40 Days to Personal Revolution: Three-Day Fruit Fast

Here I am, just finishing up my final day of the three-day fruit fast that is 'prescribed' in Week 4 of Baron Baptiste's 40 Days to Personal Revolution... so how do I feel on the evening of my last day?  Pretty good, I have to say! - but definitely ready for a cup of coffee and some thing crunchy tomorrow!
 
According to the Mayo Clinic a fruit includes avocado, beans, peapods, corn kernels, cucumbers, grains, nuts, olives peppers, pumpkin, squash, sunflower seeds and tomatoes. Vegetables include celery (stem), lettuce (leaves), cauliflower and broccoli (buds), and beets, carrots and potatoes (roots).

I decided to stick to a pretty narrow definition of fruit (berries, bananas, oranges, apples, etc.) and also tomatoes and avocados, and I have to say... it wasn't even close to being as hard as I thought it would be. I know that there were others in my group that did struggle with it, and a lot of others who included things like squash and nuts, but I found the strict fruit fast surprisingly easy.  Although February is not the best month to attempt a fruit cleanse, I was able to stock up on some berries and a fresh pineapple yesterday to give myself some more variety and that got me through to the end. My one mistake was that I didn't properly shop prior to starting, so the first two days were VERY repetitive (I'm SICK of APPLES!).

Technically the fruit fast is supposed to be three days, but yesterday (on my third day) I randomly ended up at a customer's site without a car (silly of me) and had to go to lunch with my customers to pass the time until my ride was ready to leave. We were in Meade, Colorado, a TINY town north of Denver with not much going on and not many options, so they took me to the local BBQ joint.... not the best place to be if your on a fruit fast - they didn't even have fruit on the menu!  There was really no socially acceptable way for me to get out of lunch w/out eating, so I ordered a chicken salad and promised myself I wouldn't beat myself up over it... life happens and you have to roll with the punches sometimes. But I was disappointed because I knew I could have done it and I really wanted to do it, so later that day I decided that to make up for it by extending my fruit fast one more day - hence a 4-day fruit fast.
 
The hardest part of the four days was last night, because it was Nick's birthday.  Dan invited us over for dinner with Aimee and Kevin. There was pasta w/ sausage, bread (that looked amazing), Caesar salad, chicken wings, AND birthday cake.... I wanted to eat it so bad!!! But I'm proud of myself that I held strong and didn't cave to the temptation (but there is a piece of bday cake in the fridge for me that I will eat tomorrow!!)

So what did my day look like on the fruit cleanse?  For breakfast every day I had a fruit shake - fruit only, with either some coconut milk or pineapple juice.  Lunch was a fruit salad (except when it was a chicken salad!) and for dinner I had roasted tomatoes and avocado every night.  (yes as I said... my fast was a little redundant). then there was snacking throughout the day on whatever I grabbed first.  
 
So now that it's just about over, what are my take-aways form the fast
 
First: What I learned
 

•  I was REALLY surprised that I wasn't famished all day long and I was REALLY surprised by how easy the fast was for me. (ok it's not really a fast, because you can eat as much as you want but it just has to be fruit) but yeah it was great to do something so easily that I thought was going to be really hard.
• Yoga was also not as difficult as I thought it would be on the fast.  On the second day I even did YogaCross (45 minutes of cross training + 45 minutes of yoga) and felt absolutely great! Today, though, I was definitely feeling fatigued in class and had to take it easy in a couple of poses, but all in all it went pretty well.
• I was surprised by how little I actually needed to eat to feel satiated.  Of course I was eating lots of small portions throughout the day, but it gave me the sense that I probably over eat quite a bit without realizing it - in the very least it gave me a better awareness of my eating patterns and how I might make small changes to improve my general diet.
• The most important thing I learned was that I really love fruit, it is easy to eat, and I should always be snacking on fruit and eating fruit salads, it is wonderful!  Last fall I was almost never eating fruit, so I started to track it in an attempt to eat more... in October I ate fruit only 50% of the days... in January, I ate fruit 26 / 31 days - and in February right now I'm 6/6.... pretty good improvement if I do say so myself!

 

What I would do differently:

• I would buy more varieties of fruit and not be so lazy with my dinner choices - tomatoes and avocado are great, but 4 nights in a row? That is just lazy! I probably would have benefited from diversifying my diet a bit, but for a first ever cleanse, I'm not going to beat myself up over it.

 

And that's about it.  I am super excited to have finished my first ever cleanse.  I also combined the fruit fast with a 7-day cleanse from Arbonne where you basically just drink their cleanse drink every day for 7 days.  It didn't cause any cramping or bathroom problems (like I had feared) and was probably the easiest cleanse I've ever heard of, so that was pretty great too. 

 I'm not sure how detoxified my body really is after all of this cleansing, I don't know if you're supposed to feel different or anything, i feel about the same (but i did lose a couple of pounds!) but it did feel pretty good to spend a week being super diligent about what I ate  (except on super bowl Sunday when I was washing down my Doritos with my Arbonne cleanse!).  Now that it's over though, I'm ready for some solid food tomorrow!!