Fertilehealthy

It’s once again time for me to answer all your questions, comment on your comments and share anything I forgot to mention during the week.  So, grab a bottle of water (or a cup of coffee if you must!) and settle in, because this goes on and on and on and on!

I am so blessed every day by the kindness that you guys show me and the interest you have in my journey.  This journey would have been so much harder and lonelier without you!

Lora, our Healthy You Challenge celeb who was a guest on the Oprah Show this week, wants to know how I manage to exercise while on a juice fast.  You have to remember that I’m not on a juice fast, I’m on a juice feast!  I am drinking up to four liters (about 1 gallon) of freshly extracted juice per day.  If you were to try and eat all the fruit and vegetables that I consume in  day, you wouldn’t be able to do it!  A fast is about deprivation, a feast is about abundance.  I have a lot of energy!  Having said that, that energy is supposed to be spent on detoxing and cleansing, so I’m not doing heavy exercise at the moment.  Only after Day 60, when the body starts building up again, will I get into weight training and resume my cardio sessions. I’m happy with what I’m doing right now, which is Aqua Aerobics and Pilates.

Simone says I must have dropped a size or two by now. I don’t know. I suppose I have. Most of my clothes are custom made to fit me, so I have no idea what sizes they are, but my jeans are getting looser and they were rather tight at the start of the juice feast. I will reveal my centimeters lost during the month of February next Sunday. And, in the interest of international relations, I’ll post them in inches and centimeters!

“I guess my only question for you is, how do you get your fiber on a completely liquid diet, since the fiber is in the solid part of the fruit and veggies?” Tammy, this is the whole point of the juice feast. We are giving the digestive system a well-deserved rest. The body uses a huge amount of energy to digest food. By consuming juice, you free up that energy for elimination, healing and repair. The bowel is the most obvious organ of elimination and when it is clear of food, it can eliminate toxins quickly and easily. Sadly, with our refined diets and our high meat consumption, the bowel is also in dire need of some cleaning out and this is very nicely accomplished on a juice feast. It is not uncommon to have solid stools, consisting of old impacted fecal matter for the duration of the feast. This is why enemas and colonics are so helpful. That is just another reason why it would be criminal to return to one’s previous eating habits after a juice feast - it would be like throwing mud on a white silk dress!

Swizzlepop asks whether I ever miss chewing my food. Not really. I know some juice feasters sometimes chew a piece of raw fruit and spit out the pulp, but I haven’t felt the need. We are supposed to drink our juices slowly and chew them so that they can mix well with the saliva and digest more easily.

Katschi wants to know whether the pictures of fruit and vegetables I post are my own. Unfortunately not. They are all pictures I’ve had in my Photobucket album for ages and I’m just going through them one at a time. She wants me to take pictures of my juices, which I’ll try and do. There will be three pictures - a green juice, a red juice and a yellow juice. I will play with this one day when I have a moment. There are still 70 days to go, so I will probably run out of Photobucket pictures!

The she also asks whether I use organic produce. To paraphrase Mary-Ann Shearer, if you only lived on organic produce in South Africa, you’d starve to death. The supermarkets are starting to stock more and more organic stuff, but they are very expensive. I buy whatever I can. We used to belong to one of those box-schemes where you got a box of organic produce per week, but I’m afraid that would last me about a day, if that, on a juice feast! So, for now, until I can start growing my own stuff organically, I buy what I can get, wash them very carefully with an organic soap and don’t fret about it. It’s still less toxic than meat, fish and dairy, which have the highest concentration of pesticides!

I mentioned during the week that someone may be interested in our house. Lidian wants to know where we want to move to. Well, we haven’t heard back from the agent, but Craig has decided not to sell right now anyway. We were going to move to a security estate in the Winelands (about 20 miles away). We currently live in the city. But my hubby has started buying into my dream of living in the country and growing our own food and therefore we are going to stay where we are (moving is expensive, especially agent’s commission and property transfer costs) and try to establish an internet business which we can operate from anywhere. It is my job to figure out how to earn money (lots of it) online, so that we can sell our business and get a life in the country! If you have any ideas, please let me know!

She also wants to know more about this box. How old it is and what it was used for originally. I really don’t know. It is clearly old. The inside is yellowed paper with Chinese characters on and the box has that aged patina. My sister-in-law brought it from Taiwan and told us that it was an antique money box. 

Sybil asked what’s going into the box.  I’m cutting out pictures of things that I would like to have (country house, garden, patio, travel destinations, babies, clothes, body, etc) and putting them into the box with the words “Whatever is contained in this box, IS!”  To read more about Creation Boxes, click here.

She also wants to know how long the juice feast will go on for. The conventional length of a juice feast is 92 days. You can stop anytime before that if you wish and Michelle and I are waiting to hear if we can go on longer (we’re the same age). Each day on the juice feast takes you back 120 days in the past, which will leave me at about Age 8 at the end of it. I’m quite keen to go back to birth, since I was formula-fed and a lot of my emotional untruths come from my very early childhood. That would take me to about 119 days. I can then end my feast with a rebirth ceremony.

In reaction to my “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” post, Lara (one seriously cool chick) asks whether I would consider adoption if I can’t have children naturally. As much as I want to bring forth a child and nourish it from my body, I would adopt in a heartbeat, but this is something both partners have to be in full agreement of and my husband is not there yet (men tend to take longer to move on to the next step when it comes to fertility treatments etc.). We might also be too old to be considered for adoption (I think the cut-off age is 40). I wrote some thoughts on the subject here. I absolutely love that quote by Oprah Winfrey:

“Biology is the least of what makes someone a mother.”

Quite a few of you commented on the picture in yesterday’s post.  I’m glad you did, because there’s a special story behind that picture, even though I have no idea where that is. As you know, I’ve done extensive visualization work on my healing journey. And the one picture that always comes up is of me wallking on my journey, over hills, crossing bridges, sometimes walking on cobblestones, wading through rivers and stream, sometimes through fields of grass, always walking, learning and healing. One day as I’m walking through a forest, I come across a little clearing, and there, on a rock, basking in the filtered rays of the sun, my baby patiently awaits me. I surfed the internet for pictures that fit that image in my mind and this is one of the closest ones. Interestingly enough, a lady I “met” (we’re on similar journeys and have spoken on the phone a few times, but never met) tells me that there’s a spot right here in Cape Town, somewhere on Table Mountain, that looks exactly like what I described to her. Once I’m fit enough, I’ll ask her to take me there and we could perhaps spend a little time there.

If you’ve never been to South Africa, here’s a little video with pictures from my country. The song is Nkosi Sikelele Afrika (God bless Africa), our national anthem.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pVfhd1tLdU&feature=related]

If you need a good laugh, this was the funniest post I’ve read in a long time. Misssy Martin can always be counted on for a laugh, but somedays she really outdoes herself!

If you’re wondering whether you will ever beat your addiction to sugar and fast food, read this very inspirational post by someone who did it!

Have a blessed weekend! Hope you’re still awake!