Back in June of last year my wife and I both went on Weight Watchers and over five or six months I lost a little more than 60 pounds but then the weight loss just stopped. My wife and I both seemed to reach a plateau that we just couldn't seem to break.
Trying to break the plateau we cut our daily calorie intake in half, we doubled our exercise routine, I purchased a stationary bike and added 30 minutes a day on the bike to our routine and still the plateau was unbreakable. What started happening was that my weight would vacillate wildly. I will lose as much as five to eight pounds and then gain it back again. I found losing weight to be an exercise in frustration, I'm sure that many of you know what I'm talking about.
At the first of this year my wife and I decided that what we need to do is to become more educated about food; for example, when looking at the ingredient on a label list what do all the words mean? What exactly is "Partially Hydrogenated Corn Oil?" or "Modified Yeast Extract" what are "Mono and Diglycerides?" and what do all these things do once they're in your body? I'm not biochemist so these are not easy questions for me to answer. I started doing a lot of research on this (In fact this has become something of an obsession with me) and I have found that there are a lot of people just like me, people who want a great deal more information about what is going into their bodies. I found several very well produced and very informative documentaries on the subject and the more I learn the more I realize how much I don't know and I also have begun to realize that our food supply has been compromised in the worst way. Food production and packaging companies load the food that we eat with a wide variety of chemicals in order to add flavor and shelf life and (some people claim) to make the foods we eat addictive. Most packaged food contains so much salt (sodium) that there is little doubt why high blood pressure is an epidemic in America. Even when you're buying Fresh Produce from the grocery store you are not actually buying Fresh Produce all the produce in your local grocery store is grown in some far away location, it's picked green (or not ripened) and loaded in refrigerated trucks and shipped long distances all of which can mean that the nutrients that should be there have either not fully developed or have been lost. This doesn't even take into account the chemicals and pesticides that are used agriculture today or the trend toward GMO (or Genetically Modified Organisms) that many people believe my threaten human and animal DNA and reproductive systems.
"What to do?" I wondered.
After giving it a great deal of thought what I decided to do is to, first of all, get my body cleaned up. I need to detoxify my body and then make certain that I do all that I can to keep it from getting inundated with chemicals, toxins, and pollutants again.
This brings me to one of the documentaries that I saw called, "Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead." (produced by Joe Cross) if you want to see it just Google it. The program talks a lot about the toxins and pollutants that are in our bodies right now and what they are doing to us and the diseases they cause and more importantly it suggests a good solution to get rid of these poisons. What the program suggest is a Juice Fast. This means 10 days of nothing but fruit and vegetable juices, Joe Cross refers to it as a "Reboot." My wife and I bought a juicer and we're going to give it a try. Over the next ten days, starting today, I'm going to follow, as closely as possible, the detox plan I found on Joe Cross' web site.
Okay so that's the detox part but then I have to keep the toxins from getting back in and lose the weight I'm carrying around.
Well after a good detox I've decided to try a strictly Vegan diet. It's getting to be the time of year where I can shop for my produce at local farmers markets to ensure the produce I'm buying is fresh and organically grown. In addition to this my wife an I have decided to tear out about half of our back lawn and plant a garden of our own (this is well under way and is coming along nicely).
I also decided that I'm going to keep a blog to track my progress and share some ideas with like-minded people, maybe we can help each other to become more educated about food, about diet, and about achieving and maintaining a healthy body weight. I will share recipes I'm using for the juices and for the vegan diet foods and will rate how I feel about the effectiveness of the juicing program and the taste and other attributes of the vegan recipes. I will try to keep keep this as detailed and accurate as possible.
Wish me luck :-)
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