Docs about People who make Extreme Life Changes

1. Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead.

I heard about this doc through another blog, so I decided to check it out. I tricked Meeker into watching it with me (I just turned it on) and we were hooked. After watching it, Meeker and I decided to buy a juicer and do our own juice fast (and according to twitter, everyone else who watches this movie gets the same inspiration FF: @joethejuicer ).

Meeker and I did not have the same results as this Aussie.

We made a few obvious mistakes which led to our demise, so maybe you can learn from us.

Mistake 1: We planned our juice fast to start on Dec 22.. 3 days before Christmas. We were staying in Raleigh by ourselves for Christmas because I had to work and had no vacation time left after our wedding. We thought it would be the perfect time to juice because no one was around and we could focus.Turns out, we wanted to be around people during Christmas even though we were away from family which means Christmas food temptation to the max .

Mistake 2: We did not detox leading up to our fast. Before you start a juice fast you are supposed to eat raw  so the withdrawal symptoms are less severe. Instead we went to 3 Christmas parties that week including the night before our fast. No Bueno. The preliminary fast is important, not just a "meh" as we once thought.

Mistake 3: We did not experiment with recipes or our juicer before our fast. We blindly followed all the recipes on the reboot website associated with the doc. Mean Green, you are trash, Gazpacho juice- I hate you. :-) We naively thought we would like all the juices and we just didn't. And we bought a really expensive juicer (thanks wedding registry credit!), so our juicer was yielding 2x the amount that the recipe said it would make (go Omega!) so we were probably over-doing it.. We were so disgusted... we made 40 oz of that Gazpacho juice and poured it directly down the drain because it smelled like onion (onions should not be juiced) and looked like vomit.

So, as I mentioned in a previous blog, our juice fast lasted 3 days and ended at  Cheesecake factory.

But, we have learned from our mistakes and found some juices we like so it wasn't a huge waste.

2. No Impact Man
I heard about this movie from my friend Abbi, who had rented it from the Library for free. (Abbi is one of my most frugal friends and she and her husband Joel are pretty cool. They saved up money for a whole year to drive across the country (Ohio to CA) and now live in this community in Baltimore, Reservoir Hill). Anyway, I found it on Netflix and added it to the queue. I watched it while Meeker was on a business trip. It was really interesting. Its about a guy and his family who decide to go a whole year making "no impact" . So they try to create as little waste as possible- no trash, eating local, only using bikes or walking (he lives n NYC). It was actually really interesting and inspiring, and I now cringe every time I use a zip-lock bag or paper towel. Check it out yo!