Juice Feasting – Day 17

Every time I think I’m past the detox hump, I seem to get humped again.

The past 24 hours have been rough. After drinking 1.5 quarts of watermelon-cantaloupe-blackberry-raspberry juice yesterday, I took the kids out for a few hours at the Children’s Museum near downtown Vegas. While we were out, I started to experience indigestion and heartburn, which worsened as the day went along.

We got home around 5:15pm, and I felt sick the whole evening — lots of heartburn, nausea, and acid reflux. I drank some water with ginger-lemon juice as soon as we got home. That remedy helped me last time this happened (Day 12), but it didn’t help at all this time. I only felt worse afterwards.

Later that evening I started getting really itchy on my scalp. Over the course of an hour, the itchiness spread to the rest of my body, and eventually I was scratching almost non-stop. I went to a mirror and took off my shirt — I was breaking out with hives on my chest, abs, back, and arms. The hives are gone now, but I was still mildly itchy when I woke up this morning.

I had no appetite at all last night, and the only thing I could get down after noon yesterday was water. Even the ginger-lemon water seemed to make me feel worse. So I only had 1.5 quarts of juice total yesterday.

I still had no appetite when I woke up this morning, but I managed to sip down a cup of veggie juice around noon. After that I was able to drink a quart of fruit juice. I’m feeling a bit better now, but my appetite still seems lower than usual today. I don’t feel weak or tired — I just don’t seem to want to eat or drink much.

For the past few days I’ve been having lots of bowel movements (like 8 of them yesterday) and lots of gas. The stuff that’s coming out is really foul.

Mentally I’m a little bit spacey, but otherwise I’m feeling okay today. The emotional detox has settled down a bit, although I’m still experiencing some yo-yoing in my emotions.

Weight Loss

This morning I weighed 171.2 pounds, so I’ve lost a net 7.8 pounds in 16 days. This is the lowest I’ve weighed in years.

Water Loss or Fat Loss?

The body fat measuring device I’m using reports that my body fat has dropped 2.5 percentage points since I began juice feasting. So unless the device is reporting inaccurate results, I’ve lost a significant amount of body fat on this juice feast already.

Since a juice feast is supposedly very hydrating as well, it seems unlikely that my weight loss is primarily due to water loss. I suppose it’s possible though because I’m on a very low salt diet, and sodium helps cells retain water. I am including some Celtic Sea Salt in a few of my veggie juices though. I’m also juicing one bunch of celery per day, and celery is high in organic sodium.

Hopefully this will become clearer by the end of the 92 days.

Food Cravings

I still have some food cravings surfacing now and then, and the cravings are always for cooked food. When I think about eating raw foods that I used to eat, I think, “Yeah, it would be nice to eat that again,” but there’s no emotional response connected to those thoughts. But when I think about eating certain cooked foods, I feel this addictive response throughout my whole body. None of the raw foods I imagine eating produce that kind of reaction.

The difference in these responses makes it easier for me to keep going. I know that when I’m craving cooked food, I don’t really need to eat, and the juice is satisfying me just fine. Often I’m not even hungry when I get these cravings. They’re a combination of emotional attachment and physiological addiction. If I was really hungry and needed to eat, I think I’d feel more drawn to eat something raw vs. cooked, which is how I normally ate before I began this juice feast.

Self-Discipline

It definitely takes some discipline to keep going. In many ways it would be easier to stop and go back to eating solid foods again. But the challenge isn’t because I feel hungry or weak or anything like that. Partly there’s the daily grind of making each day’s juices, but the bigger issue is dealing with all the physical and emotional detox. It’s unsettling not knowing how I’m going to feel each day. I don’t know whether I’ll be happy and energetic or nauseous and stressed out. I just have to stay focused on the present and take this one day at a time, dealing with each issue that arises as best I can.