Day Four, and all is well

Good morning again - nothing miraculous going on, just getting into the routine and feeling fine.

This is me just drinking my breakfast - nice and green.  I am also taking some flaxseed oil capsules, and I mixed a little of my extra juice with vitamineral green and some bee pollen, and sucked it through a straw as fast as I could - actually, it's not that bad.

Weight this morning - 64.9kg (143 lb).

I've had no really notable side effects; my predicted low at 4.30pm yesterday, which I was ready for, and a generally 'furry' mouth, but armed with my toothbrush and tongue scraper, I'm fine.

As predicted, I found the watermelon juice too sweet, so I mixed it up with some collard greens, and that made it more palatable to me.

Yesterday I drank 4 1/2 quarts green juice.  (Or, to borrow a phrase from Angela Stokes, greeeeeen juice.)

I've begun to have some quite vivid dreams, but I don't know if that's the detoxing effect of the juice, the niggling feeling of having to get up to the bathroom (again), or perhaps just the incredibly humid weather we've been having here in San Francisco.

It's all starting to feel quite easy now, and I don't have to think too hard about it.

A note about the weight loss - David Rainoshek, of www.Juicefeasting.com says it's perfectly normal to lose weight quite rapidly in the beginning.  There are lots of reasons for this -one is that it's due to stored solid waste being released from the bowel.  When juicing we are not consuming any fibre, and so there is less waste to store.  According to his website, a person can become quite lean towards the middle of the feast, and then as the body heals and reaches its natural equilibrium, some weight will actually come back on.  

He notes - and I can see why this is important - that it's important to only have supportive people around you, who won't freak out if they decide you're getting too thin and need a burger.  They need to listen to you and understand the process (which is very well documented on his site, so I won't repeat it all here).

Also, don't feel the need to tell everyone you meet what you are doing, if you don't wish to.  In my experience, and maybe being a New Zealander has something to do with this, people become quite irrationally emotional when it comes to discussing food.  It's been said that people would rather change their religion.  When I became a vegan, people  told me I was mad, I'd become ill, all the usual things.  I found that it was great to have educated myself and to know in a lot of detail the health risks associated with eating animal products, and the benefits to be gained from eating a mostly-raw diet.  In the face of the ill-educated I could keep my cool.  I didn't argue, or lecture them, tell them what they were doing was wrong, because that only creates bad feelings.  But armed with my knowledge, I could smile serenely, be confident that they were ill-advised, and agree to disagree.  Of course if someone asks me questions I'm only too happy to share what I know, and to direct them to good books or websites or other sources of information.

I love the way eating healthily spirals outwards.  My husband, a former eater of everything and a particular fan of preserved meats, will now slug back a green juice if I make it for him, and for the most part, avoids animal products altogether.  Our 20-year old daughter started slowly, but is now a committed vegan, without any prompting from me, other than sharing delicious food with her, and showing her how to prepare it.  She is now introducing healthier ways of eating to her boyfriend, whose major food groups were meat, pasta, cheese and energy drinks, and  was so averse to vegetables that he would pull the lettuce out of a burger. And so it goes.

It's a long weekend coming up, and I think it may be a bit challenging for me.  One of the things my husband and I love to do is to get up on a Saturday morning, put on our walking shoes and just explore San Francisco, with no plans.  We always find somewhere great to have lunch.  It's been our mission to try to discover something we didn't know about the city every weekend.

So this time we will have to forgo the cafe or restaurant lunch in favour of a packed one.  It's not a hardship, but just requires a little more forethought and planning, something we haven't been big on in our weekend rambles.  But I'm hoping that part of our discovery this weekend may be beautiful places in nature to sit and enjoy food, other than in a restaurant setting.

In any case, there are some great juice bars around the city too, so I'm sure all will be well.

Have a great day!