Minimize Me: 10 Diets to Lose 25 Lbs in 50 Days (6 page)

Tuesday 4th November to Saturday 8th
November

Weight: 15 Stone 0 lbs

The juice diet is the first of two
‘liquid only’ diets in my challenge, and it’s fair to say that I have been
dreading it. The thought of not consuming any solid food at all for five days
straight is a scary enough thing in itself, without the added misery of having to
go without things like dairy and caffeine.

The idea is that for the next five days,
I will consume nothing but juiced fruits and vegetables, spaced evenly
throughout the day. There are no solid foods at all, no snacks, no milk and
depressingly, absolutely no coffee.

The juice diet is often referred to as
the ‘detox diet’, although medical professionals distance themselves from these
claims. Catherine Collins, Chief Dietician of St George’s Hospital Medical School in London, states that "The concept of ‘detox’ is a marketing myth rather
than a physiological entity. The idea that an avalanche of vitamins, minerals,
and laxatives taken over a two to seven-day period can have a long-lasting
benefit for the body is also a marketing myth."

As my last diet required me to make all
the decisions and plan all of the meals myself, I decided this time to make it
easier on myself and follow a set juice plan. If you decide to follow the
50-day challenge yourself and don’t want to pay £4.99 for the app that I purchased,
then you can find everything you need online for free – I’m just trying to save
myself a little time (and when you’re making five fresh juices a day, you’ll
realise just how precious that time is).

The first thing I needed to do was to
buy the ingredients. I would normally purchase my shopping online and have it
delivered straight to my door, but I felt the urge to hand pick the fruit and
vegetables that were going to be my breakfast, lunch and dinner over the next
five days. I did my normal food shopping online as usual (as my wife and two
children would be eating normally for the next five days) and made a special
trip to the shops to purchase the following ingredients for my new diet.

25 apples, 18 carrots, 7 limes, 6 pears,
4 oranges, 4 bulbs of beetroot, 3 avocados, 3 sticks of celery, 2 parsnips, 2
courgettes, 2 cucumbers, 1 banana, 1 green bell pepper, 1 lemon, 450g of baby
spinach, 300g of mixed berries, 225g of blackberries, 125g of kale, 100g of
natural yoghurt, 50g of mixed seeds, 30g of sugar snap peas, 16 sprigs of mint,
14cm of ginger root, 12cm of broccoli, 8 sprigs of basil, 1 bulb of fennel and
some ice.  And breathe.

I was glad that I wasn’t doing our usual
food shop in addition, as I genuinely wouldn’t have had room in the car. The
total came to £37.43, which certainly isn’t cheap when you consider that this
is the cost for just one person and only for five days. I’ve heard of couples
going on a week-long juice diet, and based on what I paid that could easily run
to well over £100. My wife was initially keen to go on the diet with me but she
backed out at the last minute, and having seen how much it costs and having
tried and failed to cram the ingredients into the cupboards at home, I’m
genuinely glad she did.

Day 16 of the challenge and day one of
the juice diet fell on a Tuesday and, as luck would have it, I had the day off
work. My eldest daughter Charlotte had moved schools after the half-term break
and I had taken a couple of days off to help her settle in. It was certainly
more by luck than judgement that I was at home on the first day of the diet,
and having made my first juice of the day I realised that while spinach,
avocado, cucumber and apples clearly mix, holding down a full-time job while
trying to juice doesn’t.

The first day was hard, apart from the
first juice, which is always a ginger shot (an apple juiced with some ginger).
All four main juices ended up as what can only be described as green slime.
Tasty enough to start with, but my enthusiasm waned very quickly, and by the
end I was having to pinch my nose to get through it. My daughter helped me make
my last juice of the day and summed it up perfectly when she simply said
"Yuk, it looks like something Shrek would drink!"

