So, I have decided to start my blogging career in what I hope is a logical place, the present.

First to set the scene…

I am sitting in a mildly uncomfortable wooden chair, my left (cancerous) leg resting on another such chair to hopefully improve fluid drainage.  I am typing on a laptop  too large to be truly practical which is supported by a table too well made to justify the mess of papers and books on diet and self healing I have strewn over it.  I am looking out onto my parents back yard in suburban Canberra.  The family poodle has just wandered past in the hope of obtaining some of the meal my mother has sitting on the bench.  And I was just handed a juice made from celery, kale, beans and garlic.

This is not your average mid twenty male is likely to be drinking at a Saturday lunch time.  There is however some method to my madness.  I am on a juice fast.

So what is a juice fast.  Well it is a period of time during which you consume nothing but juice, water and in my case a few herbal teas.  It can range from one day to as many as you want/can handle.  The range of juices drunk during is similarly large, going from the hardcore green juice fast (lots of green leafy things), to the much more pleasant “whatever juice you feel like” fast.  If your emphasis is on the fast part of juice fast then you will probably be having only around 5 * 150ml glasses of juice a day.  As I am focusing on the juice part I am currently having between 8 and 10 * 250ml juices a day.

People fast for many different reasons.  Increasing mental clarity, improving meditation, improving general health, detoxing, targeting specific health problems, helping to uncover emotional issues, as the start of building a  diet up from scratch and many more.  In my case I am hoping to both improve my health and give myself greater insight into the types of foods that agree with my digestive system and those that don’t.

Some quick context, Since 2010 I have been a vegan, trying different diets in order to try and determine which one best allows my body to heal.  So far I have been reasonably unsatisfied with all the diets I have tried.  I decided a month ago that the time had come to start from scratch, to strip things down and build up a diet based in the way my body reacted to each new thing added to it.

Hence the juice fast, strip things down to the basics, then build it back up.  And maybe along the way take enough load off my system to allow it to deal with the ever anoying edema in my left leg and the cancers that have caused it.

RESULTS

So what happened…

Fast one:

A four and a half juice fast drinking 8 to 10 * 250ml glasses of green juice a day.  I made the juices out of a large range of ingredients, the main ones being celery, kale, fennel, beans, broccoli, bok choi, lettuce (many types) and garlic.  During this fast I noticed the following

• After the first day the edema in my leg improved
• I felt great for the first three days, my food cravings reduced, I wasn’t overly hungry and my leg was feeling pretty good.
• On the 4th day I started getting pain in my left groin around the area of the tumors.  This got worse throughout the day until that night I was having trouble walking.  I also got a temperature around 39 C and felt pretty awful.  To my mind these were all the signs of a detox reaction.
• The fever lasted for around three days (two days after the fast had finished) and the leg remained stiff for another week.
• Over the course of the fast I lost around four kg.
• I felt that the tumors in my leg had reduced in aggression, although this was just a feeling as the time frame was not large enough to see if the growth had slowed.

Fast two:

So after my first fast something went wrong, sometime during the reintroduction of food I had started eating something that didn’t agree with me.  The tumors had started growing again at their previous rate and I was gassy and bloated again.  The edema in my left leg had also worsened to its previous, problematic level.  So three weeks later I decided to try again and this time do it properly.  This time I wasn’t going to stop the fast until I was ready.

I decided at first to try experimenting with a brown rice and mung bean fast.  I did this for four days.  During this portion of the fast I experienced nothing like the previous intense detox reaction.  I did howeve get lots of emotions bubbling to the surface.  I would swing from happy to depressed very quickly, and when I sat with my feelings during meditation it was like a whirlpool of fear, stress and joy circling around my chest.  All in all it was rewarding and I am glad I did it.

However I then decided that in the spirit of doing things properly I would do another juice fast to see if I would get the same detox reaction again.  This time however I chose to incorporate some carrot, beetroot and apple juice in the fast.  That was four days ago now, and the results are…

•  Nothing like the original detox reaction although last night (night four) I did get a lot of pain in my left groin.
• The edema in my leg has once again improved.
• The emotional turmoil reduced.  I don’t know if this is a difference between the fasts or whether sitting with all the emotions that came up during the R and MB fast cleared them from my system.
• The tumors in my leg are doing interesting things which I am finding hard to quantify.   Not sure yet whether these are good things or bad, however due to their previous rapid growth I am willing to take what I can get.
• This time, with the incorporation of the sweeter juices I have lost a mere half a kg in four and a half days.
• I feel tired, and have been getting some hot flushes, my gf who was not here for the first fast says I smell different.  These could all be detox reactions.

So at the end of the 4 days of juice fasting I decided that to be properly scientific I would try two days of purely green juice again to see if it would elicit a different response.  I started that this morning (day five of the juice fast) and with the delivery of the celery, kale, bean and garlic juice I am at juice number three.  So far no change but I will keep you posted 🙂

IN SUMMATION: 

• The fasting seems to have brought on some positive results, edema improvements, emotional release, tumor growth change and detox reactions.
• During the first fast I lost a bit of weight, however with the incorporation of the sweeter juices that loss has been reduced.
• The reintroduction of food seems to be the sticking point.  I have to try and get that right.
• This is my first post, so forgive my slightly rambling style, it will hopefully improve with time 🙂