So.... I ate a tomato

Day 1:
Breakfast - Juice of 4 kale leaves, 2 celery stalks, 1/2 lemon, 1 granny smith apple, 1 cucumber and a piece of ginger
****morning snack****    One sliced tomato with pepper & apple cider vinegar
Lunch - Smoothie made with 1/2 blender of frozen chopped spinach, 2 kale leaves, 4 strawberries, 2 tbsp on blueberries, a chunk of fresh pineapple and 1 banana
Dinner - Juice of 3 kale leaves, 1 cucumber, 1 bell pepper, 1 carrot, 1/2 lime, 1 green apple
****evening cave**** 5 pan grilled green beans

I can feel you judging me!!!

OK OK OK!! So I caved a little and had to have a smidgeon of substance. I ate a damn tomato and a few green beans for crying out loud! God!

This was harder than I thought it would be and it tasted mostly terrible. I already love fruits and vegetables and will eat just about anything that grows out of the ground. I knew I needed to cram in as much green as I could today. Greens provide a tremendous amount of vidatim d, fiber, enzymes & antioxidents. Kale is the mac-daddy of greens. It fights fat for one and it's unusually high in fiber, nutrients, vitamin a & calcium, beta-carotene, which by many experts is believed to play a vital role in the battle against cancer, heart disease and certain age related illnesses. Then there's celery.... The shit I absolutely can't stand but that there's really no substitute for. It has vitamins a, k, b2 (riboflavin) b5, b6, magnesium, folate, calcium, and so on and on and on. I needed these things right away. I've been lacking energy, not sleeping well, racked with headaches and stress and in general just haven't been in a very good mood. I do NOT have cancer thankfully. But I do have atypical cells known as ductal hyperplasia that gives me a 45-48% chance of developing breast cancer. I'll see an oncologist next week and I feel certain he'll want to put me on some preventative drugs (that I won't be taking). He'll provide me with a risk assessment and hopefully if he's a decent doctor, a plan of action to help me prevent getting breast cancer.

I want to be healthy of course, but more than anything, I want to feel good and be around to see my kids grow up, to see my grandkids grow up. And I don't mean just BE here, I mean live - really live. I see so many overweight, sick people who aren't willing to make simple adjustments in their lives and do without some fatty greasy food and it's so disheartening. I've spent time with a number of people who are sick! I mean really really sick and I know they'd give anything to go back 30 years and take better care of themselves. They wish they'd never started smoking, or drinking. They wish they'd eaten better, exercised more. But now it's too late. Their lives are spent in utter misery, dependent on buckets of pills, oxygen tanks, breathing masks, insulin shots, surgeries, blood clots. The list goes on and on. I don't want that. I want to be a part of my children's lives, not a drain on them.

So today, I choked this stuff down knowing that in a few days my tastebuds will adapt and change and I'll be fine. The Pizza Hut commercial today only made me really hungry for about 5 minutes. Five miserable minutes. Five agonizing, disgustingly tantalizing miserably horrifying minutes........

Anyway, I got a recipe today on FB from a friend and I'm going to try it tomorrow for breakfast before heading out to see my surgeon for my follow up visit. It's a cup of vanilla Activia, spinach, a banana and some peanut butter and vanilla almond milk smoothie. It sounds heavenly and will be a welcome break. I'm hoping to incorporate more fruits and experiment with more recipes in the coming days. I've given myself permission to have slip-ups and cave into a tomato craving or a handfull of green beans here and there. I won't break from a strict 10 day diet of fruits and vegetables, juices and smoothie combinations. But if I have to have a tomato... I have to have a tomato. The only difference is I didn't juice it, I chewed it.

And there you have it, day 1. Day hungry, grouchy, angry 1. Eye of the Tiger and whatnot.