All-juiced 11th: The Lost Scroll, and the Aftermath.

The lost Juicevember scrolls, found in a cyber-cave online.

Day 42 (of 45). I’m sure you’re probably wondering what happened after I broke my November fast in early December. First off, I blew the dust off the Facebook scrolls and found the “lost” last post from the last day of November, posted on December 1^st. Who knew? Anyway – here that is, really quickly.

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Juicevember 30th – Preparations. I’m counting down the last hour of my 30-day juice fast like it’s New Year’s Day. I would have written this earlier, but I have been in the kitchen preparing my meals for the week since about 4:30 this afternoon. It all started with toasting sesame seeds that became what my wife/taster says is a nice tahini. Then, I drained and rinsed raw cashews that I soaked overnight and blended them with vegetable broth for a little extra fortitude in my vegan vegetable soup.

I made the soup, which my wife says is tasty but a tad spicy for her tastes (I added in a couple of habaneros and a couple of Hungarian wax peppers to the original recipe). Then I made my own hummus from cannellini beans. Tucked my oldest into bed, then finished off a mashed chickpea salad I’ll eat during the day for sustenance. Oh, did I mention that in an effort to reinforce delayed gratification I fasted through my evening juice, while cooking all of this food? I want to make sure the food I prepare on Sunday makes it as far through the week as possible, and I know that if I'm nibbling while making stuff it won't last nearly as long as it would if I held out - or taste nearly as good when, after a night in the fridge, the spices really start to work together to make the dish what it's supposed to be. I’m hoping my efforts will be repaid in tasty, nourishing food.

Another thing I want to avoid is running my taste buds into a rut. When I’ve dieted before I have tended to be very one-track with my food preferences. I’d eat the same dish for weeks at a time once I found out it helped me to lose weight. Of course, this practice completely underscored my addictive behavior, and caused me to miss out on a potentially rewarding exploration of my spice rack. This time, though, I’m planning on changing up the food choices on a regular basis. I have about a week’s worth of soup in the fridge and freezer, but after that I’ll be looking for the next thing to prepare. I know I’ll be making soups fairly regularly, and different types of nut-based cheeses, but other than that I’m open to all kinds of vegan options.


I’m actually not planning on eating that first meal until about noon, so I’ll let you know how it goes! ‪#‎juiceon

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So, that happened. Would ya look at all of that willpower? Don't worry, it didn't last long. My adversary is too crafty to come at me from a direction I was expecting. Instead, he came at me from what I thought was a safe haven. Boy - was I wrong! 

I weighed myself on December 1^st, and checked in at 270.8 pounds, down from 309.8 at the start of the juice fast. That’s 39 pounds lost in 30 days, for all of you scoring at home. I had prepared stuff for lunch and dinner: a mashed chickpea salad and a hearty soup, if memory serves. Oh, right – I have pictures to prove it. I made that 10-spice vegetable soup, with an 11^th spice (habanero peppers) added in. I only put two relatively small ones into a huge pot of soup, but…WHOOOOO! On first taste, I was almost ready to admit that I couldn’t finish the rest of it, but it did cool down eventually. For me, at least. My poor wife is nowhere near a spicy food fanatic as I am, and she couldn’t have any more of it.

Then, a few days in, I knew something was terribly wrong. I weighed myself and I had actually gained a few pounds. How was that possible, I wondered. In hindsight it was extraordinarily easy to see. I was eating a ton of nuts (cashews, mainly, in just about everything) and every recipe I made called for some amount of olive oil. It’s important to get those good fats in when you’re eating a whole food, plant-based diet, but not every meal, and certainly not in the amounts I was consuming.

The upshot was that a week later, I had to post a startling confession on my Facebook page.

Yup, the “golden boy” of good eating habits had packed TEN POUNDS back on…in a week. See? This is why I weigh myself every day. Anyway, I switched up the whole regimen to include many, many more raw veggies and staggered my prepared meals, and my body responded by losing that extra ten I had packed on, plus another five more, in the seven days that followed. The healthy eating train back on track, I continued to stick to the WFPB plan, and the rest is history.

