Monday, April 22, 2013

Juice Fast Day 1/Day 13&14 (lost a day somewhere)

So, as you can see from my title this is the end of day 13 of my juice fast, but it is also the end of day 1.  I was so bad last night.  After blogging last night and talking about going and making some green juice I went to Denny's instead.  I've been having cravings for lots of stuff, but mainly pizza and eggs.  I know this is mostly just my lack of willpower and also the fact that perhaps I didn't make a true commitment.  I thought I had, but considering I started cheating a little bit more each day, starting on day 7, I guess I really hadn't committed fully.  So I really wanted pizza, but if I was going to bother with pizza, I wanted the best, and of course it being the middle of the night, my favorite pizza place (Chi Chi's) was closed.  So the thing I was craving second most was eggs, hence Denny's.  So I got to Denny's and was gonna go all out, "I mean if your gonna cheat, then do it big time", my little devil said, "Have a milkshake and a soda with your eggs, get the mozzarella sticks too!"  But luckily my better side asserted itself and I stuck with eggs, hash-browns, bacon, and iced tea.  Yes I know, not great, but certainly better than what I was tempted to order.  Now I will say, that unlike the cheese or goldfish crackers that I had cheated with previously, this did taste amazing.  It really did hit the spot, but I felt terrible for doing it.  Before, during and after eating.

Now I'm not trying to make excuses or pardon myself or anything, but I think this was inevitable.  I wasn't getting enough juice and was therefore hungry.  I just couldn't stomach the mean green no matter what changes I made.  Yes, I know I could have made other juices, but I was afraid of getting too much fruit.  I was already making a very fruity juice first thing in the morning and felt I should be doing the mean green later in the day but could never finish enough of it.

So when I got home from Denny's I was still wide awake, after all I'd only been awake for about 14 hours.  I felt so discouraged and angry with myself.  I really wanted to do this juice thing because I believe in the science behind it and have been so inspired by other peoples results: Joe Cross of Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead and Mia Sansom from her YouTube channel GFveganlife to name a few.  So I started doing more research.  I had watched several other documentaries a few days ago (Forks over Knives, Hungry for Change, and Food Matters) so I started looking up some of the people from those and found Jason Vale the JUICE MASTER and got a couple of his books and his iphone app 5 lbs in 5 days.  After looking at some of this information I have decided to really commit this time and use this program.  His juice recipes seem a little more palatable.  They have lots of different veggies but not tons of them, instead of 4 stalks of celery it's like 1/2 a stalk, instead of a whole bunch of kale, it's like 1/2 cup of kale.  He gives you 10 recipes for the 5 days, so I decided to go ahead and do the 5 days as exact as I can (assuming I can find everything) and see how it goes.  Then after the 5 days, I'll continue on and substitute if I find I don't like a particular juice.  I also have his "Turbo Charge Your Life in 14 Days" and "Juice Yourself Slim" books that I still need to read, so he'll probably have some more juice ideas in there.

I'm feeling a bit more optimistic.  I know I may run into the same problem of not liking the juice, but I hope not.  He also broke it down into a bit more of a plan which I like.  I was making big batches of juice before, like 40 oz plus, and sipping throughout the day, and I have to admit that by the end of a batch of even one of the juices I like, I was getting sick of the flavor.  I know this means I'll have to juice and clean my juicer more often, or store my juice for longer (of course I was taking so long to drink the juice this may not be any different) but this sounds better to me.  I guess I will find out.

So I stayed awake until about 10am and then slept until 7pm.  I got up and double checked all my produce and then went to Whole Foods for the few things that I was missing.  It took me forever since I don't go there very often and a lot of the things I was buying are things I've never bought so I really wasn't sure what they even looked like.  But I managed to get everything I needed and headed home to make my first juice.  Now Jason wants you to wait a couple hours after waking before you have your first juice.  I'm going to try it for now, but its seems wrong to me.  Everything I've ever heard said you should have your first meal within 30 minutes of waking so we'll see.

So you're supposed to start the day with something he calls a "ginger shot" which is 1/2 a golden delicious apple and a large chunk (at least 3/4") of ginger.  Well ginger and I don't get along all that great and I was afraid to put something that strong on an empty stomach so at 9:30pm I made:

1 fuji apple
1/2" piece of ginger

It made 8oz which is a bit more juice than it's supposed to be, but that's to be expected since I used the whole apple.  It was okay, tomorrow I'll try it with only 1/2 and apple and the same amount of ginger and see if I can handle it.  I'm also going to use a different kind of apple (granny smith or golden delicious and see how that turns out)

I then went directly into making my 1st main juice of the day without washing the juicer.  He calls it the "Turbo with a Kick" and uses 2 golden delicious apples, 1/4 medium pineapple, 1/2 cup spinach, 1/2 lime (peeled), 1/2 stalk celery, 1 1/4" piece cucumber, 1/2" ginger, 1/4 avocado, ice

I made:

2 fuji apples
1/4 pineapple
1 oz spinach
1/2 lime (green color removed)
1/2 stalk celery
2" piece cucumber (slightly peeled)
1/2" ginger

and juiced all that, then I put the juice, 1/2 avocado (it was small), and some ice in my vitamix and blended it together.  It made 40 oz.

It was 10:30pm by the time I was drinking my juice after clean up and everything.  It still takes me a while to prep all the produce, juice and clean up, but I am slowly getting better at it.  I really liked this drink, can't taste my nemesis, the celery, at all.  I could drink this one no problem.  Best "green" drink I've had so far.  I have it again later today and this time I will try it with golden delicious apples like it called for and see how I like it. 

