Any regular reader of this column will know that I’m a fan of extremes, be it drinking, exercise or work. I’m a big fan of the “Go Big or Go Home” philosophy for two reasons: 1) it’s more fun, 2) I want variation in life before I get old. Sure, family and career building are wonderful but they also standardize one’s life: wake up, head to work, get back home, occasionally go out. That sounds like me when I’m fifty and I’m hoping by then robots will do everything.
As such, I embarked upon a fantastic binge during April and May, culminating with eight Michelin stars of food in three days, each followed by a monstrous night of boozing. It was time for me to stop when I found myself in a Copenhagen hotel holding my belt and trying to manually make a new hole with a screwdriver so it would fit my expanding waist. It was time, as they say, to go on a diet.
But I didn’t want any diet. I wanted to GO BIG. I wanted to lose 20 pounds and 30 days. And I did. Here’s what I did:
Diet
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I hit it hard with a seven-day juice detox from Punch Detox (www.punchdetox.com), a Hong Kong-based juicer that delivers fresh juices to your doorstep. I don’t get all the complaints about juicing—e.g. it’s all sugar/you’re going to be hungry—Punch uses juicers that pulverize everything so you get the nutrients and it has as many as 32 ingredients in a juice so it’s tons of stuff to fill your body. I’m 6’5 and 210 pounds and I wasn’t hungry. You’ll be just fine. Trust me.
So I did seven days of six juices a day, including a red punch, salad punch, fruit punch, and a nut milk (which sounds gross but is actually the bomb). You juice regularly and frequently and as long as you don’t walk around like a dickhead complaining to everybody, it’s pretty easy. I’d get up, have a juice, have a second as a morning snack, then have a third and go out to lunch with friends where I drank water and chatted about whatever. If you want to do something, do it, as long as you get the right help/attentionm on it. I got the Punch guys to help and lost 10 pounds. Pretty good start to the month.
Weeks two to four were simply a modified diet plan with no carbs for dinner and two smoothies a week. I stopped drinking also, which was super-hard, but sometimes you just gotta suck it up or not suck it, as the case was.
Exercise
I used to row—a fact I tell anybody who will listen—so I’m used to training hard. Unfortunately that was seven years ago and my body was like, “whoa buddy, we don’t do this anymore,” and decided to break down spectacularly. I ran and strained some knee tendons; I lifted and aggravated my surgically repaired shoulder; I tried vigorous sex but couldn’t find a partner so just sadly spent a lot of “me” time.
