Fasting with Juice

I have engaged in 3-day juice fasts. I definitely felt better and lost my hunger in the 2nd day… I bought a good juicer (Omega 4000) just for this purpose a few years ago. Historic medicine dudes recommended fasting: Hippocrates, Galen and Paracelsus, who declared fasting "the greatest remedy, the physician within." And fasting is more important these days as we are exposed to so many more toxins in food, air, shampoo, toothpaste, and tap water.

I was cleaning out my old stack of New Yorker magazines, and saw an article by Judith Thurman who did a piece on her visit to a fasting spa, We Care. The spa claims you need 2-3 weeks of a fasting regime for the body to get rid of toxins. Daily intake at the spa is lemon-water and herb teas, dietary supplements taken in precise order, gree-vegetable juice, a fibre drink, and vegetable puree.

In addition to the cynical comments she had about the place, she wrote about the physiology of fasting. Blood glucose is burned first within 24 hours. Then glycogen in the liver gets melted down after 2 days. Then your muscle starts to break down. After 3-4 days, the liver converts fatty acids to fuel, a process called ketosis which releases beta-endorphins (woo hoo!). You get disappearance of hunger and waves of elation!

Online I found this info about long water fasts (which aren’t recommended by most people!) http://www.gaianstudies.org/articles4.htm

"In the first 3 days of a fast, the body switches from using glucose (gotten from food) for energy to glycogen. Usually the body uses glycogen from the liver between meals (this is completely exhausted in the first day of fasting). Then the body shifts to ketosis - the use of fatty acids as fuel – for 2 days. It first converts glycerol, available in the body's fat stores, to glucose but this is still insufficient. So it makes the rest that it needs from catabolizing, or breaking down, the amino acids in muscle tissue, using them in the liver for gluconeogenesis, or the making of glucose. "

From the third day onward the rate of the breakdown of fatty acids from adipose or fat tissue continues to increase, hitting its peak on the tenth day. This seven day period, after the body has shifted completely over to ketosis, is where the maximum breakdown of fat tissue occurs. As part of protein conservation, the body also begins seeking out all non-body-protein sources of fuel: nonessential cellular masses such as fibroid tumors and degenerative tissues, bacteria, viruses, or any other compounds in the body that can be used for fuel. "

This is part of the reason that fasting produces the kind of health effects it does. Also, during this period of heightened ketosis the body is in a similar state as the one that occurs during sleep - a rest and detoxification cycle. It begins to focus on the removal of toxins from the body and the healing and regeneration of damaged tissues and organs."

This Juicing site: http://www.healingdaily.com/juicing-for-health/fasting.htm says that during fasting, your body will "autolyze", or self-digest, its most inferior and impure materials and metabolic wastes, including: fat deposits, abcesses, dead and dying cells, bumps and protuberances, damaged tissue, calluses, furuncles (small skin abscesses, or boils), morbid accumulations, growths, and amazingly, various kinds of neoplasms (abnormal growths of tissue, or tumors). During fasting, large amounts of accumulated metabolic wastes and poisons are, during autolysis, very quickly eliminated through the greatly enhanced cleansing capability of all the organs of elimination - liver, kidneys, skin and lungs. Several common symptoms of detoxification seen during this process could be darker urine, the possibility of catarrhal elimination of excess mucus ("rhinorrhea" - a mucous discharge from the nose), continuous discharge through the colon…

Rudolph Ballentine, M.D., Founder and Director of the Center for Holistic Medicine in New York City, does not recommend "water-fasting," which he says "is more correctly termed starvation," adding the following words of warning: "The destruction of starvation, and the cleansing and repair that happen in a well-managed fast, are polar opposites. … Juices can eliminate much of the trauma of fasting." Freshly-squeezed and extracted vegetable and fruit juices contain a wealth of vitamins and organically-complexed minerals.

Three days seems too short, and 3 weeks seems way too long. Maybe 7 days of juicing would make sense. I keep finding information celebrating the benefits of enemas and colonic hydrotherapy as part of the detoxifying regimen…. “Using an enema during a juice fast will flush the lymphatic system attached to the lower colon with water and help remove hardened fecal matter from the intestinal wall, while giving the digestive tract a chance to rest and heal.” I’ll consider it.

Here’s a 21-day fast that consists of an eight day juice fast, three days to come off the fast, and then ten days on a three-quarters raw food diet. http://www.doctoryourself.com/juicefast.html
I’ll consider that too. For now, I think I’ll go for a 4-day juice fast in the next couple weeks. It will make going to the farmer's market pretty fun.