Sunday, September 30, 2012
Day 4, Wow!
Today was amazing! I slept in till 6:40 am, I have been getting up between 6 and 6:20 but I figured its sunday I'll get a few extra winks. Every thing I have heard about day 4 is true! I feel great! My mind is much clearer then it has been, and I have a lot of energy. My first impression was to take it easy and not over do it. I'm not eating after all, but that impression quickly gave way to another, do something! Today we went to Reading to run a couple errands, then cam home got the pick up to go get a couple chairs and a couch that someone had set on the corner with a sign that said free, after that I came home and mowed the yard. Now I dont have a regular yard it takes over an hour to mow and I don't have a riding lawn mower. After that I decided to go for a jog, man did that feel good! Like I mentioned before I am doing a training plan and it has you run intervals. I found myself pushing the running intervals longer and longer I even skipped one of the walking intervals all together. Got done a felt so good I almost wanted to go again. Then when I got home I decided that I would rearrange my office. Finally at 11pm I decided I would go to bed. I could get used to feeling like this!
Saturday, September 29, 2012
Day 3, A Very Busy Sabbath
So day three was Sabbath and not just a normal Sabbath for me either. Today after church I conducted a church training and took 22 church members out on outreach for two hours. Between church and the training there was lunch at the church. Oh man did it smell good! I tried to hide in the sanctuary until everyone was done and ready to get started but the smell found me there. I made it through though. Heres the crazy thing about today, I only juiced once, and I felt great almost all day!
The only explanation is that today was just a blessing from God. To go all day on one juice and to have as much energy as I had to teach and then go run around on the streets for two hours is nothing short of supernatural. I was reminded today of a very important lesson that God has been teaching me lately. That is to be mindful of my words because they impact my reality. Towards the end of the day I started to feel a little tired no more then any other busy Sabbath, but I started whining a little bit about not having any juice all day, and I really started to get grumpy. Finally I realized what I was doing and blew it off and went on.
Attitude and expression are a big part of life in general but when your juice fasting they can really help you out. If you don't want to juice fast then don't why do something by choice that your just going to whine about the whole time? it is just going to make the experience that much more unbearable. Conversely, in life when your faced with something you dont want to do but have to, don't complain about it, it really doesn't help at all. Be positive, if you speak positive your outlook on the situation will change.
The only explanation is that today was just a blessing from God. To go all day on one juice and to have as much energy as I had to teach and then go run around on the streets for two hours is nothing short of supernatural. I was reminded today of a very important lesson that God has been teaching me lately. That is to be mindful of my words because they impact my reality. Towards the end of the day I started to feel a little tired no more then any other busy Sabbath, but I started whining a little bit about not having any juice all day, and I really started to get grumpy. Finally I realized what I was doing and blew it off and went on.
Attitude and expression are a big part of life in general but when your juice fasting they can really help you out. If you don't want to juice fast then don't why do something by choice that your just going to whine about the whole time? it is just going to make the experience that much more unbearable. Conversely, in life when your faced with something you dont want to do but have to, don't complain about it, it really doesn't help at all. Be positive, if you speak positive your outlook on the situation will change.
Friday, September 28, 2012
Day 2
Waking up at 6am I felt great! Got up had worship drank some of that lemon/cucumber water and some greens. Then I made some juice, Today the plan called for just Pineapple juice. So I guess this is where I will part way with the plan. I threw in carrots, a sweet potato, beets, spinach, apples, ginger, and some strawberries. It wasn't my finest juicing decision but it was tolerable.
Something I havent mentioned yet is how I am preparing the juice for the day. I went out and bought a dozen quart mason jars at Walmart. Each morning I juice for the whole day so that when I get an urge to eat there is juice ready to go. Hunger comes on very suddenly during a juice fast and one of my biggest down falls in the past has been not having juice handy. It is best to use some type of container that you can seal well, it keeps the juice fresh, which also keeps it tasting good.
After I did my juicing I went out for a jog, I am doing a couch to 5k plan using my iPhone. My sister-in-law is using it and showed it to me a couple days ago. Since my bike is out of commission I figure I will work on my running through the fall and winter. I felt pretty good after I finished, but that was about the end of the good feelings.
A couple hours after I got home from my jog my head got very foggy and the detox continued. It was a long busy day but I survived. I m expecting tomorrow to be more of the same. Most of what I have seen or read indicates that it takes 3 or 4 days to get past the detox stage and really start feeling a difference. So we'll see what tomorrow brings.
Something I havent mentioned yet is how I am preparing the juice for the day. I went out and bought a dozen quart mason jars at Walmart. Each morning I juice for the whole day so that when I get an urge to eat there is juice ready to go. Hunger comes on very suddenly during a juice fast and one of my biggest down falls in the past has been not having juice handy. It is best to use some type of container that you can seal well, it keeps the juice fresh, which also keeps it tasting good.
After I did my juicing I went out for a jog, I am doing a couch to 5k plan using my iPhone. My sister-in-law is using it and showed it to me a couple days ago. Since my bike is out of commission I figure I will work on my running through the fall and winter. I felt pretty good after I finished, but that was about the end of the good feelings.
