By Natasha Julius

Some people start the New Year off with a few poxy resolutions scribbled down somewhere only to be forgotten by February. Me? I’m going on a two-week juice fast.
Day 10: Sprout to Get Me
There were some lines I discovered very early on that I simply wouldn’t cross; foods that ordinarily I love and adore, but couldn’t stomach the thought of consuming in juice form. Cauliflower? Love it, don’t ever want to juice it. Asparagus? Yum. Don’t ever want to juice it. Avocado? Yam? Garlic? Leek? The list was fairly long. It wasn’t based on any concrete evidence; it was more of a gut thing. “Go with your gut,” I told myself, “and everything will be just fine.”
This strategy has worked well for me so far, but earlier today at the supermarket I had a moment of weakness. Hang in there for a moment and I’ll explain.

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Posted on January 10, 2007

By Natasha Julius

Some people start the New Year off with a few poxy resolutions scribbled down somewhere only to be forgotten by February. Me? I’m going on a two-week juice fast.
Day 9: Driving Force
I like to challenge myself, as you’ve probably guessed by now, so today I tried something I’ve shied away from thus far in my fast. I got behind the wheel of a car.
This wasn’t just a question of wanton fancy. It was actually a necessity. In general, as a city mouse I can avoid taking to the streets. However, I teach yoga out in the suburbs on Tuesdays and there really isn’t any other way to get there. So there I was on a bright, sunny afternoon, 100% food-free for more than a week, hitting the highway with a peppy little V6 underfoot. And you know what? I can comfortably say I wasn’t the most high-risk driver out there. I think that distinction would probably go to the crazy lady with no wing mirrors switching lanes the way some people kick off their shoes. Or perhaps the guy who was consulting a map flung open across his steering wheel while holding and talking on a cell phone. The open road is populated by psychopaths, my friends, and an ultra-focused fasting fiend is the least of your worries.

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Posted on January 9, 2007

By Natasha Julius

Some people start the New Year off with a few poxy resolutions scribbled down somewhere only to be forgotten by February. Me? I’m going on a two-week juice fast.
Day 8: The Daily Grind
An interesting thing happens when you stop using your mouth to chew. You begin to notice just how often you use your jaw muscles. Every time you take a bite of food, your mandible contracts, retracts and moves side-to-side. It’s an incredibly complex ballet of two coordinated joints, requiring eight muscles that extend from the base of the jaw to the sides of the skull well above the brow ridge and temple. These same muscles are used when talking, grinning, protruding the jaw. They are among the tightest muscles in the body.
For me, clenching the jaw is an immediate response to stress. I also tend to clench my jaw or grind my teeth when I sleep. Every time the upper and lower teeth are in contact with each other I know I’m flexing some kind of muscle. Now that I’ve been chew-free for more than a week, I can tell you that it happens way more often than I ever realized. I can also tell you it’s taking a bigger toll than you might suspect.

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Posted on January 8, 2007

By The Beachwood Spinning Disc Shaped Object Affairs Desk

What was that unidentified flying object spotted hovering above Gate C-17 at O’Hare airport recently? A Beachwood investigation has narrowed the list to these 20 possibilities.
– A giant rotating TIF district.
– Dennis FitzSimons’ golden parachute.
– A Starbucks location-scouting drone.
– The Alpha Centauri Outfit collecting their cut.
– Oprah’s ego.

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Posted on January 8, 2007

By Natasha Julius

Some people start the New Year off with a few poxy resolutions scribbled down somewhere only to be forgotten by February. Me? I’m going on a two-week juice fast.
Day 7: The longest chard
It’s the halfway point of my fast and I think I can safely say that most of the serious detoxification is behind me. No more headaches, no more nose dripping like a tapped maple, no more confusing waves of digestive discomfort. I actually feel pretty damn good. So naturally, my thoughts are turning to the next week and what the biggest challenges will be for the remainder of the fast. I have a very busy schedule through Saturday, teaching yoga every day. Obviously, maintaining my energy level and packing enough juice will be two major issues from here on out. But these pale in comparison to the single greatest threat to my resolve: boredom.
Here’s the thing about freshly-extracted fruit and vegetable juices. After a while, they all taste pretty much the same. I mean, there are obviously some minor variations on the basic theme, but more or less they’re either kind of bitter or kind of sweet. However many combinations you come up with, they’ll generally cancel each other out and become a smooth, thickish, vaguely-earthy liquid. The one notable exception is chard, which has a very distinct note of seaweed to it, similar to when you’re wading in the ocean and you get hit in the face with a wave and accidentally swallow a little of it. Just me?

