I enjoy eating "regular" foods. I love food. I love fast food. I love sugary foods. I love donuts and hamburgers and cake and greasy potato chips. They make me happy. How do I enjoy this world and not let my body be ruined by it?
Yeah, yeah..moderation in all things. Except that I have trouble with moderation. One bite turns into two bites. One treat a day, turns into two treats a day. And then 3, and then 4. Over the years, I've gone on sugar bans. These have always helped me to feel better. And yet, time and time again I start adding it back into my life and in a few years time I am once again in a vicious cycle of craving sugar from the moment I get up until I go to bed at night.
I have always been drawn to people who reap the health benefits of a really good diet. Raw food diets and the like hold an appeal to me because I can see the benefits and believe that the earth holds everything we need for our bodies to work well. However, I don't feel that I could ever maintain a strict lifestyle like that. Actually, I have very little desire to even try a lifestyle like that because I want to be able to enjoy some "bad" things every once in a while. But finding moderation is difficult when I am enslaved by the habits and cravings that I currently have. But, I am ready for a change. My hope is that a Juice Fast will quickly eliminate many of the cravings I have so that I can begin a healthier, more balanced way of eating for the rest of my life so that "one little treat" can just be "one little treat" and no more. My experience with my sugar ban makes me believe I can achieve that if I work at it.
Over the last 2 months, I have slowly improved my eating habits. I started, as always, with sugar. I went off of sugar. I did not go all Nazi and refuse to eat anything with sugar in it, such as graham crackers, or Cheerios. But I did stay away from cookies, cake, candy, sugary cereals or anything deemed "sugary" tasting. I also allowed myself one "Sugar Day" a week, in which I could have treats that day. By giving myself these allowances, I found it much easier to stick to it and stay strong. As the weeks passed, I found that I did not even want sugar on my Sugar Days because I felt so awful after eating it. I crave those treats less and less. Now, I am often satisfied with just a little bit, although I can still feel the cravings lurking inside of me and ready to become uncontrolled at any moment.
As my cravings have subsided, I've started making other changes as well. Eating less high fat meals, adding in more vegetables, etc. I started to track my calories on FitDay.com which helped me to realize how much I was eating. It has been two months and I've been eating healthier. I've lost 15lbs. I'm ready to move to the next step. I believe that next step is Juice Fasting. I believe it will help rid my body of the remaining cravings it has for food that is detrimental to me. I feel that it will help my body to refocus and heal and basically "reset" itself.
I've been reading up on Juice Fasting a lot. On one hand, I think it sounds crazy. One more hyped up"Detox" idea. On the other hand, it seems that anyone who has tried it has great results. It is difficult to find a single person who has tried it and not felt extrodinary results. The few I've found did not appear to be very well prepared and were not healing their bodies, but starving them. I'm not interested in starving myself. I'm interested in giving my body a chance to work properly. And since I already fast one day a month for religious reasons, I do believe in the power of fasting. Although I wouldn't even really classify Juice Fasting as fasting, since you are taking in nutrients. I will start with a 3 day Juice Fast today to try out some of the things that I've been reading. I want to do a longer one in the future but feel I need to do more preparing before I take that step. This blog is one of those steps. I will use the next few weeks to gather recipes, information, prepare supplies and set myself up for success. I will use what I discover on my 3 day Juice Fast to help me find what does and does not work for me.
I truly hope this can be a huge stepping stone to better health. I'm your typical 31 year old woman. I am in decent health, but I know I could feel better. I am tired a lot. That happens, I'm sure, when you have 4 children. But I know I can have more energy. I am about 30 lbs overweight (again, I just had a baby 3 months ago!). I suffer from a few relatively minor physical symptoms that many people live with and don't give a second thought to, such as rough skin, headaches, fatigue, irritability, etc. My knees have started hurting these last two months of working out. However, I believe that if my body were in peak condition, that many of those conditions would be alleviated. I guess this will be a test to see if my gut instinct is right.
I'm looking forward to this! My goals for this experiment are to see if I can:
- Improve my overall health
- Feel better
- Have more energy
- Reduce my cravings for junk food
- Jump start a lifestyle of much healthier eating
- Get rid of my headaches
- Heal my body of back pain, knee pain
- See if my skin improves
- Lose a little of this extra weight
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