Do you wish you could slow things down, give your body a detox, and improve your health overall? Then a vegetable juice fasting week might just be the thing for you!
What Can You Expect from a Juice Fasting Week?
In our article “Fasting – The Reset Button for Body and Soul”, we have already presented the benefits of fasting and different ways you can fast. Compared to pure water fasting, fasting with freshly squeezed juices is milder for the body, and yet very effective.
Pioneers of this form of fasting include Norman Walker and Dr. Max Gerson. Both Dr. Brian Clement and Dr. John Switzer can certify this method and are convinced of its benefits. They’ve also each integrated freshly pressed juices as an essential component of their respective therapies.
The Vegetable Juice Fast – Advantages:
Freshly squeezed vegetable juices ideally can combine detoxification with getting a proper supply of nutrients:
- Nutrient supply: On one hand, the consumption of freshly pressed vegetable juices provides the body with plenty of important nutrients and vital substances.
- Detoxification: On the other hand, the body is relieved and at the same time stimulated enough to detoxify for the purpose of strengthening the immune system and thus the body’s self-healing powers. The relief of the excretory organs, and the cleansing and regeneration of the liver and intestines, are essential.
Additionally, they allow the usual benefits of a fasting cure:
- New taste experiences with delicious, freshly squeezed vegetable juices.
- Feelings of freshness, clarity, and more lightness
- A more mindful approach to yourself and your eating habits
- Desire for a change of diet
- Decluttering in yourself and in your house (a juice cleanse might make you feel like cleaning and sorting out drawers!)
- Joy, pride, and drive
- Letting go of unhealthy habits
JUICE FASTING GUIDE
- How Do You Motivate Yourself?
- How Do You Prepare Yourself?
- How Do You Successfully Get through the Fasting Days?
- What’s Happening inside Your Body?
- How to Organize Your Juice Fasting Week
- How Do You Feel afterwards?
IMPORTANT TIPS
- Don’t Be Too Hard on Yourself!
- Raw Food Fasting
- Salutogenesis
JUICE FASTING GUIDE
How Do You Motivate Yourself?
- Look forward to an extraordinary week.
- Create a goal to have in mind of feeling light and confident.
- Visualize how you will feel after the detox week.
How Do You Prepare Yourself?
- Choose a week without too much hustle and bustle.
- Prepare for the fast a few days prior to starting it.
- Get everything you need for the first few days.
How Do You Successfully Get through the Fasting Days?
- Allow yourself plenty of rest.
- Take time to go out into nature on a regular basis.
- If you are not feeling well, try to take it easy and pay attention to your body.
- Drink extra coconut water or juice for the first 3 days until your body gets used to the fasting mode.
- Also clean up your home, and get rid of old things – this will additionally tidy your mind and will feel liberating.
- Focus on healing and regeneration.
- Support your body with a brush massage before showering.
- Enjoy warm alkaline baths.
What’s Happening inside Your Body?
The digestive system is relieved tremendously during fasting. Imagine how the intestines and internal organs now have time to clean up and regenerate.
It’s important to drink plenty of fluids so that the waste products can be flushed out.
The big challenge is usually the first 2-3 days. This “healing crisis” is a little different for everyone. You might feel a bit restless, cold, and have a headache. You may also experience dark circles under your eyes, bad breath, or tongue coating. These are all signs that the body is excreting toxins. And this is where enemas help; they provide relief and help to avoid getting re-intoxicated by the food residues in the intestines.
Additionally, brush massages and alkaline baths are very supportive for the lymphatic system and the elimination of acids!
How to Organize Your Juice Fasting Week:
Make yourself a clear-cut plan, which you can follow even in difficult moments. It makes sense to start the fasting days on a weekend, so you can take care of yourself in peace for the first 2 days.
Our Suggestion:
- 3 relief days
- 5-7 fasting days
- 3 buildup days
Relief Days
Starting as early as 3 days before the actual fasting, you should avoid sugar, meat, dairy products, gluten, alcohol, and coffee, and eat light meals with lots of fruits and vegetables to gently prepare the body for the fasting metabolism.
