Juice Fast - Day 1

So I've decided to do a 10 day juice fast. Well I want to do a 10 day juice fast, but I think I'll go for 5 days first and see how I feel. Now don't think that I'm doing this to loose weight or anything and think I've gone crazy...no I'm simply doing it for the health benefits. Think of it as a kind of spring cleaning...or winter cleaning rather. I also want to do it to help overcome appetite and improve self-control.

The night before Day 1, Monday night, I decided I might as well eat a nice last supper. So I had chips, an orange, ramen, teff pudding & some raw chocolate desert balls, and some real chocolate. Yum. I'll have to hide that chocolate away now. =)

My juicing buddy is my housemate Jenn. Since pretty much everyone from Fountainview is gone on the California Christmas tour, we figured now was a good time to juice and there are no convenient cafeteria meals.


We are using a Breville juicer. Although I have not really used any other juicers, so I don't have much of a comparison, I've heard that Breville juicers are really good quality and so far I've been impressed. Not much pulp in the juice at all.

For our breakfast juice we had:
Carrots
Kale
Swiss chard
A little ginger
1 lime
Apples

I think that's it. After we juiced everything but the kale, we put the juice and the whole kale in the blender. We thought it might be good to drink more of the Kale by blending it. It wasn't such a great idea. It didn't blend down all too well and kale has an already dense texture. I wouldn't recommend blending Kale for juice. I drank almost 1 liter.

Lunch juice:
1 large beet
Spinach
Grapes
About a 2 inch chunk of ginger
1 lime
3 broccoli stalks
About a 1/4 of a french cucumber
Apples (I think)

This juice was much better than breakfast's juice. But since we still had about 1 liter left over from breakfast we mixed the two together. It was still drinkable. I couldn't finish my whole 1 liter jar though. So I drank the rest for supper. It wasn't quite enough juice for supper and I was still hungry, but I was too lazy to do more juicing so I drank most of the juice from one young fresh coconut.

One of my friends who did a juice fast a couple weeks ago told us we needed to use psyllium while we juice. It is high in fiber, actually it is pretty much only fiber. She said we should take about 4 tablespoons a day. So I thought for breakfast I would take 2. So pouring about 2 inches worth of my juice into a separate cup (you never want to contaminate all your juice with psyllium!) I quickly mixed in the psyllium. I hadn't had psyllium since I was a kid and I'd forgotten how bad it is. It got thicker and thicker and soon I was spooning myself mouthfuls of this awful tasting thick mass, like gooey pudding. I choked down every last bite even though it seemed there was always more left. There had to be a better way! So for lunch I poured about an inch of juice into a cup and on top the juice I dumped about 3/4 of a tablespoon of psyllium and without mixing it all I gulped it down. This gave the psyllium no time to expand and me hardly any time to taste it. Whatever bits of psyllium were left, I poured a bit more juice over and drank that down too. It is definitely doable drinking it that way. I also think that 4 tablespoons is a little overkill. I think I can handle 2 a day if i drink it before it hardly absorbs any liquid.

Jenn and I found some nice juicing recipes at this link. The juice recipes are under the links called Reboot Standard Meal Plan Days 5 to 10. I think we will try some of them out, though a few look pretty sketchy to me. =)

Day 1 Observations
I've been colder than normal. It seems my body heat has been down. I was so cool in the evening that I drank a cup of tea to warm myself up (and I'm not a huge tea person).
I felt like I had a bit of indigestion and I usually hardly ever get indigestion.
I had plenty of energy and did my usual P90X workout in the evening. I think I had a teeny bit less energy than normal, but not bad. It's only day one though.


If anyone has done a juice fast before and would like to share tips etc., please leave a comment or somthing. I'd love to hear from you, I'm pretty new to this whole juicing thing. =)