January 2012

Well this month has gone by pretty quickly so I figure I should sum up the month before it comes to a close.  I started the month off staying strong as a non smoker in 2012.  I made it thru New Years Eve with my family and friends who are smokers and then headed home to enjoy the rest of my vacation time with my son. 

Early January found me back at work struggling to start off a juice fast on my own after being a fan of the FatSickandNearlyDead documentary film.  I failed on my first night of my solo juice fast and came home and found pleasure in my left over chicken quesadillas from the New Years Eve party.

I stumbled across the updated website for a blog I subscribe to – it used to be rawradianthealth.com, but she updated her site to radiancecentral.com.  After looking over the new site I discovered she (Natasha St. Michael) was hosting a 10 day juice fast that you could sign up for and it was only $20.  I signed right up and with her wealth of information had great success with my 3 day pre fast diet, 10 day juice fast, and 3 day post fast diet.

After the fast I was undecided about my future diet.  I was leaning toward a raw food diet because I felt so unbelievably great coming off of my juice fast.  I looked into raw cookbooks and vegan cookbooks and things started to get complicated for me.  A lot of raw food recipes call for dehydrators, high speed blenders, etc.  I didn’t have the money to invest in all of those things and with having an 8 year old son I knew that I had to keep my options open to include him on this journey. 

I continued to keep myself educated and stayed with a mainly raw food diet and definitely continued no meat and no dairy.  I had a taste of feta, pasta and imitation crab on my off day, but other than that I stayed strong as much as possible with my dietary concerns. This brings us to the third week of January and I found myself watching the movie Forks over Knives – another documentary – that I was referred to by one of the several juice fasters and their video journals on YouTube. 

Forks over Knives is a documentary about two medical doctors and their personal journeys and discoveries leading to the conclusion that food is our ultimate medicine.  Food and nutrition can compel the body to heal itself from any disease or chronic condition that can be present in the body.  These doctors based their research on a whole foods, plant based diet.  It includes raw foods, whole foods and some whole foods cooked in their most basic form.  I decided this was the route for me to take with TomTom – no special appliances needed for this one.

I am starting the last week of January with a decision on how I will approach the remainder of 2012.  I will stick with a whole foods, plant based diet.  No meat.  No dairy.  I will also continue to incorporate raw foods and recipes and juices into my diet in an attempt to smoothly transition myself and TomTom into a healthier future. 

TomTom can’t handle his dairy anyway and his allergies are off the chain right now because I haven’t been giving him his daily dose of zyrtec.  I am contemplating giving him some each day as the allergies continue to present themselves.  I know he needs to be off of it for at least one week to get it out of his system and it has only been about three days.  I am not enjoying watching him suffer and may have to continue giving him the zyrtec but maybe less often.  I haven’t come to a decision on that yet because we are playing it day by day.  Therefore it is my conclusion that if I am restricting my son from dairy, I am restricting myself.  That’s only fair, right?

Good news – I was able to find all of the ingredients I needed for some vegan and raw food recipes right here in Covington at Springs of Life.  This is great news because I don’t have to rely on driving into New Orleans to find the things I need for our every day diet. 

I was also able to find some really great recipes from another blog – tofuguru.  She is another intelligent and talented young lady who has greatly helped me confirm my journey into vegan food.  I don’t feel like I am lacking anything.  Yes, the ingredients are some times strange and foreign to me, but I don’ have any serious complaints yet about eating vegetable protein or banana ice cream with chocolate drizzle.  It has all been excellent tasting food!

I am also considering doing a 10 day juice fast at the beginning of every month until I feel like I have made some real progress over the years of nutritional damage I have caused my body.  February is right around the corner and I know I have done it once so I don’t see why I can’t do it again.

Not to mention I lost about 10 pounds on my January juice fast and have managed to keep it off and add another pound to that total even with all the food I am eating!  That’s a pretty sweet bonus too.

I plan to go to the doctor at the end of February to have him check up on my blood pressure and lab work.  Just to make sure everything is moving in the right direction.  This will also prove to be further evidence to me that I am on the right path.  Everything is very exciting and new to me right now and I hope it continues that way as I make my way into February and all the new things I have to learn in life.

Day 10 of Juice Fast

DAY 10!!!!

