Day Seven - Apples are tasty again!?

It's the final day of this dreaded diet and, through some bizarre twist of fate, I feel absolutely fine - good, even. I've had four apples today (the most I've managed on any given day of this week) and a 2L carton of orange juice. I feel satisfied, bright and reasonably high on energy. Apples are beginning to taste all right to me again, which seems crazy, but since it's the last day I'm not too bothered. My mother exclaimed that my skinny jeans were falling off me when I arrived in earlier (carefully missing her delicious Sunday dinner, although the remnants scattered on plates around the kitchen almost brought a tear to my eye). My grandmother muttered something about me being a stick to begin with (not true) and my grandfather asked for more dessert (damn him).

Other than that, this has been an all right day. The scorching weather made it easy to drink lots of water and juice, meaning that I felt full for most of the day without actually ingesting much. Although this week has been difficult, it hasn't been hell either. D's diet (if one can even call it that) of maple syrup, cayenne pepper and sea-salt water sounded a lot more miserable. I think I got off kind of easy. H's juice cleanse sounds like a fun way to do it, too. The worst is probably the baby food diet. I feel like that might make me ill... Anyway, this diet wasn't too bad in the end. I missed all of the foods I couldn't eat, but it was nice to discover new juices (M&S do some great ones) and get more fruit into me (or only fruit, as the case may be).

Throughout this week I have learned a few valuable lessons:

• Crazy, crash diets suck - seriously, they do. I can't understand why anybody would be so desperate as to put him/herself through such shit in order to lose a few pounds that will be quickly gained back once he/she reverts to eating properly once again.
• Depriving oneself of a food (or most foods, in my case) is horrible - moreover, it doesn't work. I found myself craving food and drink that I didn't even like, or have on a regular basis. I wanted the bad stuff even more. What's the point of that!?
• The body needs a certain amount of food for energy - I was dead on my feet this week. My body was running on empty, and I could feel it. I couldn't work out, my brain was slower than usual, my attention span sucked, my vision was blurred at times and I looked and felt like death. It definitely wasn't worth it to lose a few pounds.
  

And so, it seems the moral of the story (or my story, at least) is that this diet, in particular (although I am against all crazy, crash diets) does not work. It made me tired, pale, weak, frail and moody. I was hungry pretty much on a constant basis, I missed running and eating and feeling healthy and being full of energy. I didn't feel like me, which was weird.

As for weight loss, in total I lost four pounds this week, which is crazy but not necessarily incredible either. With how crap I was feeling, I would've preferred to have lost a stone or two to make up for all of the misery I put myself through. Like I said, I cannot understand the attraction to doing something like this. It doesn't speed up the metabolism, the weight loss wasn't huge and I felt like shit.

But, despite all of that, I had fun! This was an interesting experiment, and it wouldn't put me off subjecting my body to something like this in the future (just for fun, of course). It was interesting to see how my body reacted to such a severe shift in diet, and how it affected the rest of my life. And, above all else, I learned what I knew all along - the only way to lose weight/maintain a healthy body weight is to eat right and exercise on a regular basis. Now that this week is over, I will go back to doing so.