Rebooting My Reboot

Long time, no blog eh? I've made a mess of trying to reboot my life it seems. The failure for me of juicing caused a real emotional impact. I was so hopeful it would be helpful, so when it went bad for me I lost hope. I guess I needed to take some time to really examine things from another perspective. I needed to learn to forgive myself and realize that the only real failure is not trying. And some changes I made did stick. I'm much better at serving size, especially with my lunches. I'm drinking more water, and when I do drink soda it's usually soda I made at home with a sodastream soda maker. It's still diet soda, so no carbs, no sugar, and no calories. And it's a fraction of the sodium per serving compared to store bought. Still some sofium, but my daily intake isdown a huge amount and is in the normal amount allowed per day.

But I feel like I'm finally ready to try to ride this horse again. It's time to get back in the saddle and take the reigns of my health once again. I don't have a plan tjis time beyond to just try harder at the tjings I know I need to do. And I need to try and get my activity up. I downloaded a pefometer app to my phone so I can start challenging myself to take more steps each day. I wish I had a treadmill. That would be awesome. Have you looked at the cost of a decent heavy-duty treadmill though? Insanity I tell you. I should start looking for used ones. But for now I just need to find a way to increase my activity without dieing in 100+ temps. Everyone wish me luck!

Day 21 - 28: Checking In

Good evening everyone.  I know I've been getting messages from people asking what's going on.  I kind of cut off abruptly in the middle of the attempted juice fast last weekend.  Well to start off with, I'm fine.  It was a bit of an emotional setback to find out that the juicing thing just wasn't going to work for me.  No matter how hard I tried the green juices just were not happening for me.  My body had involuntary and violent reactions to them in very unpleasant ways.  I just couldn't see putting myself through that much suffering to try and get healthy.  If doing the juicing made me miserable then I would never be able to keep it going and make it work.  I would have failed at it and probably ended up totally ruining all my work with a severe bout of emotional eating.  So instead I kept control of what's going on and made the decision to come up with a Plan B.

Day 20: I Need a Plan B...

Today has been a day of highs and lows.  Part of me wants to crawl in a hole and sleep for a couple of days and pretend today hadn't happened yet.  But the grown-up part of me that's serious about making changes in my life knows what I really need to do is put it all out there on my blog. Hopefully y'all can help me figure this out.

Day 13 - 19: Ramping Up

So this past week has been the "Ramping Up" week for our first all-juice Reboot.  Following the guidelines on the Reboot Your Life website this week was about trying to get our bodies ready for what's going to be a very drastic change in diet.  Even though we're starting easy with a simple 3-day juice fast it's still going to be a shock to our systems.  And so the point of the ramp up period is to give yourself every advantage you can in preparing your body for the change. The recommendations include reducing and then eliminating things like dairy and caffeine, and also completely eliminating junk foods and processed foods.  And of course along with that is the need to increase your water intake.

Days 7 - 12: Going Strong

Good evening everyone.  Just checking in with a blog post to let anyone whose actually reading know how I've been doing.  Things are going well, but not too much has changed.  The Plan is proceeding.  This was a pretty calm week without much new going on in the way of diet or health.  My girlfriend's birthday was this week, so we did have one night with a slice of cake for each of us.  But I figure if you're going to be so rigid you can't even enjoy a birthday cake you're setting yourself up for failure.  Passing on the ice cream after the play last week was one thing, but birthdays are at a different level.

Days 3 - 6: Moving Forward

As I noted at the start of my last blog post on Tuesday I got the news that my Aunt Susie was dying due to complications from her Parkinson's Disease.  Well Wednesday morning just after getting to work I got the call from my dad that my aunt had passed away.  After fighting bravely for many years God called my aunt home, and she obeyed His call.  Being here in California with my family back in Michigan can make things a struggle at times, and losing a member of the family is one of those times.  I was so upset by the news that I turned around and left work that morning and stayed home of Thursday as well.  Not only was I struggling to deal with the grief of the loss of my aunt while not being able to be with my family, but this threw me face-to-face with my issues with emotional eating.

Day 2: Light on the Ginger

I got the news tonight when I got home from work that my Aunt back in Michigan is dying. She has lived with Parkinson's Disease for years and it seems the God is ready to bring her home. So understandably my mind found it hard to focus on doing our first test juicing tonight, but I felt I needed to do it. I told myself that my aunt would be proud of me for taking these steps to get healthy, and she wouldn't want anything to get in my way. So I got together the ingredients, fired up the juicer, and away we went!

Day 1: No Juice For You!

So a bit of a snag in the plans for today. It's funny that I can walk into a Safeway store and find apples, ginger, and carrots any time I want, yet apparently the people that pull items for the home delivery orders are not able to find them. My girlfriend was at work with the car today, so I ordered groceries to be delivered. The guy showed up with most of my order, but missed the apples and ginger. So the juicing will have to wait another night. We'll stop at the store on the way home from work tomorrow and get the stuff, and then tomorrow night we'll try out the juice for dinner and see how it goes.

Just an important note for myself more than anything else. I'm not putting anything off. This is going to happen. The next step of the plan wasn't going to happen for a couple of weeks anyway, which is when we'll be able to take a Friday or Monday off to do the three-day "Long Weekend" plan on the Reboot website. So one more day doesn't derail anything. Meanwhile I will continue to work on portion control and smarter choices with regular food.

Day 1: Some Snapshots

Hi everyone. I figured that the first thing I should do while waiting for the chance to get my juicing ingredients is to share some snapshots for the beginning of my journey. First, the juicer!

Jack LaLanne Power Juicer

And So It Begins...

Introduction:

So this blog entry will hopefully be the first of many to chronicle my journey to a healthier life.  I'm trying two things with this blog that I've never really tried before.  First, I'm going to be completely open and honest about just how messed up my health and habits are.  This is going to be painful for me, and it opens me up to be mocked, but I need to get myself out from behind my walls and admit to what is dragging me down.  I might make it even easier for all the immature people on the internet to insult me, but I can't live in fear of that.  Too much of my life has been defined by how others treat me because of my weight.  I won't let those people kill me, and I know that if I don't make these changes then I likely won't make it to see another 10 years.


The second thing I'm doing is making this blog, and trying to get people to read it and share it with others.  I want people to read, comment, and share with others.  Not because I want some kind of fleeting internet fame, but because I need people to be accountable to, but also people to support me.  I'm not looking for negative reinforcement because I don't respond to that.  I've been beat down so much in my life growing up that all negative reinforcement does is push me deeper into the dark places in my mind that have caused me to get to where I am now.  So I will be removing any comments that don't contribute to the positive atmosphere of support I'm trying to make here.  I'm trying to do everything I can to give myself a fighting chance at this.


I plan on using juicing as my catalyst to change.  I hope that I can use juicing to retrain my pallet to like vegetables, and from there can lead to making healthy choices when not juicing.  That should then get my losing weight and getting energy so I can start with cardio exercise to really get to work on getting healthy and keeping it off.  That's the grand plan at least.  But I have a long history filled with failures to overcome in order to make this work.