JOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSE

Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead.

At a friend's suggestion, my roomie and I watched this documentary on Netflix. It follows two men, both in differing states of unhealthiness, who are prime examples of the movie's namesake. They embark on this drastic all-juice diet cleanse program wherein they ingest pretty much nothing but juiced vegetables and fruits, all while keeping a moderate regimen of a diet. Nothing special, right? Just another healthy documentary trying to sell some new diet-food making appliance to the guilty masses?

Of course it is. XD

The thing is, though, this movie has a guy in it that is painfully familiar. Phil Staples is well into his 400s, weightwise. He is drudging through life, miserable and sad. He cannot play with his kids because he tires too easily. He breathes heavily from walking short distances. He has trouble doing far-too common, everyday tasks because of his size. He is alone, he is slow, he is dull and he is miserable because of the life he is trapped in.

So, he starts in on this diet, all juice all the time, and the change is nothing short of miraculous. I'm not just talking about getting skinnier; I lost weight on the shake diet, any fast will make you lose weight. But he has energy, he has pep. He was sluggish and monotone, suddenly he's speaking with vim and vigor, he's popping off lines and smiling. He has a positive effect on those around him and whoohoo, Phil's suddenly the man.

Well, I wanna be the man, too.

I see this guy on this diet and I think to myself, hell, I'm just waiting for this doctor to call me, and I did the shakes before, sure, but that was eating food out of boxes and teflon packs. This diet is 100% real stuff that comes out of the earth, focusing on foods I've normally stayed far away from. I'm all for it.

So, I go to their website and do some research. For some reason, the diet the guy in the movie was on isn't readily available; there are plenty of diets including both juices and eating, but no all-juice diets longer than three days (and no diets past 15 days, period). It kinda weirds me out; did they have to change the diet in the movie because someone tried it and got hurt, or there was some adverse effect they didn't really talk about?

I dig and I dig and I find out that basically, just like in the movie, they don't want to make the diet readily available in 2-month fast form to anyone who hasn't first consulted their doctor. Good call.  (I'm seeing mine on the 28th, btw, so I'll be asking him about it then)

Anyways, I find a few juice recipes and throw together a 3-day regimen. Taking the ingredients for a bunch of different recipes, I compile them into a list... and it looks pretty daunting.

And that's just for three days.

But whatever, it's time to do this, right? So, my roomie and I go half in for a juicer like in the movie ($80 each, ouch), then we trek on down to the San Mateo Whole Foods market to find some of this crazy plantlife all the healthy folk seem to be so crazy about.

It is a -nightmare-. Nearly everything there has the golden label of organic on it, written ever-so-coolly on blackboard in white chalk, and gathering everything on the list is straight chaos. When we finally do get everything (or nearly everything; we had to go to Trader Joe's for Kale, compensate blueberries for cranberries and we just plain forgot to get ginger), we take it to the counter... and pretty much drop a whole hundo each.

We could've done better research on where to get produce and chosen cheaper recipes, but we were in a rush and completely new to the process. Next time, we're going in smart and we're going in cheap; there's no reason why this diet shouldn't be cheaper than eating out 2-3 times a day.

So, here we are; Superbowl's over, we've eaten the last of our farewell meals and we've got everything lined up by the juicer. The phone's focused and I'm about to take video of the first juice... when...

Click.

Click.

Click.

The juicer doesn't work.

So, now we've got about $200 of PLANTS in our fridge and no juicer to turn it all into easy-to-consume liquid yumminess. Bit of a bummer, right?

Ah well. Tomorrow's a new day, and we're going to send this dumb juicer back and pick up a new one at Macy's. Now that we're all caught up to present, hopefully my blog posts will come in smaller chunks, eh?

Look forward to my first juice video/picture, coming soon!