The poor reviews didn’t stop there –
about half an hour later, when the juice was a distant memory and we were about
halfway through her homework, she looked up and said "Daddy, can you stop
talking? Your voice smells!" There is nothing quite like being put in your
place by a four-year-old. The thing is, she was absolutely spot-on both times.
It did look like something Shrek would drink and I knew full well that my
breath absolutely stank. I had spent the whole day trying to suppress veggie
burps and could feel a horrible fuzz building up around my mouth. I ended up
having to brush my teeth every couple of hours and I found myself drinking
litres and litres of water. Needing to drink so much water came as a massive
surprise to me. Being on a liquid diet, I expected to be really hungry, but the
opposite was true – I never felt hungry once and all I craved was cold, fresh
water.

I realised after that first day that I
wasn’t going to succeed on the diet if I had to go to work. It just wasn’t
practical to travel the hour-and-a-half commute each way and somehow try to
either make all of the juices beforehand or when I got to work. The juices
wouldn’t have stayed fresh had I juiced them beforehand, and I wouldn’t have
been able to carry all of the ingredients and equipment to be able to juice
when I got there. This left me with a bit of an issue as I couldn’t call in
sick and I’d just had two days off as annual leave.

Amazingly, my boss was very
understanding. I just told him the truth, and he said "Well, if you can
come in tomorrow that would be great, but it’s fine if you want to work from
home on Thursday and Friday." I’m very lucky that I have a very
understanding boss and I work for a good company. Had he not agreed, I would
have had no other choice but to admit defeat. It did leave me with the small
issue of having to get through Wednesday, however.

I decided that the easiest way to get
through day two of the juice diet was to cheat. I did say at the start of this
book that it was likely I would find some short cuts along the way, and it
finally happened on Day 17 of the challenge. As cheating goes, it could have
been a lot worse. Instead of pre-juicing or bringing the ingredients in to
juice, I simply purchased my juice from a shop. We’re not talking a bottle of
Tropicana from the local corner shop, we’re talking two incredibly expensive
juices from Pret. It was absolute torture, because the one thing you don’t want
to be doing when suffering the effects of caffeine withdrawal is browsing the
shelves of a coffee shop. One of the juices was called Beet Beautiful and the
other was called Super Smoothie. There was nothing beautiful or super about
either of them in my opinion and having spent over £7 on them, it managed to
bring the total spend on the juice diet to just over £50.

My original plan was to drink one of the
juices for breakfast, one for lunch, and then pop out after lunch and purchase
whichever was the tastiest in order to have that one again at 4pm. That was the
plan. Trying to compare which one was tastiest was like trying to work out
whether I would prefer to be punched in the face or kicked in the balls.
Needless to say, neither came out on top, so I skipped the 4pm juice entirely
and avoided a second kick to the balls. I also promised myself that in future
Pret was only ever to be used for coffee and pastry purchases. Less kick in the
balls, more hugs and kisses.

I felt pretty lousy all day, but
strangely, I still hadn’t felt hungry. It was a strange feeling that I found
hard to put into words. I felt apprehensive, nauseous and confused. The thought
of another vegetable-based drink made my spine tingle, so when I got home, I
decided to cheat once again and look through all of the juices on the plan and
choose the tastiest-looking one. I went for the ‘Berry Banana Crunch’, a
combination of apple juice, banana, berries, yoghurt and seeds, and it was
fantastic. It really hit the spot and meant that my taste buds took centre
stage and let my gag reflex have a break for a change.

Day three of the juice diet was easier
for a couple of reasons – I was working from home which gave me the ability to
make my juices fresh every time, and also the juices on day three happened to
be very enjoyable. In fact, maybe I’m being a little unfair, because the only
juices that I really hadn’t liked up until now were the ones I had purchased. I
have to say that by home juicing, you really do get a sense of how much
goodness you are getting. Most of the recipes require citrus fruits to be
peeled and for certain vegetables like cucumbers to be cut, and the smells in the
kitchen at times were amazing. On a couple of occasions I remember thinking to
myself, "Where have I smelt that before?" and on day three of the
juice diet I finally worked it out while taking a shower and glancing at my
wife’s dazzling array of pampering paraphernalia. There were avocado creams,
cucumber shampoos and lemon and lime moisturisers, and I’ll admit that I
briefly toyed with the idea of drinking one of them to save me the hassle of
juicing the next day.