Until the end of the spring semester, when the wheels came off the bus. But that’s another story for another post…

Aaaaand, speaking of weight. Well, I finally weighed in this morning, after not weighing myself at all while I was on vacation. I was tracking my fat loss while we were there, though, and I dropped another percent in the week. So I thought I would be at least in the mid-190s, if not the low-190s, which would set me up well to finish out the fast in the 180s. Which would have been incredible.

Notice how I said, “would have been.”

I stepped on the scale this morning, and staring back at me was this. Again.

I didn’t need to take another picture, because this was the exact same weight as when I checked in before my masters’ degree exam. One stinkin’ week ago.

You mean to tell me that, after a full week of faithful juicing, regular bathroom visits (and sometimes irregular, if you know what I mean), and two long runs without the benefit of a moving rubber road underneath my feet, that I didn’t lose even a single ounce of weight? Not a thimbleful of blubber? Not even an eye-dropper of fluff? Unbelievable!

In the middle of a huuuuuge plateau right now, apparently.

I have hit plateaus (plateaux?) before, and powered through them by sticking to the plan, but a week’s worth of no weight lost, even though I felt like I was losing at the same rate as I have been (about a pound a day), is extraordinarily frustrating. I know that some highly sought-after experts have advocated for NOT weighing yourself every day, but for me, I think it’s absolutely necessary in order for me to make the adjustments necessary to avoid such extended periods of stagnation. Almost the opposite of the old aphorism, “A watched pot never boils.” In my world, a scale ignored returns the favor.

It’s hard for me to be frustrated for long, though. I’m still losing weight at a rate that at this moment is actually greater than a pound a day, even with a big fat zero hanging over my head from the past week. I’ve dropped another 43 lbs. during this fast, bringing my total to somewhere around 150 lbs. lost in total. (Remember that I don’t know how much I weighed at my heaviest, because I literally maxed out my home scale.) Even though I had some serious congestion in my lungs when we were up north, I still managed to get out and run distances I could never have dreamed before – without taking the inhaler that has been absolutely vital for any strenuous workout I've done since I was 10. I’m now having to fold over the 36-inch waist pants and shorts I used to wear when I thought I was doing well and looking slim, and I’m actually about to retire the last pair of 36 shorts still in use. I can't wear the 33-waist pants I just bought without a belt. And I have saggy skin. On the bottoms of my feet! (Among other places, but WOW!)

So – don’t cry for me, Argentina. Or, as Jodie Foster would have said in the weird Appalachian dialect she somehow invented for the movie Nell, “No cay fo’ Nay-uhl.” (Who else remembers Nell?)

[In Liam Neeson's voice] "Don't cry for Nell."

I’m looking forward to eating mostly raw foods and smoothies as I transition back to solid foods, and keeping it simple. One of my biggest mistakes from my first fast, as you just read, was hunting down all of these recipes during the last few days of the fast, then feeling like I had to make every. Single. One of them. For every meal, every day. This time, though, I’ve only hunted down a few dozen recipes (hear me out!) and instead of making them every day, I’m staggering them over the course of, you know, the rest of my natural life. There’s absolutely no rush! Unless something goes horribly wrong, I’m eating this way until I’m no longer able to raise a pair of chopsticks to my own mouth, which means that I’ll have countless opportunities to experiment in a ton of different ways. Also, most of my “meals” will be whole, raw foods anyway. A salad with chopped veggies and sunflower seeds, topped off with homemade, OIL FREE, raspberry vinaigrette dressing, just for example.

We’ve also blocked off certain days as outlets for some of the more adventurous aspects of our culinary exploration. I’m really looking forward to Tofu Thursdays, especially since my wife isn’t a big fan of tofu. Guess what? A few months ago, neither was I. Then, though, I had a tofu scramble at the Heirloom Café on campus, and I was hooked. We’ll also probably try recipes that involve not only tofu but also tempeh, seitan, and other vegan meat-like products on that day. Looking forward to it!

My Lean Habits book came, as I thought it would. Since I’m taking this week off of reading for school, what better thing to do than read that book? More to follow tomorrow. Thanks for reading!

All-juiced 10th - FLASHBACK: The last stop!

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.

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.

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 40^th 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! 

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 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!