Normally when the clouds look interesting, it’s a sure sign that the hallucinogens are kicking in. You’ve seen the spazzled scrawny chap sitting on the grassy mound, pointing at the sky with his tongue lolling from his gaping mouth, eyes all akimbo. “The clouds man, they look like….like….wow! There’s President Nixon!”.
Today, I went outside and looked at the clouds and they looked kinda funny. Maybe it’s because I haven’t eaten for 3 days. That could be it. And before I get onto the topic of juice fasting, let me not pass up an opportunity to remember how despicably hot it is in Austin TX. Not sunny. Not a little warm. Bowel-crushingly hot – the kind of searing temperatures that make any fluid left in the inside of your car for more than an hour too hot to drink. Yes, a man from a nation of tea-drinkers finding a fluid too hot to ingest comfortably despite years of practice. Texas is so devilishly hot it makes me wonder if I have in fact done something so bad that I skipped purgatory and got straight to the seventh gas burner of hell directly below Death Valley. And while we’re at it, let’s not forget that Austin is the allergy capital of the planet too. So clouds are both a good thing, and as I said, they looked kind of odd to me.
So, why juicing? I held an open house at a rather attractive home in Mueller – you know, the sort of house you’d tap if you were a player. And I met a friend of a friend who told me that he and his fiance were going on a juice fast. We also got to talking about urinating in clowns’ mouths, an unlikely topic for an open house, so I figured Jonas must know a thing or two about the world. He spoke of the documentary Fat Sick and Almost Dead, and told of the protagonist’s quest to eschew prescription medication and become a better human. By only drinking fruit and veg juice for 60 days. Not to be out-hippied by Jonas and even my own recently master-cleansed wife, I decided to watch the video, and by the next day had been to the grocery store for a metric shed-load of fresh greens.
Though I took a photo of the verdant shopping trolley, I should probably have taken a photo of my own smug face, looking round at the check out to make sure everyone noticed me as I lorded it up.
The juice fast came on fast. Obviously I skipped the 5 days of easing in and slowly giving up caffeine and meat, and went cold tofurkey straight into liquid lunches. I gurgle often, and I can feel my back muscles decaying, but apart from that, it’s all raging bursts of anger and trippy clouds. (aka rainbows and unicorns, which, minus the trippy clouds is just like any other day).
So what do they taste like? I vacillate between finding the variety of juices recommended at Join the reboot either purple and tasty or green and revolting.
Do I feel weak? I am only really shaky after I finish kick-boxing or picking the kids up from school. I don’t have as much vim on some days as I do on others.
Would I recommend it to 10 friends and 100 enemies? Yes. Watch the documentary – free on Netflix – and skip through the cartoons and you’ll see a heart warming and bowel-emptying tale of two men getting their life back in order.
Why am I doing it? I’m tired of being cracked out on pseudoephedrine to combat allergies, and am curious how I’ll fare in the war against mold and pollen with no medications but without the hindrance of food. Of course, I am still trying to get from “almost fit” to fit, and something drastic and short-lived is bound to work, right?