Indeed, it sucked.

I did the juice. For a while.

As you may have guessed from the last entry, the green juice was indeed a problem. I just couldn't get past the taste and smell. The real nutrition is in the green juices; the kale, the chard, the spinach and so forth. I like these things. But, when you juice them, all you get is the concentrated chlorophyl and it smells and tastes like fresh mowed grass. I'm sure that smells delightful, to a cow, but I'm not much of a fan of grass to begin with, drinking the stuff was hard! Toward the end I was burying the chard and kale behind enough fruit that I could drink it, but I was worried about the sugar numbers and my diabetes.

The juices were filling, but not satisfying. I spent the whole week fixated on cheeseburgers. Weird, but it was where my head was at. With them being filling, with my fears of bumping my sugar with the fruit juices and with the gross-out factor on the green juices, I found myself often coming in at or below 1200 calories for the day. Not good. Starving myself was not an option.

I started to get some … cramps. Maybe not cramps, maybe spasms is a better word. The deal is that a muscle would contract and not release. It wasn't painful, it was sudden and alarming. Last Friday night, while in bed, my thigh flexed and wouldn't release. I kicked out my leg to try to get it to un-flex and the whole leg fired off: thigh, calf, foot and even my toes, all flexed and wouldn't relax. This lasted for over a minute while I lay there wondering what I was going to do? I don't know if it was lack of calories, lack of sodium, lack of potassium or what - but this freaked me out.

Nine days in and I was done with the 15 day juice fast.

That's the bad news. The good news came when I got on the scale Monday morning and saw that I had dropped 20 pounds. Well, I guess it's good news. Certainly seemed like a scary way to do it at the time.

In the process of all of this, I started a food diary out at MyFitnessPal. I've been keeping track of exactly what I'm eating - like I did out here years ago. It also keeps track of my exercise. It's not as good as Fitocracy for exercise tracking, but the food diary has really helped me see and control what I eat. I have even squeezed in some fast food - but I have found myself repeatedly playing with the fast food options before going to get the food. (The smaller fries, one burger instead of two ...) Yesterday I played with it until I decided to go home and eat something I already had that was better for me - saved myself 500 calories in the process.

In a few weeks I will get back on the scale. Sooner if I find myself waning. I've had some soymilk and I'm about to go make myself an omelet - all of which will get into the diary. I want the sacrifices I made on that juice fast to indeed be a reboot and to keep these good numbers going. I'm tired of being fat, sick and nearly dead.

I want to be healthy.