If you’re a real time friend or a friend on facebook you already know I’m on a two week juice fast because I’ve talked about nothing else for a week.
At the start of August Drew and I went on our annual vacation to visit my mother and siblings in Northern Michigan, and ate the usual mountain of food. My family is very healthy, we don’t eat junk food or a lot of meat and that area is rife with produce that tastes better than anywhere else I’ve been. You can pull up to a roadside stand manned with only a little lockbox for self-service payment and get amazing peaches, cherry, corn, etc for a quarter of a price of the less savory versions in a New York supermarket. But even though it’s veggie-heavy, we do love to cook and eat, and my sister and mother are excellent bakers. Everyone uses the vacation as an opportunity to really go for it.
My brother has dubbed this time of year “the Crammies”. All planning revolves around the food. Going to the beach? We’re gonna need sandwiches. Big ones. What are we going to make for dinner? Who’s going to cook it? What kind of dessert are we having? Can we have spaghetti again? We’re going to need garlic bread. More fresh-baked rhubarb pie, please! Put some ice cream on it!
On top of this, my mother and I really enjoy wine o’clock on the patio, so prior or during cooking our enormous meal we would have a glass (mom) or two (me) to relax from the busy day of thinking about what to have for dinner.
I could feel myself expandimg, confirmed by a visit to Macy’s to buy new bras, in which I learned that I am a full size bigger than I thought I was, and spent much time in that area where the bras look more like utilitarian headgear than something to gently cup the bust. Traumatic. Girls with small busts don’t understand this, girls with big busts know exactly what I’m talking about. When you get heavier, it stops being cute.
So I’ve been wanting to clean out, drop a couple of pounds and reset the appetite buttons, plus I was kind of interested to see if I could push myself.
And here I am, on day 8. I won’t bore you with a day by day account, because there is so much already written on the internet and even I am bored with my own self-obsession at this point. I will tell you that I had no idea how much I liked food until I stopped eating it. Zoe did. She said, in her elegant British accent, “But Dahling, you’re such a foodie. You’re going to be so unhappy!”
Sigh…
The idea, for the uninitiated, is to get nutrients purely from juice rather than the whole vegetable or fruit with fiber in order to give the digestive system a break and the body time to detox. And detox it will. I have not experienced all of the horror listed by other poor souls online, but there have been a few. On the first day I couldn’t see straight by mid-afternoon and was then visited with the worst headache I’ve ever experienced. It was blinding. Luckily that lessened on day two until it passed and I moved on to some cold-ish symptoms, a dry mouth, body aches, and general weakness. The first few days I slept like a rock as soon as I laid down, now I’m in this weird phase where although slightly weaker, I am not sleeping as much. I like sleep almost as much as food, so this is also a bummer.
What I was not prepared for was the obsessing. My brain locked into this weird place where it spun around and around food and the fact that I was not eating food. It was beyond physical hunger, because you can satiate your body with a decent serving of fresh juice. I could feel that my belly was full but my brain didn’t want to accept it. I was completely tweaked with thoughts about food and fasting, unable to quiet my mind. I’m sure some of this actually is natural physical need, but it went way beyond that.
Sunday (day 5) was the worst. I work on Saturday nights and Drew and I always have a leisurely Sunday which involves ordering in whatever kind of food we want. Sometimes it’s burritos, sometimes it’s a big spread of Indian food, sometimes it’s Italian. Doesn’t matter, we like it all. Luckily he is out of town so the routine was broken anyway, but my first thought upon waking was, “Ooh! What am I going to order to eat today?” and then the saddened realization that I would only be grinding more carrots into the dreaded machine. It was a long, lonely day. I watched Anna Karenina and wept a little for both her and me and found myself unconsciously dipping my tongue in my lemon water to try to catch the bits of pulp floating in it.
Prior to that, on Friday, I picked up a couple of bottled juices at the Juice Press so I wouldn’t get too hungry during or after work. Juice Press makes the most amazing juices, really tasty and some are very concentrated for various health scenarios, there’s nothing better when you have a cold or a hangover. You just have to get past the slouchy hat wearing, super-hip young clientele and staff, which sometimes, like say when you haven’t eaten in three days, can seem irritatingly pretentious and worthy of shoving out of the way to get to the cooler.
