Tim Buchalka is my name, and this is Day 1 of my 56 day challenge.
I have decided that enough is enough. I have been overweight pretty well all my adult life.and look, there has always been an excuse. There has always been a reason. It is too hard, I am addicted to sugar. I just like sweet foods too much. And the years have rolled on and I am now 47 and I realise I have been overweight for 30 years.
As a young kid, as a young bloke when I was in my teens, early teens 13, 14,15, I didn't really have much of a weight problem. But as I moved into adulthood, yes, the weight started stacking on. And why? Well, no real surprises. Today's food, processed food. I love ice cream, chocolate, chips, all those types of things. All those man-made type foods. And I have piled on the kilos. I say kilos, but for you US folks, I have piled on the pounds.
I am currently 111 1/2 kg which is about 246 pounds, if I can do my calculations correctly. Enough is enough. I have had a gutful, which is an Australian saying meaning I have had enough. I am not going to put up with this any more. I have decided to take a 56 day challenge which is basically eight weeks, you know 8x7 is 56, again if my maths is correct.
And for eight weeks I'm going to survive on nothing but juice. Now, when I say juice, we are not talking about the supermarket variety, you know the grocer type variety. We are talking about using a juicer, using a machine, and getting fresh fruit and vegetables, putting that all into a machine, and drinking that each day.
So what this is is the first video in a series. I actually plan to do 56 videos. One video for each day of this journey of this challenge, to show you my progress. Because what I want to do is by the end of that - are you waiting for this? - I want to get my weight down to about 80 kg. So we are talking about a weight of, I think, from memory, that's about 165 pounds. (80 Kgs = 176 pounds actually).
So I am looking to lose over 30 kg – 31 kg in only 56 days, which I know sounds like a tremendous amount, but, it's going to happen. It is going to happen! I am going to be 80 kg in 56 days time. So that's - I'm now 246 pounds. That's a loss of about 75 pounds or thereabouts. If I am adding up correctly, about 80 pounds actually. [32 Kgs = 70 pounds]. That's a serious amount of weight. But look, juice fasts which is basically what this is, can actually make you lose weight in that period of time.
I am going to be doing some exercise, but the exercise I am doing is going to be pretty straightforward. I'm going to be walking. This is day one as I said and I have done a walk, a 40 min walk, listening to my headphones, to a nice audio book. And I just walked. I did not walk particularly fast. In fact it was quite slow, because I have been out of practice of exercise.
In terms of what I am going to be doing over the coming videos, I'm going to be going into more details as to what I am drinking. But this morning I had about 500 mls, which is about 16 to 18 fluid ounces of fruit, vegetable mixture, which was comprising of lemon, cucumber, spinach celery – basically five or six different varieties of vegetables and a few different types of fruit. I had some apple in there as well. I converted all that to juice, and drank it.
And the thing that surprised me, was that it tasted quite nice! I was quite surprised that it was quite drinkable. And I felt quite full after it. So I am going to be doing that, just that, for the next 56 days.
Now in terms of going through this program, it is extra ordinarily healthy for you. Juice. If you can imagine having all those nutrients... We are talking about real food the way nature intended. We're not talking about any thing processed. We are not talking about anything of that nature at all. It's all fresh fruit and vegetables. So I plan to buy the fruit and vegetables every day or every second day as I need them and put them straight into the blender and drink them.
So I am going to chronicle this every day of my journey in the next 56 days. I am going to tell you every day how I am feeling, and a little bit more about the journey.
And the other thing I am doing is I am removing all other substances. So, I am a coffee drink, I love my coffee. And I have to say I am already feeling the effects on Day One, in that I am feeling a bit - what's the word - lightheaded? A bit groggy. A bit foggy. And I have got a headache already no doubt that is from the coffee. Now the fact that I am feeling this now makes me think, What is this doing to me? What is this actually doing to my body? Actually, what I need to get into is one of the other reasons why I decided to do this as well.
But just that you are getting headaches by not having coffee, you realise that coffee is addictive isn't it. Actually I like tea and coffee, I like both. But it is obviously addictive, because my body is saying give me some of this stuff or I'm going to give you a darn headache unless you actually get me some more of it!
Anyway that's my plan. I'm going off it cold turkey. I'm going to stick just to juices for the next eight weeks, which is the next 56 days, and if you want to you can actually follow along and look at the video each day on YouTube or on my website, and leave me some comments, and follow my journey.
If this is something that interests use you can actually look at the results I'm getting and decide whether this is something you want to do with your life. Now obviously I'm not a doctor so I can't give you any advice as to whether you should or shouldn't do that. But let me tell you some of the other reasons why I have decided to get my act together and to get myself back to health.
Reason number one. I am an asthmatic. You can probably hear that in my talking I'm very sort of nasally and I have been as a child quite sick with asthma. When I got older I got a lot better but I still suffer from asthma. It is still there sort of niggling in the background. I want to completely get rid of that asthma as well.