On the last evening before fasting begins, it’s important not to eat anything else and to start emptying the bowels. The best method for this is by using Cassia fistula, also called Indian blue vine. Its fruits, brown pods up to 30 cm long, have laxative and detoxifying properties. For a bowel cleansing, take a ping pong ball-sized amount of leaflets and soak them in water, strain them through a sieve, and drink the tea in the evening before bedtime. Alternatively, a purge with Epsom salts is also possible.
Fasting Days
For the actual fasting, 7 days are ideal. Days 1-3 are the most drastic period of change, which may be accompanied by a small crisis, days 4-5 are already much easier, and on days 6-7 you can typically see and feel the results, and are full of euphoria.
Fasting Drinks:
Water, ginger water, lemon water, freshly squeezed vegetable and fruit juices, coconut water, alkaline and fasting tea, and vegetable broth.
Note: Freshly squeezed fruit juices have a cleansing effect, and freshly squeezed vegetable juices build you up!
Daily Routine:
- In the morning: 1/2 liter of lemon water
- Throughout the day: 1-1 1/2 liters of vegetable/fruit juices (with high green content), fresh water from a young coconut, water as needed
- Get ideas for fresh juices HERE
- In the evening: warm vegetable broth prepared from mixed vegetables simmered in water for one hour. If you’re not strictly vegan, bone broth is also quite nourishing. It’s very rich in minerals and contains collagen, a structural protein that supports connective tissue.
- Do an enema every other day to really cleanse the intestines.
Of course, if you are doing especially well, you can add 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 (or more) juice days.
Buildup Days
In order to benefit from all the positive aspects of fasting, it’s very important to make the FAST BREAK very conscious and thoughtful. It would really be too bad to make big mistakes at this point of the process! We can think of it as if the digestive system were now in a “virgin” state; it should be gently confronted with the first food.
The classic way to break a fast is with an apple. There are other options as well, but the important thing is to chew very thoroughly. After fasting, the taste buds are extremely sensitive, and additionally, you’ll feel full much faster, because the stomach has contracted during fasting. This is also a great opportunity to rediscover the variety of tastes, and to get used to a more conscious and mindful eating behavior. A lot of particularly unhealthy foods may not taste that great anymore, so instead this is a great time to rediscover fresh and natural foods.
Our Suggestion:
- A glass of lemon water in the morning after waking up
- A smoothie, fruit, or chia pudding with fruit at about 10:00 am
- A large salad with delicious dips between 2:00 and 4:00 pm
How Do You Feel afterwards?
- Are you proud that you did it?
- Do you have more mindfulness in everyday life?
- Are you more focused?
- Do you have a more receptive sense of taste and a more conscious approach to food?
- Do you feel like changing your diet?
- Do you feel lighter and more comfortable in your body?
Final Tips
Don’t Be Too Hard on Yourself!
- It’s better to make some cutbacks instead of giving up or canceling your detox week altogether.
- Of course, you can organize your detox week according to your own preferences. Make it fit for you!
- During the fasting, start thinking about how you want to eat afterwards to avoid yo-yo effects.
- Enjoy your success and go into the next week with mindfulness!
Raw Food Fasting
Does a vegetable juice fasting week sound too extreme? Then raw food fasting could be just the thing for you.
Raw food fasting, perhaps even combined with intermittent fasting, gently purifies and detoxifies the body. Unlike conventional fasting, raw food fasting allows fruit and vegetables to be eaten whole without fats (without olives, nuts, avocados, oils) and also as juices or smoothies. Thus, the body receives plenty of vitamins, minerals, enzymes, and fiber and at the same time can cleanse itself in a slow way. Fats have an acid-forming effect and interfere with the cleansing process, since they re-bind toxins and waste mobilized from the fatty tissue.
This type of fasting also acts like a reset button for both body and soul. Pretty soon you’ll start sensing smells and tastes more intensely again, you’ll activate your digestion, you’ll gain a more mindful attitude towards food, and perhaps get an appetite for even further dietary improvements.
Salutogenesis
While medicine is primarily concerned with the development and healing of diseases (pathogenesis), salutogenesis focuses on the preventive side of things, including the following question:
How can we live so that illness does not occur in the first place?
In the meantime, fasting has developed into a mainstay of preventive health care. If you decide to fast for a week, you can mobilize your body’s self-regulation and can take care of yourself actively and preventatively. .
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