Bok Choy Paneer and Chennai Curry (Gabriel Cousens Phase I Day 2)

Hello!

Today is a good day and I am really enjoying eating. I will attempt a vegetable juice fast in a few weeks but probably for something like 3 days at first. I really enjoyed juice fasting you know, I just have to tweak my diet and do another one that will benefit me even more. For now, I have been following Gabriel Cousen's advice on how to solve many health problems and eliminate fungal infections. I am on phase I of the diet outlined in his book, Rainbow Green Live-Food Cuisine, and the recipes are so delicious.

I made the Bok Choy Paneer and Chennai Curry. Both were so delicious and I actually made another serving of the latter dish (I cut the recipe by about a half each time though) because I was still hungry. These are great, filling dishes that are low in sugar. I also had some coconut flakes with coconut aminos which tasted amazing! But I probably can't have that since it is a fermented food and has sugar and that is not allowed until Phase 1.5. Come to think of it, I still put ACV in my kale salads as well and that is not allowed either. I need to substitute lemon juice for these things. Little things like this can go unnoticed which is bad for healing. Anyways, here are pictures of how the food came out:

Bok Choy Paneer (I used cashews instead of pine nuts):

Chennai Curry (I used coconut flakes instead of fresh coconut pulp):

Day after breaking the fast + Day 1 of Dr. Cousen's Live-Food Cuisine

Why did I break my fast earlier?

I broke the fast yesterday, but not for the reasons you might expect. I did give into a craving for a kale salad I made, but I could have resisted it easily had it not been for one other reason. No, it's not because of my slow weight loss (I fit into my clothes better actually and know that I have lost weight) which didn't stop me from breaking my fast. It wasn't that I got bored with my juices or had immense hunger. And it wasn't that my body was ready to stop fasting. It's a long story but bear with me...

In short, I know that I am allergic to many if not all fruits. Allergies do not show up internally in me (they do but I do not know any internal symptoms) but they show up horribly externally. If I avoid sugars my skin is super clean and soft and looks awesome. Give me an apple and I have little red dots on my cheeks when looking up close. Give me citrus fruits and I get horrible cystic like pimples that don't pop and are huge and horrible. Give me all kinds of fruits in great quantity like on a juice fast and I look more horrible every passing day. These are NOT detox symptoms. I know this because I have noticed this pattern for many years. The point is to know your own body and to do what is necessary to make things better.

The Decision: 

I had two options: continue the juice fast but omit all fruits and do a pure vegetable juice fast (this is what I should have done since the beginning) or break the fast and clean my liver and change my diet and then attempt a vegetable juice fast. I chose the latter because it was stressful to change things around during my juice fast and I got used to so much sugar in my juices. It was a less stressful option to eat a kale salad instead. So I did and I felt great, kind of. I put nutritional yeast in my salad and got a headache which was a bad idea but now I know better. My body felt great otherwise though. I did not have too much but I did eat quite a bit of fat compared to no fat when juicing. I still felt great from eating something. 

I broke my fast and slept for 11 hours!! I had some herbal tea in the morning and closer to noon (right now actually) made a juice from red cabbage, garlic, jalapeno, and kale stems. It tastes spicy and good! These are the kind of juices that I should have been making. I will probably have a small portion of a kale salad for lunch, maybe a juice before dinner, and Bok Choy Paneer for dinner. Let me explain the food choices.

New Diet:

I know that there is something going on in my body that I need to fix. I have this book by Dr. Gabriel Cousens called Rainbow Green Live-Food Cuisine that I owned for 5 years already. Somehow I have never fully followed the diet outlined in the book but I know I need to for my health. Basically the plan is to do a restricted diet short term to eliminate candida and other fungi from my system by making my body more resilient and then transition into a more or less regular raw food diet with a limit on high sugar foods. Actually there are 3 stages with the first one lasting at least one month (Phase 1), the second one at least 6 months (Phase 1.5), and the third one as maintenance (Phase 2).

There are lots of fun recipes in the book that I will try to make and post pictures of everyday. I will post tomorrow the food I will make this afternoon.

But the food I will limit myself to the next 2 months (Phase 1) is:

nuts and seeds, coconut, greens and vegetables (except high glycemic ones like carrots and beets and other roots and gourds),  seaweeds, vegetable fruits, oils, lemons/lmes, and stevia leaf.

This doesn't sound like much or sounds hard to do but it is actually my ideal diet. I used to follow this more or less for shorter periods and that is when I felt the best. I really want my body to heal from fungi and other problems so I am committed to following this for as long as it takes. As I mentioned, the recipes in the book are fabulous and I would like to create all of them at one point.

