Tag Archives: diet

Sep14

My 5-day Juice Cleanse

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If you’ve never done a juice cleanse and want to know what to expect, read this. I prepaid for my juices and had to pick up my 6 daily juices every morning. This was my first time to do a cleanse and my thoughts are below.

Day 1: I could do this for 20 days!
The day was easy. I enjoyed all of the juices and was just mildly hungry by the end of the day. But, when you’re at the beginning of a cleanse or a diet, you tend to start planning your first meal like it’s your last. Also, food commercials on TV are super annoying. I want pizza!!

Day 2: Why don’t they have a ranch dressing cleanse?
Juices are okay today but I’m really craving ranch dressing. My coworker tried to find a ranch dressing cleanse with no success. We did decide that if we blended spinach, tomatoes, cucumbers, and a tablespoon of dry ranch dressing mix that technically we would make a salad. As the day goes on, I start to notice that I have to go to the bathroom more often, for more than one reason if you know what I mean. The best part of the day was fitting into my size 6 pencil skirt and tucking in my blouse. The worst part of this day is that no one really explained how your body does the cleansing and everyone should be aware about possible anal leakage because I had an accident on the way home…in my pencil skirt.

Day 3: Ginger is the ROOT of all evil!
Today is the worse day. I hate it so much I feel like throwing my juices back and asking for a margarita instead. (Which makes me think they should make a margarita juice cleanse, too.) Every day someone new is making the juices and today 2 of them had way too much ginger. It was so overpowering that I couldn’t hold anything down. Luckily, we have a small store in our office so I could buy a banana. I also ate an avocado that evening but only drank 2.5 juices of the 6 for the day. At this point I wonder if the person who created this awful idea of juicing did it for punishment purposes of killing yourself slowly from the inside out.

Day 4: All I want is chicken
I’ve been a pescatarian for about 2 months and today I want meat…particularly chicken. I want it fried, baked, and dipped in ranch (go figure). The juices are okay but the ones with ginger are still disgusting. I’m really not sure if I can ever eat ginger again. I had some carrots during lunch and half of a white peach during dinner. I’m so thankful that I’m feeling better, there’s only one more day left, and my rear is starting to feel better. I go to bed dreaming of Chick-fil-a’s chicken salad sandwich and fries…dipped in ranch.

Day 5: A new reason to be thankful for Friday
Finally, it’s the last day and I’m feeling more like myself. I keep thinking all day that I want to eat a salad tonight. I had an apple during the day and only drank three of the juices. I had a small salad with no dressing during dinner and so glad this dang experience is nearly over. Oh, and the juicer I ordered from Groupon before starting this cleanse finally arrived. I don’t even open the box and even consider returning it.

Day 6: I’ve reached the promise land
I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO EAT!! I’m so excited it’s like Christmas Day!! I made coffee first. Later I shared a plate of eggs, red potatoes, and refried black beans with my husband for breakfast. By lunch I had a black bean patty and some edamame. We went to a birthday party and there was both ranch and onion dips! I tried to control myself because I knew we were going to sushi. Sushi was soo good. Sake was soo good. I’m happy and never want to do a 5-day juice cleanse again.

Day 7: I Love Food
I had no extra weight gain from my food binge the day before. Yippee! Overall I lost 5 pounds and I’ll take that in a week any time. Now all I have to do is keep it up and keep the weight off!

May1

Alcohol and Fat Metabolism

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Four weeks ago I started in a new diet program at work.  Diet is emphasized here because it’s not really a diet program so much as it’s a new way of living life.  The program is called Nuvita and allows you to track your exercise and calories burned through a watch and band you wear while working out.  You also track your daily food intake and mobility (stretching).  The program seems to be successful and we have a coach that meets with us every Monday to review the program and go over lessons.

Last week, our coach reviewed alcohol and what the intake can do to your body and metabolism.  I, personally, know that alcohol is a huge factor in my weight gain.  I’m pretty sure that if I stop drinking and limit it to only special occasions I will probably see a good drop in my weight.

I wanted to share the document she sent to all of us that discusses alcohol and weight gain.  I’m not a doctor but, it makes sense.  And, it’s interesting to see how long your body haults your metabolism when drinking.

I have written about the effects of alcohol on fat metabolism before.  During my recent interaction with employees, I was asked about this subject.  I was presented with several statements similar to the following, “I eat really healthy, but…… I like to have a few beers. Is that why I can’t lose weight?”  The article below should answer that question.

The main problem with alcohol aside from the number of empty calories it contains is  the effect is has on fat metabolism. A recent study, for example, has shown that even small amounts of alcohol have a large impact on fat metabolism. In this study, eight men were given two drinks of vodka and lemonade separated by 30 minutes. Each drink contained just less than 90 calories. Fat metabolism was measured before and after consumption of the drink. For several hours after drinking the vodka, whole body lipid oxidation (a measure of how much fat your body is burning) dropped by 73%.

The reason why alcohol has this dramatic effect on fat metabolism has to do with the way alcohol is handled in the body. When alcohol is consumed, it readily passes from the stomach and intestines into the blood and goes to the liver. In the liver, an enzyme mediates the conversion of alcohol to acetaldehyde followed by a rapid conversion to acetate by other enzymes. So rather than getting stored as fat, the main fate of alcohol is conversion into acetate, the amount of acetate formed is dose dependent on the amount of alcohol consumed.  The more you drink the more acetate formed. For example, blood levels of acetate after drinking the vodka were 2.5 times higher than normal. And it appears this sharp rise in acetate puts the brakes on fat loss.

Also alcohol, because it can be considered part way between carbs and fats, has more calories than carbs. That’s why even the low carb beers contain less than 100 calories even though they only have about 2.5 grams of carbs and .5 grams of protein. While the carbs and protein only make up 12 calories, the 12 grams of alcohol make up the remaining 80 or so calories.

• 9 calories per gram of FAT

• 4 calories per gram of PROTEIN

• 4 calories per gram of CARBOHYDRATE

• 7 calories per gram of ALCOHOL

Daily alcohol consumption will slow or stop your results. The drawbacks are probably going to far outweigh any health benefits. Your liver can’t metabolize alcohol and fat at the same time. It will always get rid of the acetate converted from the alcohol first. That means that as long as there’s alcohol in your system you won’t be burning any body fat. If you have one or two drinks, you might stall your fat loss for a few hours. If you have quite a few drinks, it might be as long as four days before you’re metabolizing fat again.

If wine with dinner is part of your lifestyle, and you’re not in any particular hurry to have abs like a cheese grater, you might experiment a little. See if you can have a glass of wine a few times a week and still be making progress. If it’s really slow going, keep cutting back the number of drinks until you’re satisfied with the level of your results.