Juice Fast Day 8

So I cheated (severely) on day 7 with soup, calamari, 3 slices of pizza, and several bites of Thai Green Curry with rice. It was awesome while it lasted. But day 8 sucked. Bad. I felt like crap when I woke up. I decided there was no question about returning to this old familiar lifestyle of waking up feeling overwhelmed, tired, and stiff. So I started the day with some organic decaf green tea, which I've been drinking all summer. (It's a super cleanser discussed in the book Skinny Bitch).

Then around mid-morning I ate a banana.

At lunch time I juiced apples, cantaloupe, pineapple, strawberries, and some carrot and celery. It filled a short wide plastic cup and was very sweet and yummy.

Then around mid-afternoon, I decided to use my blender to blend an orange with its peel still on. I'd seen it done online as part of a blender experiment. The KitchenAid blender, which I own, did the best job of four blenders blending a whole orange.

Also, I had a massage at the Ocean House in Southern RI this summer and the masseuse told me about a professional development workshop he attended, where he learned that cures for diseases are being found in the peels of fruits and veggies, including pineapple peels. He said he owns a high end blender and incorporates otherwise inedible peels into his daily smoothies.

My friend Fred also said he'd heard of making orange juice with whole oranges, peel still in tact.

So I figured, why not? I went ahead and blended an orange with its peel still on, and poured something that looked remarkably thick, creamy, and bright into my cup. But when I tried it, I nearly threw-up.

Now listen to me. I've drinken some disgusting things lately. Powdered seaweed drinks mixed with water, blended salads without any dressing, veggie juices with beets and kale. But this whole orange juice peel drink topped the disgusting charts and surpassed any wretched thing that's gone into my mouth ever. Well maybe there's one exception but I won't go there. It was unthinkably offensive to my entire being. You couldn't pay me to drink it again.

I poured the orange drink back into the blender and tried to redeem it. I added some coconut milk and another orange without the peel, some pineapple, and some more water, and re-blended. It was even worse, if possible. And now there was more of it to drink or waste. So I then added a scoop of my Boku green powdered superfood to it, hoping the seaweed flavor would mask the orange peel flavor, and re-blended. And again, just as horrible as ever. I filled not one, but two wide plastic cups and put them in the fridge. All afternoon, I forced down gulps of one cup until I finished it. I took the other cup home for dinner, but had one sip and decided I'd rather starve, and dumped it down the drain. The memory of the taste is still haunting me as I write about it, so I'll move on now.

There was one good thing about Day 8. I went to an evening yoga class after work from 6:30-8:00 at the Y. It was the best yoga class I've ever been to. The teacher, Lori, had just returned from a weekend anatomy conference, and she had lots of new poses, counterposes, binds, and twists to lead us through. The room was dark and the Indian music was enchanting. I went home and took a hot shower, then put on my snuggie and lay down to read. I got through about two pages before falling asleep in my reading position with my light still on. It was three hours later, around midnight, I awoke and turned off my little lamp and went back to bed for another seven hours.

Waking up this morning on Day 9 felt remarkable. I didn't have to be at work until 8:00 (as opposed to 6:30), and my body feels like it's floating through the air as I walk. This is the feeling I read about and never achieved on my first 3 and 10 day juice fasts this summer. It came this morning. I'm almost out of spiritual breath from all the Thank You Jesus's I've internally repeated all morning. But I weighed myself and I'm still staggering at 130.5 lbs. The 120's will be tough and emotional. I might go crazy. And I'll certainly enter them in the next day or two. We'll see.