I would like to mention that there are some things I am not completely following to the book. Cousens believes that cashews are something to avoid because of their mycotoxic content but I will not do this because I have a big bag of them (I will not eat them in great quantities however). Also, I have some wild jungle peanut butter that is completely healthy and mycotoxin free that is also something I will eat (rarely though).

So this is what I will do and I know many will disagree with this plan but I know this is how I will feel best (and I need to get sugar cravings under control again). See you tomorrow!

Juice Fast Day 13 plus Handling Cravings

Today is Day 13 and I weigh the same as yesterday, 134.2. I have lost 1.6 pounds total in 13 days. As you can tell it can be discouraging not losing much weight when people lose at least 5 pounds by this time. This happens to me all the time though when I eat healthier/exercise/etc so this time it is not discouraging me it is just the way my body is. If I were to do this solely for weight purposes this would have made me think about quitting. I wrote some pros and cons of my experiences so far.

Pros:

• PMS seems to be better but unsure of this.
• Undereye circles seem to be a little better but not much (this may just be a genetic thing)
• I seem to look smaller (although the scale says otherwise)
• I am already at day 13! I need to try this fully at least once in my life.
• Mood seems to be better.
• Juicing is easy and delicious.
• Sleeping is good, I mostly don't feel tired in the morning.
• I am probably detoxing so I am healing my body doing this.
• I have material to write in my blog.

Cons: 

• Craving kale salads :) This is a big one.
• Pimples all over face (I usually get this when eating fruit as I veer away from it). I love fruit but it doesn't love my face or body as I get pimples everywhere when I eat it. This could be a liver thing so I was doing the liver flushes but I guess it hasn't helped yet. Maybe I could do a pure green juice fast with no sugar at all but I am not sure that I am ready to do that. Maybe I need to for more results. I think I will first do this fast and if it results poorly then I will do a green juice fast albeit with less days at first. I feel like doing a green juice fast is great but it won't mean that I will be able to eat delicious fruit again without getting skin problems. This is the part that worries me.
• Slow weight loss. I was expecting to lose a little bit of weight at least. Not losing practically anything has me thinking... But if nothing works for weight loss then quitting won't help this at all.
• Cooking for others. When smells are overpowering it gets very difficult.
• Money. This isn't really a problem as produce isn't that expensive but it can be annoying to go to the store every other day.
• No detox symptoms or real changes experienced yet. Perhaps this is a reason why I need to continue this fast but it seems strange not to have experienced a whole lot by now.

 The thing with juicing is that you don't know what to expect or how your body will react. So it is bad for me to say that this doesn't work and I need to break the fast. I will definitely continue and I am used to juicing already so it won't be so hard to power though. I don't know how long I will go but I will check in periodically and think about continuing. I am not juicing too many fruits but it may be enough for my body to not be able to handle them. I will think of doing a green juice fast... Maybe once all my fruits are gone I will attempt a one day green juice fast and see how hungry I get. It's just so hard limiting yourself over and over again without seeing any results. There is a limit to how much a person is OK with limiting his or her food choices. Which leads me to the next point:

Handling Cravings:

I think I figured this one out at least to combat the first con in the list: my craving for kale salads. This is all a mental issue by the way. A person who has no limits to what he or she eats simply eats whatever he or she is craving. These may not be the healthiest cravings and go away on a healthier diet. When I eat raw I almost don't crave any cooked food because of how I can recreate a raw version of it. Also I find that eating enough wards away many cravings as well. So the trick to cravings when eating raw is to focus on what you can eat and make a raw version of the dish as well as to make sure you are eating enough.

With juicing this gets even more complex because you can't recreate a kale salad with a juice. But you can use the same thinking and shift your focus from what you can't have to what you can have. Instead of spending my time thinking of delicious raw foods I have to spend my time thinking of delicious raw juices. Then I will start coming up with juices I should try and how delicious they will be. This may be what I need to do if I do a green juice fast with no fruits as the only juice I like this way is gazpacho and I can't imagine only drinking that all of my fast. Nevertheless I may need to do that because I can't stand it when my face has little red dots all over it.

So the point is to always keep your mind on what you CAN have and just dream about those foods and come up with new recipes rather than salivating over what you CANT have but will have soon, in a while, or never again.

