It’s been a while since I have done a juice fast longer than just a few days, so I feel it is time for one once again. Some people would say, if it is so great, why do you have to do it again? Well, you could look at it a bit like one part of your hygienic regime – just as you clean your teeth and wash your body more than once, giving your inside a break every once in a while is a good idea in my opinion.
Why detox at all?
Yes, of course your body has all the functions and abilities to detox itself, however you can always be supportive or make things harder for your body.
Consuming less ideal foods, junk food, alcohol and other drugs, allowing too much stress and too little relaxation and reflection or exposing yourself to environmental pollution which is almost unavoidable these days, are all things which add to the work your body already does for you.
Yes, your liver and kidney filter out CRAP, however if you keep refilling with more crap, your organs will of course have to work much harder.
And since I am not a saint neither, I know this will be good for me 🙂
The goal is to stay juicy as long as I feel it is good for me. Sure, there will be moments of wanting to dive into some solid foods, especially at the beginning there might also be some hunger and withdrawal symptoms -luckily I do not drink coffee so I won’t have issues with that; I do however like sweet foods, hence all the raw dessert recipes on here, so we will see how I go in regards to this.
My trick to stick with a detox is to not limit the amount of juice but to have as much as I desire, and 75% of it to be vegetable juice. You can add an apple or other fruit for sweetness to the veggie juice, but only 25% of the total should be pure fruit (in my opinion) because of all the fruit sugars which will have my energy spike then plummet.
My juicing, fasting and detox experience
I didn’t document all of them, but here are some examples:
My very first fasting experience was the Master Cleanse when I was 16, and the only goal back then was to lose weight. I stuck with it for 7 days and broke the fast with gummy bears and chocolate. Let’s just say, it was a grand example of how not to approach or do a cleanse, on all levels …
Fast forward to February and March 2009, when I did my longest cleanse to date, 35 days of juice to heal allergies and a week of juices or smoothies per year, ever since. Read more about it here.
June 2011: Green Smoothie Retreat with Victoria, Sergei and Valya Boutenko.
It was a super interesting week, with not only lots and lots of green smoothie variations but also lectures by the Boutenkos as well as emotional work with the techniques of Byron Katie. This was a first for me and changed a lot about how I viewed myself and others – spoiler alert, self love increased, taking sh*t from others decreased. Highly recommendable. I didn’t journal as it was not much of a challenge for me, but I did film some of the talks we got to experience. You can view them here:
Lectures with Victoria Boutenko
Green Smoothie with Valya Boutenko
Wild Edibles with Sergei Boutenko
August 2014: Mono fast, with 4 days of watermelon only
The only thing I missed were greens – but I was surprised when I checked ph and it went from 5.5 to 7.5 in the first 12 hours of the watermelon fast already.
June 2015: 1 week of Green Juice
I was in Mexico, and took advantage of all the juice bars around and went for my most ‘luxurious’ cleanse, with all the green juices made for me. It was awesome and I wrote my book “Milk. Vegan” during that time.
2016: 1 Week of Smoothies
In 2016 I did another week of smoothies only and put together all my experience in an online course, “Own Your Healing”. It is currently only available in German (get it here), however if there is enough interest, I will create an English version as well.
2018: 3 Days Dry Fast
In December 2018, I did a dry fast for 80 hours, so no drinks or water at all. I had been on the island of Panglao in the Philippines for a few months to train for deep freediving, and decided at the end, when all the training was over, to give dry fasting a go after having read a lot about it. More on this here.
2019: Raw Vegan Yoga Retreat
In May 2019, I collaborated with holistic dentist Dr. Karin Bender-Gonser and taught yoga on her retreat where we enjoyed mostly juices as well as a little bit of raw food – so not a full juice cleanse but still a very rewarding week.