Day Twenty-five

Weight today is 62.9kg (138.6lb) - a slight gain; a direct result of drinking a ton of fruity juice yesterday.  Serves me right.

I'm feeling good, bright and energetic; wore my skinny jeans yesterday for the first time in about 8 months. Always a good feeling.  I must stress that I never totally intended this journey to be about weight-loss - it was more about regaining my health and clearing out all the junk in my system.  I do believe I've done that, and that's only the beginning of the journey, of course.  It's like cleaning your house - you don't wait till it's clean and then replace all of the dirt.  I must be very vigilant and return to my good, mostly-raw lifestyle - that is, when this period of juicing is over.

I've decided that 30 days is all I'm going to do.

The more reading I do, I feel 30 days is a good length;  it allows for a great detox and clear-out and shake-off of bad habits, without compromising GI health.  On the longer juice feasts, the advice is to start taking fiber supplements toward the end of the fast, so as to maintain the strength of the intestinal muscles and not run the risk of prolapse due to their not being used.  That's great for those who want to do it, but I don't see why I should take supplements when I could just eat the fiber I'm removing from the foods I'm juicing.  It seems illogical to me.  Fiber has no calories, and it has added benefits in the colon, where some fibers actually ferment and produce fatty acids which are then used by the colon for energy. This also helps to maintain a healthy bacterial balance in the colon, rather than having to worry about taking supplements for that, too.  The other thing I'm reading (but haven't finished yet) is that with a prolonged period of emptiness in the colon, there is a risk of parasitic  infestation, which needs to be taken care of with supplements also.  My research on that is still incomplete, so I'll fill you in some more when it's done.

Having done a nutritional analysis which I'll share with you on the last day, I have to say 30 days is a very safe period of time if you're at all worried about deficiencies.  Longer than that, and there may be some minor problems, but nothing which isn't solveable.  It's not a starvation diet!!

All in all, for me personally, I believe 30 days to be a terrific period of time.  Heck, there are great benefits to be had from 14 or 21 days, too.  Because I started this on September 1st, I'll finish on September 30th.  That seems nice and neat to me.  As a New Zealander, we spend September preparing for summer.  September is a time of new life and light.  It is the month in which daylight saving begins.  It's the month in which we suddenly decide to paint the living room, plant a garden, clean the house from top to bottom.  So there's a kind of poetic rightness to it all for me.

Juice feasting is a completely individual journey, and if you're going to do it, you need to really listen to what your body is telling you.  I believe 90 days for me is too long.  Perhaps for someone with chronic health and dietary issues, it might be a very appropriate thing to do, but to just mindlessly hang on to a number out of principle is not wise.  It is our health we are dealing with, after all.

So I have six days left, counting today.  Perhaps I'll continue to blog my journey and return to the real world.

More tomorrow.