And Then Came Juice...

I mentioned that I was about to start something really big in my last post. Well it all started yesterday and I'm excited to tell you about it. It all comes down to juice.

Over the past year or so I've really started to dislike most things having to due with specific 'nutrients'. Michael Pollan says it well in his book, In Defense of Food. I recommend that you read it and his other books, but to summarize part of it, he explains how we went from talking about food to talking about nutrients. Nutrients, he says, are invisible components of food that have no industry backing them and therefore are the easy scapegoat for what's wrong with our diet. The government can't say 'eat less red meat' because Big Beef won't allow it, but they can say 'eat less saturated fat'. That's a very subtle switch, but so incredibly powerful. What is saturated fat? What does it look like? Where can you find it? How can you avoid it? These questions aren't easily answered and that makes it really easy to turn certain components of food into the bad guy.

First, I think God created our foods so that all of the components work in harmony together, and removing one aspect of the food messes up all the other aspects. But setting that aside, the Nutrition Industry can't seem to make up their mind on which nutrients are good and which are bad. (Michael Pollan, among other people, also points out that it is financially profitable for the Nutrition Industry to change their mind a lot and breed confusion.) For a long time, fat was the enemy. Now we know that fat is an important part of a healthy diet and that the creation of low-fat foods have actually made us fatter and more unhealthy. When the calorie count of sugar became a concern, calorie-free artificial sweeteners became popular; these sweeteners cause a host of problems. Picking on one particular component has only made the problem worse. I started to make this connection when I compared the ingredients list on a tub of regular sour cream with a tub of lite sour cream. I recognized all of the ingredients in the regular version, but I can't say the same about the lite version. I began to realize that Big Food created chemicals in a lab that would make the food taste the same as it should but for less calories, less fat, less sugar, less this, less that. That's when I realized that eating the real thing was better than eating the fake thing which was made to taste like the real thing and the way to make it healthier was to simply eat less of the real thing.

So getting back to how I found juice. I stopped considering diets that focused on invisible components (low calorie, low fat, high fiber, etc.) and started looking at things that talk about food. But there are still so many different options! Paleo, vegan, dairy-free, vegetarian, low grain, high carb, etc. And looking into each of them, they all have their advocates which swear by it because of the weight they lost and how good they feel, even when the diets are in complete contradiction to one another. Someone on a no carb diet can claim the same thing as someone on a high carb diet. I'm starting to realize that it is highly subjective and what works for one person won't work for everyone. This makes sense because everyone's body is unique, so everyone's healthy eating plan should also be unique.

So I guess I'm building my own healthy eating plan based on what works best for my body. But where to begin? I realized that I do not know of a single plan out there that doesn't allow fruits or vegetables. Quite the opposite, more fruits and vegetables are strongly encouraged. So I decided to start there. Vegans and vegetarians have proven that you can get all the nutrients you need without consuming animal products (watch the Forks Over Knives documentary for some science behind that) and low-carb diets everywhere have proven that you don't need grain so I knew I'd be getting all the nutrition my body needed from just fruits and vegetables.

In the course of planning a switch to vegetables and fruits (veggies first because they're more important), I stumbled upon JuiceLand here in Austin which led me to the documentary Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead which led me to the world of juice fasting. I decided that a juice fast would be the best way to reboot my system, to use Joe Cross's term, and start over. Once I've gone through the detoxification process and have my body cleaned out, I'll be ready to see how dairy, grain and meat each effect me. I will also have reset my taste buds and hunger triggers, enabling me to implement healthier eating practices.

Yesterday was the first day of my fast. I'll write more about that and juicing in general later. For now, this is long enough!