Juice Fasting For Weight Loss and Juice Fasting For Stubborn Fat!

How much weight will I lose on a juice fast?

The main benefit offered by a juice fast, to those who wish to lose weight, is the speed of the weight loss. Initially, weight loss can be as high as three-to-four pounds per day, but as the fast continues, the average loss will be one pound-per-day.

To see a person drop 30-to-40 pounds in a 30-day juice fast is to see a person totally transform his life. Self-esteem is given a boost and for the first time in their life, discipline becomes a lifestyle. The fast becomes a catalyst for a total life overhaul. People start dressing better, showing more confidence, becoming more organized, more dedicated in relationships and more at peace.

Juice fasting for weight loss and stubborn fat

Trying to stay on a diet can turn a simple journey to the supermarket into an epic challenge of self-discipline. How can you ignore all the florescent-lit aisles of junk food offering every temptation known to the tongue when you are hungry depressed and feeling deprived? It becomes a war of desires where your willingness to surrender is quickly rewarded.

In a culture that esteems fashion-model thinness as perfect beauty, fat is the ugly disease that must be cured. This creates an obsession with weight-loss that increases the difficulty in losing weight. It is like trying not to think of a white horse. The more you try not to think of it the more it comes back into your thoughts.

Obsession, slow metabolism and high-calorie food are a deadly combination for weight gain. The worst offenders of weight gain are starches, fats, and refined sugars. Since the biggest part of our diet is starch in the form of breakfast cereal, cookies, cakes, pies, chips and bread, it has the greatest impact on weight gain. Starches are worse than sugar. For a short amount of time, the blood sugar will peak allowing the body to store the excess sugar as body fat. Starch is different in that it is a slow release of sugar, which is perfect for long-distance runners, however, if you are inactive, the slow-releasing sugars will be turned into body fat. Excess calories equate to excess fat.

For many, juice fasting is a last ditch effort to lose stubborn fat that has resisted every attempt at weight reduction. Diets may have given you a short-lived victory, only to suffer defeat by one indulgence that escalates into a feeding frenzy resulting in being heavier than before the diet.
How juice fasting affects addiction to food

My war with food addiction lasted 10 long years. I had been healed from years of drug abuse, but my battle with addictive behavior was not over. I desperately wanted control over what I ate, not for weight loss, as I was thin, due to a very fast metabolism; but binge eating made me feel like garbage.

Cookies, cakes, ice cream and chocolate were the enemies I loved. At the saturation point, where I could not stand myself anymore, I would fast and my body would recover from the damage of the abuse, but it only deepened the power of my addiction.

After 20 days of juice fasting, I would go on a feeding frenzy destroying all the benefits of the fast. My resting stomach was stuffed with the most volatile mixtures of food. Sometimes it took weeks to recover. After years of blowing fasts, the realization came that fasting was increasing my compulsiveness.

Fasting had become a drug. I longed for the freedom of the fast, that amazing feeling of being in total control. Victory tasted sweet but it never lasted. Over and over I plunged into the pit of hell, blowing the fast and enduring painful feelings of being a failure, guilt and feeling out of control.

Tom wrote a book on how to overcome overeating

My book, Eating in Freedom, was written after years of my continual battles with compulsive eating in a desperate attempt to get free. I discovered principles for keeping my thought life pure and reassuring. With each chapter, I learned, and by the end of the book, for the first time in my life, I was free from food addiction.

Not only did it work for me but thousands of others. No fancy secret knowledge, just methods to change how you think, for when you change how you think, you change how you eat. Once you get your diet and thinking to this point, it becomes a lifestyle; then you will naturally want the foods that are good for you.

How the juice fasting diet affects metabolism

The fear is that while juice fasting, the metabolism will slow down and afterward there will be more weight gained than before the fast. Initially, any calorie reduction will cause a lowering in the BMR or base metabolic rate. Cleansing will bring health that will increase metabolic performance and energy output. In other words, you will eat less and feel more energetic.

The greatest impact you can have on increasing your resting metabolism is exercise. After a workout, you can be sitting on the couch reading while burning calories, as the muscles are grabbing glucose from the blood to replace glycogen supplies. The key to weight loss is fewer calories and more exercise. A diet high in raw food provides fewer, low-density calories, and higher-fiber, more-filling foods.
How the juice fasting diet affects digestion

After a juice fast, the body is more efficient. Digestion is better due to a cleaner colon. The colon walls have been cleansed of impacted feces, allowing improved absorption of nutrients. The good news is that greater efficiency equals enhanced energy. Healthy people burn more calories. They also eat less because they are more active and feel better about themselves. They don't need food as a security blanket.

