Day Before

I've been looking at Jason Vale's 7lbs in 7 days app on my iPhone for the last 5 months now and I think it's time to finally commit. Ever since doing the "meat" diet in the early 2000s , I've had a certain fear of radical dieting. Don't get me wrong, during these diets I lost all the weight as promised but then I gained it all back again in short order, only to find that losing was now twice as hard. It was almost as if my body was exacting some kind of revenge for the trauma that I had put it through. So needless to say, I've been trying a "rational" diet of trying to count calories.. and I've failed.

I first became familiar with juicing as a result of watching the "Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead" movie. Like the chunker in the movie, I too have been getting the red flag from my physician. The wake up call was when he told me my blood count is showing signs of pre-diabetes. Still, some wake up calls take time to settle in. So I've been procrastinating, sitting on my hands, and just generally hoping this would all go away through care and portion control. After one particular week where I had eaten lots of greens and other.. I thought, NOW the scale is going to bless me.. Not only did the scale NOT bless me, the bastard added 4 pounds. That was pretty much the last straw. Having sat at an unhealthy weight now for the past 8 years, I need to lose this weight and get healthy as I enter into the last quarter of my life.

It Begins
 I have been slow to act on this diet because of a number of concerns. One of my concerns is the basic, how am I going to do this? I have been drinking juices for some of my breakfasts for the past 3 months. I love the flavor, and have learned how to work quickly and efficiently at juicing. My record juice time is around 17 minutes from cutting to drinking, with clean up in between. Of course, once the machine is running and masticating, I can churn out at least two to three full juices in that timeframe.

I'm not lazy by any measure, but at the same time I know myself and all the logistics that surround juicing seems a bit daunting.

Questions surrounding juicing.

When will I juice?
I've decided that around 7pm the night before is my best window for working.

What will I need?
I will need three metal juice flasks that I will take to work with me. The morning juice at 8 am and the two evening juices can just be 1 large cup.

How will this feel?
I did a dry run for the entire day leading up to dinner yesterday, and I can say that a mid day hunger set in that threatened to derail me.  I had a safety net of nuts nearby just-in-case. Bleary eye and shaky hands at work is NOT cool. At around 4pm I had to turn to the nuts once. I will say, that as I was driving home, the hunger passed and a sweet easy feeling settled upon me and I was more aware of everything, it felt good. So, I have a few reservations, but overall, I'm looking forward to this.

One think I learned here, DO NOT DEVIATE FROM THE SCHEDULE. There are milestones throughout the day meant to cut the hunger ache, stay on that schedule.

Will I be able to exercise?
With so little food in my stomach, will I be asking for trouble if I go to the gym? Only experience will tell, I'll be documenting that here.

How will avoid the post diet bounce?
With the "meat" diet, I only kept the weight off for a while. I'm committed to this effort, and I am already planning my meals post 7 days, RIGHT NOW. I don't want to come to the finish line and the get confused and reach for some errant slice of pizza. I MUST be prepared.

When will I begin?
Sunday. This will give me a day to aclimate before heading to work the next day

This blog will remind me how this feels in the future when I redo the 7 days, 3 months from now. It's important to have a reminder of why this important and the blog will do just that.