Do you need to give your health a super-duper kick-start?

I’ve recently been coming across a lot of testimonials of people who have used juice fasting to literally save their own lives from disease and obesity.

My family has been having fun borrowing movies from our Chiropractor’s office. He has a great selection of informative and inspiring books and DVDs on health related topics. The latest one we watched is called ‘Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead’. It starts out with a man named Joe Cross from Australia travelling across the United States while going on a juice fast. He is overweight and has a rare skin disease that he has to take medication for.

It’s great watching him lose weight and have his medications reduced over the time of his travels, and funny, yet sad, hearing the conversations he has with other overweight and ill individuals he comes across on his travels. Many of them only expect to live until their 50’s but aren’t willing to give up their unhealthy way of eating! One guy even asked him what he would do with his extra years of life if he did live another 5 or 10 years extra like it was no big deal!!!

The most touching part of the story though, is when fate brings Joe across the path of a trucker who has the same rare skin disease as him. This man, named Phil, was living a pitiful existence literally eating himself to death. He was over 400 lbs and could hardly walk from his truck to the truck stops to eat. He had distanced himself from his family and expressed regret at not spending time with his youngest son because he couldn’t do much with his weight and health as they were.

Just as Joe was finishing his journey and got back to Australia a much thinner and healthier man, he received a call for help from Phil. Seeing Phil transform physically and emotionally over the span of time he fasted was an inspiring and heart-warming thing. He lost over 200 lbs and got off all of his meds! He went on to help many others, including his brother who had a heart attack and needed to make some changes.

Both Joe and Phil used juice fasting as a kick-start, or reboot as they call it, to detoxify their bodies and lose excess weight. They went on to eat a healthy diet full of plant based foods when they were finished rather than going back to their old way of living. They both became active and started a whole new healthy lifestyle.

I don’t condone fasting as a lose-weight quick gimmick for those who just go back to eating the way they used to, but it is a great way to cleanse and jump-start a new way of healthy eating and living. This type of fasting is sometimes referred to as juice ‘feasting’. You drink lots of fresh juice high in greens so you are getting a blast of nutrients and don’t feel hungry. Depending on their goals, some people do it for a few days and some do it for 30, 60 or even 100 days! I’ve been looking at many testimonies of people on the longer juice feasts and it’s amazing to hear the awesome results.

After watching this film, my family decided to start a juice feast in the New Year. I’ll keep you posted on how it goes! I encourage you to check out this film and to look up juice feasting on line for some of the great stories of people’s experience with it. Here’s the link to Joe Cross’s site if you want to check it out http://www.fatsickandnearlydead.com/

Cheers and happy, healthy holidays to you all!