Despite that, there was definitely some confidence lurking in the back of my brain. I had really learned some things during these life-altering ten days—things about myself and things about food and health in general—that had truly turned my head around in so many ways. I felt committed to staying healthier and more mindful about my eating. I wanted to continue to feel better, and to work really hard to not be addicted to foods. All I could do was embrace my commitment and give it a go.
It has turned out, over the years, that one of the permanent benefits of juice fasting is that it consistently results in cravings for healthy foods. Each time I juice fast, through the introduction of a vast amount of vegetables and fruit, my body seems to recalibrate, I get rid of cravings for sugary, fatty, processed foods, and instead I want to consume whole foods.
One of the things that helped me stick to that first juice fast—there is no doubt about it—was the fact that I had set a specific amount of time for it. If I say that I’m going to do it for ten days, then I will do it for ten days. But if I say I am going to do it for three, there is pretty much no chance that I will exceed that. It’s a mental thing. It’s very similar, I think, to deciding how long you will work out or how far you will run. If you say you will run for three miles, chances are, you will do your three miles, but you won’t want to exceed that—because that’s what your body and brain were expecting. Everything I read advised against setting my sights too low, since it was unlikely I would exceed my goal. Leaving it open-ended has a similar effect, because I know I will almost definitely disappoint myself somehow, by cutting out earlier than I otherwise would.
day 10
I was completely elated to finish my juice fast! I was also thrilled in anticipation of eating the next day (“I’ve got to tell you—we’re hungry!”). And I won’t deny it: When I got on the Wii Fit scale that day and found out I had lost eleven pounds (even though I still opted for the setting that didn’t display my actual weight—only how much I’d lost), I was really, really happy. Of course, I lost that much weight largely because I had a lot to lose—someone smaller than I was at the beginning of the fast wouldn’t lose that much.
But it was much more than the weight loss that was making me so happy. My main impetus for the juice fast was that I had felt addicted to so many foods that were not good for me, and I wanted to end that addiction. And, on day ten, I really felt like maybe I had made a big step in that direction.
I feel like I can now go back into real life addiction free, for the most part. There are obviously emotional connotations with food that people have to work on—I’m sure I have to work on. It’s really easy when I’m having a bad day to run around the corner and get a vegan panini . . . and maybe sometimes I can. But other times I’m going to try to consume mostly whole foods.
In thinking back on what had been useful to me in sticking to the juice fast, and what might help me continue to eat well going forward, I realized that one of the most important motivating forces was my work and my life’s mission. Self-care had become so much more important to me because I think of myself as an activist, and taking care of my body was a way of avoiding burnout and a way of taking care of my own animal needs. In order to be there 100 percent for animals, I need to be there 100 percent for myself. Getting healthy and flooding my body with nutrients was, I felt, an investment in my work.
My motivation of self-care as an investment in my work had been such an important drive throughout the juice fast. That motivation also acted as a reminder of how important it is to get my head out of thinking about just myself. This included obsessing about my appearance and about what others thought of me. Embracing a healthy diet and lifestyle was, ironically, a way of focusing on others—because I simply could not be there for them at the level I wanted or needed to be if I wasn’t taking care of myself, too. Given my particular work and passion, those “others” were all the animals who needed saving from misery. In an interesting twist, thinking about my own health journey in this way—focusing on the importance of working to save them—ended up being the very best thing I could do to save myself.
However I got through that very first juice fast, the fact remains that I didn’t think I could do it, but then—bam!—I did it. Everyone has something in his or her life like this. We didn’t think we could take care of a dog, drive across the country, finish college, get a master’s degree, get through that life crisis with more strength than before, run that long race, create and manage that nonprofit, write that book. Those are my examples, actually. With each of them, there were at least moments when I doubted myself. And then, step by step, I succeeded. Considering a juice fast from afar—imagining the day-to-day logistics and headaches (sometimes literal ones) of not eating—sounds extremely overwhelming, so I find it easier not to think of it that way. For me, as with life, I try very hard to just take it juice by juice. I don’t always remember that sentiment, by the way. I am very far from perfect, with juicing or with anything else. But I try not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
When I finished day ten of my first ten-day juice fast, I felt like I had indeed just finished a marathon. I was exuberant, tired, motivated, wanting to celebrate, and ready to change my life again.
SIXTEEN
letting go of the past
I can hang out the second week of December. Cool?” I was chatting on the phone with my old friend Sara—the one who had once reminded me of my love of purple eye shadow. “Or, wait, no . . .” I thumbed through my calendar some more. “How about early January? January . . . eighth?”
Sara’s voice was monotone. “Jazz,” she said, “you can’t hang out until next year? I just want to get a drink.” (And she didn’t mean kale juice.)
I am an avid and passionate planner. I literally get all tingly at the prospect of sitting down and working out dates. I find deep satisfaction in looking ahead on the calendar and writing in work obligations, social obligations, and juicing obligations. There is no way that my juice-fast regimen would have been successful had this not been a key element in my personality, because given my hectic schedule, I simply never would have found the time to juice.