Day four of the juice diet was hard. It
was very, very hard. It started with a juice that was heavy in vegetables and
light in fruit. There was a combination of spinach, carrots, courgette,
cucumber, broccoli, celery, green bell pepper and avocado, with only two apples
to sweeten the mix. I made a double batch due to the preparation involved and
saved half of the resulting juice for 7pm, my final juice of the day. As I went
to take a small sip, the smell hit me so hard in the face it made the Pret
juices seem like amateur boxers. My body immediately began deploying the
defence mechanisms and my gag reflex started to warm up as saliva rushed into
my mouth in preparation for a full and forceful rejection. I took up position
by the kitchen sink, pinched my nose and downed the juice in one, and to my
amazement it stayed down. A few minutes later and I was starting to question
what I was doing. I’m not sure whether it was the combination of so many
vegetables or the fact that I was consuming them at 10am, but something made me
snap. I jumped to my feet, strode to the fridge, removed the juice I had stored
for later and poured it straight down the sink. I was aware at the time of how
wasteful I was being but I honestly didn’t care. In a strange way, I felt angry
that I had managed to keep my juice down and so this was simply retribution.

I felt like ending the project right
there and then. It was certainly my lowest moment so far. I started making a
mental shopping list, and it’s safe to say that there wasn’t a single fruit or
vegetable in sight. "That’s it, it’s over," I told my wife.
"It’s Friday night tonight, so let’s just bloody enjoy it. I’m going to go
and get a takeaway after work and I’ll get a trolley full of chocolate while
I’m at it." Embarrassingly, that is pretty much how every previous diet
has ended for me, and while my wife has always done her best to talk me out of
it, the takeaway and the chocolate have always won. "You’ll regret it if
you throw in the towel now," she said. "You’ve done really well so
far and it’ll be a new diet again on Sunday. It’s the Atkins next, isn't
it?" "Yes," I said, flicking my gaze between the Chinese and
Indian menus. "Then why don’t you just focus on that lovely big roast
dinner you’ll be tucking into on Sunday?" she asked excitedly. "Wow,
you’re planning on cooking us a roast?" I asked, surprised. "Well,
no… I forgot to mention that Mum has invited us round on Sunday…"
"You’re meant to be cheering me up!" I said.

I love my mother-in-law’s cooking
really, and the thought of her home-cooked Sunday lunch was enough to calm me
down. It was true that it wouldn’t be long before I’d be on the next diet, and
with the Atkins diet, I was sure that I could consume an enormous amount of
meat at the very least. I remember thinking back to my conversation with Louis
and him recommending I follow the juice diet with the Atkins because I may be
craving meat and more importantly craving something to chew on. "It
doesn’t matter that you can’t have any potatoes, parsnips, carrots or Yorkshire
pudding, does it?" said my wife as she left the room.

I somehow managed to make it through day
four of the juice diet, but by the morning of day five I had just had enough.
The smell of fresh fruit and vegetables made me feel physically ill, so I chose
to skip my breakfast juice. I was feeling dizzy with hunger and sick of the
thought of more juice, and it was at 1pm that I finally cracked. Rather than
going off the rails and eating everything in the house, I simply chose to have
a poached egg on toast with a freshly-brewed coffee. I should perhaps be
apologising at this point and feeling remorseful, but I won’t and I don’t. I’ve
decided to have a day off – big deal. People who are dieting have days off all
the time and, to be honest, I think it’s a perfectly sensible thing to do. I
know that I’m as committed to this project now as I was on the day I started
it, and by giving myself a day off, I feel like I’m giving myself a better
chance of success. We had a lovely bowl of pasta in the evening and I even
managed to pluck up the courage to chop up some of the leftover vegetables and
use them in the dish. I even had a small bar of chocolate to accompany my
evening coffee in front of the fire, knowing full well that chocolate was
completely off the menu once the Atkins diet kicked in.