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!

Are you a disabled person who is constantly limiting your amount of fluid intake because you are worried your leg bag might overflow? If you are, there’s a good chance you’re getting urinary tract infections (UTIs) because you aren’t drinking enough liquids. I used to be in that situation too, but my life changed for the better after I discovered the substantial benefits of using an electric leg bag opener. I now have the freedom to drink as much as I want without needing to rely on someone else to drain my bag and, for me, UTIs are history.

Dealing with UTIs

Most people with spinal cord injuries suffer from UTIs at some point in their lives. I certainly had my share of UTIs during my early years of being disabled as a C5/C6 quadriplegic. I remember one infection was so bad that there was blood in my urine – and that really scared me. Antibiotics seemed to be the only way to cure UTIs, but I have always dreaded taking medication, especially antibiotics, as they also kill the good bacteria in your body.

Because of my specific type of spinal injury, I developed a condition whereby I became a 100% automatic reflexer. Being an automatic reflexer basically means that the bladder empties by itself, and you have no control over when it empties or how much gets released. It’s kind of like your bladder becomes a leaky faucet.  Initially after my injury but before becoming an automatic reflexer I had to be catheterized on a fixed schedule and I had to manage my fluid intake very carefully. The biggest problem was the fact that I could not catheterize myself because I no longer have full use of my fingers.

After becoming an automatic reflexer I no longer had to insert a catheter, which can be a major cause of UTIs, but I was still getting my share of infections. Apparently, my urethral sphincter was not always relaxing enough which caused my bladder to maintain a urine level in which bacteria would grow, eventually resulting into a UTI. Occasionally my bladder would fill up so much that it would turn into autonomic dysreflexia, a condition that causes extremely high blood pressure and usually coincides with a pounding headache. It turned out that the distal sphincters that connect my bladder to the urethra did not coordinate properly with the bladder, and drainage was obstructed. The treatment required undergoing a sphincterotomy, which is a surgical procedure that weakens the sphincter muscles so urine can flow out more easily.

Using a leg bag

After the sphincterotomy, my frequency of infections decreased but I would still get one occasionally. Almost immediately I realized there was a direct link between the number of bladder infections I experienced and the amount of fluids I drank. On a day I hardly drank anything my urine looked brownish in the evening, and when I drank a lot of water for a few days my urine would be almost completely clear and colorless.

It seemed like a simple solution to just always drink a lot of water to avoid getting UTIs, right? So, why not just do that? Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. Since I am an automatic reflexer and my bladder drains without me having control over it, the urine needs to be captured somehow. For people with my condition, this is typically accomplished through the use of a bag strapped to the lower leg. I wear one, and I think of it as my second bladder. The problem is that the leg bag needs to be emptied to prevent it from overflowing and, unfortunately, I can’t do it myself.  I am completely dependent on someone else because to empty it requires opening a valve at the bottom of the bag that I can’t reach. It’s not something you can ask any stranger to do for you and I certainly didn’t want my coworkers to bother with it either.

One of my goals has always been to minimize the amount of help I need from other people at work as it can cause resentment over time. Keeping this in mind, I wanted to avoid needing to have my leg bag emptied at work at all costs.  The only way to do that was to minimize my fluid intake during the day, but I still wanted to drink lots of fluids to maintain a healthy bladder. So I modified my fluid intake and drank very little during the day, the consumed plenty of liquids in the evening at home when someone could help me empty the bag. Sometimes I would even wait to drink much until an hour before bed so I wouldn’t have to bug anyone with emptying my leg bag. Of course, that wasn’t serving my bladder too well.

An Automatic Leg Bag Opener to the Rescue

About three years ago, I decided to do some research on automatic, powered leg bag openers. I had heard of their existence, but I had always been apprehensive to try one as I was afraid it might release by accident, and I was concerned that it would be too noticeable when mounted on my wheelchair.

I found one that appeared to be a great system and I bit the bullet and ordered one. It has definitely been one of the greatest improvements I have experienced during my disabled life. The system was fairly easy to mount on the wheelchair and it can draw power from the wheelchair battery. It isn’t noticeable, and someone looking at me wouldn’t even know it is there.

The unit is easy to connect when I get in my wheelchair in the morning and likewise simple to disconnect when I get out at night. The activation (to open the leg bag) is done by pushing a button on a small control unit. I hide the unit in a small pouch within easy reach on the side of my chair. Additionally, it has a safety feature which prevents any accidental release.

It does contain a small filter that needs to be wiped off occasionally, indicated by a slower drainage flow. I did have a few breakdowns of the unit during the first two years I owned it, but recently the manufacturer released a new, improved model which I now use and it has worked flawlessly.

I am happy to say that I am very satisfied with the product. Even though the system is not inexpensive, I consider it well worth the investment.