But one thing that meant, of course, was seriously reassessing my social life. To accommodate my work schedule, I learned to schedule juice fasts six months ahead of time, meaning that I knew I would be unavailable to socialize during that time—assuming it was socializing that involved food and drink—as well as a few days in either direction of the fasts. That meant I was unavailable for virtually two weeks of the month one month, and one week the following. Put on top of that my speaking schedule and family obligations, and I was left with a very tiny window to see my friends. If I wasn’t working, I was juice fasting, and I didn’t like to make plans during my fasts, for fear of being triggered by food if my friend in front of me was eating. Some very dedicated pals would meet me for tea, or even come over for juice, but for the most part—aside from doing the fasts alongside Mariann and finding that connection together—the juice fasts were largely a solitary and self-focused period.
Because I would avoid making other plans during my juice fasts so that I could burrow in with my juice and my thoughts, quite often the rest of my month would be overloaded with plans. Given my eagerness for scheduling, it became like a game to me. But I can see how, for many people, taking that kind of huge chunk out of their social life would be tough.
There’s an upside to this, too, though. The period of a juice fast, to me, is one where it makes sense to keep my head down a bit more than usual and focus on rebuilding my self-care as I jump-start my health. My life is frequently very outwardly focused—gotta meet the next deadline, gotta write the next article, gotta record that podcast episode, gotta do life’s chores immediately. Something I’ve struggled with quite a bit, in fact, is taking time to simply breathe. A juice fast is always a time I can do just that, and even in anticipation of it, I look forward to the upcoming me time. It was a
very clear boundary I would set, and stick to, whether it was a boundary with myself or with my friends.
Recently, I was given a postcard—which now has a permanent spot on my fridge—with a picture of a woman with a word bubble beside her that reads, “Not today—I’m cleansing.” This is true for me in spades. Admittedly, I have found that I am sometimes a cliché of myself, and many of my friends—who were, at first, perplexed by my frequent juice fasts—have now learned to laugh with me as I schedule dinner meetings and social get-togethers around my juicing schedule. Prioritizing my life this way might seem extreme to some, but now that I’ve found my groove with it—and having experienced the remarkable and consistent health benefits firsthand—it’s just what I do. It’s as much a part of me as the tattoos on my skin. And I’d even argue that what’s actually “extreme” is not my juicing or my veganism—but rather, this dangerous habit our society has adopted of unprioritizing our health, over and over again, because, oh hell, you’ve gotta live.
All of this said, I do think it is possible to be way more social and active than I personally tend to be during my juice fasts. I understand, for example, that there might be parents of young children, or other people with active schedules, who are intrigued by juice fasting, and I don’t want to make it seem like it would be impossible to do both—it wouldn’t. I have met many mothers and fathers, teachers, and those working in various service industries or who have physically taxing jobs and have to remain totally on their game in order to do their day-to-day commitments, who are juicing-curious. For those people, I would simply advise working more personal time into your daily regimen than usual, and trying as well as you can to reduce your exposure to triggers (like food) and overexertion (maybe skip your advanced yoga class during your juice fast—opt instead for a restorative yoga session). We each have to find our own beat and do the best we can. I love what economist George Stigler says: “If you never miss a plane, you’re spending too much time at the airport.”
Despite my planning, there were definitely times when, for whatever reason, I did have to socialize and follow through with work obligations during my juice fasts, and—I’ll admit—they were sometimes painful. If a work meeting had to take place, I would make sure to schedule it at a location where I could get an herbal tea (which I began to allow myself on my fasts). Still, being around food felt triggering to me. It’s not as though I would have broken the fast and eaten the food, but minimizing the outside distractions as much as possible—which includes emptying my cabinets of tempting foods, not watching TV commercials or reading ad-heavy magazines, and avoiding going to cafés as much as I could—was something that helped me tremendously. Whenever possible, I would avoid these situations, but there were times when that became impossible, and during those times, I just kept that saying in my head (and sometimes printed out, on a sheet of paper, in my pocket): The frustration is temporary. What you are doing is so good for you—both physically and mentally. The results will pay off. Just get through this. I tend not to be an affirmation-type person in general, yet keeping affirmations like that on hand was something I found grounding.
Seem tough? How can you possibly throw your hands up in the air and change your plans for a week and a half when there’s so much fun to be had, and—once again—you’ve gotta live, right?
Yeah, you do. And living is exactly what I am doing—also in spades—both in terms of basking in my exciting, delicious, and fulfilling life, while at the same time prioritizing my well-being and health. Not to sound too crunchy, but I strongly believe that the foods I eat directly relate to the energy I put out into the world. When I’m eating more consciously, I find that I more easily extend that intentionality to my relationships with others. Once I started taking the time to be honest with myself about where food actually comes from, I found that if I truly want to consume in a way that comports with my worldview and is in harmony with my ethical beliefs, whole, plant-based foods must become the star of the show.
