Many of you have asked us what’s been keeping us so busy lately, and where we’re going next. Rather unexpectedly and unplanned (for me, those are the most rewarding adventures) our traveling journey has taken us on an inner path to health and wellness. Two weeks ago Geoff and I made the decision to cut sugar, white flour, preservatives, and meat from our diet for a while to see how we felt. Our results were so amazing that we decided to speed up the process by undergoing a juice fast six days ago.
When we started this we didn’t have any set deadline when we wanted to end it, we just knew that many of the foods we were eating were unhealthy. We were waking up in the morning not feeling rested and rejuvenated. Because we both work out of the house and rarely have an early morning appointment, we don’t rely on an alarm clock to wake us up, but rather choose to wake up gradually when we feel we’ve gotten enough sleep. It was when we were sleeping for 8 or 9 hours a night and still feeling tired and sapped that we knew we needed to make some changes. We both felt like we were a bit zombie like, and not getting enough nutrition from our food.
So here it is, the end of May, and we’ve settled back into the summer routine with Geoff’s Timberline Forestry consulting business. Geoff’s been working on his contracts for landowners, stomping through the woods, and walking for miles a day carrying heavy gear. He’ll be the first to admit that he needs to be in optimal health, and he realized that after eating the way we did on our cross-country journey he added some extra pounds.
For me, it’s an entirely different set of circumstances. Having a neuromuscular syndrome called Charcot Marie Tooth Syndrome, my muscles don’t receive the appropriate transmission from my brain and therefore don’t contract and function properly, causing atrophy. I’ve worn leg braces since I was five, and have had countless “corrective” surgeries since age six including tendon transfers, bone grafts, ankle fusions, and whatever else my neurologists at the time deemed helpful.
Because I do have muscle atrophy and have mobility difficulties it’s important for me to stay lean and not be carrying around any extra weight or I run the risk of falling. Having fallen last spring while walking in my house I broke my foot in two places and tore the ligaments that connect the calf muscle to the side of the foot. Thankfully I don’t need those ligaments due to having my ankles fused, but three months in a wheelchair rather did me in. I found driving my Jeep or even walking across the room to be far too challenging on some days.
That injury was one of my biggest motivators in the push for leaving Michigan last winter. I didn’t want to risk a slip on the ice and another injury while still attempting to recover strength from the last one. After having some rather frightening issues with difficulties driving the Jeep I decided to sell it and make some major changes.
A couple of weeks ago Geoff happened to be in our local health food store when he glanced at their bookshelf and saw a book entitled “Are You Confused?
” by Dr. Paavo Airola. With as tired and run down as we’d been feeling, the title smacked Geoff in the face and he borrowed the book and started reading it that evening.
I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen Geoff so motivated or enlightened by any book he’s read, but the light bulb in his head went off and the connection between diet and health seemed to click more than it ever had in the past. We decided that a juice fast as outlined in the book would be good for both of us. Detoxing the body and nourishing your cells with fresh, organic produce is a fantastic regimen, and to date, we’ve seen nothing that can drop weight and fat faster.
This fast consists of no more than 48 ounces of freshly juiced fruit OR vegetable juice a day. Organic is important, as is not mixing fruits with vegetables except where lemons are concerned. We opted for fruit juice in the morning (diluted 50% with water), and vegetable juice for lunch and dinner. We have been drinking a detox tea every day, as well as rose hip and chamomile tea, and all the water we want.
Also included in the regimen is daily dry brushing (exfoliating) your skin with a loofah or natural bristle brush prior to taking a bath or shower. It’s important to sweat out toxins through your skin. The dry brushing speeds up cellular regeneration and removes dry, dead skin cells.
A daily enema is also required. I know, I know. Ick, right? I didn’t want to undergo that either, however, it’s a must. When you’re not eating a regular diet consisting of fiber, digestion slows down and food sits and ferments inside your colon. Having done a cleanse in the past and feeling like I was going to die during the detoxification process, I can attest that this is the number one difference to the number two problem. The detox symptoms that I had (headache and chills) immediately went away after flushing the waste out, and it’s amazing how much better we both feel after our morning routine. (Thankfully we have two bathrooms!)
Geoff has been interested in dietary changes for a while now, and this isn’t the first time we’ve tweaked our diet. Two years ago he did some research on calorie restricted diets and followed those recommendations and went on a diet consisting of mostly vegetables, some fruits, nuts and low fat meats, but a high amount of lean protein. Being a visual person, he documented weight and body fat changes daily for over three months.
