Juice fast (not about today)
Tuesday, July 20th, 2010 10:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chanaleh
[I was thinking about posting this friendslocked, but... what the heck.]
Today is Tisha B'Av, which commemorates the destruction of both the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem, as well as a host of other catastrophes of Jewish history.
What I want to write about here, though, is not the religious aspect, but the fasting.
Three weeks ago (June 29) was the minor fast day of 17 Tammuz. For the minor fast days, especially in the summer, I often will do a liquid fast rather than the traditional not-even-water.
One of the interesting things about religious fast days is that by the time I get to the end of them, I invariably feel like I could keep going pretty easily. The first 24 hours are the hardest, no?
Also, I have read a fair bit over the years about food, nutrition, alternative medicine, and the notion of multi-day water or juice fasting as a cleansing/detox regimen. (Note that I once made a rather poor effort at the Lemonade Cleanse... starting with failure to properly taper off caffeine. It ended badly the first night, when I was at a shul meeting with a pounding headache and looking so peaked that my friend B took me in hand and forcibly plied me with Coca-Cola, which, needless to say, made me feel better within minutes, but I decided that particular attempt was not happening for me after that.)
So I was interested in doing a longer liquid fast sometime... but it's never been possible for me to try before, mostly for social reasons: How do you come home and tell someone you're still not eating even though the fast day is over, without inciting reactions from concern to discomfort to outrage? But what with living alone again, and some other convenient scheduling factors, I decided the time was right to try it.
The official fast day of 17 Tammuz was not until Tuesday. I started "tapering off" on the Sunday with lunch (salad greens, plain chicken, some crispbread) and "dinner" (strawberry smoothie) and, okay, dessert later on (a little vanilla-bean coconut milk "ice cream" which BTW was phenomenally good) -- and no coffee. However, I ended up deciding that for the remaining days I was simply NOT going to bother eliminating caffeine, but rather focus on eliminating wheat, dairy, and refined sugar/HFCS... so I had iced coffee with soymilk every morning, which suited me just fine.
I also had instant miso soup in the morning or evening, for protein. Oh right, and a fiber supplement. Y'know.
Other than that, I had juice... stocked up from Trader Joe's: some of the refrigerated pints (carrot, green-superfood, protein smoothie) and some of the large shelf-stable bottles (the V8 clone and the green-superfood). I know, all the juicing sites say very particularly that you MUST do this sort of program by drinking juice the INSTANT it comes off your juicer or you miss all the LIVE enzymes and fragile air-soluble vitamins and whatnot... but I didn't. Except for that one time I stopped off at Blue Shirt (inspired by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
eesti's visit the preceding weekend) and got the "Bee Strong" (carrots, celery, and beets)... which was, admittedly, quite fantastic.
So what was it like?
The thing I noticed most drastically was HOW FUCKING TIRED I was. No joke. Strangely, even, it was really the worst on Monday morning, when I had barely started -- I literally did not want to get out of bed even after a more-reasonable-than-usual quantity of sleep. Was that the lack of caffeine from Sunday? Maybe, but I repaired that in short order, and I still noticed constantly from Monday to Thursday how ridiculously tired I felt all the time. Also, constant mild state of brain fog rather like what I normally get if I try to have a 2pm meeting without eating my lunch first... cannot focus, cannot think. While this would be a great way to spend a spa vacation where I could lie around, nap, read, and do yoga for an entire week (and my God, doesn't that sound appealing in its own way!), it was a serious detriment to trying to work normally. It struck me that in the absence of food I really could have used 12 hours of sleep a day, which, again -- appealing in its own way, but hard to arrange. The next time I manage to do this I think it's really going to have to be on that basis. The connection between food and sleep is a deep and complex one, but I'd never been so aware of this particular part of the equation.
Anyway. What I was not was hungry. While being proactive about pushing juice (so it wasn't a question of low blood sugar per se) and water, the cloudy-brained feeling was as close as I really got.
I have often found on fast days (say, in shul on Yom Kippur) that I spend whole hours fantasizing about food -- not even things I would normally think of wanting, but things that just float into my mind in vivid detail: aroma, temperature, texture. Also, if I am walking or driving around town while fasting, I start to find that my backbrain is processing the entire environment in terms of available food supply: "Hey, there's a burrito place, we could go there! -- Wait, no. [three seconds later] Hey, there's a Dunkin' Donuts, we could go there! NO." Repeat until I get where I am going or find something more distracting to do.
I had NONE of that this time. I occasionally had a growly stomach, but it didn't feel like hunger; it was more of an inconvenience than expressing a deep-seated need.
Which brings me to one of my goals in this exercise: I'd been feeling for several weeks like my eating was spiraling out of control, not in a bingey psychological way, but simply in an animal way like "OMG FEED ME" all the time. I honestly believe in listening to your body's signals, but mine were starting to feel kind of tyrannical. Given how complex food gets in our society (what you're eating, when you're eating it, what you should be eating versus all the crap that's no good for you, to say nothing of our completely skewed senses of our own nutritional needs), I wanted to do something that would give me a step back from all that. To hold down the Reset button for a little while.
