There are a lot of things I could have titled this post, but I decided to focus on the positive side of what Wino Loreal and I just did for ourselves. It's not completely Weight Watchers related, but in some ways it is because, in order to be successful on the WW scales, you have to embrace all things 0 Points Plus - namely fruits and vegetables. Which we didn't. We thought we did, but we clearly didn't. I'll start from the beginning but get to the good stuff quick...
Last month, we watched a documentary called "Fat Sick and Nearly Dead" (available on Netflix streaming) which chronicles Joe Cross, an overweight guy who's also suffering from a debilitating autoimmune disease and who's determined to regain his health, and his 60-day fruit & vegetable juice cleanse trek around the States. It was motivating to see someone so determined take things into his own hands and follow through on a plan to lose weight and get healthy. The people he meets and inspires along the way are the real gem of the movie in my opinion, and if you're interested, he has a website with his full Reboot program available free to charge to anyone who wants to follow along.
We wanted to try it. Not for the full 60 days, but maybe for 10. We took the quiz on the Reboot website and it told us we needed to start with the Reboot Entry program - a 15-day "journey" of juicing and eating raw & cooked vegetables and fruits. Sounded easy enough, but in the end we decided to do our own cleanse of sorts and combined Vegan + Raw for what I am calling the VRAWWW! Cleanse (trademark!). Only raw fruits and veggies. No meat. No fish. No dairy, carbs, beans, or nuts. We allowed olive oil and we did end up cooking our veggies on day 4. We went so far as to dine out at a Vegan/Raw restaurant called Cafe Gratitude which was nice, but let me tell you, their raw Deep Dish Pizza was neither "deep dish" nor "pizza". And the enchilada? Cashew sour cream isn't anything like real sour cream. I kid you not, the guys next to us saw we ordered all raw food and said "good luck" before we dug in. But I digress...
We started on Saturday 10/22 and planned for 5 days of VRAWWW! That morning, we got $80 from the ATM and headed to the Farmer's Market for the freshest fruits and vegetables around. We made a list of everything we could have and loaded up. We spent every last dime we had on extra avocados - the only thing I truly enjoyed for 5 days. We were excited about the possibilities around us - kale, chard, fresh tomatoes, squash, wild mushrooms, beets, cilantro, jicama, berries! As we spread the bounty out on the kitchen island, we plotted what we'd have for lunch. And once we finished that, we thought about our next snack. And after our snack, we wanted something else. And what should we have for dinner? We didn't leave the house all day. We were miserable; focused on food and all the restrictions around it.
Sunday morning - rise & shine to a delicious fruit smoothie! Now, what's for breakfast? (something resembling baby food if you must know) I could use a snack. How about lunch? We were stuck in the same pattern - comatose on the couch with no will to get up and go outside. We bickered. We had horrible headaches (no caffeine!). We slept. We begrudgingly went outside, but came back in 20 minutes later. We were so caught up on all the food we couldn't have it didn't even matter if we were hungry or not! That night was dinner at Cafe Gratitude (you read how that turned out) and, thankfully, a play we had tickets to...we had to get out of the house and we wouldn't be around food in the theater.
Monday? Better. I had a ton of energy at boot camp and was feeling great (albeit exhausted when 2pm rolled around). Tuesday? Even better. Easier and I wasn't so focused on food. Wednesday? Home free! It was Weight Watchers weigh-in and the scales would tell us if this cleanse did anything for our weight loss mission. Wino Loreal was down a pound and I was down 2.6. Not what we had hoped for, but we have to remind ourselves this cleanse wasn't so much geared towards weight loss as it was toward resetting our systems and getting us to think about food - specifically fruits and vegetables - differently. Last night we splurged with a piece of pizza and a beer. It was good. We didn't feel guilty. But we also vowed that those kinds of foods shouldn't be the norm in our diet, but instead be just what it was - a splurge.
And you know, a funny thing happened today. As I went to the kitchen for a snack, I looked in the fridge and saw all kinds of options staring at me; leftover pizza, guacamole, cheese, hard-boiled eggs. I chose grapes. Without even thinking about it, I chose grapes. And as I sat down to eat my snack, it occurred to me that our cleanse did its job - sure I lost a few pounds, but I also gained the instinct to make healthier choices.
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