I really should have waited a few days before announcing the juice diet thing.
Susan came home with a new juicer Friday night. From what little research we did, it appears they come in three price ranges: the under-$50 “manual” juicer, the $80-$100 “good” juicer, and the $250+ “I want to run a juice bar”. We bought the Jack LaLane $100 model from Walmart … and kept the receipt, just in case. She also brought home a giant pile of fruits and vegetables.
Starting a new diet is always a little scary and a little exciting. I was looking forward to that breakfast glass of juice … and then I saw it. It was green, and not a good, attractive looking green. It was yucky, mossy-pond water green. And let me tell you, it looked 100x better than it tasted. After one drink, I literally began dry heaving. It tasted like a handful of grass. Absolutely awful. I managed to choke down the entire glass full of green garbage, and was willing to stick with it until Susan threw in the towel, but from the first sip I knew we weren’t going to make it 10 days, or even 10 meals. Or maybe 10 hours.
At lunch, we made a slightly different concoction. This one had pears, apples, celery, cucumbers, and once again, kale. Kale tastes like … Mother Nature’s armpit. It was so bad. To get our minds off of food, we got in the car and decided to go run some errands.
Now maybe Susan and pipe in here in the comments, but I’m not exactly sure what happened next. We drove over to the north side of OKC, and then the south side. What should have taken 10-15 minutes seemed to me to have taken an hour. I started getting really confused. I had trouble focusing on the road (did I mention I was driving?) Susan says I asked about the missing hour several times but, I don’t remember that.
When I got home, I ate an egg. At 3pm, I closed my eyes. When I woke up, it was 8pm. I had a horrible headache, my vision was blurry, and I had stomach cramps.
And THEN. CAME. THE DIARRHEA.
Without getting into the details, let’s just say for the next hour or so, I was “The Human Juicer”.
Believe it or not, my experience was better than Susan’s. By the time it was all said and done, she was running a fever, had broken out in a cold sweat, and had started throwing up. Stupid kale.
The best part of this entire experience was Susan’s foresight to hang on to the receipt. Walmart asked no questions when Susan, still a bit queasy, walked back in to return the juicer. I suspect it’s a scenario they’ve seen before.
For dinner last night, I had a big salad with some shrimp on it and it tasted great. If nothing else, our quick jaunt into the world of juicing sure made me appreciate salad a lot more. It wasn’t the thought of a liquid fast that bothered me, it was that god-awful taste. I actually think I could do something like Slimfast for a month with no problem.
Say …
EDIT: I have closed comments for this post, as all it does now is attract spammers.
After losing 70 lbs so far and keeping it off, I can bravely say (then duck) that there’s no way around the old fashioned calories in/calories out. http://www.myfitnesspal.com is free and is very helpful to track that stuff. There’s even a free iphone app. I also work at Weight Watchers which is also very good as no food is limited and if counting every calorie is a bit hard core then they are definitely the place to start. As for the calories out, find something you love and can stick with. Riding, gardening, rowing, running, aerobics, walking the dog, anything as long as you enjoy it and can stick with it. Involve the kids and they will make sure you stick with it too. Not trying to sound preachy and I wish I always followed my own advice, but just sharing what has worked for me. It’s still a struggle but well worth it in the health benefits. I’ve lost far too many people in my family to diabetes and now all my siblings have it and I’m not going to allow it to happen to me if I can help it.
Ive been saying for years that health food can kill ya LOL
I told you so. YUCK.
The fruity drinks can be good, juicing vegetables tastes like dumpster juice.
Your reaction is normal. When I did my research on it a lot of people talked about going through the headaches and stuff at first. It’s a big leap going from real food to a juice fast. It helps to do the maintenance diet first where you replace half your meals with juice for a week or so before going on the full fast.
Sounds like the experience we had about 9 years ago……..somewhere a friend had mentioned the ‘eat every other day / juice only every other day’ diet…..so we did the same – big juicer, loads of fruit & veg (cost a bomb) and spent all day juicing……..by 10pm we were tucking into grilled steaks (‘cos they’re healthier, right?)
