I started a Facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/Vegans-and-Raw-Foodies-172654636111420/ , back in 2010 because I had terrible back pain from an auto accident. I had tried everything to stop the pain, and finally found that way through eating healthier! I want to share this wonderful adventure in healthier foods with you!
So let us begin at the very beginning. One day, I got into a small fender-bender type of accident and it seemed as if no physical harm had taken place. But about six months later, I started to get tingling down my right arm, and my back started to hurt so bad that even breathing hurt something terrible. I didn’t know it at the time, but a chiropractor I started to go to told me that the tingling down my arm indicated that I was in an accident. My insurance company knew this also and covered all the costs of my chiropractic care under PIP(personal injury protection) insurance.
Back to the pain… The pain was so bad, that if I bent over wrong, I would be dysfunctional the rest of the day, I couldn’t do anything but lay on my back for comfort. No medicine that doctors gave me helped even in the slightest. Ibuprofen was the only thing that would slightly help. In other words, I was in pain constantly about 90% of the time, totally misery and terrible torment…”God, take my life and let it be over” type of pain. I knew something needed to change and quick!
Do you know those detox tea bags you see in the coffee and tea aisle of the grocery store? Well I would never buy those because detox seemed like a scary word to drink without knowing what it would actually do in my body. So that will lay the groundwork on how I felt about detox….absolutely nothing, no clue….just a apprehension and healthy distrust against the tea corporations. Well, to continue, one morning I pulled out my back like usual, and I was at my wits end, so decided to google the word “detox” to see what would come up. And what I saw about half way down the search page was a link to someone’s juice fasting blog. So I clicked it open, and this woman was doing a 21 day juice fast! Yes that’s right… only drinking juice she made with her juice machine every time she was hungry.
So I had nothing to lose really by trying it, I was in constant pain and nothing else I did worked, so right then and there, I was on a 10 day juice fast. I immediately got up and took out my juicer, about 3 apples and a bunch of carrots and made my first juice. I announced to my family that I was now on a juice fast and no one believed me that I was actually going to follow through, which made me more determined.
Through the next couple days, I started to add a lot of vegetables to my juice, so a normal juice go-to consisted of kale, cucumber, a green apple, celery, lemon, and ginger. I would make a watermelon, lime, and cucumber juice for a treat. The greens need a different kind of juicer to get all that healthy nutrition blood out of their leaves, so I ordered a new juicer. I would watch YouTube videos by people who did juice fasting and had a lot of experience and continued to learn more and more each day.
Everything was going well up until day four. On day four, I could not even think of getting out of bed. My head was killing me and my whole body was unhappy. My husband (at that time….now ex-husband) asked me if I would like some Ibuprofen to which I said no. I felt that this was part of the “detox” part of the juice fast. My ex-husband kindly made me some juice since he joined me on this journey of juice detox. I think what was going that day, was that my body was mad that I was not giving it all the processed food, coffee, and sugar it was used to, and it was telling me so. When people detox from their drug of choice, the body is eventually going to scream, and it is usually sooner than later. This is when most people quit. However, I was about to experience something I was hoping for, but was really skeptical of, even though I was giving it all a fair shake.
On day five of my juice fast, I woke up, and was wondering how I would feel. I laid there for a little while and noticed that I did not have a headache. So I let my feet hit the floor. Got out of bed and felt FANTASTIC! No pain so far, and I didn’t feel that I needed any coffee! I came out to the kitchen and proclaimed that I felt great and wasn’t in pain. Then I got dressed and went outside to start making a garden. Juice fasting can be quite expensive, so I planted kale, swiss chard, spinach and some other winter veggies and covered them up for winter.
I will write more about this over the next few days and post again, but I will tell you in advance that ALL my pain has never returned!
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