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Posted on January 7, 2007

By Natasha Julius

Some people start the New Year off with a few poxy resolutions scribbled down somewhere only to be forgotten by February. Me? I’m going on a two-week juice fast.
Day 6: Dinner-free dinner party
I like to think I’m a pretty social person, with decent social skills and an active social life. I never stopped to think before this week how much of that identity is bound to the act of eating, especially at a dinner party. Sharing food does more than nourish people; it provides a conduit for conversation, a means of sharing ideas from one common experience. It may sound like I’m overstating this, but trust me, I’m not.
Tonight I went to a dinner party. I talked, shared ideas, and had a wonderful time. But my wonderful time was drastically different from the wonderful time had by everyone else, because everyone else was eating. Everyone else was able to share a unique experience of consuming food expertly prepared for them by our hostess. They were able comment on that food in a way that I simply wasn’t.

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Posted on January 6, 2007

By Natasha Julius

Some people start the New Year off with a few poxy resolutions scribbled down somewhere only to be forgotten by February. Me? I’m going on a two-week juice fast.
Day 5: Food for Thought
No great feat of daring or stupidity is ever achieved alone, and so I, like so many before me, have recruited accomplices to help on my journey into foodlessness. I call them my “fast buddies” – people who’ve vowed to join me, in fact or in spirit, for the duration of these two weeks. So when a girl who can’t eat or drink alcohol wants to go out on a Friday night, she’s naturally going to call one of her fast buddies. Tonight, it was my friend Pants. Pants isn’t so much fasting as making radical changes in his diet, which include temporary abstention from the demon drink. In other words, he’s not opposed to sitting stone-cold sober and watching me sip broccoli juice.
It was good to get out of the house for a while and bend a sympathetic ear, because frankly today was a struggle. I think I’d imagined that I’d break the hunger barrier and that would be that – smooth sailing until next Sunday. Imagine my shock when the familiar growl began anew in my belly. It certainly wasn’t as strong as it was at first, but I couldn’t deny that my stomach was unsatisfied. At the same time, the very thought of chewing and then swallowing food has become completely foreign and somewhat frightening to me. I’m again trying to balance the intellectual knowledge that I’ve had plenty of nourishment with the physical reality that my stomach is empty.

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Posted on January 5, 2007

By Natasha Julius

Some people start the New Year off with a few poxy resolutions scribbled down somewhere only to be forgotten by February. Me? I’m going on a two-week juice fast.
Day 4: Brush with destiny
My work schedule on Thursday requires that I be out of the house most of the day, away from my cats, away from my familiar things, and – of the greatest import to this feature – far away from Dave’s juicer. Another day, another test. Had I been graded on my performance, I’m thinking I would’ve scraped by with an underachieving C. I left home with enough liquefied fruits and veggies to get me through the morning, figuring it would be easy enough to find unadulterated, hopefully organic juice in downtown Chicago. It isn’t. So the first lesson of the day is, no matter how heavy it may get, always pack more juice than you think you’ll need.

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Posted on January 4, 2007

By Natasha Julius

Some people start the New Year off with a few poxy resolutions scribbled down somewhere only to be forgotten by February. Me? I’m going on a two-week juice fast.
Day 3: Sipping point
Today I faced my first major test of the young fasting season. I went back to my job. Teaching yoga. I’m not going to try and compare the physical demands of yoga instruction with those of, say, building a house or lumberjacking, but the fact of the matter is it’s an energy-consuming enterprise. All things considered, I think I managed to pull it off. Fortunately, the spigot that is my nose stopped dripping for the duration of class, and no one seemed to notice any abnormal spaciness. I did learn one thing for certain, though: I need to drink more juice.

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Posted on January 3, 2007

By Maude Perkins

Let us now pause to reflect on some of the highlights of working in customer service the last couple of weeks, before moving on to whatever horrors 2007 will bring.
Hot Glove
For our quaint suburban town’s annual Christmas Walk, where residents gather in the town center to compare fur coats, the bank next door to us requested we make them 600 hot cocoas for the event. Amidst the craziness of the night, some kid left behind a pair of gloves, which we threw into the back room with the rest of the lost and found. It wasn’t until the end of the night, when the bank returned our giant hot cocoa containers, that my coworkers opened the lid to one of them only to discover that one of the gloves had somehow found its way inside the five-gallon cocoa urn and spent the evening floating around in it.
I still find it difficult not to laugh riotously when my memory returns to my coworkers’ discovery. Not only because the bank’s large cocoa request on this busy night was a major inconvenience for our store, but because I can only imagine where that little glove had been. Wiped across a runny nose or two, I suspect. Or perhaps run along the back of many-a-cute neighborhood dogs on the way to the Christmas Walk. Either way, it makes me smile to picture all those yuppies drinking the delicious free cocoa, garnished with a dirty glove.

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Posted on January 3, 2007