si dawson

First of all — a dis­claimer. I ain't a juice feastin' expert. I can only talk about my own experience.

And so I shall!

Ok, some back­ground — why did I do a juice feast in the first place? Spir­i­tual clar­ity, essen­tially. In the process of weed­ing my emo­tional gar­den, I knew that the lighter my food intake, the more detox­ing I'd do, the more things would come up, and the more I could heal. Did juice feast­ing help with this? Definitely.

Yes, I drank this much green juice.

Now, what did I do? I juice feasted — which means drink­ing at least 4L (4qt) of mainly veg­etable juice, every day. I did this for 30 some­thing days. After that, I went straight into a water fast (hey! why not? In for a penny, in for a pound!).

While I was doing the juice feast, I had colonics every week (more on those later) — which helped enor­mously, btw. Did I man­age to just drink juice the entire time? No, I "screwed up" on sev­eral occa­sions. Oh, I also drank psyl­lium & ben­tonite shakes sev­eral times daily for most of that time. The­o­ret­i­cally that should have helped clean me out. Did I notice any­thing? Not that I could tell. Between the shakes and spo­radic eat­ing, I sus­pect my diges­tive sys­tem never really got to the super calm, clear state that peo­ple talk about — but in terms of heal­ing, ahhh, hehe, yeah, it was plenty intense enough, thankyouverymuch.

So, what have I learned com­ing off the feast?

1. It's VERY easy to overeat.
Even though I'm not 100% my diges­tive sys­tem ever com­pletely switched off, I find pretty much every time I eat that my stom­ach is hurt­ing after­wards. I never ate much to start with, but I think I'm going to have to start mak­ing half por­tions — ie, about half the size of a child's meal.

2. It's VERY easy to under­drink.
Nor­mally I drink 4-5L (4-5qt) of water a day. I have a big glass, and I just sip it through­out the day. When juic­ing, I'd drink maybe 2L of water a day, but 4L of juice. Take the juice away, and it's been hard to remind myself to start upping the water again. This has, of course, messed up my abil­ity to digest food (I've been more clogged up than I would be on water).

3. The "6 day feast break­ing" is wayyyyy too short.
I've been off for two weeks now, and my body is still freak­ing out every time I eat any­thing. It's not over after 6 days, that's just the begin­ning of the adjustment.

4. You're going to be drink­ing juice for much longer than time+6 days.
When I fin­ished, I was all with the "Thank God!! I am SO sick of juice!!". Ahhh, famous last words. It's not just the feast break­ing time, but also with a shrunken stom­ach, so reduced food intake, where will your nutri­ents come from? Juic­ing is still the eas­i­est way to get them — with­out mess­ing up your sys­tem. Psy­cho­log­i­cally this has been real­l­lly tough for me to realise & accept. Must. Keep. Juicing.

5. Hard food is bad.
Even two weeks later, I can feel that my body is not ready for hard to digest food. Eg, I'll juice cel­ery, but I haven't put it in my sal­ads yet. I'll blend (small amounts of soft) nuts, but not eat them raw, and so on.

6. Your tastes will change, dras­ti­cally.
I just threw out all the toxic stuff in my house. I had a mouth­ful of some­thing that had sta­bi­liz­ers, emul­si­fiers etc and instantly felt ill. Now I'm some­one with a con­crete stom­ach lin­ing, so this is pretty unusual. Also, things that I used to like are just too sweet for me now. Kale, I can't get enough of (never used to be able to stand it). Wuhhh.. what just happened?

7. The heal­ing hasn't stopped.
Sev­eral issues *cough*likethisone*cough* have con­tin­ued to bub­ble up as I've been tran­si­tion­ing. I fig­ured every­thing would just halt, but noooo, still more to go, food-in-my-belly or not

8. Pace your­self!
All those things you've been miss­ing while on the juice? Ahhh, pace your­self. Think, as Kris­ten points out in terms of a cou­ple of dif­fer­ent things a week. Don't do what I did, which was have all those things I'd missed in one day. *OW*. Yeah, it's stu­pid, I fig­ured that (even­tu­ally). I like to learn expe­ri­en­tially. Thanks though.

All that said, it's great to be back eat­ing again. I've missed tex­tures. I've missed sub­tle com­bi­na­tions of flavours (instead of everything-blurred-together-soup). Oh, and I've missed body fat. Holy crap I need some — it's win­ter here!! What was I thinking?