When I was very sick with ME/CFS, after a couple of years of severe gastrointestinal problems, including several bleeding episodes (but no visible damage), my bowels went on strike and refused to move anymore. For a total time of NINE months.
Despite all sorts of laxatives, purges and flushes, nothing moved down there.
I had to have the waste mechanically removed every couple of weeks using hydrocolontherapy LINK, I could eat very little, and my mood was atrocious.
Funny how constipation has such a strong influence on one’s mood. I felt petty, peevish, and grumpy, and I probably was all of those things.
After multiple diagnoses of IBS -C (as usual, “incurable”), I was left with the problem and no hope for a solution. The top gastroenterologist’s advice to “only eat pasta, just a little vegetables, and only one beer per day” (I didn’t even drink) as a main treatment left me really skeptical.
I was already doing the healthiest diet I knew of, full of whole grains, mostly unprocessed food, low fat (which I thought was important, at the time I didn’t know any better). I couldn’t figure out why my bowels had stopped moving.
During my extensive searches, I came across a movie. It’s not the greatest movie, artistically speaking (sorry, I went to film school) , but it spoke to me directly, and I found its message to be incredibly powerful.
That movie is called Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead, and it tells the story of an overweight guy with multiple health problems who discovers (the story is a bit hazy about how he discovers it) that juicing fresh produce will introduce such a massive amount of needed nutrients that the body has no choice but to heal itself.
I had already come across this concept from my readings about cancer. I was desperate to treat my ME/CFS, and there were zero sources on the topic, so I started reading about all these alternative cancer treatments, in the hope of finding something that would apply to my situation.
Juicing was recommended in the well-known Gerson therapy as a way to reduce inflammation in all types of illnesses, not just cancer. Juicing and NOT blending smoothies , because the minimal fibre content in juices allows enzymes, minerals, and nutrients to be absorbed quickly and without much interference from digestion, a bit like an IV.
Going back to the movie, the most convincing part for me was seeing this guy juicing from the back of his car, as he traveled from town to town all across America, to convince fat and sick people everywhere to turn their lives around. If he could do it from the back of a car, I had no excuses. I wasn’t particularly overweight, but I was definitely sick and halfway to dying, and the movie gave me new hope.
Enjoy the movie here (the cartoon bits ARE great):
I got started with a pretty average juicer thatt after that first experience put me off juicing for a good couple of years – the whole process was gruesome (for the vegetables), messy, and I was left with a tiny amount of muddy juice after wrestling with several pounds of vegetables.
Years later I got the right juicer (which should be a cold press, single mastication juicer, like these ones, that won’t heat the juice and kill the enzymes, the whole cleaning process was cut down to two minutes and not a drop of juice was wasted. At the time I didn’t know.
(this is my juicer, but any good quality single mastication juicer without BPA will do)
So, after watching the movie a few times back to back, I cheerfully embarked on my first juice fast, for a week . I juiced, as the guy suggested, some greens, some celery or cucumber for base, some roots (less roots because of sugar), some citrus fruit (lemon or grapefruit) and half an apple or some blueberries for flavour, no more.
By the way, the guy’s name is Joe Cross, and he created this wonderful website full of (free) information and recipes, bless him.
After one week – during which I felt horribly hungry – I had ONE bowel movement, not even a complete one, but at least my intestines didn’t feel dead like they had for the previous 8 months. I took that as a good sign.
I tried again, this time for two weeks, after that I carefully resumed eating a macrobiotic diet, and at that point a miracle happened: my bowels began to move normally again. It took at least two years before i could stop being super careful, but thankfully I never had that problem again. My mood just couldn’t take it.
Juicing has a long history in naturopathy-friendly circles.
Norman Walker explained better than I can do the answer to the question: “why not just eat the vegetables?”. While raw fruit and vegetables act as a broom cleaning the intestines, digesting the food is a lot of work for the body, that takes energy which could be used towards healing. . Drinking just the juice releases the body from that task, and allows the digestive system to rest for a while (juice fasts are supposed to be temporary), while still getting most of the nutrients we need.
