I Did a 78 Day Juice Feast

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Once upon a time I lived for seventy-eight days on juice only. True story! I ate no solid food for 78 days straight, drinking between three and four litres of fresh fruit and vegetable juices each day, and I didn’t die; I didn’t get diabetes from all the fructose, and in fact I felt amazing!

But why would I do such a crazy thing? I had my reasons.

My first reason was simply that I love new ideas and trying new things. I was obsessed with finding ways to improve my physical health and with eating a healthy diet (plant-based at the time because that was my paradigm), so I just wanted to give it a go.

My second reason was that I was desperate to heal my body.

It was 2012, and I’d been diagnosed with hyperthyroidism. If you don’t know what that is, it’s an overactive thyroid condition, often Graves’ disease, which is an autoimmune condition.

What hyperthyroidism means is that everything in your body speeds up and life gets really difficult.

The symptoms were crazy difficult to live with, potentially life-threatening, and really scary.

** NOTE: I eventually realised that Lugol’s iodine triggered my hyperthyroidism. You can read about that here.

The list of symptoms I was experiencing was long and bizarre, but included a super fast heart rate (like 160 beats a minute while resting and much higher with movement); crazy emotions and mood swings that would have me in tears every day over nothing; sweating; hair loss; itching skin that felt like I had bugs crawling all over me; wild anxiety and muscle loss that happened so fast, and made me so weak, that hubby would have to help me up the two steps between our local beach and the road.

It was scary. I’d always been really strong, and yet here I was; I’d gone from working out at the gym most days of the week, squatting over 100kg, and running several times a week, to hardly being able to move my own body without assistance.

I was an itchy, anxious, crying, balding mess that was too weak to get myself up off the floor.

But the thing was, I wasn’t willing to go down the mainstream medical route where the options would be harmful drugs, radioactive iodine, or the removal of my thyroid. These options were NOT an option for me.

I had to find another way.

When the doctor told me I was hyperthyroid, you could have knocked me over with a feather. It wasn’t what I expected at all, and she immediately wanted to refer me to an endocrinologist. That’s standard practice with Graves.

I said NO.

I’d been delving into thyroid issues for years because I’d suspected I was HYPOthyroid (underactive) for much of my adult life (this was recently confirmed by my genetics. You can read more about that here), and so I was pretty well informed on the standard mainstream treatments.

The doctor looked at me like I was mental. I told her, “I know what their answers are, and I’m not willing to say yes to any of them. I’ll do my own research, and hopefully I can find my own way to sort this out.”

And so that’s what I did.

I was scared, but I knew there had to be another way. I went to the library, and I borrowed every book I could find on thyroid disease that wasn’t based solely on mainstream medicine. I was avoiding mainstream information because I was looking for alternative ways.

Not drugs. Not surgery. And NOT radioactive iodine!

I already had some knowledge on the subject, and after doing some reading, I made a decision very quickly to remove gluten from my diet completely. I also stopped drinking coffee because it can potentially mimic gluten.

Once the gluten was gone, I realised that corn also seemed to be an issue because some of my symptoms would return whenever I ate it. Corn is used a lot in gluten-free products, and I began to notice that the ache around my eyes (another symptom) would return after eating these products. So after a short while, I removed all corn from my diet too.

In the meantime, while researching all this, I stumbled across information about Juice Feasting.

The difference between juice fasting and juice feasting is the quantity of juice consumed. When juice fasting, you abstain from food and drink small amounts of fresh juices as you would water when doing a water fast. Just enough to get you through the fast.

Juice feasting, on the other hand, is where you drink between three and four litres of fresh juices each day. That’s a lot! And it requires mountains of produce!

I was already an avid juicer. I’d been making and consuming fresh fruit and vegetable juices off and on for a few years. I’d even done a couple of short juice fasts in the past, and so when I came across information about juice feasting, I was excited to try it. I could see the potential of flooding my body with liquid nutrients for an extended period, while at the same time giving my digestive system time to rest, repair, and hopefully heal.

So I jumped in with an ideal goal of ninety days, but knowing I’d actually be happy if I managed a week or two.

The sheer quantity of juice consumed meant that even at the beginning of my juice feast, I didn’t get very hungry. The nutrition supplied by fresh juices, and the rate at which our bodies can assimilate those nutrients, meant that even though my belly was sometimes grumbling and felt empty, my body wasn’t calling out for food.

I actually felt satiated for possibly the first time in my life…

Because to be honest, I’m a bit of a food addict. I’ve been known to not only eat when I’m hungry, but also when I’m not hungry, when I’m bored, and I can even eat when I’m pretty full!

I actually wonder if I’m part Labrador…

So to have a grumbling belly and have it not matter - well, that was a very new experience for me. I easily managed 78 days with no solid food. I didn’t want to stop.

The first thing that happened was that I began to feel better very quickly. My symptoms began to dissipate; gradually, my heart rate began to slow down, my emotions settled, my hair stopped falling, and within about six weeks I was back at the gym, working out, albeit rather tentatively because as soon as I overdid it, I could feel my heart doing strange things in my chest. I monitored my heart rate and blood pressure daily for quite a long time after I felt well again.

I gradually lost weight - 12 kilos all up. I looked great, I felt great, and I looked younger.

I felt truly amazing!