Learned about 2 years ago that you cannot beat the calories in / out that Cchristo mentioned, I lost 30lbs in 8 months, but put it all back on again once I stopped using the personal trainer and had to ‘go it alone’……
So 2 years on I’m the heaviest I’ve ever been and am now resolving that I need to change that in any event, but what has been the driving factor is finding out that I need to be tested for the gene that leads to early onset cardiomyopathy as my cousins have it and it might be on this side of the family…..or maybe not? However, as my grandmother died of it aged 42 back in the 1950’s, I’m not hopeful!
Phew! Not sure where all that came from!
I had made some juices and put them in containers in the fridge a few weeks ago. Then I quit juicing and ignored them. A couple of days ago one got knocked over and spilled out and I just left it because I didn’t want to deal with it. Today I cleaned it out, because it was starting to stink up the whole house, and it was probably the grossest 10 minutes of my life.
You had me at “The Human Juicer”. hehe.
Sorry it didn’t work out for you, but I’m actually amazed that you went as far as you did with this.
There are a lot of ways to drop weight and still eat tasty things. Like you, I can’t change my eating habits over night, but a good salad with some shrimp is always good. Just don’t over do it with the dressing. I love me some real ranch dressing, but have since moved to a lite version with less calories and tastes pretty good too.
Hey Rob… longtime reader, first time poster…
If you haven’t seen it already, check out “The Hacker’s Diet”. It’s basically a manifesto on weight loss for hackers by John Walker, the guy who co-wrote AutoCAD.
http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/
Basically, it’s the calories in / calories out thing, but it has good suggestions, good encouragement, and it talks about weight loss in a way that appeals to someone with an engineering / hacker mentality.
Also, it has an excellent (and simple and free) online weight tracker. Just log your weight daily and it will apply a smoothing algorithm so you can see your weight gain/loss trend in the daily noise.
I lost 90 lbs a few years ago that I attribute to that simple tracker. Of course, I reached my goal weight, stopped tracking, and put 100 lbs back on over the next two years. So this summer I’ve started again. Down 36 lbs so far. When I reach my goal weight this time, I need to remember to KEEP WEIGHING IN. As an old boss of mine once told me about a completely different subject, “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.” Apparently, it applies here too.
Anyway, as someone who struggles with weight too, I wish you luck. It is not easy.
All the talk about kale kept making me think of this, at the 1:53 mark…
I just read your posts and it seemd to me like the same thing we did….24hrs after watching the movie (and a LOT of research on juicers) we owned one juicer (an Omega 8006), had another juicer on order (the Breville elite…because it was out of stock everywhere!) and a shopping cart overflowing with friuts and veggies. The difference is, I started adding the juice to my diet slowly. Over the next week I replaced at least 2 meals a day with juice and made a large amount in the morning so that I could sip on it till it was time to make the lunch juice. Today I started my juice fast & I’ll let you know how it goes 60 days from now.
The main thing is to treat the juice as you would any recipe, taste it along the way and see what it needs to make it better. If it were just greens I think I’d vomit too, but if you add carrots and apples and a bit of ginger it can suddenly become yummy (although it doesn’t ever look good). The idea is slowly changing your taste buds by starting out with extra sweet fruit in the mix and slowly increasing the amount of green. Trust me, if you try it that way it becomes much easier! Its a diet change yes, but it doesn’t have to be gross! You can add spices like cinnimon, ginger, nutmeg etc. and they will also make it easier to choke down. Trust me, after a week of simply adding it to your diet, it will start to taste better and better.
Another good trick is to add as many different things as possible. Most of my juice has about an equil amount of fruits to veggies with at least 10 – 15 different ingredients. We too looked up recipes online, and the ones they have up are either boring or gross and don’t give you all the vitamins and nutrients youd get from a glass of my juice. I incourage you to try some on your own! It allows me to drink things I would never eat (like cactus) & I am able to mask the gross flavors with extra yummy fruits.
As for the juicers, we expected to love the breville, but when it came we were disapointed! The Omega (which was also $40 cheaper) juices much slower but you get so much more juice! The breville does NOT juice greens well at all & we found ourselves throwing money down the drain trying to juice spinach and wheat grass, where as the Omega does a wonderful job with greens! The breville is wonderful with apples, oranges, carrots, almost any hard friut or veggie but in order to get the most out of your food (especially while fasting) you need the greens too!
Anyway, enough with my ramble, I’ll let you know how it goes…only 59 more days :)