I cannot express how proud I am of myself for completing my 10 day juice fast.  I never imagined I would be able to do it.  The key was definitely taking it one day at a time and staying away from cooked foods or situations that involved cooked foods.  This has been an eye opening experience for me in so many ways.  I have learned so many new things about nutrition and overall care for my body that I had never known the previous 36 years of my life.  This was incredible.

Tomorrow I get to break my fast.  I will start out with either a fruit juice or a green juice in the morning.  Then for lunch I have already balled up two personal sized watermelons that are chilling in the fridge.  I can have as much of that watermelon as I damn well please!  I might also throw in a juice from Vitality if I have the time at lunch.  Dinner….oooooooo dinner… Dinner will be a huge, humongazoid, gigantor salad with all the fixings I want from seeds and sprouts to bell pepper, onion, carrots, cauliflower, cucumber, broccoli and anything else I manage to find at the store tomorrow.  Then I am going to drizzle it in various raw food dressings to see which ones I like the most.  I might even bathe the salad in the stuff if it is nonfat all raw ingredients.

As for today I tried to stick to some of my favorite juices to remember why I started on this journey in the first place.

Breakfast Juice: Beet, Celery, Cucumber, Beet Root Tops, Apple, Ginger

Lunch Juice: I made Dan the Man’s Green Life Juice and chugged it down: Spinach, Cilantro, Kale, Celery, Apple.

Fruit Juice: I made a recipe I found online called Perfectly Sweet: Carrots, Orange and Grapes.

Results of my juice fast:

I can do anything I put my mind to is my number one result.

I lost 10 pounds!  Woo Hoo!

My face is absolutely gorgeous – my skin is glowing, I haven’t worn anything but mascara and lip gloss all week, it is smooth and rosy and I wouldn’t give that up for a chocolate shake.

I have learned so much about my diet, my nutrition and my body.

I still have my itchy psoriasis. I am hoping that by continuing raw for another 15 days after the fast it will help diminish the psoriasis.

All in all I have really enjoyed this experience and can’t wait for my next journey of finding raw recipes all over the internet. My favorite so far is for chocolate coconut ice cream.  YUM!  I start my reboot diet on Monday of next week.

My video journal

Day 9 of Juice Fast

My patience is fleeting.

I tried to be a patient, laid back parent with my son tonight, but the more I see how much he has managed to approach his project for school with laziness and without any care whatsoever I am done with it.  I am so done.  I can’t even write about this anymore because it just keeps making me angry.

I am at day 9 and I want rest.  I want to stay in my bed all day and cover my head and do nothing – no thinking, no hearing, no distractions, no one to bother me.  I just want to be… under my covers and in my cocoon of nothingness.  I’m done.

I can’t get rest.  I can’t get peace and quiet other than the hour I rush home from lunch and make my juice.  I am craving the quiet and the calmness of the level my body is running at right now, but my life doesn’t allow that to happen and it is starting to piss me off.

As for today I am still on the border of being done with juices.  For breakfast I made a favorite juice of mine from before all this that called for beets as the base.  I used some golden beets that I had bought instead of red beets that I normally use in the recipe.  It was ok and I drank most of the 2 cups of juice.

Breakfast Juice: Celery, Cucumber, beets, ginger, apple

Lunch Juice: I did the Raw V-8 recipe again that I did on Day 8 but I halved the ingredients so it didn’t yield as much juice.  I only drank about one cup of the 3 cups it yielded – wasted juice and I felt horrible about it.

Fruit Juice: Orange and Apple.  I really wanted that sweet taste back that I missed so much from my hand squeezed orange juice of the past.  I juiced about 8 oranges in a citrus juicer and 8 apples.  I mixed the juice so in my cup it was 1/2 orange, 1/2 apple and again with the tangy taste and not so much sweet.  What is going on with my taste buds? 

I am seriously craving something sweet – just that sweet taste – not necessarily a bad sweet food, but just a nice sweet piece of fruit.  I hope it isn’t lost forever.  I am also seriously craving pizza, or a Lakeview Harbor Steak Burger.  And then I will start stressing about if I am ever going to allow myself that type of food again.  How will I be able to do our annual mardi gras feast at Lakeview Harbor and not eat the Steak burger and heaping loaded mashed potato?  Next thing I know I’m biting my nails and all wigged out about not getting to eat it ever again.