As of this morning, Geoff has lost 11.6 pounds on this juice fast in the past six days. It took him 6 days to accomplish what it took 53 days to achieve on the previous diet. His calculations show that of those 11.6 pounds, 5.0 pounds were fat and 6.6 was lean mass. The lean mass loss is undesired, however the main goal of the fast is a body detoxification process. Although weight loss can occur rapidly it shouldn’t be a primary goal for undergoing a fast.
In the past six days on this juice fast, Geoff has dropped as much in fat as it took him 25 days on the previous diet to achieve. Dropping fat is Geoff’s number one priority, so for him, this is an astounding result. Geoff’s physique is much leaner and most of the weight has dropped from his stomach, thighs and butt.
I’m not a huge chart and graph person, because those numbers don’t mean much to me. With the way my body works I need to be more concerned with checking in with myself to see how I feel on a regular basis so I know if I’m overdoing something that may prove to have adverse effects to me.
Prior to the fast I had noticed I was carrying extra weight in my stomach area and my clothes just weren’t fitting as well as they had before. Throw an extra few pounds on me and I can really tell a huge difference getting around. A week before the fast we cut out sugar, white flour, and preservatives to reduce the amount of detox symptoms, and I think that made a big difference.
On this juice fast I have lost more than 2 pounds of fat, and 2 sizes on my belt. My abs look much like they did 10 years ago- much flatter, stronger, and leaner. I can’t detect or feel any loss of muscle. We’ve both had ample energy on this fast to up our exercise routine and have been riding our bikes, Geoff been walking, jogging, and doing pull ups, and we’ve both been doing a number of pushup and crunches daily. We’re both finding we don’t need nearly as much sleep, and that was one of my big concerns.
One of the more interesting changes for me that was unexpected has been seeing my pms symptoms vanish. I would frequently get these neurological pains where it felt like the nerves in my thighs were being ripped out with tweezers, and that seems to be gone. I also noticed that the majority of my fibercystic breast tissue is now gone, and that was something that plagued me for eons. Currently I’m not sure if the correlation is due to the lack of meat, not eating cooked foods, or having detoxed. Something tells me it’s the meat, but we’ll see.
Having seen the transformation we’ve undergone, both physically and mentally, we have decided that the best way to put this entire diet thing to the test is to undergo a raw food diet for the month of June and reassess how we’re dong at that point. Geoff’s primary goal is to build lean mass, and drop more fat. My goal is to gain strength, energy, and endurance.
You might think a juice fast would require too much time, but in all actuality, the time savings involved is immense. We’re able to juice whole apples, 6 or 7 carrots at a time, and huge handfuls of greens without standing there slicing up produce. Our kitchen clean up now is a snap. We can rinse the juicer out in less than five minutes. To make it even easier, we line the pulp container with a grocery bag so we can easily dump our produce scraps out back for the critters. We’ve run the dishwasher once in the past week, rather than daily, and haven’t used the stove at all. Produce doesn’t come with much packaging so the amount of trash we’ve accumulated has drastically been reduced. And grocery shopping has become the simplest thing ever- one department- in the front of the store- quick, easy, and efficient.
I’ve heard from a lot of people who say they could never fast because they’d get too hungry, or they can’t skip a meal. Geoff and I both had a few hunger issues here and there on the fast, but nothing like the shaky, ravenous feeling we get when eating regularly and skipping a meal. Oddly, having decided to break the fast today we both ate an apple an hour or so after our morning fruit juice and we’re both hungrier now than expected. Heck, a pizza sounds great, but I know that would be a horrible idea. ;)
We’ll be posting some juice recipes we’ve been using- some we love and some we’d rather NEVER try again. We’ll also be posting updates about how we’re doing when we undergo the raw food challenge starting June 1st. My intention is to continue to eliminate sugar, white flour, and fatty meats until then, while Geoff is going to gradually break the fast over the next three days (extremely critical!) and then eat whatever he wants for a couple of days to see how he feels.
Despite whether or not a complete juice fast is something you want to undertake, the health and nutrition you can gain by adding freshly juiced drinks to your existing diet will make a big impact.
