there's loads of information out there on teh intarweb, some of which one should probably not trust... so i'm checking stuff out carefully. here's a summary of what juice fasting is all about.
the human body is not set up to digest much of what we eat these days. our physiological make up and lack of appropriate enzymes make for a tough time of it when a load of pasta, meat and dairy hit your gut. bad food combinations also add to the mess, where only one set of enzymes can work on digesting food at any one time but different types of food require different enzymes. and there's the depleted enzyme situation to remember. so, over time, we end up with badly digested food sitting in the, um, lower end of the digestive tract. these denatured foods are treated by the body as toxins and the story goes that these toxins remain in the body, trapped in cells. especially in the liver. to make it easier to understand think about cellulite. what you're seeing there are the visible effects of cells full of toxins, trapped under the skin. massage and lymphatic drainage can help shift the toxins, but you do have to make sure they all get out or the toxins will end up floating around in your blood again and make you very ill indeed.
obviously that's a very simplistic version of things but basically we eat the wrong stuff to be healthy. the only stuff our body is equipped to digest are raw fruits and veggies and living foods (sprouted or fremented seeds, grains and pulses) and that diet will maintain optimum health. however, having followed a crappy diet for years you have all this fat and toxins and what leslie kenton refers to as meso-health: 'just gettting by' health. so you need to rid the body of all the built up toxins, clean out your colon and start afresh on a raw vegan diet.
still with me? so, to get rid of all that stuff you drink only fresh raw fruit and veg juices. the idea here is that you are getting tons of vitamins and minerals so you have all the nutrients you need (and loads more than your average diet would provide) but you get no solid food so your digestive system can shut down. the nutrients from the juices go straight into your bloodstream and your stomach has no solids to contend with. so now your digestive system has some downtime and all the energy it usually saps from you can go into cell repair. and that's it really.
you need to juice fast for a minimum of five days for your body to start the repair work and you'll get quite unwell from time to time as toxins are released from the cells they've been trapped in and flood back into your bloodstream. headaches are the most common ailment but as you go on for 8 days or 2 weeks you'll get weirder things happen. for a start you'll start to expel the stuff that's been stuck in your colon. nice. you won't be hungry, amazingly, after ten days. but old injuries will come back and hurt and your skin will be dry with such a lack of fat in your diet. you'll get spots or boils, go dizzy when you stand up too quickly and more. then, at the two to three week stage you'll have bags of energy and not need to sleep as much as you're used to.
to come off a juice fast, which is normally recommended as a 30 day programme, you need to be careful too. no good going down pizza express and scoffing everything in sight, plus a bottle of their finest pinot grigio. you need to eat very lightly for the first two or three days. lots of people recommend eating an avocado or a mango, with nothing else for your first meal. then maybe an apple or some tomatoes. after that start shredding some lettuce and go for a light salad. then build up. if you plan to return to your regular diet then take it very slowly with no cooked food/dairy for a week and even then have a tiny amount of cooked/dairy compared to the raw fruit and veg.
so that's what i've been doing. i didn't want to post this until i'd finished the fast, so family didn't get worried. i know it's not considered normal to most of the world. i've read up on it and i'm convinced, it makes a lot of sense. next few posts are little updates of my journey.