The above juice fasting article was written by Guest Writer, Tom McGregor, author of Eating in Freedom, which you can download into your computer today.

Tom had an overeating disorder and once ate an entire gallon of ice cream in one sitting and almost froze his stomach. He shares his story in this article: My war with food addiction.

Juice fasting to lose weight? Here are some great juicer recipes and fruit smoothie recipes to help you get started!

Morning Sunshine Smoothie

2 large oranges
1 red grapefruit
6 frozen strawberries
1/2 banana

Squeeze the juice from the oranges and grapefruit.
Put the juice in a blender and blend with the strawberries and banana.
Watermelon Dream Juice

2 cups cubed watermelon, cold
2 cups cubed cantaloupe, cold
1 inch piece of fresh ginger, peeled

Pass the ingredients through a juicer.
Strawberry Thirst Quencher Smoothie

1/2 cup frozen strawberries
1 cup orange juice
2 tsp. fresh squeezed lemon juice

Put ingredients in a blender.
Carrot Cleanser Juice

4 large carrots
1 stalk of celery
1 apple
handful spinach
juice from 1/2 lemon (optional)

Pass the ingredients through a blender.

The story of how Tom helped Carl W. lose 100 pounds on a 40-day juice fast

Note from Healthrecipes.com:
Carl had a liver disorder and his 100-pound weight loss from juice fasting was unique to his condition. While juice fasting is not recommended for those with liver disorders, we believe that freshly-made juices from carrots, beets, celery and lemon are good for the liver.

"Fasting with water, juice and a complete diet of natural foods gave me a new lease on life! The disease crippling me was chronic hepatitis. Drug abuse began at thirteen and after years of serious addiction, I contracted hepatitis, a very painful and frustrating illness.

As the years progressed my liver deteriorated, causing my other filtering organs (kidneys and spleen) to be overworked, thus damaging them, causing even more pain. For sixteen years I suffered. My liver was swollen to the size of a football. The liver is the largest cleansing organ, and does not have room for swelling. When it does, constant irritating pain is felt from the rib cage to the stomach. Hepatitis is impossible to forget.

Life was dismal and without hope. I was a 270-lb., burned out drug addict coming off a massive intake of chemicals. It took 20 to 30 tranquilizers a day to prevent my mind from losing its sanity.

My emotions were out of control. Nerves were like electrical wires on overload. Without knowing what else to do I phoned Tom (author of Eating in Freedom), a friend I had not seen in years. Tom's heart was moved. He explained that I was in serious trouble and needed help.

After a few days of sleeping, I awoke only to realize how grossly complicated my rebellious life had become. The past 20 years flooded my conscious. I had played the role of someone else; someone tough, ruthless, and invincible. All that was left was an empty, barren soul. The flood of tears wouldn't stop as I agonized over the loss of my family. There was no one to blame —I was a victim of my own demise. I thought moving in with Tom would help the massive depression that was now my life, but nothing could stop my eyes from seeing painful reality. Tom stayed up several nights listening to my sad story. If all my pent up anguish hadn't found an outlet, my insides would have exploded.

After 20 days of juice fasting the changes were remarkable. As the pain lessened, I started to feel alive again. I wasn't cured, but because of the results I continued the fast.

After 40 days of juice fasting, there was a metamorphosis from a sickly, unstable human into someone vibrant with health and well being. My self-esteem began to build gradually as I shed 100 pounds. At the start I weighed 270 lbs. This bulk was caused by the retention of large amounts of body fluids. Due to the drugs and the damaged liver, my body could not release these fluids.

After the 40 days my weight had dropped to 170 lbs.; whatever had caused the bloating had healed. The swelling on my right side from my liver had disappeared completely. My mind was clear and stable. For the first time in years, I could live without tranquilizers! I sincerely thought drugs had done permanent damage to my brain. I was wrong!

If a butterfly could talk of its experience of changing from a crawling insect into a multi-colored, graceful, flying creation, it would most likely be saying the words I felt in my heart. I was given back what drugs took away.

This knowledge has brought me a new zeal for life. It has freed me from a tremendous addiction. It has brought me closer to God in spirit than ever before."