Feeling like this was the best part of the whole experience - and the massive reduction in bowel movements. Somehow my bowel still worked every day, but I didn’t have the stress of the chronic diarrhea that I’d been living with for years.

I didn’t want to go back to eating solid food, but I knew I had to. I had booked a trip to New Zealand for Christmas, and so I couldn’t make my ninety-day goal. I realised after I started that I only had 80 days before we were due to fly out.

Because I didn’t want to stop, I procrastinated and left it too late to end my juice feast correctly. I started eating solid food a couple of days before we were due to leave for New Zealand, and I jumped back into solid food way too fast and made some really bad choices.

Cheese and rice crackers on the plane? Seriously, what was I thinking?

To cut a long story short, I got horribly constipated while we were on holiday. It was BAD, and when I finally did manage to get my bowels to move, it was like giving birth to some sort of huge alien…

Shitty subject. I know!

But I can tell you that the benefits of that juice feast lasted for a very long time, and my hyperthyroid symptoms never came back.

I thought about doing an extended juice feast again for many years, but I never managed to get myself motivated enough to do it. The longest I managed in the years after was a couple of days.

In saying that though, I did decide that if I did ever have reason to revisit juice feasting and if I managed to get myself inspired enough to do it again for a longer time, I’d do a maximum of thirty days in one hit because of the bowel issues I had after.

My gut wasn’t great before I did the juice feast, and it was NOT good after I finished. It seemed that I wasn’t digesting food well at all, and a lot of what I was eating was passing through me, undigested. This was something I’d noticed before, but it was much worse after my 78-day juice feasting experiment.

I suspect that my existing gut issues were the problem. Obviously, many people are fine after doing extended fasts and juice feasts. Others seem to gradually return to eating food, and their gut returns to digesting their food just fine.

I’d hoped that this experience would allow my gut to heal; that wasn’t my experience. I suspect that although my rapid return to eating solid food didn’t help, my lifelong gut issues (as well as drinking far too much wine back then) meant that my digestive system was compromised so much that it almost became paralysed, and the juices, while high in nutrients, didn’t contain the nutrients my gut actually needed.

I’ve been through a lot since then to try to heal my gut and my bowel. My first foray into the GAPs diet began not long after returning from our trip to New Zealand. My gut was in such a bad way that I knew I needed to do something. I stumbled across the GAPs diet online, and so I borrowed the original GAPs book from the library, read it and did the protocol as described, which did improve things for me.

This was the first time I ever removed all plants from my diet - albeit briefly - and although it made a huge difference very quickly, I still believed that plants were the healthiest foods and meat was somehow evil.

Sometimes we just need to keep getting smacked upside the head for it to sink in…

But the GAPs diet didn’t resolve my problems completely - probably because I was still drinking far too much wine, and I, of course, went back to eating far too many plants far too quickly.

I stuck with the basics though, making and consuming meat broth every day for over two years, and including fermented vegetables in my diet every day (the start of my ongoing obsession with fermenting foods).

I now have a copy of the newer GAPs book, which is a very worthwhile read for anyone with gut issues (most people these days). You can find that book here.

To really heal my gut, I’ve had to remove most plants from my diet, eat the animal foods our ancestors have eaten forever and implement specific protocols. But in recent years, I also ended up with mould illness, which made things far more complicated!

I will be writing about how I finally healed my gut soon. It’s a long story. But I do have some of it explained in this article, and I’ve also talked a lot about what I’ve been doing over the past few years on my YouTube channel, which you can find here.

Even though I’m a huge fan of a primal, carnivore-style diet these days and I know meat is proper human food, I have to admit that juice feasting was an amazing experience and has benefits. It is a strategy that, from my own experience, can be used to improve a health issue quickly. I suspect that many people eating a standard diet and living a toxic lifestyle would benefit greatly from doing a short juice feast. However, it’s not going to heal your body or your gut in the way some of the vegan influencers might tell you it will.

It will allow your body to improve its condition and to cleanse itself. But it’s not a cure-all.

Juice feasting allowed me to stop my disease in its tracks and helped me get my health back, without the drugs, surgery or radioactive iodine that seemed to be my only other options at the time. I now know that if I’d dropped the plants and eaten a carnivore diet, I’d have likely gotten a better result without the worsening gut issues. Unfortunately, my belief at the time was that plants were the healthier option, and meat was harmful.

I was living in Hervey Bay, Queensland, Australia at the time, and fresh produce was plentiful and affordable. I used everything!

I started with more fruits in my juices, and then as time went on, my juices became more filled with vegetables and herbs.

I used everything from pineapple, melons and lemons, to cucumbers, carrots, tomato, capsicum, parsley, garlic, coriander and more.

I introduced one tablespoon of bee pollen per day partway through to provide some additional protein. I did eat that each day, and it was amazingly pleasant to have something to chew, even if it was only a little!

Then in the last two or three weeks before I began eating again, I started blending avocado with some of my juices to provide some fat. Avocado and fresh juices make an amazing, very creamy smoothie!

Always know that your body is an amazing, self-healing organism. It’s always doing the right thing (as much as mainstream medicine makes out it’s not), and if you give it what it needs, or more often, remove the things that are holding it back, it will heal.

Your body can heal almost anything when given the opportunity. Just give it what it needs and get out of the way. So often, we are made to feel powerless when, in fact, we have more power than we can imagine.

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