The other thing was I had a very nice invasive procedure the other day. Because I am having trouble with my butt. I'm not going to go into any sort of detail because I'm sure you don't want to hear it, but I had a colonoscopy, basically. It is a procedure where, yes, they do put a tube up your butt. Luckily you are sedated and you are out of it! They check to see whether everything is okay there and you haven't got any sort of bowel cancer and all those types of things. And they did actually find two what they call polyps, which as the doctor explained to me are potentially the start of cancer. It still actually, well actually I haven't got the results back. I'm not getting any results back until tomorrow or the next day but he felt fairly confident that there wasn't any cancer there.
But it just hit me. I thought immediately that, you know, I'm at risk here. This could already be the start of cancer.
So yes, it's in very early stages but my body is already sort of losing the fight so to speak and why? It's because I'm so overweight. I'm 35 kilos or 80, 90 pounds or whatever it is overweight. I am putting all this enormous burden on my body and it is done really well to carry me through to age 47 so far but how much longer can it do it? How much longer can it survive with all this pressure that I put on it?
The other thing that I have noticed in about the last four or five weeks is I'm feeling my heart racing a little bit. I can just hear my heart beating. And it seems to be racing a little bit. So, obviously I consulted my doctor, and I wouldn't suggest that you not do that. I think you should certainly have doctors involved. And I did some blood tests and I did an ECG, which is the heart check, and there was a possibility that they found something with the ECG, which they said may not be an issue but they picked up something. So I'm going to a specialist next month in August (this is now July that I'm doing this). So that's another point of concern.
But I have also had some blood tests. I have quite high cholesterol, quite high sugar. We're not talking dramatically high. But we are talking higher than average. And let's be honest here. The reason for this is my weight. I can sit there and say well I'm just unlucky or it's in my genes or I am big boned or whatever it is. The fact is I'm putting all this strain and stress on my body because I am overweight. And I have had enough. I'm not going to do it any more. So I have decided to go cold turkey, and actually go on this juice fast to get rid of these issues.
Lastly, I have also got a problem with my knee. When I was 16 I had a car crash. 16 in Australia is the legal age to get your licence. So I got my learners permit at 16, and then a few months later was able to get my licence. And a few months later, my first or second journey by myself doing things that I shouldn't have been doing (very, very silly driver!) – I crashed into a stobie pole. We call them stobie polls here in Adelaide in Australia. Telegraph poles, you know the poles that hold up telegraph wires for the phone lines and so forth. I crashed into one of those and broke my leg.
Ever since then I have had an issue with my right knee. And for the times when I have got motivated, because I have lost weight in the past, but I've been in that cycle and I gained it again, my knee has always been a problem. Because I got to the stage at one point where I lost 25 or 30 kg over a period of time and I was exercising quite hard every day, and working hard, and got to the stage where I was jogging – but my knee was giving me grief.
So I want that to clear up as well. So the interesting thing is, with all this weight loss journey in the past, everything I have ever done has all been about scarcity, taking things away, not eating chocolate, and going without. But now I got to the stage now where at 47 I've realised that what I have actually been going without, is good nutrition.
I've actually been piling in this junk food, this processed food. Which isn't healthy for me, but quite frankly I am addicted to it. And for all these years I have been neglecting my body. I haven't been giving my body the true nutritional value, nutrition that is actually needs to survive, and that is actually what I have been doing without. So this a new life for me, this challenge.
I'm not calling it a diet. It's not a diet. Diet is what you're going without, normally. The traditional diet is, don't eat this, don't eat that, don't eat chocolate, you have to go without this. This is not about that. This is the other way around. This is give me my body the nutrients it wants, the nutrients it needs.
And I firmly believe in self-healing. I believe that over this 56 days the healing in my body – all these conditions that I've currently got are going to go away. So I would say by Day 56 they are going to be largely or completely gone and I will have lost all that weight because I've been giving the nutrients that my body wants. It is going to sell heal itself. And I'm not going to have to worry about these types of issues, and worry about - quite frankly - dying early!
Because that is the real concern to me, kicking the bucket. Again in Australia – I think it is an Australian saying, "dying prematurely". And I am making a stand here and I'm going to do the right thing, and I'm going to give my body the nutrition it needs, and some exercise as well, each day.
And we're going to succeed, with your help. I'd like you to follow my journey, if you've got an interest in this, and hopefully this will inspire you, if you're looking to do something similar, because you can chronicle my results, you can watch my results over the next 56 days, and just see what happened, and see how I felt. And I'm going to tell you exactly each day when I do this video how I feel - the ups and downs of the previous day, how I got through them, et cetera.
So I'm going to end the video here now. Thank you very much for watching. I hope you going to get a lot out of this. And more importantly I hope that I'm going to because I'm doing this for selfish reasons as well! I am committing myself to doing a video each day. That's going to spur me on to make sure that I keep to it and not try and get out of it or breakdown or not continue this challenge for the next 56 days.
You can watch a high definition version of this juice fasting plan video here if you wish.
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