The Writer Walks

Lately I've been experimenting with diets. I can tell you right now, that is not healthy. Instead of doing hard work I'm always looking for shortcuts when it comes to me trying to stay fit. Take yesterday, for example. I tried doing a ten day juice fast. Yep, just like in the one in Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead by Joe Cross. I was all set and ready to go. We got a juicer, several bags of fruits and vegetables and two containers.

On my last day of solid food I had Jambalaya and one cup of coffee ice cream.

The morning of, instead of a bagel or cereal, I chugged a full glass of vegetable juice. Everything was going great until 10am when I was at work. I started getting a massive headache, it was hard for me to focus and I was starting to get dizzy. The drive home was extremely long. By the time I settled in at home, I was bogged down, woozy, exhausted and on the brink of throwing up from just juice and no solids.

In the end, I cracked. I had water and some crackers and when my strength was up I had mac and cheese. Lasted 23 hours without solid food.

I think from now on I have to stick to taking better care of myself and not depend so much on shortcuts. From now on I think I should incorporate more salads and a juice every other day. Plus some Power90 exercises.

But I didn't want the weekend to pass without me doing something health driven. So when my father-in-law asked if I wanted to join an event in downtown Chicago, I jumped at the chance. It was a Feed America to defeat hunger thing.

Can you taste the irony?

Now, having fully emersed myself in hunger the day prior, I now know the seriousness of the situation. I got up by 6am and we got there by 8:30am. It was packed, there were people everywhere. It was a brisk 3 mile walk. Every person who registered counted as a donation to a food bank depository. If I remember correctly, for every person who signed up, that's 7 pounds of food donated.

We had a great view, talked to a couple of people and felt good. It was great knowing you can participate in something that's part of the big picture.

Afterwards, my father-in-law took my to lunch. I decided to be smart for once and order a wedge salad instead of my traditional burger. We chatted about exercise gimmicks, such as the shake-weight and the vibrating belt machine, comics, the pros and cons of remakes, reboots and DC and Marvel, and had a great time.

Basically, I no lika da juice.

You Like The Juice? Juice is Good? - watch more funny videos

Occasionally, yes, juice is fine. But not for the whole day. But at least I tried it out.

I feel way healthier than I did yesterday.

And who knows, maybe a short story will come out of this. Until then, I pull my chair back to the desk, open up the laptop and start typing away, throwing myself back into the writing.

Here's some footage of the walk.