That, I think, I did.
I did not go into it expecting to lose any weight. Rather, I thought I might show a few pounds' weight loss after a few days, but that it would likely bounce back up again once I returned to some version of normal eating. And this is more or less what I got. My weight continues to exist as some kind of quantum expectation value within a five-pound range, and that's fine.
ETA: Oh, but, so, other than that, what else did I experience? Basically, nothing. No dramatic digestive results, no visible skin clearing nor breakouts, no surge of energy on day 4 or other mood effects -- nothing particularly out of the ordinary at all, aside from Teh Tired. Maybe I would find otherwise if I gave it a full week; maybe next time I'll try for that. Or maybe not.
So, Thursday of that week was the fourth full day. It was July 1, the night of Somerville's "July 4th" fireworks. I walked up to Ball Sq to watch them (though I was surprised I didn't run into anyone I knew, as I had in previous years), and then around 10pm when they were over, I walked back down into Davis Sq and got a Super Fennel from Mr. Crepe. Wheat and dairy wrapped up in a salady package... probably not the way they say you should reintroduce such things after four days off, but let me tell you, it was awesome.
So, yeah, as for today, I'm continuing to drink water, but nothing else. A different sort of experience. (I had a massage appointment withchaiya 10 days ago where she expressed serious concern about my hydration levels, as well as muscle tension and usage patterns in general, so I'm sticking with the water.) Also, work is officially closed until 1pm today, so I think I'll go put laundry in -- if there's still time! -- and then come back and stretch and rest until I need to go anywhere else. Still haven't decided whether to do the shul break-fast tonight; I think I'll just wait and see whether I feel like it, or if I have a better impulse by then. ETA: Now, of course, surrealestate's post about kimchi is making me think about sushi and Korean places. :-)
Today is Tisha B'Av, which commemorates the destruction of both the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem, as well as a host of other catastrophes of Jewish history.
What I want to write about here, though, is not the religious aspect, but the fasting.
Three weeks ago (June 29) was the minor fast day of 17 Tammuz. For the minor fast days, especially in the summer, I often will do a liquid fast rather than the traditional not-even-water.
One of the interesting things about religious fast days is that by the time I get to the end of them, I invariably feel like I could keep going pretty easily. The first 24 hours are the hardest, no?
Also, I have read a fair bit over the years about food, nutrition, alternative medicine, and the notion of multi-day water or juice fasting as a cleansing/detox regimen. (Note that I once made a rather poor effort at the Lemonade Cleanse... starting with failure to properly taper off caffeine. It ended badly the first night, when I was at a shul meeting with a pounding headache and looking so peaked that my friend B took me in hand and forcibly plied me with Coca-Cola, which, needless to say, made me feel better within minutes, but I decided that particular attempt was not happening for me after that.)
So I was interested in doing a longer liquid fast sometime... but it's never been possible for me to try before, mostly for social reasons: How do you come home and tell someone you're still not eating even though the fast day is over, without inciting reactions from concern to discomfort to outrage? But what with living alone again, and some other convenient scheduling factors, I decided the time was right to try it.
The official fast day of 17 Tammuz was not until Tuesday. I started "tapering off" on the Sunday with lunch (salad greens, plain chicken, some crispbread) and "dinner" (strawberry smoothie) and, okay, dessert later on (a little vanilla-bean coconut milk "ice cream" which BTW was phenomenally good) -- and no coffee. However, I ended up deciding that for the remaining days I was simply NOT going to bother eliminating caffeine, but rather focus on eliminating wheat, dairy, and refined sugar/HFCS... so I had iced coffee with soymilk every morning, which suited me just fine.
I also had instant miso soup in the morning or evening, for protein. Oh right, and a fiber supplement. Y'know.
Other than that, I had juice... stocked up from Trader Joe's: some of the refrigerated pints (carrot, green-superfood, protein smoothie) and some of the large shelf-stable bottles (the V8 clone and the green-superfood). I know, all the juicing sites say very particularly that you MUST do this sort of program by drinking juice the INSTANT it comes off your juicer or you miss all the LIVE enzymes and fragile air-soluble vitamins and whatnot... but I didn't. Except for that one time I stopped off at Blue Shirt (inspired by
eesti's visit the preceding weekend) and got the "Bee Strong" (carrots, celery, and beets)... which was, admittedly, quite fantastic.So what was it like?
