Over Winter Break, my husband, youngest son and I watched the documentary “Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead.”

We generally… when it’s convenient… try to eat well. So, while we try to be good about it, figure that because we are mainly healthy, and mainly thin and mainly try to exercise, we’re probably doing OK. Probably like many of you. We avoid fast food and eat out maybe once a week.

We’ve talked about trying to eat healthier. But any real action is usually driven by a health-related spike. Because really… why fix something that isn’t broken?? A number of years ago I had some of what I believe were stress and immune system issues that caused me to have crazy migraines. I think during that time of my life, I spent more time in bed than anywhere else. Thankfully with some lifestyle changes, diet and exercise… they are GONE (and have been for about 5 years whoo hoo)! But nothing real extreme…

So back to the punch line… After watching the show… and it was interesting if you’re into health-related documentaries, I would recommend it… we talked about trying a juice fast…  Sorry I jumped way ahead, the story line was a wealthy fat guy with medical issues who decided to try a 60-day juice fast as he went across the US NY to CA. He filmed the trip (including some cute, appropriate animation). It included segments on the people he met, their health and eating habits(so many of us have such terrible eating habits); a woman with migraines who agreed to try a 10-day juice fast; and the story of a truck driver the main character met with the same condition and his subsequent path to life-changing juice fast and weight loss. There was a nice balance of facts, motivation and reality (by the way… they included input from medical pros throughout).

So we were hooked. Our problem was that as we looked at the calendar, and sad as it is… we couldn’t find a 10-day period without food-based social events. Brother… our lives revolve around food. We couldn’t believe how much of our life involved social eating. No wonder I’ve added that 20 pounds over the past 20 years…

The good news is that as we talked over the next couple days, it seemed insane to make a step change. We didn’t have any burning medical issues driving this and our general policy (ok mine) is to not make major lifestyle changes on a dime. Try things gradually. The simple reason is that as pointed out by my engineer dad, step changes are not necessarily good for humans. We can run the litany of family and friends who made decisions to change diet or exercise or lifestyle and instead of gradual adoption, choose to “make that change NOW” and had some recoil from that decision.

So we decided and started to add fresh juice from our spiffy new juicer to our diet. To pay a little more attention to what we are eating while adding this fresh juice once or twice a day. After a couple weeks, we will see what we should change.

Watch for our updates…