Why do I want it?  Because it tastes soooooooooooo good.  One of the best burgers I have ever had and that is why I always plan on going to eat there before the Endymion parade.  Am I not going to drink too?  Drink alcohol that is?? I know I can live without it, but I like to have a drink every now and again to help step back from my life and enjoy the good times.  Am I going to give that up too? 

Why do I stress out over not being able to eat these foods or drink again in the future?  I know they are not good for me at all, but there is still that wanting.  It’s crazy? !? I don’t get it.

Today my juice fast group video was about breaking the fast.  This is something I didn’t really want to think of until the morning of the 11th day.  I didn’t want to be thinking about what I am going to eat and when for the next 48 hours because it makes it so much harder to cope.  The rule of thumb is that I wake up on the 11th day and have a breakfast juice – great, more juice – and then for lunch I can eat as much of one type of high water fruit as possible.  Watermelon.  I want watermelon.  I want lots of watermelon.  I want to eat so much watermelon that I feel sick and burp watermelon flavor.  And of course I can also have a green juice for lunch.  Then for dinner I can have a big, huge, enormous, beautiful salad.  I am going to be dreaming about this salad for the next day and a half.  It is going to have romaine, and broccoli, and cauliflower, and carrots, and radishes, and onion… ooooooo onion, and big chunks of green bell pepper, and God help me… salt and pepper!  I am almost in ecstasy just thinking about it.  I will have to photo it and post it on my blog.  Then I will find a salad dressing that I can make from raw fruits and veggies and slather it – bathe it – coat my salad with it.  Then I am going to sit and be in complete euphoria as I savor every single bite and chew.

Aaaaaahhhhhhh.  I have to stop that.

I really want to have my favorite juices tomorrow so that I get over these issues I am having with juice right now.  I will have to think about that before I go to sleep tonight.  I am exhausted and don’t have time to make a video journal tonight.  I will make one as a closing for my 10 day juice fast tomorrow.

Until then….

Day 8 of Juice Fast

So close to victory!

Only two more days and I have finished this goal I have set out for myself.  I’m in that final stretch and I can see the finish line and it is nothing but strength and persistence that will help me soar through it!

Today was a good day with juicing.  I didn’t write down my juice menu before bed last night, I just played around with it in my head and decided to go with a carrot juice base today because I hadn’t done that one in a few days.

Breakfast Juice: Carrot, Pear, Cucumber, Celery, Collard Greens – made about 2 cups of juice

Lunch Juice – Raw V8 recipe from prettysmartrawfoodideas blog.  It called for carrots, beet, tomatoes, spinach, cabbage, red & green bell pepper, celery, onion, garlic, kale and chili pepper to taste.  This made over 4 cups of juice and I drank at least 3 of them. It was very good and had much more flavor than most of the juices I had been drinking.

Fruit Juice: Watermelon, nectarines, peach

The fruit juice tasted really tangy to me today and others said they tasted the sweetness to it.  I wonder if my taste is changing from the juice fast?

Today I had a negative confrontation with people that are really close to me.  I’m going to leave out all the juicy details because I’m not trying to put anyone down, but I was definitely in no mood for it being 8 days in to my juice fast.  How often are we affected by the negative things that people who are close to us say to us?  How often do we let those things run around and around inside our heads?  Why do people need to be hurtful and say things like that to you?  What ever happened to just talking instead of trying to post blame or curse at you and put you down?  I couldn’t handle it.  I got my things together and exited the building as quickly as possible.  I still don’t know what to do with it now other than just move on and put it behind me.  I have no fault in what happened and I have to let go of the things that were shouted at me. 

Along with changing my diet and health in the future I also need to take closer look at the environment that my life takes place in and think about where I want to be in the future. This is an excellent thing to happen because my juice fasting group gets to set goals for their future today!  I guess I should get started working on that now.

My video journal

What to expect when Juice Fasting – Part 9

The point.

Why I made these videos and how I hope it might help you if you are considering a juice fast.

The End

What to expect when Juice Fasting – Part 8

Clean up, clean up, everybody every where!

Clean up, clean up, everybody do your share!

Cleaning the Mess

What to expect when Juice Fasting – Part 7

I went back to the kitchen to make my fruit juice for dessert.  I wanted to share that with you and prep you for the clean up required after you make your juices.

My favorite time of day - Fruit Juice!