Student focuses on inner beauty after juice fast torture

Like most self-respecting Americans, we in the Fang family do not view the holiday season as a time to be grateful for what we already have but rather as a time to thoroughly abuse our first-world privileges. Be it from washing down that superlative number of honey-baked ham slices with mashed potatoes or treating cheesecake as an appetizer, the holidays always guarantee that I look more like Santa than I probably should.

However, after this holiday season, when I noticed with distress that my man bosom needed the help of a bra, I knew I had to resort to drastic measures.

I initially scoured the Internet for diet ideas and had almost given up hope after my research yielded disturbing diets like  “drunkorexia” when I remembered an article I had read in Time about juicing.

From my understanding of the article, juicing met both of my standards. It did not require physical exertion nor did it seem likely that it would lead to my untimely death.

The article mentioned the juicing company BluePrintCleanse in a relatively favorable light, claiming that the variety of juices the company offered were nutritious, yet still drinkable. After looking at the company’s website in greater detail and reading that actress Olivia Wilde no longer felt like she ate a Goodyear blimp halfway through the BluePrintCleanse, I was sold.

The cleanse, which is available at Whole Foods, comes with 6 drinks each day, two of which are potent green juices which consist of kale, parsley, romaine, cucumber, spinach, apple and more.

Being weak-willed and allergic to cashews, I skipped their cashew milk option and replaced it with a slice of whole wheat bread.

Since the juice is ridiculously expensive at $65 a day (including the cashew milk), and I did not want explosive diarrhea from only drinking liquids for a week, I decided to limit my experiment to two days. Don’t fret, two days was already far too long.

The first day, I started off with the green juice for breakfast. For such a miserable combination of ingredients, the taste was not actually that insufferable since  most of the kale and spinach madness was masked by pronounced lemon flavor. I followed it up with easily the most delicious drink of the bunch: a pineapple, mint and apple concoction.

Oddly enough, those two juices left me feeling full until the afternoon. For my late lunch, I drank another green juice, followed a couple hours later with a surprisingly tame spicy cayenne lemonade.

At around 7 p.m., I indulged in the slice of bread and choked down an absolutely noxious beet, apple and ginger amalgam that I am still too upset about to describe in detail.

Relatively unscathed after my first day, I went to bed early, feeling like I had conquered the diet. Yet, debilitating defeat was imminent.

I approached the next day with the same apportionment as the first. Morning was, once again, without incident but during the afternoon, I ceased to feel like a human being. Having polished off my “lunch” juices, I was still coping with crippling hunger during Mr. Dwyer’s economics class.

Resorting to fantasizing about fried chicken in a morally base manner, the only time I paid attention to the lecture was when he brought up a tantalizing hypothetical.

“You go to Jake’s and you get a garlic chicken pizza,” he said in what I perceived to be a perversely teasing tone.

But then he continued the hypothetical with a question about how that purchase affects gross domestic product and I quickly ignored him once more, instead fantasizing about garlic chicken pizza from Jake’s.

The next period, I am ashamed to admit that I glared at senior Jackie Gu during Mr. Rodriguex’s Spanish class when she offered to give me a bite of her Rojoz Wrap. I proceeded to thank her for her well-intentioned generosity by dropping endless  insinuations regarding how disgusting the wrap probably tasted. My mental stability only continued to unravel further as the day progressed.

My relief when the fast was over can only be likened to finishing a standardized test. I did lose two pounds, but to be honest, I gained that back after five minutes of  gorging myself on garlic chicken pizza from Jake’s the day after finishing my fast.

Ultimately, I learned that lose-weight-quick schemes are probably too good to be true. I also realized that more often than not, working to attain an ideal weight or physical appearance just isn’t worth sacrificing mental health and garlic chicken pizza.