Post-juice remorse

I spent roughly two months juicing. The main staples of my diet were a very robust green juice, a carrot & orange juice, and a beet juice that sometimes had blueberries mixed in. The chronicle can be found in this blog.

I stopped juicing about two months ago. Ish.

If you do a juice fast, you eventually need to ask yourself: What comes after? It's the only part I didn't really think through. I returned to eating in a similar (though not identical) way that I had before I started the juice fast. I kept drinking juice, just less of it. Pressures from within (such as laziness, force of habit, cravings for junk, etc) and without (other people pressuring me to compromise, nagging me about cost and hassle, telling me it's not healthy to continue, etc) basically led me to eat like everyone else does again. What I need to be clear about is that we're not talking about an all-junk diet here: Basic meat, vegetables, grains/wheat, a bit of coffee now and then, a bit of soda now and then. Certainly not an Olympic athlete's diet, but no worse than the average Canadian.

So... since I stopped my juice fast, I've experienced these things:

- Exhaustion. I have to take a nap every single afternoon.
- Irritability. I'm like 200% more of a bitch.
- I wake up feeling crappy every single day.
- Weight gain. And I mean a lot of it.
- Depression.
- Impotence*.
- Disorientation and "foggy-headedness."

The moral of the story is: I can only go by how I feel, and that's always the final authority and decider. And how do I feel? Terrible. Fat, dull, lazy, and stupid. And when I was juicing, I felt great. I felt like I was relaxed and clear-minded. I felt happy. I felt like I was finally healthy and balanced. And when I stopped, I did it wrong. I didn't have a really solid exit plan and I let other people convince me I was doing something bad to myself that needed correcting with a "normal" diet of sugar, fat, salt, wheat, dairy, and caffeine. And the lion's share of blame is on me, because I know better.

So I'm going back to it for a month or so while I figure out my post-fast diet (I appreciate suggestions, but please be aware that I probably won't follow them as I'm conducting my own research at the moment. :)). The bottom line is that, even though lots of people keep telling me how I "need" to be eating and not just juicing, I feel like crap when I'm not juicing. People who told me I "have to" go back to the "normal" way of eating to be healthy were wrong. I shouldn't have stopped juicing. It worked. I have a lot of friends who sermonize about how I'm supposed to be "living," but my juice diet is the only lifestyle change I adopted which actually delivered on its promise.

I'll keep those of you who are interested updated right here.

*Not that you really need to hear this, but there are people reading this blog who are looking for frank and blunt explanations of what happens, so I felt I should be honest