Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead (2010)

A documentary about one Australian's trip across the US while doing a juice fast to reboot his declining health.

Ever since I was a kid, I've heard the saying that "you are what you eat", and that is certainly true.  Your body can't pull the nutrients it needs out of thin air through your
skin... you have to consume it.  So what happens when all you feed it are fatty, processed foods?  You're going to be missing something.  Your body may be able to compensate for a bad diet when you're young, but as we get older, our bodies are not going to be able to compensate any longer.  Our internal maintenance systems are going to fall behind.

This movie promotes the idea of packing crates of vegetable nutrients into a day's eating through juicing.  Those who need to lose weight stick to just the juice, doing a "juice fast" for anywhere from ten to sixty days, or more.  Medically monitored the whole time through diagnostic machines and blood tests, they lost remarkable amounts of weight in what seemed like an unhealthy amount of time, but their testing continued to show an improvement, rather than a decline.

There is no mention of what to do if you feel you are unhealthy, but *under* ideal weight, or simply need to maintain your current weight.

While they make a very large point about the cost of a heart attack ($50k in hospital costs, medications, etc.) versus a month of juicing ($400+ a month), the outlay for the produce is a bit daunting, especially if you're trying to find organic produce in a small town or rural area.  If you still have additional groceries to buy for your family to eat, it can make for one whopper of a food bill.  That's going to be a problem.

All of this has very little to do with the quality of the movie itself, which was fairly good.  As a movie for knitters, it was great... I was working a complex "mystery" lace pattern, and could still follow the movie and the chart easily.  I laughed out loud at least twice, at Joe's comment about his gut at the beginning, and some of the animated sequences.  One eye roll for the "six weeks earlier" flashback, as that is a movie-making pet peeve of mine that I will not get over no matter what context.

I gave this movie four out of five stars.  It works well as inspiration to eat healthy and get healthy, but it is not a guide... the information is nowhere near complete for every person's situation.  There is a sequel, and I wanted to check that out as well... perhaps we'll find out more about Bear and how he did after starting the juice post-heart-attack.