Traveling Lighter

I dropped another 15 lbs this weekend and it wasn't from juicing.  This time the  weight came from my high school yearbooks - all four of them.  I wrote about this in my post   This Will Go Down on Your Permanent Record when I decided to tear out the pages that I wanted to save and scan them into my computer.  I spent Saturday in my pajamas and finished this project.  Now I can make my own yearbook or video with the people I actually knew (and liked) and the memories I want to keep.  

This is all part of my striving to travel lighter and simplify my belongings.  I've also been scanning more of my son's artwork from elementary school and making sure all of our photographs have been scanned.  I've been working on that project for a few years now and I'm pretty sure most of them are now in my computer, which is backed up through the online service Mozy.com several times each day.  So, if anything happens to my computer, I can always restore the images.  If something happens to the internet, I'll probably won't be too concerned with my family photos because I'll probably be too busy running away from zombies.

Halfway Through

Today is the 22nd day of my juice fast and that means I'm halfway to my goal of 44 days (I chose 44 days as a symbolic gesture because I'll be 44 in April).  I've lost 30lbs and feel wonderful.  I haven't had a headache since those first couple of days of detox and only needed ibuprofen once last week when my back was acting up - a quick trip to my chiropractor took care of that issue though.  My skin is getting smoother and softer and I'm sleeping better.  I am amazed how easy the last 3 weeks have been and look forward to the next 3 weeks and trying more new fruits and vegetables to put through my juicer.

I have a pretty good idea now how to break my fast with small portions of fruit and salad for the first week or so and will then begin adding blended smoothies for breakfast, soups and beans and other starches for lunch or dinner.  I'll slowly add high quality, organic meat back into my diet, but will limit it to a few times a week and juicing will continue to be part of my daily routine.  

For some, a 44 day juice fast may seem like an extreme measure or even overkill.  When you have as much weight to lose as I do, extreme measures are necessary.  For me this has been a natural progression of starting from a spiritual place about two years ago and working from the inside out before addressing my daily food intake.  Just like my decision to follow a long-time dream to move to Santa Fe and then radically simplify my possessions, juicing seems to have been the next right thing for me and now I have a Radical Vision of the next 44 years of my life that looks something like this:

~ fewer possessions and more experiences
~ whole food instead of junk food
~ learning to love exercising my body
~ helping as many people as possible organize & redesign their lives
~ learning how to be a Mom, Daughter & Sister from a distance
~ making new friends and staying close to old friends
~ traveling around the world
~ many road trips between Santa Fe and Nebraska
~ finding love in all the right places 

Hopefully I'll meet a few of you along the way as I travel my road to happy destiny.