We welcome your input and comments, and hope you follow along with us on this journey. It’s one we never intended to take, but these unexpected journeys are sometimes the most enlightening and rewarding.
When we started this we didn’t have any set deadline when we wanted to end it, we just knew that many of the foods we were eating were unhealthy. We were waking up in the morning not feeling rested and rejuvenated. Because we both work out of the house and rarely have an early morning appointment, we don’t rely on an alarm clock to wake us up, but rather choose to wake up gradually when we feel we’ve gotten enough sleep. It was when we were sleeping for 8 or 9 hours a night and still feeling tired and sapped that we knew we needed to make some changes. We both felt like we were a bit zombie like, and not getting enough nutrition from our food.
So here it is, the end of May, and we’ve settled back into the summer routine with Geoff’s Timberline Forestry consulting business. Geoff’s been working on his contracts for landowners, stomping through the woods, and walking for miles a day carrying heavy gear. He’ll be the first to admit that he needs to be in optimal health, and he realized that after eating the way we did on our cross-country journey he added some extra pounds.
For me, it’s an entirely different set of circumstances. Having a neuromuscular syndrome called Charcot Marie Tooth Syndrome, my muscles don’t receive the appropriate transmission from my brain and therefore don’t contract and function properly, causing atrophy. I’ve worn leg braces since I was five, and have had countless “corrective” surgeries since age six including tendon transfers, bone grafts, ankle fusions, and whatever else my neurologists at the time deemed helpful.
Because I do have muscle atrophy and have mobility difficulties it’s important for me to stay lean and not be carrying around any extra weight or I run the risk of falling. Having fallen last spring while walking in my house I broke my foot in two places and tore the ligaments that connect the calf muscle to the side of the foot. Thankfully I don’t need those ligaments due to having my ankles fused, but three months in a wheelchair rather did me in. I found driving my Jeep or even walking across the room to be far too challenging on some days.
That injury was one of my biggest motivators in the push for leaving Michigan last winter. I didn’t want to risk a slip on the ice and another injury while still attempting to recover strength from the last one. After having some rather frightening issues with difficulties driving the Jeep I decided to sell it and make some major changes.
A couple of weeks ago Geoff happened to be in our local health food store when he glanced at their bookshelf and saw a book entitled “Are You Confused?
” by Dr. Paavo Airola. With as tired and run down as we’d been feeling, the title smacked Geoff in the face and he borrowed the book and started reading it that evening.
I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen Geoff so motivated or enlightened by any book he’s read, but the light bulb in his head went off and the connection between diet and health seemed to click more than it ever had in the past. We decided that a juice fast as outlined in the book would be good for both of us. Detoxing the body and nourishing your cells with fresh, organic produce is a fantastic regimen, and to date, we’ve seen nothing that can drop weight and fat faster.
This fast consists of no more than 48 ounces of freshly juiced fruit OR vegetable juice a day. Organic is important, as is not mixing fruits with vegetables except where lemons are concerned. We opted for fruit juice in the morning (diluted 50% with water), and vegetable juice for lunch and dinner. We have been drinking a detox tea every day, as well as rose hip and chamomile tea, and all the water we want.
Also included in the regimen is daily dry brushing (exfoliating) your skin with a loofah or natural bristle brush prior to taking a bath or shower. It’s important to sweat out toxins through your skin. The dry brushing speeds up cellular regeneration and removes dry, dead skin cells.
A daily enema is also required. I know, I know. Ick, right? I didn’t want to undergo that either, however, it’s a must. When you’re not eating a regular diet consisting of fiber, digestion slows down and food sits and ferments inside your colon. Having done a cleanse in the past and feeling like I was going to die during the detoxification process, I can attest that this is the number one difference to the number two problem. The detox symptoms that I had (headache and chills) immediately went away after flushing the waste out, and it’s amazing how much better we both feel after our morning routine. (Thankfully we have two bathrooms!)
Geoff has been interested in dietary changes for a while now, and this isn’t the first time we’ve tweaked our diet. Two years ago he did some research on calorie restricted diets and followed those recommendations and went on a diet consisting of mostly vegetables, some fruits, nuts and low fat meats, but a high amount of lean protein. Being a visual person, he documented weight and body fat changes daily for over three months.
