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Arts & Entertainment

Film Preaches Drinking Your Vegetables

A documentary about a man who embarks on a juice fast has beneficial message for all.

We know we need to eat our veggies. But filmmaker Joe Cross says to drink them.

In a new documentary called “Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead,” Cross attempts to buck a large belly and a troublesome auto-immune disorder by drinking nothing but juiced fruit and vegetables for 60 days. The film was screened at the last week, after which Cross took the stage to educate the audience about the importance of micronutrients.

“What I did in this movie was impose my own famine,” he said.

Cross’s fasting involved drinking six 20 ounce cups of juice a day, some of them diluted with water. He often began his morning with a fruit laced concoction, and then moved into vegetable rich drinks he calls “mean greens.”

As the movie reveals, a body saturated in micronutrients believes itself to be in a state where no food is available. Not only does this cleanse the system of a wide variety of unneeded (and rather revolting) ingredients, but it also provides a vast array of health benefits.

Cross said in the 60 days he was drinking his food, he lost 80 lbs, needed only 4 to 5 hours of sleep, found his thoughts sharper and regained an energy he wasn’t sure he’d ever had before. Now he can’t stop singing the praises of a lifestyle built on fruits and vegetables.

“I believe we see in color because fruits and vegetables are colorful,” he said, “I think our hands are capable of grabbing because all plant food is accessible at our height.”

Cross does not think that we should solely eat vegetables and nothing else. His goal is to get the average micronutrients consumed daily by Americans from 5 percent to 10 percent. Food is neither good nor bad, because telling someone the thing they’re eating is bad never stops them, he said.

He insisted that if you exercise and eat mainly micronutrients, there’s nothing wrong with a beer and a hotdog during the weekend. “I thought it was all about juice,” he reflects in the film, “but it’s about a balanced lifestyle.”

The documentary takes a turn when a morbidly obese truck driver named Phil calls Cross to seek his help.

As Cross explained after the screening, the original cut of the movie had nothing to do with Phil. The two share a brief scene during Cross’s 60 day fast, and the filmmaker is shocked to learn that Phil suffers from the same rare disease as himself. Seven months after the movie had wrapped, Phil reached out to Cross, desperate to shed his excess weight before things took a turn for the lethal.

Without betraying too much, Phil’s transformation is nothing short of inspiring, if not somewhat miraculous.

“I used to see fat people,” Cross said. “Now, I see people walking around with excess energy, and I just want to ask them ‘When are you going to use this energy?’ If Phil can do it, anyone can do it.”

But “Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead” is hardly indoctrination. Rather, it is a look at human resilience, focused on the way a small group of people found to improve themselves, Cross told the audience.

“I have a saying: we spend the first forty years of our life trying to kill ourselves, and the next forty trying to live,” he said. “I decided to live”

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