Detoxifying a Disabled Body Through Juice Feasting

As part of our New Year’s resolution my wife and I decided to do a 60 day juice feast to cleanse our bodies from years of a build-up of toxins. You read that right; that is 60 days of only drinking fruit and vegetable juices. You might be surprised, but during the entire juice feast, I felt better and more energetic than I ever have since I was a kid.

What is juice feasting?

First of all, juice feasting is not to be confused with fasting where you ingest no food and starve the body of nutrients. On the contrary, during a juice feast you typically consume about 12 to 15 pounds of fruits and vegetables (preferably organic) each day. Your body actually gets many more nutrients through a juice feast than the average American diet. The 12 to 15 pounds of fruits and vegetables turns into an equivalent of four quarts of juice and you will not feel hungry.

People who are overweight will usually lose quite a bit of weight during a juice feast, but a juice feast is not really a weight loss program. A juice feast is about getting your health back on track through detoxifying your body. It is said that after 30 days of juice feasting, every additional day of juice feasting will restore all the cells in your body to the state they were in 120 days earlier, making you feel rejuvenated. But rather than explaining the multiple benefits of juice feasting myself, I leave that up to the experts from the juice feasting web site (www.juicefeasting.com) where you can find all the details.

Even though the health benefits of a juice feast can be extremely beneficial to your overall health, you should definitely do your own research first. The juice feasting web site is a good place to start, but you may also want to consult with your doctor, especially if you are using a lot of medication or if you are currently experiencing any severe medical condition.

Also be aware that you may experience severe cleansing reactions such as headaches, sweating, and diarrhea, especially if your diet hasn’t been all that healthy before. For a disabled person some of those conditions may be hard to deal with.

Why did I undertake a juice feast as a disabled person?

As a C5/C6 quadriplegic I always felt that I needed to take extra care of my body to keep my organs healthy. Because rigorous exercising is hard for me to do, it is even more important to supply my body with the best nutrition possible. My wife and I have been on a journey for a while to find the diet that works best for me (see my previous article) and it has paid off. Due to a mostly raw vegan diet during the past eight years, my health has improved tremendously compared to what it was ten years ago; I feel much more energetic and I haven’t had to take a single sick day for many years now.  The trick for me has been to add a lot of raw greens to my diet – and a quick and easy way to start doing that is to drink fruit smoothies mixed with vegetables such as spinach, lettuce, kale, and chard.

If you have any interest at all in exploring the benefits of a raw food diet, just start with a simple Internet search on “raw food diet” and you will find a wealth of information about the subject. You may also go to the following link to get a brief high level introduction: Raw food diet and nutrition – living food.

If I claim to be in such good health already because of my raw vegan diet, why did I decide to do a 60 day juice feast?

Indeed, I already went through several cleansing cycles over the years just by being on a raw vegan diet. However, it takes a lot to recover from 40 years of eating a standard diet consisting mostly of meat and potatoes, white bread, cheeses, and sugars. By limiting your diet to only juices your body is able to cleanse itself much more deeply. This happens because digesting juice is much easier than solid foods, and your body is able to allocate all of the energy it would have spent in digestion to healing itself.

What did juice feasting do for me?

During the first days of the juice feast, I experienced sweating and headaches and I also had more frequent bowel movements of which some were more like diarrhea. But those symptoms became less frequent as I got further into the program and I started to feel gradually more energetic and very alert. I also started sleeping much better and I never seemed to get tired. Actually, during the juice feast I went through some really intense times at work and the juice feast really helped me cope with the heavy workloads. At 7 AM during the weekdays I was already sitting behind my computer and usually didn’t stop untill 7 or 8 PM in the evening – and I rarely took any breaks. In addition, I was working  several hours during the weekends as well. It was almost unbelievable; I felt like I could go on forever. Needless to say, I got a lot done.

But around day 50 I began to experience the effects of a very heavy cleansing. My intestines were making incredibly loud noises, I was almost constantly sweating, and I experienced pounding headaches similar to what I used to get during the episodes of dysreflexia I would often get during the first several months after my paralyzing accident. I knew I was going through some really deep detoxification, and it went on for about three days. What happened to me is exactly what is also explained on the juice feasting website. From years of eating a standard diet a layer of mucus and dried up waste builds up against the walls of your intestines and never gets eliminated. Such build up reduces the assimilation of nutrients into the bloodstream and basically creates toxicity in your bowels which can eventually result in diseases such as cancer. The noise in my intestines that I had been hearing for three days was actually caused by my body making an effort to peel off a part of this layer from my intestinal walls. Finally, after three days, my body released this layer as part of a bowel movement that coincided with an extreme headache. I will spare you the description of what my body eliminated, but it looked exactly like descriptions and pictures of this phenomena that I have seen on some websites. I felt extremely relieved, the noises stopped and the headaches and sweating disappeared almost instantaneously after my body rid itself from this toxic waste that had been stuck to my bowels for who knows how many years.

After that, I didn’t really experience any more severe cleansing, but I was buzzing with energy – I don’t think I had felt that good in my entire life. Honestly, I felt rejuvenated.

After 60 days, my weight had come down from 175 pounds to 155 – close to where I was before my accident. My cravings for any food I consider bad, but tasty, were pretty much gone and my skin looked very healthy. Some people we hadn’t seen in a while even complimented my wife and I, saying they saw a vibrancy in our eyes that they don’t see in people very often.

During the entire juice feast I also felt more connected to nature, more spiritual, optimistic, happy, and emotionally very stable. I guess that when your body feels good, the world looks like a happier place even during these tough economic times.

However, it was nice to be able to chew again after 60 days of not eating. Even the soaked prunes we ate during our first day of breaking the fast tasted like a delicacy. Actually, I found myself enjoying and appreciating even the simplest foods like a carrot, a sprouted pea, or a leaf of lettuce much more after going through the juice feast.

Do I recommend doing a juice feast to other disabled persons?

There’s no doubt in my mind that a diet of unprocessed fruits and vegetables is much healthier than the standard American diet. Though I certainly don’t claim to be a medical expert or a nutritionist, my personal experiences confirm this for me. But I might very well be the first quadriplegic in the world who has done a 60 day juice feast. So, any statistics will be hard to find, especially since the idea of detoxifying your body through juice feasting is very new.

I don’t recommend for a person with a severe physical disability like mine to dive into a juice feast “cold turkey” after having been on a standard American diet for a few decades. As I mentioned before, I have experienced several severe cleansing cycles over the years through eating a mostly raw vegan diet. I can only imagine that the cleansing symptoms I experienced during the juice feast would have been much more severe without several years of eating raw vegan food. My bodily discomforts would probably have been so severe that they would have been hard to deal with as a quadriplegic confined to a wheelchair.

Juice feasting is very powerful and it is difficult to predict how your body will react. Therefore, you almost need to be able to rely on a 24-hour a day support person during the entire program, and I am lucky to be able to count on my wife for that. Also, juicing 15 pounds of fruits and vegetables a day takes a lot of time and effort which I would never be able to do myself. And my wife Shari quickly realized which fruit and vegetable combinations produced really tasty juice. Her sense and understanding of the process made juice feasting very enjoyable.

So again, I just want to extoll the virtues I experienced through this process, but I really recommend that before attempting a juice feast, do your own research and slowly transition into a healthier diet by gradually adding more raw foods and especially greens to your diet first. If you decide juice feasting is right for you, I hope you feel as happy and healthy as I did!