The Juice Detox Diet 3-Book Collection. Jason Vale
way to skin a cat, as they say, and there are always two ways to go about a program like this. One is the way my two friends went about it—the hard way; the other way therefore is clearly …
10
I have said it from the start of this book—and I mention it in all of my books: the single most important aspect of this program is the right psychology, the right way of thinking. If you go into this program without extremely good mental preparation, you may succeed through sheer grit, willpower, and determination, but you won’t make it easy for yourself. It’s more than likely, though, that you won’t reach the end, and before you know where you are you’ll be back eating and drinking the same old junk. This is not what you want and it’s not what I want for you either.
What is crazy is that there is no reason on the planet why anyone should find the program hard. I’m not saying that some people don’t find it hard—as you saw with my two friends, some clearly do—but what I am saying is that there is no need to. The reality is that if you do struggle it will only be because of what you say to yourself.
That’s it and that’s all. I wish it were more complicated, but the bottom line is, if you sit and gripe about what you think you can’t have you will find it hard, and if you don’t do that you won’t! It really is as simple as that.
When I say, “What you think you can’t have,” the reality is that you can have whatever the hell you like. After all, you are the one who is choosing to do this because you want to clean your system and you want the mental and physical rewards that come with it. It won’t make any difference to me, the people up the street, or anyone else for that matter. You want to do this because you want to look and feel damn good.
This is what people forget when they change their eating and lifestyle—they are choosing to do it. This is why it makes absolutely no sense at all to go into what is essentially a self-imposed mental tantrum. And isn’t that pretty much all it comes down to?
The Power of CAN’T
Words are far more powerful that any “physical” withdrawal from druglike foods and drinks. In fact, even with a drug like nicotine, which has been described by some experts as “just as hard to give up as heroin,” the “suffering” that people experience when stopping is caused primarily by words, not the nicotine. The most powerful of all words when it comes to changing what you eat or when on a detox like this is the word CAN’T. I have a great acronym for it:
Constant And Never-ending Tantrum
It’s this simple:
If you say, “I want but I can’t have”—you will suffer.
If you say, “I can but I don’t want to have”—you won’t.
By removing the “T” from “CAN’T” you have effectively removed the self-imposed tantrum. Let me give you an example.
One of the people who was in the focus group called me up on day 4 and said, “Jay, help, I want some chocolate and it’s driving me crazy that I can’t have any. What can you do?” Right away you can hear that it’s clearly a mental craving because the body never craves chocolate. I now hear screams of “ARE YOU KIDDING ME, VALE!” but seriously, it’s the mind that craves chocolate, not the body. As it was a false mental need and not a genuine physical one it was up to her, and not me, to get rid of the “craving.” A mental “craving” is simply a self-imposed mental tantrum and if the tantrum stops the craving does too. With that in mind I simply said that she should go to the store, buy some chocolate, eat it, and call me when she got back. I then said goodbye and hung up. The phone rang again almost immediately and the woman said, “WHAT? Did you just say I should go to the store and buy some chocolate and eat it—are you kidding?”
“No!”
“Hang on. Let me get this right. I’m on your 7 lbs in 7 Days juice program. You’re the guy who’s into healthy eating and the person who even wrote a book called The Simple Way to Stop Eating Chocolate. And here you are telling me to go and eat some chocolate. That’s not the sort of help I expected!”
“Look, if you had called me and said you wanted a banana I would have told you to go and have one. Instead you said you wanted to have some chocolate so I told you to go and have some. What’s wrong with that?”
“The reason I’m calling you is because I DON’T WANT TO HAVE ANY CHOCOLATE—I WANT TO COMPLETE THIS PROGRAM” … and, yes, she was shouting a lot by this stage!
“Oh,” I said, “so you don’t want any chocolate. Thank God for that. So how are you?”
There was then a little silence before she said, “Don’t try to get smart.” But I wasn’t trying to get smart. I was trying to point out that what she had was a self-imposed tantrum caused only by what she was saying to herself. Effectively she was moping around for something that she hoped she wouldn’t have. How nuts is that—moping around for something that you hope you won’t have? Imagine a child kicking up a fuss because he didn’t have a toy but the minute you offered it he started shouting, saying he didn’t actually want it. Imagine if he was feeling deprived without it but didn’t really want to have it—kind of a no-win situation, I would say. This was precisely the position this woman was in and precisely the position all people who struggle put themselves through when changing what they eat or stopping smoking. The cause of her problem was not some genuine chocolate deficiency but rather a feeling of mental deprivation. The way to remove it is extremely simple. This was my reply to her:
“Please don’t take this the wrong way, but theonly way to solve your problem is this:either have the chocolate and shutup, or don’t have it and shut up,but whatever you do,SHUT UP!”
Although taken aback a little at first, she soon realized what I was saying was true. She didn’t actually want the chocolate, which is why she called. What she wanted was to complete the program and have the tremendous mental and physical results that come from it. And this is precisely what you want too. It is why you have read this far into the book. If you dump the excuses and don’t mope around for things you actually don’t want to have anyway, then it’s easy. If you come up with a bunch of “buts” and start to bitch and feel sorry for yourself, then of course you will find it hard. It’s not rocket science when you look at it.
Should I Say Anything or Just Bite My Tongue?
Prime examples of just what can happen if not armed with the correct way of thinking are my two friends I mentioned earlier. I have told you about Martin, the friend who only managed to “survive” for two days before “butting” his way to defeat, but what I didn’t tell you was the full story of what happened to him.
During the early evening of day 2 he experienced what I now refer to as a “bread head.” This is where he had such a mental craving for bread (in other words SUGAR) that when he went to take a bite he bit so quickly and so hard that he literally bit a hole in his tongue (if you ever see the 7 lbs in 7 Days DVD you will see exactly what I mean). The tongue is an organ that repairs itself perhaps faster than any other and yet even when he woke up the following morning the hole still hadn’t healed. He ended up having to go to the hospital, where he had two stitches! If he had only said the right things to himself he would never have had to bite his tongue.
Clearly this is an extremely rare case, even for those people who have no mental prep. What I want you to get from this tale is that he wasn’t suffering physically before he took a chunk of bread; he simply had a mother of a mental craving. The point is that he had a bread head, not a bread stomach. In exactly the same way, the woman who called me had a chocolate head rather than