Day 15

Hm, unfortunately juice feasting won't fix my crappy job! My students are as unmotivated as ever, and their nasty behavior throughout the day escalated into a full-fledged "incident" in PM homeroom. Yaaay, violence and frustration! I swear the children would be in more control of their emotions if their diets weren't so freaking atrocious. I thought about it, and I think today was the WORST day since I started teaching this September.

I was actually so stressed out that when one of my classes left the room (this is before shit even started hitting the fan!), I started crying uncontrollably. That's never happened to me, even once. I can't imagine what the stress of working at that middle school is doing to my body. Honestly, I'd quit if I could afford to. I should start saving...Maybe I could start selling flax seed/juice pulp crackers to help my cause. :)

Anway, on an even more serious note...the "one head of celery per day" advice (I feel like I've been getting a decent amount of leafy greens and cukes in otherwise) is to be fucking heeded. I think I'm on the cusp of what could be a serious iodine deficiency, or some kind of weird detox.

After never going back to the kelp flakes after day four (yuck), I'd only been using celery very, very sporadically as its not my favorite vegetable. At all. And by "sporadically," I mean basically never. I've now got these mountainous bumps near my thyroid glands, which is a clear indication of an iodine deficiency, and they've only been getting bigger the past few days. Yuck.

Since I can't really handle the celery + apple + leafy green combination, I will just add an entire head of celery to all of my apple juices...Making all of my juices for the day green! I find that pretty exciting, haha. Also, as mentioned in my previous post, I'm going to try to up the daily green intake overall.

So, I went to Whole Foods and bought 2 bunches of collards, 2 bunches of kale, and 3 heads of celery. Believe it or not, that put me back $20. Yep, $20. For seven bunches of greens! I'm sure the farmers didn't even see a third of that. Gaaaah. I hate Whole Foods...and at the same time the co-op seems so far away. Bleh. I'm going to look into ordering my greens in bulk, as it just seems to make more sense that way.

On the brighter side, Trader Joe's was fully stocked tonight! I grabbed 6 of the ever elusive organic cucumbers, 3 3-lb bags of apples, some frozen blueberries...and some mint. I'm going to try the watermelon & mint combination tomorrow, I believe. I also grabbed some cilantro and some ginger from the corner vegetable stand.

I LOVE cilantro. Smelling the freshly peeled garlic, cilantro, citrus, and ripe fruits and veggies really had me craving some fresh salsa & salad! I'm still amazed by the heightening of my senses...while blending up the celery for my juice this evening I could smell it from across the kitchen when I ran to the fridge for more ingredients!

I'm really starting to crave fresh, raw foods instead of whole cooked foods, which I wasn't entirely confident would happen. I think I"ll appreciate solid food SO much more than I did before! The first few days of the feast I was thinking about any and every possible type of crap junk food (haha, detox?) and last night I fell asleep thinking about raw pizza. I'm sure I could write a really, really great un-cookbook at this point, as my mind is swirling with recipes (and kale juice).

Onto the Juices!:
-- 2 qts water w/lemon & MSM
-- 1.2 L apple juice w/1 tablespoon hemp oil (9 red delicious apples)
-- 1 qt red chard/apple (5 gala apples, 1 bunch red chard)
-- 1 qt orange juice
-- 1 qt celery/apple/lemon/cucumber (1 cucumber, 4 gala apples, juice of 1 lemon, 1 cucumber)