the start of day 9! the story of inflammation...

What a difference a day can make! I woke up feeling loads better this morning. I'm not sure what all was going on but I trust that my body needed to do what it needed to do. I'm happy I just slowed down and vegged out. In retrospect, it would have been THE perfect time to get a colonic or enema. I'm looking forward to when my bathroom gets done so I can have a colema board on premises for such times as this. For now, I just drank a lot of water and rested. I felt better after the savory juice that Matt made last night. It had jalapeno peppers and garlic in it. Maybe those things helped to clear out something that was making me feel so zapped. I'll post recipes from yesterday and today down below. I keep commenting that it's unbelievable how much fruit and veggies we are going through. It's a juice feast, not a fast. We are drinking from about 80 - 90 ounces of juice per day. My joints, muscles and bones feel very good. I feel like so much inflammation has just dissolved out of my body. I definitely want to keep steering my boat in this direction for sure. I feel way better in my body. Even when I felt my body feeling tired yesterday, I was still able to walk up and down stairs with great ease. You don't realize how you are feeling until something is different and then you have a place to compare it to. Over the last 10 years, my body has been so happy with the diet and lifestyle changes that I've had thus far. I went from being in constant pain for 7 years where it was hard to eat, sleep, walk, sit, stand and be without shooting, screaming, yelling, horrible pain. I even had one doctor tell me that I'm just going to have to live with it. I finally found a great chiropractor in Montpelier, Leita Hancock, who helped me start to get back into a place of minimal pain. When I shifted my diet to incorporate what Joel Fuhrman writes about, that's when I had the fastest and biggest shift in my body. 45 lbs released and I could start to walk again. I went from not even being able to walk 1/4 mile without Matt having to come and get me with the car because I was crying in pain to being able to walk 5 miles a day. Still, there has been continuous and chronic inflammation patterns. I was doing about 80-90% better and I would have these things where some flare up would happen every 6-8 months (not really that regularly.) But I'd be doing great and then something would happen and I'd be screaming out in pain and not being able to move for a few days. The most recent was in November when a deep tissue massage sent me into a 2 month back spasm. I discovered sound therapy with Eileen McKusick which helped miraculously. The other thing that I've been doing with regularity and finding gratifying results and pleasure with is Lydia Russell's Anusara yoga. The yoga is helping me to strengthen core muscle groups so that my body knows what it feels like to hold itself up. The Anusara part helps me to remember the bliss inside me and live it up each day. The journey continues. I fell back into eating more fats from nuts/seeds/oils and way more sweets than I need. This fast is breaking that cycle and pointing my boat in a different direction. I thought I was feeling so much better and yet now I can see how I feel now in these last 9 days. But if I'm honest, as of 10 days ago, I was coming home and feeling so much pain in my legs from standing for 4-6 hours each day. I thought I was doing better because I wasn't feeling the old pain in my hips and back. But it just shifted to my knees and legs. I also put on some weight that didn't make things easier on my body to move either. So this is all a very fortuitous series of events here, starting with the back spasms in November. OK onto the recipes. A recap from yesterday: morning juice of Day 8: big bunch of lettuce, 3 carrots, 2 oranges, 1 grapefruit and 1 apple. made 24 ish ounces of juice for both of us. YUM afternoon juice of Day 8: 1 bunch of kale, 2 beets with greens, 3 carrots, 2 pears, 1 apple and a container of strawberries. This made a whopping 32 ounces of juice for each of us. It’s pretty delicious too. early evening juice of Day 8: 1 bunch kale and 3 pears. served 2 16 ounce juices evening juice of Day 8: finally! a yummy savory juice! Matt made this: a bunch of kale (the last from the garden), 3 carrots, pea shoots, 1 beet with greens, 1 red bell pepper, 2 jalapenos (de-seeded), 3 cloves garlic, 3 stalks celery, 4 tomatoes. Spiced up with coconut aminos and chipotle spice. - this made about 24-20 ounces each person. I actually couldn't finish it - it was so filling! and this morning's juice of Day 9: this morning's juice that Matt made: 6 carrots, 1 container strawberries, 3 pears, 2 oranges, 1 grapefruit. It's delicious. I'm afraid to drink it. I like a lot of greens to help with the sugars of the root veggies and fruit. Better exercise after drinking this! I gave Emily some so that I didn't have a lot. It's very yummy though!