Fasting

So I'm toying with the idea of trying an extended fast sometime in the next couple of months. Has anyone ever done this? I don't mean a 12 or 24 hour fast but more along the 7-day deal or something like that. I've been reading A LOT about that stuff recently and the more I read the more it seems like a healthy thing to do once or twice a year to clear our the system and give it a chance to repair a bunch of damage that occurs during modern living.

The thing is, unless you grow your own stuff you are going to be taking in a lot of garbage with what you eat. That stuff builds up and causes all sorts of weirdness to happen. So I want to give a fast a try and see what happens.

From what I can gather, day 2 and 3 are REALLY bad. After about 24 hours your body stops the digestion process and starts processing fat and such from your reserves. The toxins that you take in are mostly stored in the fat so your bloodstream just gets flooded with this crap. Additionally once the digestion process stops your body can start looking for dead or damaged cells and start to fix them. Between these two actions your can have 10x the toxicity in your blood than you normally have. This leads to, apparently, a REALLY BAD TIME for a couple of days while your body gets rid of all this crap that has been building up. The more toxic you are, the worse it is. Apparently it can be similar to a really bad hang over, vomit included. All kinds of weird crap comes out of your body in all kinds of weird ways. Sounds positively delightful.

However, once you get past that 2 day hellish period things start to look up and start to cycle between these really intense highs and these more mild lows as your body switches between detox and healing cycles. By the time you get to the end of the fast (if you do it for 7 days in a water fast) your body has more or less cleansed itself off the majority of toxins and your digestive track has regenerated itself. Several other systems reset and, apparently, you feel fricken awesome for quite some time. Then if you fast once a week for 24 hours or so and/or do a 7-day water fast twice a year you can maintain a more healthy system and those two days won't be as hellish.

So, wtf, right? I just feel like I am full of garbage in my system. I've been eating super healthy the past two weeks and have noticed a marked difference in my energy and mood. I just keep coming back to thinking if just eating a lot of fruit and nuts and cutting out the majority of processed foods can make that much of a difference, what would really cleaning my system out and resetting do? Everything I read about it and people I talk do that have done an extended fast all tell me that it really makes a difference.

There are two different types of fasts. A water fast, which is just absolutely brutal but is the shorter 7-10 day one. And a juice fast which is much longer but a lot more gentle. My current plan is to make an appointment with my doctor next week to talk to him about it. I am leaning to the 30 day juice fast but I'd like to see if he would be willing to monitor me to make sure the toxicity doesn't get to such a level that I my body can't deal with it. I'm also not sure how to deal with my medication in a fast. So I figure with his guidance I can give this a shot sometime in February or March and see what happens. If (when) I do it I will be updating my blog with my experience as it goes (I hope) with the good, the bad and the ugly.

Thoughts?