Financial advisers often say that we’re supposed to pay ourselves first. Even in regard to the nonprofit that I founded and run with Mariann, Our Hen House, I have learned the difficult but valuable lesson that in order to make it a sustainable enterprise, I have to be fairly paid. “But it’s a labor of love!” I would tell my board of directors, who gently insisted that in order to be professional, we had to move beyond just a “basement operation,” and they proved to be right. When it comes to my health, I try to take that same advice to heart: I need to prioritize sustainability and self-care, within the scope of what is realistic for me. For me, juice fasting is easy. Eating a vegan, whole-foods-centered diet is even easier. Together, they are a recipe for a long, healthy life. And that is an investment I will eagerly take to the bank.
—
I was literally dreaming of seitan piccata—the delectable entrée they serve at the upscale vegan eatery Candle 79, which was just a short subway ride away. I would close my eyes and have intrusive images of breaded and fried wheat gluten, delicately placed atop a small hill of buttery mashed potatoes, dotted with bold capers.
“I’m dreaming of seitan again,” I told Mariann. We were in the midst of our second juice fast, after finding so much value from our first.
“Stop talking about it,” she responded, irritated. “It’s time to have our juice. I don’t want to think about seitan right now.”
People frequently ask me if all I want to do when I come off of a juice fast is binge eat. When I was in the middle of those early juice fasts, that worry ran over and over in my mind: What if I lose control when I’m done juicing? Will I just hop on the 6 train and—oops!—wind up in a comfy and shadowy booth at Candle 79? What if the seitan piccata is my gateway drug back to a life of eating my way through the city that never sleeps, and never stops serving food? In the past, such as during my self-imposed “free time” at Weight Watchers, the time when I considered myself “off” a particular diet was the time when I would binge and eat whatever I wanted, and however much of it I desired, no questions asked. In the old days, with my old mentality, coming off of a juice fast would have clearly involved “making up for lost time,” with, for example, a seitan piccata (and an additional order for the road).
And yet, that never happened. It would appear that the obsessive thoughts I had been having of food while I was juice fasting were their own kind of detox. These thoughts were simply stuck in my brain and my mind’s eye from the old days, and I needed to extricate them as much as my body needed to extricate the toxins that caused my physical symptoms. Just like my clogged arteries that needed flushing out, my mind would not be clutter free until I allowed these images of food to come to the surface and then be set free. I would see the images of fried this and sugary that pop into my head, say to myself, “Thank you for sharing,” and then I’d move on, rather than indulging. During this mental detox (which still pops up from time to time), I found out the true meaning of “free time.” I was free of the mental clutter that used to compel me to binge eat. Instead, I was full of health-promoting foods, and a strong desire to center my diet around those very foods, and I had a newfound commitment to myself and to the world to prioritize self-care.
It wasn’t just during my juice fasts, and in the immediate aftermath of them, that my cravings disappeared. Perhaps more importantly, it was during the rest of the time—when I was simply living my life—that I found it relatively easy to stay off the junk food. One of the keys to this was eating in a balanced, nourishing, and plentiful way when I wasn’t juicing. So as I reincorporated eating, because whole foods became my new normal—and processed foods became the occasional treat—I never had to control portions again. This is hugely important—monumental, in fact. For me, controlling portions is “dieting,” and dieting is something I’ve failed at all my life. The minute you tell me (or I tell me) that I can’t have more, I want to binge till I drop. That was off the table now. When the obsessive food imagery popped up for me,
I decided to just let it be. Thank you for sharing. Eventually, since I wasn’t giving in to it, it blew away.
—
About two years into my regular, monthly juice fasts, Mariann got a job as a visiting professor at Lewis & Clark Law School’s Center for Animal Law Studies, which was, at the time, the only program in the world with razor-sharp focus on the growing field of animal law, her specialty and the subject in which she was asked to teach. (We became giddy when Mariann was also asked to teach an entire class there in the much less talked about specialty field of farmed animal law, her true passion.)
So we took our dog, Rose, and we drove—using only two-lane highways—all the way from New York City to Portland, Oregon, where we lived for six months. When we were in Portland, not only did our lives become even busier than they normally are, but Mariann was working at her office fairly regularly, and I would often join her and work from there, too. This meant that our juice fasts needed to be a little bit restructured, since there was simply no time to make the full day’s juices and send them with Mariann for her long days at school.
That was about the time that we found a store that offered premade juice for fasts, available in different-length programs, which, conveniently, was located halfway between our house and Mariann’s office. And so, after all this time of making our own juices each and every time, we made the decision to buy them premade. This began a new incarnation of our juice fasting.
It was, admittedly, very expensive. However, buying produce is also extremely expensive (especially if it’s on the organic end—and most premade juice fast programs are all organic). But it was so convenient that we decided to make it work. We took the additional money that it required—beyond the money we had budgeted for our regular juice fasts—from our monthly grocery and restaurant budget. This did force us to get creative about our groceries, since planning for our juices took a big chunk out of the budget, but the good thing about eating vegan is that there are so many low-cost, super-healthy staples—such as grains, dried beans, nuts and seeds, and frozen fruits and vegetables.
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