Hello. My name is April and I have been doing this Lemonade Cleanse or "Diet" for 7 days so far with great success. I decided to start a blog because I already see this as an interesting journey about ME. At first this "diet" was about my children, but I decided that I made the decision for me.
I've been dieting pretty much my whole life, thinking that I was fat at my lightest weight in high school. I was never happy at any weight, but I never truly stuck to any diet. I always convinced myself that I was going to start and then I failed when friends or family stuck food on my plate. After all, I was one of those kids that had to "clean" my plate or else!
This year and for the last 5 years my weight kept creeping up slowly to my heaviest weight of 228 pounds, and I'm not even 5 feet tall. Talk about heavy. I avoided pictures and mirrors as much as I could and ate everything I could get away with. I binged in secret, sometimes emotionally eating until my stomach hurt making me want to throw up...although I never did manage to throw up any food. This went on for years.
Fast forward to the last couple of weeks. Without effort, my weight went down a couple of pounds, where I stopped at 222 pounds. My skin was getting worse, (I have eczema and keratosis pillaris) it was so irritating and itchy...and my skin became so blotchy, it was disgusting. I ended up Googling everything about my health and finally by some accident came upon some information on the Lemonade Cleanse. It peaked my interest because I remember reading about cleansing to prepare for dieting. The more I read into it, the more I became excited. It dawned on my, the reason why my diets never worked was because the battle was about FOOD! This lemonade cleanse became my answer. I didn't have to worry about food, preparation, and the likelyhood of calling it quits.
The funny thing is, I began my cleanse 2 days after Thanksgiving. The other funny thing is, I didn't even binge on Thanksgiving like I normally would. I ate until I was full then stopped the rest of the evening. Then the day after, I ate NOTHING except for two small cups of McDonald's coffee. I even watched my kids eat hamburgers and drink my favorite soda (Dr. Pepper) several times, but decided I wasn't going to try to set myself up for failure again.
Immediately after that, I headed to my local Trader Joes and bought all my ingredients. I was even excited. I explained to my kids that their mommy was going to be on a diet and I wasn't going to eat anything but my special drink and water. I told them because I didn't want them to be concerned as to why I wasn't eating. I felt great making the decision to do it.
I guess when you mentally decide to take the plunge, you can do it. Granted the first couple of days were hard, but now after doing this for about a week...it's been getting easier. I'm not saying that I'm never hungry or I've stopped obsessing about food. I know it's a process. I've been doing a LOT of self-talk and now that I've gotten this far (I've never been on a diet longer than 3 days), I know I'll be able to do it. I've been able to say no to my favorite foods and I'm the cook in the family. I repeatedly tell whoever I'm with that I can't eat and even when they insist on me eating, I'm able to say no. Saying no has even gotten easier for me. I keep busy by cleaning, doing work on my laptop, watching movies (minus the usual food), taking long showers or bathes and listening to meditation/hypnosis sessions on my iPod. I try not to take naps or sleep in so that I can get myself to bed early enough before the temptations of food creep in (this happens to be the latest I've stayed up - but I want to finish this post.)
Now that I'm at the end of day 7, I would like to have an organized journal to keep track of the journey to my success. In the meantime, I'll be posting some previous vlogs of my first couple of days to catch up on my progress.
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