Saturday: Feast and Famine (Part - Famine)

I am fully aware that this post has the potential to be overwhelming, so I will try to divide it up and make it as user-friendly as possible. Let me start with the "famine" part of Saturday...

I started looking into alternative ways of eating and living after a strange bout of joint pain in both my elbows and my knees, as well Mark's flare up with Crohn's disease. What I stumbled upon was a sustainable lifestyle that nourished me in more ways than I can imagine. The pain and flare-up symptoms dissipated, but I was hooked. However, about one year later, the pain in my elbows is back up to the level it was at last July - "can't talk on a cell phone," and it "hurts to type" pain. I'd been eating well, not straining too much (in the case that it might be tendonitis - which no one really knows), but yet was under a decent amount of stress. So, I decided to do a three day cleansing fast, to see if I could rid my body of some of the toxins we naturally accumulate, as well as give my joints some energy to heal, without the added strain of digestion.

So, starting last Thursday, I began a juice/water/juice fast. I actually think I would have benefitted more from going to 5 or 7 days, but we were having a BBQ on Sunday and I wanted to attend fully. A couple of things happened:

1. The toe pain I was feeling went away fully.
2. I was not hungry at all from the evening of day 1 onwards.
3. I had moments of weakness and moments of high energy (I cooked for 6 hours straight on Saturday!)
4. I spent a good deal of the time I would have been eating and cleaning, reading and praying.
5. I did 30 minutes of yoga in the morning and evening of each day.

Another possible result of the fast, is that my period came 8 days early. And I may not have mentioned this before, but I get the most excruciating pains every month. I have since I was 11, when Aunt Flo first came to visit. And yet this time, nothing. I kept waiting. Hoping, but waiting, with bated breath. It was the most perfect period I have ever had. I strongly believe that a woman's cycle is a key indicator of her health, and sadly, my irregular, intensely painful period was only proving to me that I had some stagnation of the blood (as in Traditional Chinese Medicine), and that my hormones were a bit out of whack. But today, I celebrate, even though this has only been one victory. Let's see what next month brings. There is, also, a caveat: I had taken 6 doses of an alcoholic vitex berry tincture to help with PMS symptoms. I will not be fasting next month, so I'll be able to figure out exactly what contributed to this loveliness I now call my cycle. =)