Juice Fast Day 12

Today is day 12 of my juice fast and it is going well so far. I still weigh about the same as I started, 134.2 today, but definitely look smaller. I feel like I have lost more than 1.6 pounds but I guess this is just how my body works. Sometimes the scale doesn't really mean anything. Anyways, it doesn't really matter how much I weigh as long as I feel better.

My PMS symptoms weren't that bad this time but I would like to see them lessen for the next time. Juicing is going well. I seem to have fallen in the routine of drinking 3 big juices a day and a small glass of kombucha. Once you get used to it, juicing isn't so bad. I can go on forever if it weren't for some food cravings I have and how much waste there is from the pulp. I unfortunately do not have a compost so I have to throw everything in the trash :( Otherwise it really isn't that bad. It is interesting to see the subtle changes in my body.

Juice Fast Day 11

I weighed the same today at 134.0 so a total loss of 1.8 pounds. I also got my period today which is why my weight loss may have been slow. I woke up really tired today too. We will see if my period symptoms lessen during juicing.

Yesterday was alright; I am just cruising along. I feel like the first 10 days are pretty easy, but continuing is really just willpower and wanting health problems to go away. I got some skin breakouts recently that are unusual for me but otherwise my skin is looking nicer. I don't feel too great today but this is because of my period. Hopefully tomorrow will be better.

Juice Fast Day 10 + Cravings on a Juice Fast

Today I weighed in at 134.0 so I am going down .2 pounds every day consistently for a total of 1.8 pound loss. Maybe my TOM is near and my weight isn't reflecting the changes in my body. We will see what happens to it in the next 30 days.

Yesterday night was pretty difficult again. I made a kale salad (not for myself) but the smells were so great and it is my favorite food ever so it wouldn't leave my head the whole evening. If kale salad did not exist then I think this juice fast would have been extremely easy haha. I guess this is how other people feel when they are confronted with their favorite food during their fast. Drinking more juice didn't really help that much with regard to that craving so I just stuck it through until today, reminding myself that I will just postpone eating it for a month. Hey, at least my craving is a healthy one!

I stopped eating honey because I think I have skin problems on my face from it. It's not extreme but enough for me to stop eating it for a while. I can live without it! I replaced it with coconut sugar. I know what you are thinking, straight up sugar on a juice fast?! It really helps me continue on this journey and there are benefits to it: coconut sugar has a lower glycemic index and has less fructose then honey, I do not seem to be allergic to it, and I eat A LOT less of it than I would have if I had eaten the honey. It doesn't taste that bad and the taste is really strong so I can't eat a bunch of it but it helps me curb my cravings and take my mind off of food. Do what works for you and not what other people say you need to do. I am not ready to give this up on my fast yet and I do not care what other people think of me doing it this way. I still count that I am juice fasting and have success so far.

My skin looks better, I am gradually getting better sleep I think, my body is changing (even though the scale is slow), and my health problems are slowly going away. I think doing 40 days will be enough but we will see what happens closer to that time.

Juice Fast Day 8 and Day 9

On day 8 I weighed in at 134.4 which is down .2 pounds from the day before and on day 9, today, I weight 134.2 so 1.6 pounds overall. It's interesting to see my weight go down so slowly even though I see results in the mirror and in my clothes pretty significantly. Anyways, I'm not doing this for weight reasons as that is a bonus side effect for me but nevertheless, interesting to see the pattern.

Yesterday was pretty hard in the evening for some reason. I wasn't too hungry or tired or anything but my mind was thinking about why I am doing this. Perhaps its my subconscious mind reminding me of the slow weight loss even though that is not the most important thing for me. It was purely a mental thing; maybe from wanting to eat the salads I have been eating before or from the smells I endure from cooking food for my family. I told myself I wasn't going to have honey yesterday but at that moment I didn't feel like making juice and was a little hungry so I had the honey with and felt better immediately. So I won't give up my honey yet as it is what keeps me going on the fast. I don't think I would last long drinking only non sweet juices and nothing else. Perhaps I will be ready later in my fast but I am not counting on it.

I slept for 9 hours on the previous days and I would say I got worse sleep on both nights then before. Yesterday morning, I woke up earlier for an event and people were drunk outside out apartment and loud at about 3 in the morning so I was pretty tired later in the day. Yesterday night for some reason my mind wouldn't stop racing even when I was asleep. I don't know why but I got poor sleep.

Today will be a great day because tomorrow is day 10 and I can't believe how fast this is going. I think I will make it 40 days or more but we will see. I can definitely do these 10 days 3 more times. Its not as hard as I thought.