter.

Now, I'm not a food evangelist, but this time I couldn't help sharing the good news with anyone within earshot. I smiled, made a gesture like Vanna White hand-waving over appliances on Wheel of Fortune - only my movement encompassed myself from head to to - and said, "I've lost a hundred and fifty pounds since October eating like this!" 

"Wow - congratulations!" was the guy's reply, as he strolled off towards his car.

Looks like Chumlee slimmed down! Good for him.

Jessie, the kid checking groceries, shot me a look of disbelief. He couldn't have been any more than about 23, and he had a few pounds to lose, by my quick visual assessment. Actually, he reminded me of Austin "Chumlee" Russell from that show on the History Channel, if Chumlee had cut his ratty hair and slimmed down to a manageable weight that allowed him not to have to breathe with his mouth open all the time.

I'm sure Chumlee's a nice person, but I know for sure that Jessie is a nice person. I told him that I'm on a juice cleanse, and that all of this beautifHe asked me how I managed to incorporate meat into my diet, and I told him that I didn't. His face sank a little bit, because he had just finished telling me some of the ways he liked to eat meat and cheese, but I reassured him that he could still eat meat if he felt the need to do it.

"Dear Dr. Atkins: Thanks fer nuthin'. Love, my kidneys."

I told him that personally, my decision not to eat meat had more to do with the fact that my kidneys were shot from years of Atkins Diets and the overproduction of uric acid it had wrought. Giving them a permanent break from having to elevate my uric acid was one of the best things I could have done for my overall health. He said that he was cutting back on his "pop" consumption (yep - we're definitely in the Midwest) and replacing it with unsweetened tea, and that his mom had told him that lemon water was a great way to lose weight as well (as he checked out my lemons).

Little decisions like those will eventually pile up and lead to lasting weight loss, if you really want them to. If not, you can yo-yo diet your way through your twenties and thirties, like I did, and finally figure it out on the doorstep of your forties. Or do it some other way! There's no way I would recommend going this radical with juicing and cutting animal products completely out of your life, unless you were dealing with the same potentially life-threatening conditions I was back in October. However you find it, though - health is sooooo much better than un-health! I mean, I wouldn't even consider myself fully healthy yet, and it already beats how I've ever felt in my life by a long shot.

Speaking of how I'm feeling, with a week left in the juice fast - wow, is it really just that long? - and relieved temporarily of my grad school-related duties, I'm now aggressively seeking ways to make my newfound success into a permanent lifestyle, rather than just a crash-recover cycle. I think I just may have tapped into an amazing resource to that effect, completely unintentionally. More on that front next week.

Meanwhile - I hope you enjoy today's post-Thanksgiving flashback. I made it through dinner and leftovers pretty successfully. Even passed food from one person to the next with only slight pangs of regret as I sipped away at my water. In today's post I'm contemplating what might happen when the REAL battle begins, after the cage of juice fasting has been removed and I'm forced to make consistently good decisions with my eating. The fact that I'm still working on that should tell you all that you need to know on that front, but it's always a good thing to look back on my optimism heading into the battle. Enjoy!!




NOTE: These entries were originally posted on Facebook during November 2014, a month in which I embarked on my first super-extended juice. I began the month with some significant health problems and ended it some 40 pounds lighter! 

Since then, I have eaten a whole-food, plant-based diet and lost a total of 145 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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An open box of these was ALWAYS an empty box...

Juicevember 28th – on the road. We’re back home safely after a wonderful Thanksgiving with my wife’s family. I didn’t mention this at all in my rather abbreviated post from yesterday, but dinner also marked the first time my five-month-old son ate solid food. No – we didn’t hand him a turkey leg and tell him to go to town. Just some rice cereal, served over mama’s milk. He ate it up, and was trying to gnaw on the bowl when it was all gone! The kid has mastered the “eat everything” reflex, for sure. We put him down on the floor to get stuff ready before we left this morning and he rolled over and started gumming whatever was near his mouth. Which, this time, was the leather ottoman. Seeing him Hoover up his first meal made me happy that I chose this month to meet my food addiction head-on. He doesn’t know any better, so he’s going to eat how his daddy eats. If Daddy chooses taste and quantity over health, then that’s what the kids (particularly, the sons) learn. If Daddy models eating for enjoyment, moderation, and health, that’s what they will do.

Road trips have also traditionally been an excuse for me to abandon whatever eating program I’ve been pursuing in favor of bags of whatever I can find at a truck stop and energy drinks (the sugar-free kind, because I’m health-conscious). I found this time around that not many truck stops serve fresh juice. And besides that, it just wasn’t time for me to eat anything yet. Instead of pining over not having that large bag of cashews, or box of Cheez-Its (which have yet to survive more than a couple of days under my watch), I sipped on hot water with lemon and that was about it.

I wanted to do *this* on my previously aching knee.

Yet another victory yesterday afternoon. I noticed while walking up the stairs that I wasn’t actually feeling the pain that I’m so used to feeling whenever I flex or put any weight on my left knee. In disbelief, I got upstairs and tested the knee out by doing a couple of deep knee bends. It’s been several years since I’ve been able to bend it at all without a sickening click and excruciating pain. This time, I felt the click but no pain whatsoever. I resisted the urge to do a couple of Russian dance moves, but I was super-pumped. I’m thinking it was a combination of losing a bunch of weight and feeding my body the nutrients it needed to unblock whatever was causing the knee to lock up like it had been doing for years. Next stop, the squat machine. I can’t wait to get my lower body back into the workout routine!

And I’m scouting out recipes for my first meal on the 1st. I won’t have a ton of time between tutoring appointments to sit down and have the veganmeatloaf like I wanted to, so I’m saving that for Wednesday. Instead, I’m planning on preparing a vegan vegetable soup on Sunday night, then having it chill in the fridge until dinnertime. Another thing I want to have on hand at all times is hummus, but I don’t want to buy the pre-made stuff so I’ve found a couple of easy to make recipes for white bean hummus using cannellini beans. I’m also making a vegan cheese wheel from raw sunflower seeds, soaked overnight. Theoretically, I’m making enough of all of these meals so they last for the better part of the week, so I’ll let you know how it goes. The hummus and “cheese” will be great for small solid meals during the day, just to keep the metabolism going around my juices. The soup will be the perfect filler-upper for dinner, and I’m planning on limiting myself to one bowl per day. Again, that’s where the real battle will happen. I hope I’m ready! ‪#‎juiceon

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Monday will be the FINAL flashback post! That's right - I was off into December after one more post. Can you believe it? Thanks for following me along this journey, and this flashback to a previous extended fast, to this point. Yup - it's all new stuff for most of next week, no pressure. 

Have a great weekend, and I'll catch up with you soon! Peace and blessings to all!!