Juice, anyone?

So EVERY SINGLE TIME I watch a food-related documentary, I always think to myself “I should do that. I want to do that,” in regards to eating clean, or let’s face it, just MORE clean, since in times of stress I tend to eat to my heart’s desire, translation carbs, sugar, carbs, sugar, carbs, sugar…oh, and a diet pop. (prefer the word soda? Meh, I’m from the midwest baby, deal with it.)

Anyhoo…the most recent documentary I watched was “Hungry for Change.” Much like the others (Food Matters, Food Inc, Fat Sick & Nearly Dead, and Forks Over Knives) they extolled the virtues of eating clean, as much raw as possible, as much green leafies as possible, and the powers of juicing. I even bought a juicer about a year and a half ago. It’s a nice Breville, similar to the kind shown in “Forks…” But of course, keeping a ton of veggies on hand isn’t as simple as it seems, and I began juicing less and less. The girls love it, they L-O-V-E some strawberry juice. Frankly, who wouldn’t?

A few things I gained from the documentary:

• Diet pop is evil. I already knew this, which is why last year I kicked my 13-year habit of having 3-4 20 ounce bottles of diet pepsi a day. Don’t judge, this might be the very first time I actually ADMIT how much I was drinking. I still miss it. I occasionally want some. After watching this documentary, I plan to never go back.

• Personal affirmations can change the soul, especially for you Negative Nellies out there. (One of whom just might be me, sometimes.) The one mentioned in this documentary goes something like this: “I love myself, unconditionally, right now.” I’ve made a promise to myself to reaffirm this, everyday, twice a day in the mirror.

• And of course, leafy greens are the best way to go. Of course it’s not easy, and of course convenience foods are easy (because they’re MADE to be easy,) but they’re also made to sustain you unnaturally, and unnatural is unhealthy. This is not earth shattering news by any means, but acknowledging the behavioral aspect behind some of the choices I personally make hit home with me.

I’m sure I’m forgetting some, but those are some takeaways I had. If you haven’t seen it and are into those kind of food docs, I highly recommend it.

And so fast forward to today, and I’m on Day 3 of juicing! My “plan” is basically juicing twice per day for meals, and then eating one meal. Right now given the work day and my dislike of juice that isn’t fresh, it’s working out to be breakfast and dinner are juice, and I eat lunch. My week one goal is to do this for 7 days, and we’ll go from there. Here’s what I’ve noticed so far:

• Not so much before today, but as of this morning, I feel so energized! Like “woo-hoo” super good feeling

• The first two days I found myself feeling sick to my stomach around mid-morning. I chalk that up to my usual mornings that involve a fairly decent size breakfast and sometimes a mid-morning snack. It’s been less and less each day.

• Yesterday I noticed a metallic taste in my mouth. My friend Rabiya suggested it might be from detoxing? I guess, although am I really detoxing if I’m still eating in the middle of the day? I’m not eating CRAP, that’s for sure…but whatever.

• HOLY SHIT. There’s a lot of….well….I guess there is a cleanse of sorts going on, let’s just put it that way. TMI (too much information)? Well I guess the whole point of blogging and telling you about my juicing adventure is to provide the information…I mean who knows, maybe you stumbled upon this blog when googling “juicing,” who knows. (SIDE NOTE: I just noticed my spell check mark up googling…I think we can all agree that googling is now a verb, right?)

So anyway, all is well. I plan to get some running over the weekend when my schedule permits. That’s another blog post for another time. It will be interesting to see how that goes. I assume I will just add more juices to my day, or maybe a little more food to my one meal. Whatever. I’ll figure it out. I’ll let you know how it’s going.