The thing I noticed most drastically was HOW FUCKING TIRED I was. No joke. Strangely, even, it was really the worst on Monday morning, when I had barely started -- I literally did not want to get out of bed even after a more-reasonable-than-usual quantity of sleep. Was that the lack of caffeine from Sunday? Maybe, but I repaired that in short order, and I still noticed constantly from Monday to Thursday how ridiculously tired I felt all the time. Also, constant mild state of brain fog rather like what I normally get if I try to have a 2pm meeting without eating my lunch first... cannot focus, cannot think. While this would be a great way to spend a spa vacation where I could lie around, nap, read, and do yoga for an entire week (and my God, doesn't that sound appealing in its own way!), it was a serious detriment to trying to work normally. It struck me that in the absence of food I really could have used 12 hours of sleep a day, which, again -- appealing in its own way, but hard to arrange. The next time I manage to do this I think it's really going to have to be on that basis. The connection between food and sleep is a deep and complex one, but I'd never been so aware of this particular part of the equation.
Anyway. What I was not was hungry. While being proactive about pushing juice (so it wasn't a question of low blood sugar per se) and water, the cloudy-brained feeling was as close as I really got.
I have often found on fast days (say, in shul on Yom Kippur) that I spend whole hours fantasizing about food -- not even things I would normally think of wanting, but things that just float into my mind in vivid detail: aroma, temperature, texture. Also, if I am walking or driving around town while fasting, I start to find that my backbrain is processing the entire environment in terms of available food supply: "Hey, there's a burrito place, we could go there! -- Wait, no. [three seconds later] Hey, there's a Dunkin' Donuts, we could go there! NO." Repeat until I get where I am going or find something more distracting to do.
I had NONE of that this time. I occasionally had a growly stomach, but it didn't feel like hunger; it was more of an inconvenience than expressing a deep-seated need.
Which brings me to one of my goals in this exercise: I'd been feeling for several weeks like my eating was spiraling out of control, not in a bingey psychological way, but simply in an animal way like "OMG FEED ME" all the time. I honestly believe in listening to your body's signals, but mine were starting to feel kind of tyrannical. Given how complex food gets in our society (what you're eating, when you're eating it, what you should be eating versus all the crap that's no good for you, to say nothing of our completely skewed senses of our own nutritional needs), I wanted to do something that would give me a step back from all that. To hold down the Reset button for a little while.
That, I think, I did.
I did not go into it expecting to lose any weight. Rather, I thought I might show a few pounds' weight loss after a few days, but that it would likely bounce back up again once I returned to some version of normal eating. And this is more or less what I got. My weight continues to exist as some kind of quantum expectation value within a five-pound range, and that's fine.
ETA: Oh, but, so, other than that, what else did I experience? Basically, nothing. No dramatic digestive results, no visible skin clearing nor breakouts, no surge of energy on day 4 or other mood effects -- nothing particularly out of the ordinary at all, aside from Teh Tired. Maybe I would find otherwise if I gave it a full week; maybe next time I'll try for that. Or maybe not.
So, Thursday of that week was the fourth full day. It was July 1, the night of Somerville's "July 4th" fireworks. I walked up to Ball Sq to watch them (though I was surprised I didn't run into anyone I knew, as I had in previous years), and then around 10pm when they were over, I walked back down into Davis Sq and got a Super Fennel from Mr. Crepe. Wheat and dairy wrapped up in a salady package... probably not the way they say you should reintroduce such things after four days off, but let me tell you, it was awesome.
So, yeah, as for today, I'm continuing to drink water, but nothing else. A different sort of experience. (I had a massage appointment with
chaiya 10 days ago where she expressed serious concern about my hydration levels, as well as muscle tension and usage patterns in general, so I'm sticking with the water.) Also, work is officially closed until 1pm today, so I think I'll go put laundry in -- if there's still time! -- and then come back and stretch and rest until I need to go anywhere else. Still haven't decided whether to do the shul break-fast tonight; I think I'll just wait and see whether I feel like it, or if I have a better impulse by then. ETA: Now, of course, surrealestate's post about kimchi is making me think about sushi and Korean places. :-)![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: Tuesday, July 20th, 2010 04:07 pm (UTC)My personal experience with juice fasting has been similar to yours, but on the MC, I did great, did my workouts, used my brain effectively, etc. But I don't drink coffee or soda, so there was no issue with caffeine.
no subject
Date: Tuesday, July 20th, 2010 04:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Tuesday, July 20th, 2010 04:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Tuesday, July 20th, 2010 10:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Tuesday, July 20th, 2010 11:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Wednesday, July 21st, 2010 02:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: Tuesday, July 20th, 2010 04:37 pm (UTC)I haven't done any significant research on "cleanse" fasting, but I suspect it's not something I'd be likely to try regardless.
no subject
Date: Tuesday, July 20th, 2010 04:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Tuesday, July 20th, 2010 08:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Wednesday, July 21st, 2010 12:57 pm (UTC)Which is just to say that futzing with caffeine intake can have odd effects on some people. Very hard sometimes to separate those effects from other factors that might be going on at the time (is my headache due to withdrawal or a stiff neck? etc. etc.). And let's face it, total dietary change is a big other factor.