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Please note, when I wrote this I knew nothing about managing autoimmune diseases with diet. It was an interesting experiment from which I learned, but I would no longer use a juice fast as a way to manage autoimmune disease. If you are interested getting experimenting with food as medicine, the Paleo Autoimmune Protocol (AIP) would be a much better place to start.
Recently I've been experimenting with juice fasting for one or two days at a time. Mostly it's been driven by curiosity on my part about what it's like to go for an extended period of time without eating anything (though of course juice does have calories). There is also a lot of research, and vast quantities of anecdotal evidence, which support the health benefits of fasting.
The benefits you hear about the most are:
So far it's been an interesting process, my first fast was about 36 hours and I was surprised to discover that I didn't suffer from any physical discomfort at all. I did get hungry but it was pretty simple to manage the urge to eat, in fact I found it easier to eat nothing then I normally find it to control my sweet tooth.
The book I read about fasting had some general guidelines about how to come off of a fast. Most of it is common sense (eg. don't make your first meal a steak, instead start slowly with easily digestible food), but one thing that I stuck to was to eat my first couple of meals slowly and to make a point of chewing food very well. As somebody who normally wolfs their food it was an interesting experience and I enjoyed the increased attention I paid my meals.
The most interesting thing is obvious in hindsight. It's that the biggest challenge with regular fasting isn't that it gets difficult to endure the “hardship” but rather that it gets repetitive. Fasting is surprising easy, the struggle is with the discipline to do it regularly, because not eating is more boring then eating!
♡2014 by adam shand. sharing is an act of love, please share. | about · services · contact |