I decided to go vegetarian during my senior year of high school. A girl I liked had sworn off meat, and hoping to win her over, I did the same. I lasted less than three days.
So maybe I should have thought a little bit harder as I loaded my shopping cart during a late night trip to the grocery store this past weekend. I've been on a health food kick recently, so I filled my buggy with whole-wheat bread, tilapia, baby spinach, and as many different fruits as I could stuff into those plastic bags you find all over the produce section.
I'd never given much consideration to my eating habits until a routine doctor's appointment a few weeks ago, when a nurse told me that my blood pressure was a little too high for her liking.
Life has been extraordinarily stressful for the past few months. I'm spending anywhere between 50 and 60 hours per week at the office, and that doesn't include all of the work I do from home. I have eaten tons of fast food, consumed a ridiculous amount of caffeine, and not gotten nearly as much sleep as I would like. Add to that some family health issues and a few setbacks in my personal life, and I feel completely burned out, emotionally, physically, and spiritually.
I have decided that I'm going to turn things around this summer. I'm tired of coming home from work every day and not having the energy to do anything besides lay on my couch and flip aimlessly through channels on the TV. I want to feel better, about myself and about life in general. And changing my crummy diet seems like a great place to start. (I also decided this weekend that I want to start playing tennis, but that's a topic for another post).
After I had loaded up on fruits and vegetables last Saturday night, I steered my shopping cart toward the milk and juice section. I grabbed a handful of smoothies from the freezer and tossed them into my buggy. I felt pretty safe buying drinks with names like Strawberry Banana, Mighty Mango, and Berry Blast. I even threw in something called The Green Machine for good measure.
The Green Machine, according to its label, is a concoction of apples, bananas, kiwis, mangos, pineapples, broccoli, spinach, wheat grass, and some stuff I had never heard of before. (Spirulina? Chlorella?) I carried that bad boy into our staff meeting at work yesterday morning, hoping to impress everybody else in the office with my newfound healthy eating regimen.
Instead, the first thing I heard was, "That looks like something you drink before you have a colonoscopy!"
You've heard the saying "Drink this, it will put hair on your chest", right? Well, I'm pretty sure they were talking about The Green Machine when they came up with that phrase. I worked a nine-and-a-half-hour day yesterday, and when I left the office a few minutes before 5:00, I still had over half a bottle left of it. Not exactly something that would make Jack LaLanne proud.
I will keep you all updated on how my quest to get healthy this summer goes. But in the meantime, if you have any suggestions on how to make drinking fruit and vegetable smoothies a little more bearable, for the love, please send them my way.