I bought a smoothie by accident, all the bottles are the same and I was focused on how good the ingredients sounded. Smoothies are not allowed as they are made with the whole fruit and vegetable and therefore will engage the entire digestive system. I had a momentary panic when the straw went into the bottle and I realized it was too thick to be juice. Then I thought, well, fuck it, I just plunked down an exorbitant amount of money for this thing, and some people do smoothie fasts and this one tiny bit isn’t going to kill the entire process. So I drank it, and as I did the sun came out from behind the clouds and a chorus of angels sang Handel’s Messiah. I was so happy. It tasted so good. My stomach felt a little overfull afterward and there was some guilt, but it was fabulous for that brief and shining pureed strawberry moment.
Finally, finally this morning of day 8 I woke up and found a quieter brain. I did some yoga and felt more myself than I have in a week. I would still really, really, reaaaaaaallly enjoy a plate of spaghetti or even a couple of potato chips right now, and I haven’t yet experienced all that ethereal joy that people crow about (except when cheating with a smoothie), but I’m not suffering mentally or physically. And my skin looks great and I have lost a couple of pounds, enough to inspire an early morning, no make-up selfie which I posted on facebook, much to my sister’s chagrin..
Note the Xbox controller in the background. Keeping it klassy!
All right–main reason for blogging today: I’m so sorry to do this to my friends, but I’ve got a product review to do!
Every once in a while I get asked to endorse something. I always say no because it’s usually something I have no interest in, like online gambling sites, and it never pays much. It feels yucky to me. I’d love to get paid for blogging, but not if I have to lie. I may be a slut, but I’m not a whore! Or, erm, something like that…
So bear with me, for the first and most likely last product review that you will see here. Unless of course liquor sponsorship shows up, then it could get dicey. But Patron hasn’t called yet.
A month or so ago the good people at Rounderwear emailed me to see if I would review their product, and I said yes. I don’t know why. They didn’t offer remuneration, I guess I wasn’t paying attention while going through emails and have a tendency to say yes instinctively when it comes to underwear. I did the lingerie buying for Patricia Field for a while and loved it. I like the lace, the colors, the femininity, the promise of a more beautiful life in all the tiny bits of clothing. Unfortunately my taste was too high-brow for the clientele and I eventually passed on the task to someone with more of a liking for neon lycra stripper gear. But it was fun while it lasted.
Rounderwear sent me the panty of my choice, which was the boyshort. The architecture behind the line is that it rounds your butt with strategically placed bands. Having worked in retail with Japanese girls, I am no stranger to the butt lifting, filling out and shaping phenomena. Those tiny, perfectly proportioned feline women are always trying to get more booty, while I, on the other hand, am not looking for more padding. Yoga keeps my behind in decent shape, and I (usually) eat enough food that it’s never been in the slightest danger of disappearing.
Fun fact: As a teenager this was not the case, and I was devastated to learn that a couple male members of my high school class had taken to calling me “Tits on a Tube”. It was quite upsetting.
But I digress. Here are the Rounderbum panties on me. Please forgive these crappy kitchen and in front of the tv selfies today, but living in Manhattan it’s a miracle I’ve even got enough space to stand and photograph my own ass. You get what you get.
The panties actually work, and there’s no padding. I tried them under jeans and could see a rounder shape, which was nice and natural looking. The bands lift and push your butt up, similar to the way a push-up bra works. They’re also made really well and would survive some use. My Japanese friends would love them, I think most people looking for more butt would love them.
Downside, they cut into my belly in a way that I find unflattering. You have to have no belly fat for this boyshort, or maybe get a size up from your usual. And they’re a bit uncomfortable after a while, everything felt tight and elasticized. Maybe you could get used to it? I’m accustomed to having a free-roaming, untethered-except-by-normal-means butt. It’s like trying to bridle a wild stallion! Okay, maybe not, but it was a bit constricting. I would say that if you’re not super thin it’s best to go with their more traditional and spanx-like versions with padding.
Overall, two thumbs up, fine family fare.
Summary:
Fasting sucks ass but it’s doable. If you want more thoughts about my own experience you are welcome to email me or ask in the comment section. Or, you could pick up a couple of hamburgers and stop by my place.
Second, rounder butts are easy to achieve with the proper underwear, and could possibly keep you from being called horrible names in high school.
MISS ANTHROPE'S HOUSE OF HIGH DRAMA 
I simply adore you.
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