Norman Walker built the first known juicing machine, opened the first juice bar (before 1930, talk about anticipating trends) in California (where else?!) and developed numerous juice recipes to treat various ailments.
Like Linus Pauling, the twice Nobel Prize champion of high dosage Vitamin C, who died at 93, Norman Walker made good advertisement to his theories by passing away in his sleep at age 99, after a lifetime of raw food diet and juicing.
On the other hand Max Gerson, a German doctor who immigrated to the United States in 1938, apparently treated himself of ailments with a raw food diet as a young man, and then, after becoming a practicing doctor, he used the same diet for his patients with success. I can imagine that he only started prescribing juices after the technology became available, in the US? I can’t find any mention of juicers in pre WW2 Germany.
In case you are interested, I found this nice website dedicated to Gerson, with some pretty good explanations.
While searching for juice recipes, I came across another useful book, The Wheatgrass miracle by Anne Wigmore. (I see now it is available with a different title, I guess “Miracle” was a bit of an overstatement)
She claimed that eating wheatgrass from the open fields was a well known folk remedy in her country of origin, Lithuania, and that juicing it provided a powerhouse of nutrients with strong detoxification properties. According to Wigmore, the power of wheatgrass and raw produce in general comes from LIVE ENZYMES, the little known elements that create life in plants, and that, according to Wigmore affect the human body at a deep, cellular level, in ways that science has yet to analyze.
Norman Walker was equally obsessed by live enzymes, considering all cooked food as dead and useless.
My bioresonance lady in Amsterdam suggested me to take wheatgrass supplements after removing amalgams to detox from mercury (be aware that wheatgrass will remove mercury from the amalgams themselves if you still have them in your teeth! so avoid wheatgrass until you don’t have any sources of mercury in your body).
I was lucky enough to find a shop that sold the grass already grown, and that was a huge support in my second and third year of remission. After the mold problems started, I tried growing wheatgrass myself in order to juice it but it didn’t help much in that situation. Despite this, I am still a big fan of wheatgrass, and while of course it will not cure everything (nothing can), and I would never rely solely on that to treat anything, it’s a powerful (and cheap! if you grow it yourself) natural remedy.
Another kind of juice I’d like to mention is SPROUTS juice. Juicing sprouts, isn’t that crazy? Jucing sprouts and microgreens.
Grains are considered so powerful in macrobiotics because they contain all of the nutrients required to grow an entire plant in a single small seed or grain.
After a grain has sprouted, the lectin content (the natural protective substance that according to Paleo theorists, can potentially increase inflammation) is reduced, so the sprout is similar to a blade of grass than to a grain, but it still has a lot of nutrients. So, the rationale is that juicing sprouts will greatly multiply the nutrients intake. I assure you it’s not tasty, but you will feel the effects immediately.
I was very passionate about sprouting, but since I am basically homeless and always on the go, I haven’t been able to indulge. Sometimes I make the effort and grow sprouts if the room is large enough andi it doesn’t look like I will make the place become moldy (ah, the joys of mold avoidance LINK).
I use these little thingies that travel well, then I just buy some glass containers in the supermarket, usually large pickles jars that fit with the lid, and I’m done.
I wanted to share some of the books that I used to have in my library (back when I had a library), but it’s a really long list, so I will share it in this separate post LINK.
A couple of disclaimers: juicing will NOT be helpful at all if you have a problem with oxalates. I imagine that you can work around it by juicing only produce with less oxalates, but I haven’t personally tried it.
Also, juicing alkalinises the blood, which in general is a good thing, considering that modern Western diet is extremely acid forming, but if you are one of the few individuals whose problem is being too alkaline, then you might have a problem there.
That’s all, thanks for reading, happy juicing!