As of this morning, Geoff has lost 11.6 pounds on this juice fast in the past six days. It took him 6 days to accomplish what it took 53 days to achieve on the previous diet. His calculations show that of those 11.6 pounds, 5.0 pounds were fat and 6.6 was lean mass. The lean mass loss is undesired, however the main goal of the fast is a body detoxification process. Although weight loss can occur rapidly it shouldn’t be a primary goal for undergoing a fast.
In the past six days on this juice fast, Geoff has dropped as much in fat as it took him 25 days on the previous diet to achieve. Dropping fat is Geoff’s number one priority, so for him, this is an astounding result. Geoff’s physique is much leaner and most of the weight has dropped from his stomach, thighs and butt.
I’m not a huge chart and graph person, because those numbers don’t mean much to me. With the way my body works I need to be more concerned with checking in with myself to see how I feel on a regular basis so I know if I’m overdoing something that may prove to have adverse effects to me.
Prior to the fast I had noticed I was carrying extra weight in my stomach area and my clothes just weren’t fitting as well as they had before. Throw an extra few pounds on me and I can really tell a huge difference getting around. A week before the fast we cut out sugar, white flour, and preservatives to reduce the amount of detox symptoms, and I think that made a big difference.
On this juice fast I have lost more than 2 pounds of fat, and 2 sizes on my belt. My abs look much like they did 10 years ago- much flatter, stronger, and leaner. I can’t detect or feel any loss of muscle. We’ve both had ample energy on this fast to up our exercise routine and have been riding our bikes, Geoff been walking, jogging, and doing pull ups, and we’ve both been doing a number of pushup and crunches daily. We’re both finding we don’t need nearly as much sleep, and that was one of my big concerns.
One of the more interesting changes for me that was unexpected has been seeing my pms symptoms vanish. I would frequently get these neurological pains where it felt like the nerves in my thighs were being ripped out with tweezers, and that seems to be gone. I also noticed that the majority of my fibercystic breast tissue is now gone, and that was something that plagued me for eons. Currently I’m not sure if the correlation is due to the lack of meat, not eating cooked foods, or having detoxed. Something tells me it’s the meat, but we’ll see.
Having seen the transformation we’ve undergone, both physically and mentally, we have decided that the best way to put this entire diet thing to the test is to undergo a raw food diet for the month of June and reassess how we’re dong at that point. Geoff’s primary goal is to build lean mass, and drop more fat. My goal is to gain strength, energy, and endurance.
Many of you have asked us what kind of juicer we use. We both can’t say enough good things about our Breville JE900 juicer. It’s very economical, has a large nozzle where you put your produce so that finely slicing stuff isn’t required, the pulp comes out very dry, and clean up is a breeze.
You might think a juice fast would require too much time, but in all actuality, the time savings involved is immense. We’re able to juice whole apples, 6 or 7 carrots at a time, and huge handfuls of greens without standing there slicing up produce. Our kitchen clean up now is a snap. We can rinse the juicer out in less than five minutes. To make it even easier, we line the pulp container with a grocery bag so we can easily dump our produce scraps out back for the critters. We’ve run the dishwasher once in the past week, rather than daily, and haven’t used the stove at all. Produce doesn’t come with much packaging so the amount of trash we’ve accumulated has drastically been reduced. And grocery shopping has become the simplest thing ever- one department- in the front of the store- quick, easy, and efficient.
I’ve heard from a lot of people who say they could never fast because they’d get too hungry, or they can’t skip a meal. Geoff and I both had a few hunger issues here and there on the fast, but nothing like the shaky, ravenous feeling we get when eating regularly and skipping a meal. Oddly, having decided to break the fast today we both ate an apple an hour or so after our morning fruit juice and we’re both hungrier now than expected. Heck, a pizza sounds great, but I know that would be a horrible idea. ;)
We’ll be posting some juice recipes we’ve been using- some we love and some we’d rather NEVER try again. We’ll also be posting updates about how we’re doing when we undergo the raw food challenge starting June 1st. My intention is to continue to eliminate sugar, white flour, and fatty meats until then, while Geoff is going to gradually break the fast over the next three days (extremely critical!) and then eat whatever he wants for a couple of days to see how he feels.
Despite whether or not a complete juice fast is something you want to undertake, the health and nutrition you can gain by adding freshly juiced drinks to your existing diet will make a big impact.
We welcome your input and comments, and hope you follow along with us on this journey. It’s one we never intended to take, but these unexpected journeys are sometimes the most enlightening and rewarding.
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