Juice Feasting – Day 6

Today I felt totally normal, about the same as I felt before I started the juice feast. I didn’t have any detox problems at all today.

Today’s Juices

  1. watermelon
  2. coconut water
  3. carrot, celery, romaine, spinach, fennel, ginger, lemon
  4. carrot, celery, yam, apple, rainbow chard, parsley, ginger, lime

I drank about 1.0 gallons total.

These juices were all very good. The organic watermelon juice was just incredible. I could probably enjoy having a quart of that every day.

Juice #4 was the first time I juiced chard. I juiced the whole bunch in order to see what it was like, and fortunately the result was very good. The yam added an interesting earthy flavor to the juice.

I’m gradually developing my juice-sense, so I can more accurately predict how a juice will taste based on the ingredients. I think it will still take a few more weeks before I really get the hang of this though. There are still a number of items I’ve never juiced, so I don’t know what effect they’ll have until I try them. At least I’ve figured out the right ratio of ginger and lime to add.

I got caught up in my work today and didn’t have my third juice until 7:30pm. I’ve noticed that my workday is pretty efficient when I don’t have to stop for food.

Weight Loss

I weighed 178.2 pounds this morning for a net loss of 0.8 pounds in 5 days. I’m surprised the weight loss hasn’t been more rapid. I read that during the first 30 days of juice feasting, the average weight loss is 30 pounds for men and 20 pounds for women. Maybe I’m losing weight more slowly because I came from an all-raw diet to begin with, or maybe it’s slower because I don’t have 30 pounds to lose. I’m definitely not cheating.

Bathroom Visits

Aside from the daily enemas, I’m only having about one bowel movement per day. However, what’s coming out isn’t very voluminous and smells absolutely rotten. While eating 100% raw, there was virtually no smell when I had a bowel movement unless I ate really pungent foods like garlic (this is typical for many vegans too), so this is a definite change.

I certainly have to urinate a lot more though, sometimes as much as 2-3 times in an hour. It seems that urination is much more frequent after drinking fruit juice vs. veggie juice. Maybe the veggie juice digests more slowly because I’m mixing so many different kinds of produce together, whereas I often enjoy a single fruit juice (like watermelon) by itself. Fortunately the frequent bathroom visits aren’t a problem for me because my home office has an attached bathroom, so the toilet is only seconds from my desk.

Dry Skin

I’m already starting to get dry skin on my hands, similar to what I experienced during my low-fat raw diet trial in January. This concerns me a little because by the end of that January trial, the dry skin was so bad that the knuckles on both of my hands were cracked and bleeding. I posted a photo of one of my hands in the Day 29 update from that trial if you care to have a look. Right now my hands look and feel very dry. I’m doing dry skin brushing each day, but so far that doesn’t seem to be helping.

I never had any problems with dry skin while eating 100% raw for most of this year. It was only when I restricted my fat intake at 10% of total calories that my skin began to dry out. At first I thought this problem had something to do with all the produce I was handling (like citrus juice drying out my hands), but I’ve certainly handled a lot of produce in the last several months, and the dry skin problems didn’t return when I incorporated more fat into my raw diet. So the low-fat diet is the most likely culprit.

I’m not sure whether I should rub oil on my hands to help moisturize them or if I should increase my fat intake a little. As per the juicefeasting.com protocol, I’ve been including a small amount of hemp oil and coconut oil in my juice feast, about one tablespoon per day at most.

Drinking vs. Eating

It’s a strange process to get hungry and then to satisfy my hunger with liquids instead of solid foods. By the time I was ready for my third juice today, I was very hungry, and my natural inclination would have been to eat something such as a big salad. My brain objected to the idea that a quart of juice could satisfy my hunger. But by the time I was done drinking that juice, my hunger was indeed gone, and I had no desire for any kind of food. This is very strange for me because my expectations are still out of alignment with what I’m experiencing. A quart of juice does satisfy my hunger, even though my brain has a hard time believing that it will work.

As long as I have enough juice each day, hunger isn’t a problem. But when I go too many hours between juices, then I start to get hungry and begin to think about eating solid foods again.

Aside from the dry skin problem, everything seems to be going well so far. I certainly don’t feel like I’m about to drop from starvation.

86 days to go.