Juice Feasting – Day 11

This was the toughest day so far since I began juice feasting.

I woke up feeling very drained, unmotivated, and lazy. It was hard to get going in the morning. I really didn’t want to do anything except stay in bed. I had to drag myself to the kitchen to make my first batch of juice.

Emotional Roller Coaster

As the morning progressed, I felt sad and depressed for a couple hours. I wasn’t sad about anything in particular. I just had a general feeling of depression and malaise. In fact, I almost started to cry at one point — about nothing in particular.

Shortly before noon this sadness shifted to feelings of stress, anxiety, and worry. I couldn’t think of anything that I should be worried about, but for some reason my body started producing a massive stress reaction. The attack and decay of those feelings came in waves of varying intensity and lasted for several hours. Sometimes I felt so nervous that my hands began shaking, as if I were suffering from terrible stage fright. It was like I was having a fight-or-flight response to some kind of perceived danger.

I asked Erin if she was feeling stressed since sometimes I pick up on her emotions, but she seemed to be just fine. The kids didn’t seem stressed or worried either.

I wasn’t having any particular thoughts that spawned these feelings. It was like my entire physiology had a mind of its own and decided to drag me along on an emotional roller coaster. I had the awareness to stop and observe these feelings, knowing they were spawned by the detox process, but that didn’t stop the emotions from arising.

Blood Sugar Crash

In the early afternoon, I started to feel physically weak, like I was suffering from low blood sugar. I thought I’d had plenty of juice/calories up to that point, so this was probably a consequence of feeling totally stressed out for too long. Stress hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline increase heart rate and blood sugar supply while suppressing digestion, so this could have have led to a blood sugar crash.

I started feeling a little better after drinking some more juice. Erin took my blood sugar about 15 minutes after I drank the juice, and the reading was 95, which would normally be okay for me, but for some reason it felt much lower. I expected the number to be in the 60s or 70s based on how I felt at the time.

In the early evening I had a 75-minute phone interview. Fortunately my emotional stability and energy levels returned to semi-normal within the last half-hour before the call, and the interview went just fine. I certainly can’t attribute any feelings of stress to the interview. I’ve done numerous phone interviews since my book came out, sometimes as many as three in a day, and I typically look forward to them and enjoy them.

I felt mostly okay for a few hours after the interview, and by 8pm I was feeling pretty good, nearly back to my normal happy self. However, by 9pm I started feeling mildly stressed again. That feeling of stress has been gradually increasing ever since.

It’s about 11pm now as I type this, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to keep typing because I’m experiencing this mounting feeling of dread that comes in waves. All I’m doing is sitting in my home office blogging, something I’ve done hundreds of times before, and my body is producing feelings verging on panic.

Logically I know I’m in no real danger, but my adrenals apparently feel otherwise.

Weight Loss

My weight rebounded to 176.6 pounds this morning for a net loss of 2.4 pounds in 10 days. If it’s really true that the average man loses 30 pounds in the first 30 days of juice feasting (20 pounds for women), my results are obviously nowhere close to that.

Off to Bed…

If there are any special mental and emotional breakthroughs to be experienced while juice feasting, I’ve yet to experience them. During the past 11 days, at my best I’ve felt no better than I did while eating raw foods. And the worst has been much worse than I recall feeling while eating raw.

The most significant positive results I can point to so far have been a small amount of weight loss as well as the major improvement to a knee injury that I wrote about in my Day 10 update. However, I suspect the latter may have been due to the MSM I’m taking and not the juice feast itself.

This emotional detox is getting intense. I hope I don’t have to endure too many more days like today. To be fair I’ve read that the first 30 days of a 92-day juice feast are the hardest, both physically and emotionally. I’m definitely relying on my self-discipline to keep going though, now that my initial burst of enthusiasm and motivation has faded. I think the hardest part is not being able to predict what I’ll have to deal with next. I really have to take this one day at a time.

I’m off to bed now. Hopefully I’ll feel better in the morning.