[MightySunTzu]

Hey Ginkgo,

I am planning to fast again soon and as i was looking back on this thread i noticed that you had made some interesting comments to which i had yet to respond...

Originally Posted by ginkgo

You could have rounded it out to 30 days since it was hours away from it.

Hmm. I just couldn't, but i understand what you're saying. 30 days was just too nice and round a number for me to stop short of it once i was that close. If I had stopped at 29 days and 16 hours, even though it rounds to 30, i just couldn't have been quite as satisfied with it .

Originally Posted by ginkgo

I never heard of breaking a fast with cooked food.

I actually broke it with raw juice, but then later had some cooked tomato juice and onion juice (broth) as well.

Originally Posted by ginkgo

Did your tongue clear when you had genuine hunger? Sometimes the body needs food even though it is not done cleaning out stuff.

It did not, my genuine hunger arrived not because i was completely done cleansing my body, but because i ran low on something my body could no longer provide from its reserves.

Originally Posted by ginkgo

Also with real hunger, you can start eating again instead of converting to a juice fast.

You are absolutely right about this and in this fast i experienced the difference. In breaking my 10 day fast, whole fruits and vegetables were too much too soon... and made me feel digestively bogged down... whereas juice-only made me feel great. but in this fast, since it went to completion, my body was ready for more than juice very very early. In a system that had returned to "Genuine hunger" there was no way i was going to be able to go 7 days of juice-only as i had planned. With juice alone, i kept feeling a return to genuine hunger over and over again... and i needed to eat whole foods that i might out-run it .

Originally Posted by ginkgo

Just like Dr Shelton gave enemas to 6,000 fasters before he stopped, the hygenists had learned that it is better to break the fast with solid food, instead of juice, like a half an orange every 2 hours...

Good analogy here . I think what it comes down to is that when a fast goes to completion, the body is more ready for solid foods than when a fast does not. In my own experience, whole fruits and vegetables too early in the process of breaking "uncompleted fasts", made me feel bogged down, where juice alone made me feel amazingly good. I didn't need "juices alone" for very long before whole fruits and vegetables made me feel amazingly good also, but i did need to transition through them. By contrast, i suspect that in this "completed fast" (ie: return to genuine hunger), my body was ready for the whole fruits immediately.

But back to fasts where a return to genuine hunger has not been achieved (ie: all but only one of my fasts), if i was able to have a half an orange every two hours, i'm sure that would have been fine... but in my own case, while it is easy to avoid digestively over-taxing myself with any quantity of juice, it has been quite difficult to be disciplined enough in the area of resisting the quantity of fruit and vegetables my body, heart, mind, and soul desire upon breaking the fast. i would eat that half orange and want 3 more halves in the same meal... and at that point, it would be too much and i would be bogged down. Juices to me are therefore the safest way to go in terms of breaking a fast and not inviting more digestive challenge than we are ready for too soon... truly a digestively simple bridgeway into whole fruits and vegetables which are digestively simple relative to other foods, but digestively complicated compared to juice.

Originally Posted by ginkgo

Also Arnold Ehret says that fast is really broken when you have your first bowel movement which solid food helps with.

In my own experience in this 30 day fast, i had only raw, then cooked juices before bed and woke up to 3 morning bms (after 19 days without the slightest movement). No solid food whatsoever led to this delightful release. At least in my case, the juice alone seemed to re-engage peristalsis in all of its glory.