Juice Cleanse, Day 1

After watching the documentary Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead, Nick and I were inspired to try a juice cleanse. We started this morning, and I'm too woozy and short-tempered to write about the background, so instead, here's the play-by-play:

Day 1
7:00am. Nick puts a cucumber, 20 ounces of grapes, and 2 pears into a blender. That's breakfast. It's actually quite tasty.

8:00. Noticeable absence of coffee. I do not have to carry my to-go cup out to the car with me, along with 2 kids, 2 lunch boxes, and Sadie's naptime sleeping bag. One less thing to carry, and yet, I still forget to buckle Sadie in to her car seat. I don't realize it until I merge onto the freeway. (Immediately pull over and buckle her in.)

8:30. Arrive at daycare. Sadie doesn't want to go to school because she doesn't like her teacher's bangs. ("They go down her face!") Hustle kids inside and have trouble managing to get everyone/thing inside in one piece. In no mood for idle chit-chat with daycare teachers. Sadie and I bonk heads as I lean down to take her shoes off and I feel like I'm going to blow a gasket. I need to get out of there, pronto.

9:00am. Arrive at work parking spot on bottom of steep hill. A thick feeling has entered my head, like someone is pouring hot molasses into my brain. The molasses hurts my poor head in a vague, undefinable way. Walk up the steep hill rather slowly.

9:30am. Have much less patience for the clutter in my personal email in-box. Normally I scan the offers for things I can't afford, read about environmental news or ways to Feng Shui my home, but today I delete without opening. This is rare.

10:00am. Glance co-workers' desk and thoughts go immediately to coffee, as in, I should grab my coffee and chat with co-worker about her vacation. No coffee makes it a less enticing option.

10:30. Get some water to try to break up the thick molasses feeling in my head. See doughnuts and muffins at coffee shop near water fountain, but surprisingly don't crave them. Don't really crave coffee either, just want the day to be over. They say the first day is hardest; by Day 2, you start to feel good, euphoric even. Nick is picking me up at noon so we can go home and drink juice together for lunch.

11:00am. Can't concentrate. Nick will be here at 11:45 and it can't come soon enough.

11:11am. Get a cup of black tea. I can deal with the juices, but the caffeine withdrawl is killing me.

11:25am. A few sips in and I am feeling more human. Maybe I just need the hot liquid?

12:00pm. Home at last for "lunch." 3 carrots, 2 Granny Smith apples, and a thumb of ginger, juiced. Delicious (really). I drink very, very slowly. Feel satisfied. Re-read our juice cleanse book and realize we CAN have green tea, either regular or decaf! Yeehaw! Nick mishears me and thinks we can have either regular or decaf coffee. I have to squash his dreams.

1pm. Noticing a stiffness in my neck. Lack of caffeine? Or lack of caffeine leading to reduced jaw clenching and thus a chance for my knotted neck to relax?

2pm. Experiencing actual hunger pangs. Now? Maybe because I just went to the cafeteria for tea. Ok, time to analyze data. Maybe then I will be so bored I won't be hungry anymore.

3:30pm. Extreme feelings of hunger, coupled with temporary nausea, make me want to dig into a bag of tortilla chips I have stashed in my desk. I resist.

4:30pm. I cannot WAIT for dinner and for the final juice of the day, the nutmilk.

5:30pm. Nick and I are both cranky. Not fun to cook real food for the girls when we can't eat ourselves. I run out to Rosemont for ginger. When I return, I make a startling discovery: somehow I got it in my head that we could have 2 fruit juices, 1 green juice, and a nut milk per day, but I totally screwed it up. We are allowed 3 green juices a day in addition to the fruit and nut milk! Nick is so relieved to be allowed more juice he isn't even angry with me for being such a doofus and making this day harder than it needed to be. Meanwhile, we've subsisted on two juices all day, when by now we could have been on our sixth. Oops.

6:00pm. We drink our first "green" juice: spinach, apples, pears, and ginger. It's not bad. Nick says he wants to tear into Sadie's fish sticks. I feel like I'm on two planes--on the one hand, real food sounds like it would be too difficult. On the other, at this point I have a pounding headache and would do anything to get rid of it. If it is caffeine withdrawl, though, it's too late. Past experience tells me I need coffee by 10am or these vise-grip headaches are inevitable.

9pm. We're drinking our last meal of the day, which is actually a nut milk. Raw cashews blended with water, coconut oil, raw cacoa nibs, and some honey. Because our Cuisinart didn't blend the nuts all the way, we get to chew the leftover little nibs of cacao and cashews. We get to chew!

The idea is that the fats in the nut milk help you sleep through the night. I hope it works. I'm not feeling any of the supposed benefits of the cleanse yet, but that might be different tomorrow. I have hope that tomorrow might be easier due to 1) some of the worst of the caffeine withdrawl symptoms being over, and 2) we'll drink 5 juices instead of just 3.

Today was grim.