Oct 27, 2009 - Preparing to Fast

Yesterday was an interesting day. Because I'm still weaning off my blood pressure medications, I am easing into the water fast, which will begin in earnest Saturday.
Beginning last Sunday and ending two days ago (Tuesday), I ate freely from the raw foods bar and the steamed vegetable trays. Absolutely excellent. I ate as much as I wanted and steadily lost a pound a day with no hunger. There is one woman here who is in her golden years (it is hard to tell exactly how old a person is when they have been eating well for quite awhile - they seem eternally young in many respects), who lives nearby and just comes for the food and the mealtime comraderee. This isn't food you find in the old folks home - this is food that promotes life with every bite. My blood pressure steadily declined every day since Sunday to 136/84 as an added bonus.
Yesterday I was shifted to the next phase: juice. This is simply just a vegetable, fruit and distilled water mixture that really wakes up the taste buds. The first drink in the morning was celery and watermelon. The next three were pineapple and celery or carrot.
Here's the problem with this. Though these drinks are tasty, and designed to drop your caloric intake substantially to help transition you into a fast, while giving you SOMETHING to put into your stomach so you can take meds, they are incredibly sweet. Without the fiber of the whole fruit, you may just as well feed me a cup of sugar. By 5:00 pm I was on an utterly stupendous sugar high that made me want to lie, cheat and steal to break all the laws of fasting and rush to the little store behind the center to slam some barbequed chicken. But since I hadn't eaten chicken in two years, my good sense reminded me of how unwise that would be, since I paid good money to be here NOT to eat. However, I did settle on taking the 20 step walk to the market and get some bottled water, since my roommate and I thought the distilled water here tasted odd.
Shortly after returning, this little sugar trip left me feeling guilty for even going to the store in the first place, and wishing I had just stayed in my room and drank the prescribed distilled water instead. I am now pretty sure it was just me and my sugar-bombed brain falsely convicting me of all manner of imaginary crimes against self and humanity. The lesson here is: stay away from sugar that has been separated from it's source, especially if you've been eating clean for a while. Your glucose and insulin levels will thank you and your brain will thank you. Lesson learned.
Consequently, due to the calorie reduction, a healing crisis(doubtful), or the sugar high, I was chilled to the bone all day, my hands and feet were numb from internal cold, and no amount of external heat helped. I finally was able to lay down at midnight, now starving (thanks, sugar!), and shaking like a leaf with the electric blanket set on high. I finally passed out around 12:45 AM I'm guessing, slept pretty good until 3:30 a.m., at which time my eyes popped open to stare at the clock and rehearse what I would say (in a nice way) to my doctors that there was no way in hades I was drinking that devil juice sugar water again today, I don't care how fresh squeezed, enymatic or vitamin-loaded it is. But at least I was now warm through and through after my 'nap'.
When they arrived for morning rounds at 8:00 AM, they sympathized with my symptoms, and agreed that vegetable broth would most certainly be a better option for me today and tomorrow. They don't need a madman running around off campus, looking a bit like an emaciated street dog and salivating over three day old road kill - it's so undignifying and doesn't bode well for the reputation of the center.
It's going to be a good, stable day and I'm ready to go into ketosis...