Our Story

Night Owl and Busy Bee (that's me!) both work full time at our family-owned restaurant, where we've been working for at least 14 years. We are around fried food constantly, as well as the healthy stuff, and we still struggle every day to eat the right things. Our hours vary depending on the reliability of our employees, and we lose out on our days off when we would plan to rest and eat something nice. So we go to bed late, and wake up late, and have backwards schedules that force us to miss all the family parties and get-together's.

Meal planning is the bane of our existence. Don't get me wrong, we LOVE food- in fact, Night Owl can REALLY cook. And he's not even a cook at the restaurant. But we rarely have the time to do it. So the food we love has become something we have come to almost hate. We dread when the other asks: "What do you want for lunch/dinner?" Whatever is quick and as healthy as it can be.

We know the rules of nutrition, so we know what we should be eating and when. We've gone on a few diets, originally "life changes" until we fell off the wagon. But when we did it, we did it right and it lasted for quite some time. I was able to lose 20 pounds before we got married, and I did with with proper nutrition and exercise. But that was when I had more time. We've even spent a year and a half being vegetarian, though not vegan, an act inspired by a book I had read. I couldn't convince Night Owl to go the whole way, though.

We're not super fat, but we're nicely rounded and gain just a little weight each year. The funny thing is that we don't eat half as unhealthy as the rest of the people we know, and we wonder why we're so much more "fluffy" than they are. We're always exhausted and we'll sneak away for a few days at Disney or somewhere, just to get a bit of stress relief, exercise, and mental rest... but mostly to be away from it all.

We're tired of being tired. We're tired of trying to figure out the next meal. We're tired of worrying about our health. We're tired of being in our own way. So we're going to try something new.

This whole thing started because Night Owl LOVES gadgets. So he is constantly checking slickdeals.net for cool gadgety things on sale. He had been wanting a juicer for ages, so I let him get the Omega Vert juicer for half off. Night Owl also loves researching his gadgets.

So along the way he heard about two documentaries: "Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead," about a man who changed his life by going on a juicing fast, and "Forks Over Knives," about the dangers of animal products in our diets. We watched both, and we learned the second documentary was essentially the movie version of the book Busy Bee had read, plus another book she's been trying to find time to read. And we are convinced this juicer is going to solve some problems.

So our plans became to ease into a Reboot, a juicing fast, by slowly eating the rest of the food in the house but being sure to replace half our meals with juices from the juicer. We will only buy fruits and vegetables, and no other foods, until later on. Once all the stuff in the house is gone (we don't like to be wasteful), we will try an actual juicing fast, replacing all our meals with fruit and vegetable juice.

I am documenting it all here, on Owl Bee Healthy! because it will hold us both accountable. I have another blog for my art, and I've learned that a public journal keeps me on track better than a private one.

We're also planning to keep this blog pretty anonymous. Maybe sometime in the future we'll reveal our true selves, but until then, we're going to be our honest, raw selves. And if we fall off the wagon, we'll climb back up on it again, and we'll say...

"I WILL Be Healthy!"