Juice Fasting Diet: What Is It All About?
The main goal of a juice fasting diet is to detoxify your body and improve your health. One of the main effects is that it can help you to cleanse toxins from your digestive system and make you feel better.
Fasting Before A Blood Test
When you go for a yearly physical, you normally need to have a blood test. Before you get your blood taken, you normally have to fast for at least 12 hours in order to get an accurate count for things like cholesterol and blood sugar levels.
It’s been reported that what you eat can affect the amount of cholesterol in your bloodstream, so if you had a cholesterol test, you had to fast so your blood could get back to its normal levels of cholesterol.
A test involving your digestive tract also requires you to fast and perhaps drink a cleansing solution. This is done so that your doctor can start with a cleaned-out system. Under these medical fasts, the patient eats nothing and drinks only plain water.
So What Is Juice Fasting?
When you are undergoing a juice fasting diet, you don’t eat anything. Drink only water and juices from pure, raw vegetable and fruits. A juice fasting diet is said to accomplish some of the same purposes as fasting before a doctor’s visit: it can reset and cleanse your body’s systems. The two components of the diet are what is excluded from the diet, and what is included to replace the excluded elements.
A juice fasting diet is entirely plant based and raw. Dieters should extract their own juice to ensure they receive nutrients packed with vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants. The juice fasting diet is somewhat counterintuitive, because the juice on a fast should be fiber-free, and dieters have been told that fiber is good for a diet.
Foods to Avoid
On this diet, cooked food and animal products are removed from the meal plans. Refined foods like white flour, granulated sugar, and hydrogenated vegetable oils are cut out entirely. Likewise, animal products like meat, poultry, fish, eggs, milk, cheese, and sour cream are all excluded.
Excluding these processed foods and animal products may make the juice dieter feel noticeably better and have more energy in just 24 hours.
In a juice fasting diet, part of the energy boost comes from the fact that the body does not have to spend energy digesting food. If the dieter eats fruit or vegetable pulp, the pulp must be digested. That is why the fruit and vegetable juices consumed during a juice fasting diet should be juice only, free of any fiber.
Examples of juices that make up your fast can include vegetables, fruits and herbs such as
- celery, cucumber, tomato, bell pepper
- parsley, kale, beet greens, chard, spinach, dandelion leaf
- broccoli, cabbage
- carrots, beets, sweet potatoes
- dark grapes, apples, citrus, Açai berry
- yucca root, fennel, spearmint, peppermint, basil, ginger, garlic, green onion, chile pepper, fresh turmeric root, milk thistle
- wheatgrass juice, spirulina
In order to compensate for the lack of fiber, juice fasters often use an enema or an herbal or saltwater laxative during the time of fasting to continue having regular bowel movements.
The Length of a Juice Fast
Some people take week-long periods of fasting twice a year in order to cyclically purify the body. While they are on this schedule, they may also take monthly, shorter (two or three days) periods of fasting. If you don’t want to do this at home, you can go some place exotic. There are spa resorts that cater to juice fasters, with Thailand being an especially popular destination.
A Word of Caution
If you are on any type of prescription medication, be sure to talk to your doctor before making changes to your doctor. You want to be sure that there won’t be any undesirable effects of a juice fasting diet on your medication.
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July 6th, 2008 at 10:09 pm
need info on the orange juice fasting diet..
can we use bottled juice or does it has to be fresh?