I’ve been humbled by this juice fast, and as a result I’ve learned a lot.  One of the things I’ve learned that really caught me off guard is about temperature.  I’m the kind of guy who can walk out in a snow storm in short sleeves and feel okay, so all my life, especially as a teenager, when there were people in shivering while I was overheating I had a lack of empathy and understanding.  Now I fully understand how someone can freeze to death while the rest of the room complains about how hot they are.

Today, as the final stage of recovering from the juice fast, I added dairy and meat to my veggies, fruits, nuts, and vegetable fats.  I’m grateful that I took so many days to recover from just being on juice, it’s given me a greater appreciate for all stage of “feeling full”  On the juice fast I learned to feel content if my nutritional requirements were full.  As I added blended fruits and vegetables to that my stomach was full of vegetables and fruit as it couldn’t be on juice.  Adding whole fruits and vegetables to that created a sense of awareness so that I could feel my stomach as it digested… this created an entirely different sensation of full.  Nuts and Avocados created a sense of calorie full that I could much more fully appreciate, while meats and dairy gave me a heavy feeling I haven’t experienced in weeks.

I’m grateful for this experience, these learnings, and the sympathy my children nearly bled for me as they watched me not eat what I had made for them.  ”Daddy, I’m sorry you don’t get to eat this, it’s really good!”  I’m also noticing, that as I eat more ‘solid’ foods, I’m eating much less.  I think the greatest lesson that I hope to take from this is that feeling of ‘full’ that actually comes way before the feeling of “stuffed”

I hope you were able to learn some amazing things as well, even if you weren’t able to juice fast.  (final numbers aren’t important, that’s not solely why I was doing it.  but I did lose around 15+ lbs of fat.  I’ll do a body fat measurement later to see how much that’s changed.  Universally it’s agreed that even my face looks different.)

At this point, I’m not sure if I should be calling it a juice fast anymore.  It’s more of a “Recovering from a juice fast” and that’d be day 3.  Each day, I feel more… myself.  Here’s how it worked:  Juice Fast – Felt more alive and awesome!  but also felt cold, a lot, and I attribute this to my metabolism slowing down.  So as I start to actually process more and more solid foods, I feel more and more the warmth and joy that comes from my naturally high metabolism.

Today, I added nuts and avocados to the food that I’m eating.  Yesterday was whole fruits and whole vegetables.  I must admit, I’ve rarely ever been as genuinely full.  I ate nuts for breakfast, from that I felt full, I made a raw vegan shake for lunch (adding avocados) and could only drink half of it…. that kept the full feeling until dinner where I drank the other half, and only now at about 10pm did I feel hungry again.  So I ate avocados and tomatoes cut up together.  The taste of food is new and profound, as if I never actually tasted it before.

I think that if I came off the juice fast much more slowly, I could totally train my body to accept fewer calories all the time gratefully.  As it is, eating solid foods now; I am barely covering 1,000 + calories a day.  I know I’m getting the nutrients I need, and my energy is full, but it’s almost hilarious how much I’d have to eat to get overweight on a diet like this.