A couple hours after I got home from my jog my head got very foggy and the detox continued. It was a long busy day but I survived. I m expecting tomorrow to be more of the same. Most of what I have seen or read indicates that it takes 3 or 4 days to get past the detox stage and really start feeling a difference. So we'll see what tomorrow brings.
Thursday, September 27, 2012
Day 1
So today is day one of my juice fast. I found a website that has a 5 day guide with recipes so I am gonna follow it along for a while. Todays juice was apple & celery, pretty simple but really good. I also made a morning wake up concoction last night that consists of lemon, cucumber and mint leaves. I just soaked them in water over night and then drank the result, it is very refreshing. I also drank some powdered greens just to kick this thing off, but I am going to phase them out after a couple days.
Over all I felt pretty good for most of the day. By 5 o'clock though I was already starting to detox. My mind got very cloudy and I was irritated. Lauren took it all like a champ. So that's day one not much to it, we'll see what tomorrow brings.
Over all I felt pretty good for most of the day. By 5 o'clock though I was already starting to detox. My mind got very cloudy and I was irritated. Lauren took it all like a champ. So that's day one not much to it, we'll see what tomorrow brings.
Why Juice Fast?
So why have I decided to juice fast? Well, to be honest I am working off of an impression more then anything. Sure it's a great way to lose weight fast. But what I want is to change my lifestyle, I'm not really looking for a quick fix. Part of my problem has always been eating to much. The fast is as much about learning to control my appetite as anything. Detoxing is also something I am interested in, I would like to give my body a little time to catch up and flush out some of those poisons I have put in. So thats why I am embarking on this juice fast.
Wednesday, September 26, 2012
A Halfway Kind of Guy
In January of 2009 I was at the same place I am now. I was Fat! I had weighed more in the past I had topped out at around 335 lb back in 2004. Back then I new nothing about health let alone juicing. I had a girlfriend that drank soy milk and I thought that was just weird. She had also been a vegetarian for a while before we met and that was just really weird! Like so many people I thought that meat was an essential part of the human diet. By the time 2009 rolled around I had already been vegetarian for a couple years and even vegan for a while but after working my way down to 260 lb in early 2008 I had beefed back up to just over 300 lb. by the end of the year.
I was vegetarian but you can be a very unhealthy vegetarian. A vegetarian can eat McDonalds french fries, Taco Bell burritos, or Red Robin vege-burgers. Non of which are healthy but all are "vegetarian" so along with a lot of other various vege-meats and plenty of fast food I was plugging away at life and health. I started running during the winter of 2008, in Idaho of all places, with some co-workers. I even got to where I could run six miles but in spite of all that activity I was putting on the pounds. It was in Idaho that I first tried juicing. I even tried a juice fast back then. I had no idea what I was doing and didn't last but about 2 or 3 days and those were long hard horrible days. But they are the first steps that started me down the road that has led me to today.
On Christmas night 2008 I purposed to my girlfriend, Lauren, who is now my wife. A few weeks later we set a date for the wedding, June 7, 2009. I had under six months to get in shape for my wedding, but I didn't really start working on losing weight till March. In March with 3 months to go till my wedding I set out to lose some weight. Lucky for me I by this point I had moved to one of the healthiest cities in the country, Scottsdale,AZ. To slim down I implemented a extremely active lifestyle, racquetball running, biking, hiking. I also changed my diet a bit, I tried to stay away from fast food and be mostly vegan. I even tried that crazy lemonade diet that was going around that year. By June 7th I had fought off 45 lb and felt great. I was riding my bike 20 -30 miles 2-3 time a week. Climbing at least one mountain a week. towards then end of that time I would take off running in to the desert in the evenings for an hour or so. I was in the best shape of my life.
After the wedding I was determined to keep up my activity. There was just one problem. I was not by nature and active guy, my whole life I have only done enough to get by. In high school playing baseball, I was never in really good shape I just cruised through on my natural ability. When that wasn't good enough anymore I just kind of lost interest in it. I didn't want to have to put any effort in to it. My main motivation for losing the weight before our wedding was so that I wouldn't have to look at my fat self in all the wedding pictures. I was still over weight but it was such a big improvement that when I look at my pictures I feel good about how I looked. But not having that motivation anymore I quickly slid back into inactivity. Shortly after we were married Lauren and I move to Louisville, KY. We joined a gym but neither of us knew what we were doing in a gym so our trips got more and more sporadic till we hardly ever went.
From here the scale started back in the wrong direction, fast forward a couple years I had returned to an omnivorous diet and I was back over 300 pounds. The moment when I realized that I needed to do something was a day or two after a friends going away party when they started posting pictures on Facebook. I was so disgusted with myself I wanted to have them take down the pictures, but I didn't. I even left myself tagged in them so that anytime I looked through my pictures I saw them. That was July 2011, and true to form I didn't make any effort to get healthy. To be completely honest I was horrible depressed during this time, but thats a story for a different time. It wasn't until the early spring of 2012 that I started to take any steps to change my lifestyle. I cut back my meat consumption and started juicing. I also went and bought a scale, I was 328 lb, so at the time the pictures were taken I was probably over my previous record of 335 lb. Through juicing and trying to be a little conscious about what I eat I have been able to get down to 311 lb which brings me to September.
