Greetings to all of you friends, darlings and random people. My name is Jamie. I turned 31 in January, I am the mother of a beautiful and amazing 8 year old little girl, I'm very happily engaged (and getting married this September), I'm a culinary school graduate (though I no longer work in the field) AND I'm trying to get healthier.

How? Juicing.

But I'll get to that.

It's important to know that I've been overweight pretty much my entire life. I've tried dieting and working out. I've tried Weight Watchers, joined health clubs, starved myself. I've even tried just eating whatever the hell I wanted and learning to love my fat self. No dice. None of it worked. And, worse than that, as I've gotten older, the effect that carrying around all this extra weight has had on my body has become glaringly apparent. My ankles and knees ache, I'm always tired, I get winded carrying my groceries up the stairs to our apartment. That sucks! I want to be above-ground longer and live better. I want to have more energy and life for my daughter and my sweet man. I just....hadn't found something that works.

I first heard about juicing a few years back and thought, "Juicing vegetables.....why?". I pretty happily missed the point and moved on with my life. A couple of months ago, one of the pages that I follow on Facebook shared the page of a particularly lovely woman who calls herself Kitten the Juice Pirate. In reading her story, I became curious, intrigued and eventually inspired. I started reading everything I could find online about juicing. Unfortunately, everything I could find were a lot of articles on wellness websites about the logic behind juicing and the benefits of it. What I couldn't seem to find were real people talking about their real experiences with juicing. Other than Kitten. I asked two of my best friends (and two of the smartest women I know) what they knew about juicing and one of them suggested that I watch Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead (it's a documentary by a man named Joe Cross, and you can find it on Netflix). I also asked Miss Kitten how she had started, and it turned out that she found the inspiration she needed to start her wellness journey by watching the very same movie.

 SO, I watched it......and something clicked. The absolute hopelessness with which the people in said documentary regard their weight, their poor eating habits and their inevitably failing health was deeply moving to me. I guess it's fair to say that it held a rather unpleasant mirror up to all the lies I'd been telling myself about my weight and my health for years. I decided that I wanted to try it because I knew that I needed to do something. I told my fiance that I wanted a juicer. To his credit, he looked at me like I'd hit my head, but was not in any way negative or cynical after that point. I bought my juicer (a Breville BJE200XL) and fell in love with it and with juicing.

At this point, I am slightly more than a week into my juicing journey. For my first week, I juiced once a day (typically replacing my regular breakfast with juice) and the difference has been pretty impressive. I was extremely skeptical that drinking fresh vegetable and fruit juice could make me feel noticeably better and more energetic, but it REALLY does. It really does amaze me that something so simple and obvious can make me feel so good.

For my second week, I am trying to juice twice a day. Next week, I will be doing a complete juice fast. I'm a little nervous, but I'm also very excited. I'm excited everyday about the changes I'm making and the way I'm feeling, and I'm hopeful that sharing my experience will help others on whatever path to healthier living they may take.