Juicing (plus food) for the last 60 days gave me the gift of feeling and being in control of eating instead of being out-of control and feeling powerless over it. It was a launch pad to better nutrition and now I’m tracking vitamins and minerals and focusing on food quality not just calories. Juicing helped me retrain myself to like fruits and vegetables. Juicing helped me conquer my icecream, chocolate, fast food, junk food and nutrition-less food addictions. Juicing helped me stop craving white sugar! That is pretty powerful stuff.
It’s been great for my skin and my rosacea is better than I’ve seen it in several years. Whole areas of my face have completely cleared that had only been growing and staying constant for several years now (it’s a progressive disease). Cleared! Completely and without any expensive and dangerous prescription drugs or creams.
I’ve had tons of energy to get stuff done and to fuel exercise and swimming.
I have to be honest though, the clearing was sometimes brutal in the beginning and even now, whenever my weight drops a little, there is more to clear out of my system. What does that mean? It means in the first two weeks I had all kinds of symptoms popping up. Physically, I had headaches, light sensitivity in my eyes, aches and pains in random spots that seemed to travel and had no cause, trouble sleeping, transient tiredness and fatigue and my rosacea on my face flared up really bad and was so inflamed it was hard to cover with make-up. Emotionally it was a roller coaster. A lot of negative emotions started coming up for me that I needed to deal with. Depression, anxiety and anger hung around a lot right then. Anger is the only one still popping up lately when I exercise.
It did get better though! Each time I felt bad for a few days and my body stabilized again I felt better than I had before all that. For pretty much the entire 60 days it has been like that. The more my body clears both emotions and releases whatever old chemicals or bad stuff it was trying to hide in the fat, the better I feel after the clearing is done. Not just better, but better as in a deep sense of well-being that I can’t remember the last time I felt.
As I’ve been focused on improving the nutrition in my food & juice my cravings have become less. About 45 days in my appetite finally stopped being intermittently crazy. Looking back I can really see now how the drive for more and more food (that I called being hungry) was actually not a call from my body for food the way I fed it, but a call for nutrition.
I looked at old entries for nutrition within my calorie range and saw vitamins and minerals where my intake that day might have been a 6 or a 14 when it should have been 100-250. This week’s adventure has been getting my nutrition within my recommendations and still within my calorie range. The scale and I are arguing right now about these changes to my food, I’m not used to nuts and seeds and I kind of wonder if my body isn’t hoarding nutrients a little bit, in case they go away again.
One thing I only just figured out is that all I need to add to feel “full” is fiber. My fiber was chronically low, even before juicing. Like really low, a 4 or a 7 when it should be 25-35. Note to anyone adding fiber though, start s-l-o-w! My body wasn’t used to anywhere near the lowest of normal fiber so–tummy aches!
I’m not hungry! It is so crazy, but the more I meet the nutritional needs of my body with whole foods (not talking about supplements) the less hungry I feel. It is strange to not only not feel hungry, but to not need as much food to feel full. Now my issue has been how to eat all that food to get the vitamins and minerals! I have to remind myself to spread it out since real food sure goes a long way further to filling you up that the high calorie foods that made up most of my eating before.
So, 60 days later…no pain, no fatigue or unexplained tiredness (just natural tiredness at the end of the day), no anxiety (which was a big part of be deciding to juice in the first place because it was a new symptom I’d never had before in my life and really bothered me), no depression. Still dealing with emotional flare-ups, pretty much whenever the scale goes down. No out of control cravings. Lots of energy. Feeling good, sleeping good. Many good days where exercise and healthy eating is feeling normal, still bad days where it is too easy not to exercise or eat well, to let life get in the way.
I’m going to keep juicing beyond 60 days. I’m not going to do a juice fast right now, but I hope to do one at some point. Β Β