The Juice Reboot

It's all Janine Walkers fault. 

About two weeks ago she sent me a link to a documentary called Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead. It's about a guy called Joe Cross who goes on a 60 day juice and vegetable detox and cures himself of an auto-immune disease that he was taking a lot of medication for. He ended up completely without medication and lost over 100lbs in the process. The documentary is fantastic and if you can find it I'd absolutely urge you to watch it. Within minutes of it ending I had already set it back up again so that my mum could watch it too. About two hours later she turned to me and said that we should do it. Janine was a week ahead of us and had already bought her juicer and had begun her reboot and her reports were so positive that we thought that it was achievable. 

Now before you get that juicer going I'm going to give some tips because compared to Janine we found this tough going. I remember sending a text to Janine on the first night asking her HOW she managed to get past day 1! 

Why are you doing it?

That's a biggie because that thought was going through my mind in a very loud voice through most of the detox and you need to believe 100% in your response otherwise you will cave. For me the biggest reason of them all is that I am a really bad eater. I LOVE my food but I don't eat the right food. For example... my breakfast usually consists of a large cup of tea and whatever biscuits are in the biscuit tin. And if there is any cake or buns in the house I'll probably have a bit of that too. A lot of my time is spent in front of a computer screen and I am a serial nibbler of junk food throughout the day. A lot of the time I don't even realise I'm doing it. And I know how unhealthy that is so I needed to change my patterns and become healthier and happier before it's too late. My mum did hers to reboot her weight loss and get back into a pattern of healthy eating. 

Weigh yourself beforehand

Now up until Saturday morning when our detox started, I didn't even know we had scales in the house! We decided to weigh ourselves out of pure interest and fascination to see if we would lose any weight during the 4 days. For me it was not about weight loss but to break my pattern of unhealthy eating, but on day 3 when I weighed myself out of pure interest I realised I'd lost much more weight that I would have liked and decided to not continue on day 4. It's definitely handy to keep an eye on.

Do not go out drinking the night before you begin

I can tell you from experience that nothing is worse that dealing with the first day of a detox and suffering from a hangover at the same time. Horrendous. Because of that mistake I put myself off some of the juices we were making simply because they looked horrible. It's bad enough to go without eating so start off on the right foot. Plus I had a 3 day headache. 1 day of that was definitely from a hangover that I could have done without. 

Ice cubes and straws

Exactly as Janine says, these go a LONG way and help immensely! Every drink tastes better with these two factors.

Do it with a friend
Mum and I have both agreed that if the other wasn't doing it, we would have given up earlier. Plus knowing Janine had done it and being able to text and email her throughout was unbelievably helpful.

The first day was the worst for me and I did not like evenings because I remember feeling at my hungriest so to tackle that I went to bed early. Despite being convinced each night that I'd wake up hungry I actually woke up refreshed, happy and not even thinking of food! Mum and I positioned ours over a weekend from Saturday - Tuesday and I actually would recommend that as it didn't disturb too much of my work life however I did have to turn down two separate dinner invitations out on Saturday night and that made it even more obvious I was hungry and missing out on food! 

Here's what I've discovered since the detox:

* My taste buds have gone insane. Everything tastes better!

* Skin and nails look better

* My day can't begin without a large glass of water

* I've experienced feeling really hungry and survived it so now when my brain now tells me 'I'm hungry! Eat something NOW!' I think how ridiculous my brain is and I can survive spending a few more minutes making something lovely and healthy to eat instead of eating the first thing I see

I am so glad I tried it because three days on from it all I can already see that I've broken long held food patterns and it's a good sign.

If you want to read Janine's experiences from it read here

xox