I definitely recommend this type of leg bag opener, but of course only you can determine what is right for you and your situation. I am very happy with my decision to install one because, finally, after years of monitoring my fluid intake, I now have the freedom to drink as much as I want. No longer do I worry about who is going to assist me with draining my urine – I can fully control that process myself now. I feel more productive and independent. I drink six quarts of water on average each day, my urine is consistently completely clear and I haven’t had the slightest sign of a UTI since I have installed this system. Drinking lots of water also aids my bowel movements as I experience far less constipation than I used to. Also, I am hopeful that I have significantly reduced my chance of forming kidney stones since urinary tract waste gets flushed out much better and more frequently.

Good health is a key to leading a more productive, fulfilling life as a disabled person!

Richardson Products Leg Bag Opener Ordering Information

The leg bag I use is the HyroFlush Mini, made my Richardson Products, and I think it’s one of the best on the market. I would highly recommend it for anyone looking for this type of solution.

(Keep in mind the box shown in the picture below is not the entire device. Click the picture for full details of the unit and how it works.)

We also filmed a demonstration video about the electric leg bag emptier that will show you more about how it works.

from www.richardsonproducts.com

Do you, as a disabled person, usually feel tired by the early evening? Has your health started to go downhill after sitting in a wheelchair day after day for several years? Living life in a wheelchair doesn’t have to be a drag like that. If you are able to make some changes to your diet, you may likely become more energetic and get your health back on track. I switched to a mainly raw vegan diet several years ago and I have never felt more energetic and healthy in my 21 years as a C5/C6 quadriplegic than I do now. I don’t proclaim that such a diet is the solution for everyone, but it certainly has made a huge difference for me.

A heavy diet made me feel sluggish

It is generally known that health issues related to improper diet have increased significantly in America during recent decades. Even though I have never been a fast food junkie, I probably used to eat a diet higher in fat and sugar than was good for my body. That started to catch up with me about eight years ago – I began to notice that by the early evening I would feel tired and sluggish. My job at the time was intense, requiring more than the standard 40 hours a week, and I didn’t feel like I had the energy that I used to have. Seeking some sort of solution, my wife and I decided to change our diet. We started off by focusing on eating more simple cooked foods such as steamed vegetables over boiled potatoes or rice, with soups and salads as well. Additionally, we almost completely eliminated meat from our diets. Soon, I started feeling less sluggish, but it wasn’t until we transitioned to a mostly raw vegan diet that I felt fully alive again.

Do your own raw food research first

My wife and I researched raw vegan food and read several books before we jumped onto the raw food bandwagon. For anyone remotely interested in a raw, vegan diet, I definitely recommend that you do your own research and maybe even check with your doctor first before transitioning to such a diet. I don’t claim to be a medical expert or a nutritionist, but basically a raw food diet is a diet based on unprocessed and uncooked plant foods. Mostly, this means a diet rich in fresh fruit and vegetables, sprouts, seeds, nuts, grains, beans, dried fruit, and seaweed.

The “raw” part comes from not cooking the food, and only heating it slightly if needed. Heating food above 116 degrees F is believed to destroy enzymes in food that can assist in the digestion and absorption of that food. Cooking is also thought to diminish the nutritional value, or “life force” of food. Even adding small amounts of raw food to your diet here and there is said to be beneficial.

Energetic again at last

Soon after having slowly transitioned into a raw vegan diet I started feeling very energetic again.  I noticed that even after a 12+ hour workday, (working from 8AM till 9PM with just a short lunch and dinner break) I hardly felt tired at the end of the day. Eight years ago, before changing my diet, I never would have thought that possible. I was completely exhausted when I worked long days. These days, however, I sometimes feel like I have a competitive edge compared to my co-workers as my increased energy allows me to be more productive.

I am much more alert now and my mind feels sharper. I used to have oily skin and occasional pimples, but that seems to have remedied itself with this diet. I also used to get cold easily in winter and too hot in the summer. But neither the cold nor the heat seem to bother me anymore. In addition, my digestion has improved tremendously.

Since I am unable to exercise like able bodied people, I feel the least I can do for my body is to provide it with the nutrients it needs to keep my organs healthy. A few months ago I had some blood-work done as part of my physical. The results were near perfect and my cholesterol level had gone down to 113; even the doctor was amazed by my improvements.

This diet made a tremendous difference in my life and in how I feel, and because of that, I am an advocate of a whole foods, plant based diet. Even so, it’s important to do your own research first and make sure this diet is right for you. But for me, a mostly raw vegan diet has certainly changed my life for the better.

Literature - The following are some of the books that inspired us:

Raw Family: A True Story of Awakening

This is the first book my wife and I read about the benefits of a raw food diet. It is an amazing story of a Russian family that immigrated to the US and started getting ailments after a few years on a standard American diet. They all got their health back on track after switching to a raw vegan diet. Their story inspired us to make a switch ourselves. We actually also attended a few of their lectures and presentations while they were on tour in our area. This is an easy read and an excellent first exposure to the benefits of a raw vegan diet.

The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Eating Raw

This book is another inspiring read that goes more in depth regarding the benefits of raw vegan food without it being too scientific. It contains a wealth of good information and also some delicious recipes.