Day 15
Neck pain gone. Weakness in arms. Had to pause three times while washing my hair. Weight loss occurring at approximately one pound per day.
Day 16
Arm weakness continues. Tongue is heavily coated. Breath not so great. Avoiding people. Very tired. Had to sleep.
Day 17
Arm weakness better. Several episodes of rather intense pain in lungs accompanied by severe head rushes while being still. Did too much and had to sleep. Spirits very high, though…unusually so.
Day 18
Feeling the cold intensely. Had to wear clothes to bed and still couldn’t get warm. Made it out for a (slow) hike today though. The woods smell sweeter than ever with the new nose.
Day 19
Have noticed that the body feels cleaner, hair and skin less oily. Also less perspiration happening. Skin is a much healthier color. Having a toxin dump today however…very fatigued.
Day 14
We’ve made it two weeks without food, and all I can say is “Whew!” We’re more than a third of the way through this challenge.
For some reason we find our stomachs still growling—a symptom that should have ceased with digestion after the first week. It does make things more difficult, and we catch ourselves looking longingly at the calendar perhaps more than is psychologically healthy. It seems such a long haul to the end of the month right now.
Energy doesn’t seem to be much of a problem, however. We haven’t experienced any intense weakness since that first bout of detoxification. And I can’t say that I’m any more foggy headed than before I began, though I do notice my attention span has shortened somewhat. But all, in all, I’m feeling better than I’ve felt in a while, with only one exception.
At this stage of the fast, it is common for old injuries to flare up as the body re-heals them. A poor diet of processed, de-natured foods at the time of injury means that the healing process was not optimal, and the body is now redoing the work properly. Sounds good until you realize that this re-healing means re-experiencing the pain of the injury.
So for the past three days I’ve been in an agony of neck pain, walking around in a cervical collar and reliving the entire experience of breaking my neck in an auto accident some fifteen years past. It hasn’t been pretty, physically or psychologically, and it’s really been easy to push my buttons because of it, but I’m hoping that this might make an end to the osteoarthritis and to the necessity of even owning a neck brace. We shall see.
I can say, however, that the rotator cuff tendonitis, with which I have suffered for nearly a year, has almost completely disappeared. Believe me when I say that my quality of life is greatly improved by this. Anyone who has ever spent a sleepless night because of this ailment knows what I’m saying here. For many months I have been unable to so much as lift my left arm; now the pain has been reduced to the occasional twinge. Deo Gratias
Given half a chance the body will heal itself of anything. Relieved of having to focus one full third of its energy on digesting food, it’s free to work the miracles of which it is capable.
On to the next stage…