At the end of August my sister-in-law started talking about doing a biggest loser family competition. All of us would like to lose a few pounds and this seemed like a fun way to encourage each other to get healthier. Everyone else lolly gagged a bit but I started into this challenge on September 1. I weighed 311 lb that day. At Christmas we will determine a winner.
I have made it halfway to my ideal weight a couple times over the last 10 years but always end up back where I started from. I don't want to "diet" for a while, I want to change my diet for good. So I have been working towards becoming a true vegetarian, the kind that eats mostly plants, not the kind that just doesn't eat meat. Theirs a big difference. just by making that change along with juicing I knocked off 10 lb by September 27. I am hoping that by the end of the year I will have developed new lifestyle habits and will be well on my way to putting all this extra weight behind me once and for all.
So thats my goal and what has brought me to this point. I didn't set out to juice fast but here I am. I figure as long as I am doing it, why not blog about it?
I was vegetarian but you can be a very unhealthy vegetarian. A vegetarian can eat McDonalds french fries, Taco Bell burritos, or Red Robin vege-burgers. Non of which are healthy but all are "vegetarian" so along with a lot of other various vege-meats and plenty of fast food I was plugging away at life and health. I started running during the winter of 2008, in Idaho of all places, with some co-workers. I even got to where I could run six miles but in spite of all that activity I was putting on the pounds. It was in Idaho that I first tried juicing. I even tried a juice fast back then. I had no idea what I was doing and didn't last but about 2 or 3 days and those were long hard horrible days. But they are the first steps that started me down the road that has led me to today.
On Christmas night 2008 I purposed to my girlfriend, Lauren, who is now my wife. A few weeks later we set a date for the wedding, June 7, 2009. I had under six months to get in shape for my wedding, but I didn't really start working on losing weight till March. In March with 3 months to go till my wedding I set out to lose some weight. Lucky for me I by this point I had moved to one of the healthiest cities in the country, Scottsdale,AZ. To slim down I implemented a extremely active lifestyle, racquetball running, biking, hiking. I also changed my diet a bit, I tried to stay away from fast food and be mostly vegan. I even tried that crazy lemonade diet that was going around that year. By June 7th I had fought off 45 lb and felt great. I was riding my bike 20 -30 miles 2-3 time a week. Climbing at least one mountain a week. towards then end of that time I would take off running in to the desert in the evenings for an hour or so. I was in the best shape of my life.
After the wedding I was determined to keep up my activity. There was just one problem. I was not by nature and active guy, my whole life I have only done enough to get by. In high school playing baseball, I was never in really good shape I just cruised through on my natural ability. When that wasn't good enough anymore I just kind of lost interest in it. I didn't want to have to put any effort in to it. My main motivation for losing the weight before our wedding was so that I wouldn't have to look at my fat self in all the wedding pictures. I was still over weight but it was such a big improvement that when I look at my pictures I feel good about how I looked. But not having that motivation anymore I quickly slid back into inactivity. Shortly after we were married Lauren and I move to Louisville, KY. We joined a gym but neither of us knew what we were doing in a gym so our trips got more and more sporadic till we hardly ever went.
From here the scale started back in the wrong direction, fast forward a couple years I had returned to an omnivorous diet and I was back over 300 pounds. The moment when I realized that I needed to do something was a day or two after a friends going away party when they started posting pictures on Facebook. I was so disgusted with myself I wanted to have them take down the pictures, but I didn't. I even left myself tagged in them so that anytime I looked through my pictures I saw them. That was July 2011, and true to form I didn't make any effort to get healthy. To be completely honest I was horrible depressed during this time, but thats a story for a different time. It wasn't until the early spring of 2012 that I started to take any steps to change my lifestyle. I cut back my meat consumption and started juicing. I also went and bought a scale, I was 328 lb, so at the time the pictures were taken I was probably over my previous record of 335 lb. Through juicing and trying to be a little conscious about what I eat I have been able to get down to 311 lb which brings me to September.At the end of August my sister-in-law started talking about doing a biggest loser family competition. All of us would like to lose a few pounds and this seemed like a fun way to encourage each other to get healthier. Everyone else lolly gagged a bit but I started into this challenge on September 1. I weighed 311 lb that day. At Christmas we will determine a winner.
I have made it halfway to my ideal weight a couple times over the last 10 years but always end up back where I started from. I don't want to "diet" for a while, I want to change my diet for good. So I have been working towards becoming a true vegetarian, the kind that eats mostly plants, not the kind that just doesn't eat meat. Theirs a big difference. just by making that change along with juicing I knocked off 10 lb by September 27. I am hoping that by the end of the year I will have developed new lifestyle habits and will be well on my way to putting all this extra weight behind me once and for all.
So thats my goal and what has brought me to this point. I didn't set out to juice fast but here I am. I figure as long as I am doing it, why not blog about it?
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