Trying too much at once???

Therapeutic Efforts Supplements & Lifestyle
#1

I went head-first into a juice fast last week, and all my symptoms got noticably worse. I stopped after five days.

I’m guessing I should look at this in one of two ways:

  1. The significant diet change caused my body to “detox,” thus the worsening of symptoms. In time, things will get better.

or

  1. My (our?) bodies cannot handle changes like that anymore. Heck, even subtle changes are hard to handle. Slow and steady diet/health changes are the only way to go with this. Change too much at once, and things will never get better.

Anyone have any insight? Have you noticed this? I’m wondering if I just need to go through the “detox” to get to the other side, or if that’s a bad idea.

Thanks for the help.

#2

What symptoms got worse when you did your juice fast?

You should try intermittent fasting with a eating window between 4 and 6 hours per period of 24 hours. Never got a worsening of the symptoms period with it and I could see a difference very fast.

#3

Thanks for replying.

I think all my symptoms got worse: vision, dry/itchy skin, tinnitus, brain fog…

I’m not saying it’s because I switched to healthy foods, but because I went from eating poorly to eating well and my body couldn’t handle it.

My ability to handle stress has been demolished because of this. The slightest things get me irritable and quite tired.

I think it was too much stress on my system to make that cosmic shift in what I was eating.

I don’t know; this is all so confusing…

I’ll try what you are suggesting; it should be easier to do.

I do believe eating well is key to improving.

#4

I know what you mean. I almost always end up in big trouble when I try drugs or supplements.

I don’t think you would get that reaction from intermittent fasting. You don’t necessarily have to eat super healthy while doing it either. At the beginning, I was still eating lots of refined sugar for instance and I still had striking results (I try to limit my sugar consumption now). In the same time, I think it’s hard not to eat more healthy because you’re more aware of the fact that your body needs to be nourished when you have a limited eating window.

When I began doing it, it was a bit out of desperation because I was starting a new job and wasn’t sure I was going to be able to cope, and it helped me a lot with the mental sides: anxiety dropped, more mental clarity, less problems speaking, more energy.

The only fact of not eating helped me a lot in the situation. When I started, I would go back to my mental haze and exhaustion right after eating, but after a while, the improvements became permanent and it’s no longer a problem when I eat.

#5

Livingdead,

Let me make sure I have this right.

I choose 4-6 hours, say 10am - 4pm, where I eat. The other hours of the day I only drink water or maybe tea.

I’m guessing this gives the body more focusing power to heal and not digesting food all day.

Is that right?

Thanks,

Matt

#6

That’s right. In my case, I prefer to have the eating window at night to avoid being hungry when I go to sleep.

You can take tea without sugar and milk and anything that doesn’t have calories or contain very low calories, so you could even take a zero calorie soda if you want. I drink a black coffee in the morning and apple cider vinegar twice during the day. Sometimes I take mineral water in the afternoon. It used to be a problem on an empty stomach, but not anymore. Your body gets used to this eating schedule after a while and it gets very easy.

This is one theory explaining the effect of fasting. I’ll put the link of a very interesting documentary in the fasting thread. It says that they made an experiment with rats, giving them a megadose of a chemotherapy drug. One group of rats was fasting, the other was not, and the rats of the latter group died, but the fasting rats survived. So it’s as if the body gets into a protective state while fasting, and it would be something more than just the quantity of energy it can use for healing. When I began doing intermittent fasting, my sleep, that has been terrible for years, became a lot more restful, as if the fasting I was doing during day normalized my sleep. This began the second week, so it’s hard to explain it with the theory of the body having more energy to heal. There must be a regulating effect that comes just with the fact of fasting.

#7

I’m doing this type of diet from about 3 months (excluding week-ends). I call it the “warrior diet”. I have my eating window between 17.00 and 20.00 (21.00 max)

I can see some little improvements, an example is that now I can drink alcohol if I want and after that I have no more acute prostate pains.

Livingdead, how long did you do this type of fasting?

#8

I’ve been doing it since January. I’m doing it every day, but I drink maybe twice a week outside my eating window, so I guess I should say it’s more like five times a week for me as well.