So at 1:30 am I went to make my next juice, the "Natural Energizer", in which Jason puts, 1/4 medium pineapple, 3/4 cup spinach, 1/4 medium cucumber, 1/2 medium zucchini, 1/2" fennel, 15 sugar snap peas, 1/2 lime (unpeeled).  You drink this juice now and again in about 3 hours so I made a double batch and did:

1/2 pineapple
3 oz spinach
7" cucumber (slightly peeled)
.5 oz fennel (I don't tend to like licorice flavor so I was afraid to put in too much)
1/2 large zucchini
40 sugar snap peas
1 lime (green color removed)

made approx 34 oz of juice.

It was 2:45am by the time I was drinking this juice after clean up. I had trouble making this juice.  In the past I've had trouble with strings from the pineapple and spinach getting caught up in my juicer so this time I cut them up into small pieces before putting them in the juicer but I didn't even think about the stringiness of the sugar snap peas.  I was about 2/3 of the way through the peas when I realized my pulp chute was all backed up.  So I stopped juicing and took apart my juicer and unclogged it as best as I could, cut the remaining peas up really small and continued juicing.  I didn't want to wash everything off and lose a lot of stuff.  I always run my juice back through the juicer a second time because the Omega VRT makes a pulpier juice than I like, but if you run it through again it turns out great.  While I was running the juice back through again, the pulp chute got clogged again so I had to take it apart again.  So for the first time ever I ran the juice through a third time, just to make sure the clogged pulp chute didn't send any extra pulp into the juice.  So needles to say, by the time I got everything cleaned up, this juice took forever and it was almost 3am.  At least the 2nd batch is already made for when I drink it again later.  Lesson learned about sugar snap peas.

I don't really care for this juice.  It's certainly not as bad as any of the "mean green" concoctions I was trying to make before but it's not something I'd ever say I liked or looked forward to.  However, with all of my problems making it, I'm not sure it turned out right, plus I modified his recipe a bit.  So I will make it again, and the next time I do (in 5 days) I will make sure to cut up the peas really small, I will use only 30 peas instead of 40 and I might try a bit more fennel, I couldn't taste even a hit of it this time.

So, at 5:30am I had my second serving of the "Natural Energizer" juice.  I was so late drinking my earlier juice (3 instead of 1-1:30) that I postponed this juice to 5:30 instead of 4-4:30.  I have to say, I like this juice even less the second time around.  Still better than my "green" drinks, but had a tough time getting the rest of this one down.  Like I said, I'll give this drink one more try with the correct recipe and hopefully no malfunctions but if it doesn't change drastically I'll have to sub another juice is this spot or find something to add or take away from this one to make it more palatable.

At 8:45am I headed over to my parents house to use their treadmill.  I really need to get more cardio and there's no time like the present.  I started at a 2.0 incline at 1.5mph for 3 min, went to a 5.0 incline at 1.5mph for 30 min, and then back to 2.0 at 1.5mph for 3 min.  I was gonna do 60 min but figured for day one I should probably take it a little bit easy.  I felt great afterwards and knew I could keep going but the real test will be how I feel tomorrow.  Now I kept the treadmill at 1.5mph, but sometimes I was doing long slow strides and others I was doing short quick strides, so I did very my speed.  Basically I had pandora running in the background and walked in tome to the music.

Got back around 10:30am and immediately started making my final juice for the day.  It was the "Turbo with a Kick" juice that we had this morning.  This time when I made it I used golden delicious apples instead of fuji and I added 1.0oz of dandelion greens (I already had those from before I switched plans) This time it made about 44oz and even with my small changes it tasted the same as far as I could tell.  Of course what's important is that it was good.  Had the juice about 11:30am

Now it's 1:30pm and I'm having my chamomile tea before bed.  Yes I know my sleep schedule is screwy but remember I've been up since 7pm yesterday, so 18.5 hours at this point and I'm not asleep yet.  I felt really good today on my day 1 of the new plan.  Way better than I've felt in the previous 13 juice days.  I had a few moments of hunger, but with my awful schedule at the moment I've been letting a bit too much time go between juices.  I'm working on fixing my schedule but it will take time.  I really liked the one juice and the other was drinkable so I had no problem drinking all my juice and I got in plenty of water.  Of course it probably helped that I was awake and out of bed for so many hours too.

I had:

118oz of juice
96oz of water (plus I have more that I take to bed with me)
14oz herbal tea

So way better than I've done any other day.  I'm still a tiny bit burpy and bloated but almost so little that it's not worth mentioning.  Hopefully it will stay that way or go away completely.  Well, of to bed.  Here's hoping I get a nice 8 hours.  Looking forward to day 2!


Stats after 12 days of juicing (and a BIG cheat):

Starting Weight:          230
Starting Juice Weight: 217.2
Current Weight:          211.8
Daily Change: -0.5
Overall Juice Change: -5.4
Overall Change: -18.2
Starting Waist:          45.5
Starting Juice Waist: 42.5
Current Waist:      40.25
Daily Change:  -0.5
Overall Juice Change: -2.25
Overall Change: -5.25

One other stat...according to my scale (it does body fat, I know it's not 100% accurate but still) my body fat % has gone from 46% to 41.6%

I'm actually really surprised that these turned out so good considering my meal at Denny's.  I haven't had a BM since then so that means that food is still inside my system and I still managed to lose.   

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