I can tell you that from many testimonies and personal experience, the ending of a fast can be one of the most decisive moments of your whole life in terms of health. The completion of a fast can be the beginning of a new lifestyle or an excuse for a three-day feeding frenzy resulting in feelings of failure and shame. “Hope deferred makes the heart sick” Pr. 13:12. I know people who will never fast again because of the let-down during the first few days of eating, face-first in the same old pizza, a mockery to all the good that just happened during the fast.
Once you begin to eat after a fast, digestion reawakens and an interesting thing happens. Although physical addictions are broken and homeostasis is balanced, awakened hunger can also reawaken our psychological ties to the same addictions we had before the fast. Entering the world of food after a prolonged fast can almost be like walking into the neighborhood of your youth and experiencing the same old emotions of fear and insecurity you had as a kid. It can be discouraging after such a high. Fasting has freed your body from physiological addiction, but often only disciplined eating can effectively break deeper emotional addictions by replacing life-long, entrenched, comfort-eating patterns with new healthy ones.
Ending the fast by eating raw food for half the days you have fasted will serve as an effective transition from the world of fasting to the more demanding world of eating.
I hesitate calling a raw diet “fasting,” some people have made raw their lifetime diet. But there are real benefits to approaching a raw diet with a fasting mentality. Fasting demands a disciplined focus and determination. Once off the fast, we naturally loosen up focus. A raw food fast is just as demanding as juice fasting. I personally find a raw diet more challenging than juice fasting.
And here is a word of advice. Do not spend the last days of your fast dreaming about all the delicious foods you are going to indulge in. Deciding to eat raw for about half the fasting period will greatly help with this, allowing an emotional transition from the world of fasting to eating. Our imagination is so powerful Jesus said, ‘If we lust in our heart it as if we have committed adultery.” If you engage in illicit food-fantasies, dreaming about all the nasty foods you are going to gorge on after the fast you have missed the whole point, slipping right back into that old binge and purge mentality.
This is about permanently changing your eating-paradigm and never going back. Never! There is a place for enjoying a treat here and there but you know as well as I do that was never the problem! Feeling deprived? Maybe this would be a good place for a little encouragement. Vibrant health, youthful body, clear-mindedness, self-control, consistent energy, needing less sleep, clear complexion, disease resistant and longer life. Is it worth sacrificing all that for an addiction? Of course not. And if you let this program work it may take some time, some say up to a year, but you will teach your body to hunger and feel satisfied with healthy foods.
Raw food will always taste best after a fast. Eat as much as you please. You will continue to lose weight on a raw diet. In fact you may lose it faster, especially if most of your food is vegetables. There are far fewer calories in raw vegetables than juice. Raw food is bulking, fiber-filled, low density food. The abundance of soft fiber has the added benefit of cleaning out any toxins that have been deposited in the colon during the fast. Also, as you reawaken digestion the body will pull out of the fasting state, your metabolism will increase, hence you will burn more calories on a raw diet. A higher metabolism and less caloric intake equal weight loss.
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