I Went On A 24 Hour Juice Fast And Made My Kids Mac N Cheese And Didn’t Cry Once (Not Really)

shutterstock_155147969I have a lot of stupid ideas. Bleaching all of my super long hair and dying it lilac. Trying to back out of my garage when the electric door is frozen with what looks like just enough room to get my car out but isn’t. Going on a 24 hour juice fast and cooking my children Annie’s bunny organic Mac N Cheese and almost breaking into tears over the boiling water.

Ok, so the juice fast isn’t as bad as I’m making it out to be, or as bad as I whined to my Mommyish co-workers that it was. Maria Guido is the asshole who got me into this nonsense. Claiming she once juice fasted for 21 days and by the end of it she had lost 14 pounds and her skin was DEWY AND GLOWING. I don’t know about you guys, but because of this awful winter my skin basically has the texture of the cheapo paper towels you buy at Walgreens when you realize you are out of paper towels and you grab the ones closest to the checkout lane because you have to rush home and watch Scandal. My face is all dry and flakey. I have gained a mess of weight over the winter due to tator tots covered in cheese and bacon (NO LIE) and the occasional three cupcakes in one sitting, and I just feel sort of blah. Plus, I have been drinking more tequila than water.

I caved and bought the juicer everyone buys on Amazon and experimented making my own juices, but quickly learned that in order to make a decent green juice that doesn’t taste like lawnmower clippings and snail tears that you have to add a mess of yummy yummy fruit to it, which sort of defeats the whole purpose of juice cleansing. Heathy juices are sad juices. The juices I was making had basically the caloric equivalent of a Big Mac. Sure, I was making them with organic kale and celery and cucumbers but then I was adding enough fruit to make them taste like a Pop Tart. I was getting my vegetables, but I was also getting a giant dose of sugar.

I decided I wanted to be more hardcore for just a small frame of time to see what the big whoop is. So I spent a whole mess of my grocery money ordering a 24 juice cleanse from Williams Sonoma. My Life Juice cleanse cost me 65 dollahs, and you can double that because I purchased one for my husband as well so I didn’t have to suffer alone.

Screen Shot 2014-02-18 at 6.32.08 AM

 

There goes all of our FUN money for the month, which means there will be no movies with delicious popcorn covered in fake butter or like, laundry detergent. Because I don’t know how to read I blindly purchased the juices not fully realizing I would have to drink SEVEN in one day, and that those yummy looking red juices aren’t yummy because they are made with pomegranate juice or blood orange juice or red apples, they are like that because they are made with healthy shit like beets and red cabbage.

The first “juice” you drink isn’t technically a juice, it is a water made with water, lemons and pink Himalayan sea salt. Sounds sexy right? Sounds nice and sexy and healthy and cleansing. This water tasted vaguely reminiscent of Visine when you accidentally put too much into your eyes and it drips onto your lips and you instinctively lick them.

I sent my husband at least three texts that read:

THIS TASTES LIKE TUNA WATER AND DEATH.

He replied telling me to shut up and drink my expensive juice. He actually really dug the Himalayan Sea Salt Citrus Sole and asked if we could order it by the case. You cannot. I think I can make it at home by pouring a glass of tap water and adding some salt and goldfish water and waving a lemon about five feet away from the glass. And so my day went on.

The rest of the juices tasted pretty much the same. They were all very vegetable based with a hint of fruit. I whined a lot to my co-workers, until I gave up the good fight at two and announced I was going to go drink my sad juice and cry. I also may have spammed them all with photographs of brownies.

BY-_CdQIAAA5LUI

 

I had to roughly drink a bottle of juice every couple of hours and by the time my kids came home I had urinated roughly eleventy times. I don’t think I have ever peed so much in my life. Not even when I was super pregnant. Plus, I had to feed them and they wanted junk food so I made them that Annie’s organic shells and cheese, also known as Mana Of The Gods. I may have felt weepy while standing over the pot of boiling water and drinking my next green juice of the day.

My husband arrived home to find me curled up in bed watching the most recent True Detective on HBO. He was in an amazingly great mood and asked me what juice we had to drink next, because keep in mind we were on a juice drinking schedule where if we didn’t plan it correctly we would end up slugging juice at two in the morning. It was the Spiced Almond Milk, which judging by the ingredients sounded like a delicious spice infused milkshake. It wasn’t.

Have you guys been watching True Detective? IT’S SO SCARY! And this latest episode was so scary and all of these awful things are being revealed and my husband gave me my Almond Milk and I drank it and it tasted like water with STUFF in it, and it was not good, and that coupled with True Detective and what my husband said to me next almost made me barf in my bed.

I live in the south. This winter in the south we have had a huge infiltration of stink bugs. For those of you unfamiliar with stink bugs, they are these nasty evil beetle like insects that smell awful when you squish them, and they get in when it is cold, and you will find them crawling on your bedroom walls and they are pretty much the worst. And having a monthly exterminator doesn’t help. So as I sucked down my Almond Milk and watched my amazingly upsetting television show I may have told my husband that I couldn’t do it, that I couldn’t drink anymore, and he told me to:

SHUT UP AND DRINK YOUR STINK BUG WATER.

For those of you who are unaware of this, divorce lawyers don’t take your calls at nine o’clock at night.

I don’t know if juicing makes you emotional or not. Maybe it was because the show I was watching was so creepy and scary or maybe it was because the juice was cleaning my body out of all these negative sad emotions or something or maybe I just was really sad I couldn’t have MAC N Cheese. I don’t know, but I was very emotional.

Then we had to drink something called HAPPY BELLY which was made with a lot of red cabbage and shockingly enough, it tasted pretty decent.

I woke up this morning feeling fabulous. My skin doesn’t exactly look dewy but I lost two pounds probably due to water weight and I feel fabulous, energetic and awesome and I actually made my own green juice and this time I only added one apple.

I may or may not dig through the refrigerator for leftover Mac N Cheese but I do think this has inspired me to keep using my juicer because there is no way in hell I can eat five pounds of vegetables a day. Unless they are made of candy.

(Image: John E. Manuel/shutterstock)

Similar Posts