Welcome to week three of the SHARAN 21-Day Online Diabetes Reversal Programme! Today you will learn how to overcome a plateau by doing a one-day vegetable juice fast—or juice feast as Dr. Gabriel Cousens calls it! You’ll also learn how to prepare delicious vegetable juice for a juice feast.
Overcome a plateau with juice feasting
Your blood sugar level is most likely steady or falling every day. If at any time in your health journey, you find that you have reached a plateau when you are not improving any further, you may want to do a day of juice feasting to kick-start your healing process. Juice feasting is the only exception to eating whole food and it’s reserved for special days only. Vegetable juice does not spike your blood sugar levels like fruit juice does.
Juice feasting significantly helps heal and reset your body by cleansing, rebuilding, rehydrating, and alkalizing. Juice feasting is one of the most powerful ways to consume a lot of nutrients in one day in an absorbable form. The extra dose of nutrients is then available for healing, cleaning, and repair. And your digestive system gets some rest as it doesn’t have to spend a lot energy digesting solid food.
You can do a juice feast as often as you like or find useful. Most people benefit by doing it once a week or fortnight. If you are already improving, there is no need to do a juice feast.
You may experience temporary detoxification symptoms such as light-headedness, headaches, mild diarrhea, or an unexplainable “different” feeling. However, they should disappear the next day.
Watch this video by Dr. Nandita Shah to learn more about how to overcome a plateau by feasting on juices, or schedule a consultation with a SHARAN health advisor if you’d like to be guided through the process.
Key Points
- Juice feasting should be done when you feel you have reached a plateau.
- Choose a day when you won’t have to do much work and can get a lot of rest.
- Drink a glass of vegetable juice every hour, or as you feel hungry. See the juice recipe.
- You can alternate between a glass of juice with the fibre and one without the fibre (by straining the juice).
- “Eat” the juice by rolling every morsel in your mouth and chewing it before gulping it down.
- Don’t wait for hunger to set in—remember that you are feasting, not fasting! Feed yourself consistently as an act of love by drinking as much juice as you need—about four to five litres per day.
- If you cannot do a juice feast for a full day, try it for half a day and eat either a fruit meal, a light, grain-free meal, or a regular meal in the evening, depending on your hunger.
- Depending on your improvement, you can do a juice feast once a week or fortnight.
IMPORTANT NOTE
On the juice feasting day, almost all medicines should be avoided or at least reduced to half for the day and long acting insulin should be reduced the night before fasting. If you are on many medications, please take the advice of a SHARAN doctor on how to reduce the medications or do this under supervision.
Frequently asked questions
Get answers to frequently asked questions about juicing.
I thought juice wasn’t a whole food since the fibre is removed from the juice, so why is juice feasting okay?
Vegetable juice does not spike blood sugar levels like fruit juice does. Drinking vegetable juice has been found to be an effective strategy for overcoming plateaus in the healing process. Juice feasting is the only exception to the whole food rule.
Can I add fruit or fruit juices to my vegetable juices?
You should avoid anything sweet with no fibre like fruit juice or honey because it can spike your blood sugar level. In addition, you should never mix sweet fruit and vegetables (except green leaves, which can be mixed with fruit in green smoothies). It’s best to get the sweetness from carrots or beetroot.
Do I need a juicing machine?
Juicing machines are great because they separate the fibre from the vegetable juice for you. You should only be doing a juice feast once a week or less, so it’s up to you whether you want to invest in a juicer. If you don’t want to buy a juicer, you can use a blender—which is a bit more tedious. Finely-chop the vegetables, blend them with some water, and sieve the juice through a fine mesh or muslin cloth.
What kind of juicing machine do you recommend?
If you decide to invest in a juicer, slow juicers (masticating) are better, but more expensive. Any juicer will work since you should only be doing a juice feast once a week or less.
Can I do a juice feast if my fasting blood sugar level is already less than 110 or my postprandial blood sugar level is already less than 140?
No, juice feasts are only for those who have hit a plateau (i.e., your fasting blood sugar level is more than 110 or your postprandial blood sugar level is more than 140). Check out some of our other delicious drink recipes instead.
Can I add vegetable juices to my diet, apart from the juice-feasting day?
No. We recommend whole foods on a daily basis.
You can make fresh vegetable juices of your choice. It’s good to cover all the colors of the rainbow in a day or as many colors as you can. You can alternate between green juices (mixtures of cucumbers, celery, bottle gourd, spinach, mint etc) and colored juices (mixtures of carrots, beetroot, tomatoes etc). You can even mix green and colored vegetables. You can add condiments of your choice to make it delicious. (Don’t add too much salt!). You can even add ice if you wish.
Its best to make juices in a juicer, which takes out the fibre, and not a blender. Water should not be added to the juice.
KEY INGREDIENTS
Vegetable Juices:
- Mix and match the following food to suit your taste:
- Base: cucumber, bottle gourd/lauki/doodhi, or pumpkin
- Leafy greens: spinach, beet greens, cabbage, lettuce, or other leafy greens
- Sweet root vegetables: carrots and beets (use sparingly)
- Non-sweet vegetables: tomatoes, capsicum, bell peppers, celery, radishes, or onions
- Herbs: mint, coriander, basil, or parsley
- Condiments: lemon juice, black pepper, ginger juice, garlic, rock salt, turmeric, or cinnamon
Sample vegetable juice recipes
Red Juice
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Tangy Juice
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Carrot and Greens
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Carrot-Beetroot-Ginger
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Green Juice
Ridge Gourd Juice
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Mixed vegetable juice
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Mr Suresh Shah describes his first experience of juice feasting. He did a whole day of juice feasting and had 11 glasses during the day. It gave him a lot of energy. He found it a fantastic experience and the next morning the sugar levels were low 4.6 mmol/L (82.5 mg/dL) which he had never seen in the last 15 year!
“It was a fantastic experience and it gave me confidence that I can do it whenever I want to do it again.”
Film – Super Juice Me
8 people go away to a resort for an experiment to reverse 22 different diseases over the course of 28 days. A motivating story of benefits of juicing.
