DAY 12 Juice Feasting Preparation: Rest Easy
(c) 2008 by David and Katrina Rainoshek

Introduction
Hello! Were you able to get yourself a nice sharp knife and bamboo cutting board? Or did you dust off the ol’ knife and board and now they are sharp and shiny out on the counter just waiting for their exciting new job helping you Juice Feast? How about your Vita-Mix and nut mylk bags? Are they on their way yet?

Sleep in on the menu in today’s JFP, and you are going to love what you are about to hear! Also, you will start watering the seed in you that really just wants to bounce happily through life, on a rebounder! Hey, we encourage it!

Today David and I went to get ourselves a Blood Sugar Monitor at Walgreens because starting on the morning of Day 10 JFP We will be taking our FBS every morning until we begin the Global Juice Feast on March 1!

New Life Practice
Getting a Good Night’s Sleep is very, very important to health, healing and happiness. If you are sleeping well already, hooray! Then you will want to read this part for re-enforcement purposes only. If you are not sleeping as well, or as long, as you know you should be, read on!

Your body is able to do an incredible amount of wonderful things now that you are no longer dumping toxic foods into it. Instead, you are feeding every cell in your body some of the most amazing nutrition on the planet.

You can assist it in taking full advantage of this opportunity by getting adequate rest and sleep. While you are resting or sleeping, you free up energy so that your body can get to work at flushing out that old red dye #40 from your liver where it has been storing it because it was just too busy trying to keep up with all the MSG and other toxic things coming at it. Also while you are resting your body can safely remove that layer of mucus lining your intestine and bowel, that worked to protect you from the over 3,000 synthetic chemicals that are regularly added to food products (among other things) but has also (sadly) been preventing you from assimilating and absorbing valuable nutrients from your food. Remember: you absorb 90% of your nutrition through the wall of the small intestine. If that wall is lined with uneliminated waste matter, you will become malnourished. Thankfully this old matter will release and get flushed out by the Green Vegetable Juices and Intestinal Drawing Formula on the Feast.

Rest is not a waste of time! Imagine if you left your bathroom light on all the time. No matter what type of bulb it was, it would only last half as long or less than if you turned it off when you were not in the bathroom. You are like a lightbulb, and you need rest too, and not only do you not burn out as fast, but you actually re-energize yourself so that you may burn even brighter when you are on! Make use of resting in a peaceful spot during the day, sitting on a park bench, getting hugs, meditiation, deep breathing, going for a sauna, sunbathing, going to bed early, or yoga. You will find over time that your rest is very restful, and that your "on" time is very energetic and bright!

Sleep is not a waste of time! The sleeping brain and body do many important things, including regulating gastrointestinal, cardiovascular, and immune functions. Adequate sleep is especially important to hormone regulation. Lack of sleep creates hormonal imbalances that equate to metabolic disasters. It has even been shown in a ground-breaking study that after only a week of sleep deprivation, healthy, young men with no risk factor reached a pre-diabetic state. Why? Because without sleep, the central nervous system becomes more active, which inhibits the pancreas from producing enough insulin - an essential hormone that works to digest glucose, thus creating pre-diabetic blood sugar levels. Had the study's participants' sleep deprivation continued, as it does for so many people, these young men could well have turned diabetic, as so many young people currently are. So you can see, hormonal balance is very sensitive and very important, and it is extremely dependent on adequate sleep. To learn more about the importance of sleep, you can go to Day 30, Sleep and Insomnia.

Don't feel bad if you find you need more sleep than usual during the first part of your Juice Feast. You are only giving your body more time and energy to clean and repair house.

According to Sam Graci in his book The Food Connection, North America is the nation of the Great Un-Slept, being kept awake longer and longer by TV, telephones, electrical lights, the Internet, and e-mail.

Don't let this happen to you! Give yourself the gift of sleep and rest, and honor this amazing body you have been given! And remember, although sleep experts recommend eight and half hours of sleep per night, in the 1920's the average adult got nine to ten hours a night. And our ancient ancestors, following the rhythms of the sun and moon, got between ten and twelve hours of sleep. Again, don't feel bad if you are sleeping long hours; feel proud that you are doing something for your body that it desperately needs, especially if you are making up for years of inadequate sleep.

We recommend going to bed around the same time every night so that you can develop a healthy regular sleeping pattern. This will better ensure that you wake up at a regular time as well, probably without the use of an alarm clock (though make sure you do get up early enough to make your Juices!). Also, daily exercise is important to getting a good night's sleep. If you haven't yet, scroll back up this page and read the section on exercise. Make sure that you are sleeping in a completely dark room, as even the red light on an alarm clock will affect the delicate light-sensitive cells in our skin and thus our neurotransmitters that switch hormones "on" or "off." In nature, these light-sensitive cells would trigger the daytime hormones to be switched on during the light of day, and the night time hormones to be switched on during the dark of night. You do not want daytime hormones running around your body at night, thinking that there is still a bit of daylight because the red light on your alarm clock is keeping them activated. One easy solution for this is to throw a shirt over your clock. It is a good idea to turn off any electronics that share your sleeping space with you. For more, see Day 30: Sleep and Insomnia.

Remember, if you are hungry right before bed time and have another juice, make sure it is a green juice, not fruit juice, as the sugar in the fruit juice will keep you awake. The green juice will quiet you though, and send you into a nice peaceful sleep.

Sweet Dreams! You are going to love how deeply you sleep as the Juice Feast goes on!

Pssstt!! If it is midnight and you are still up reading this, time for bed!

Kitchen, Bath, and Body
Blood Sugar Monitors are one of the most empowering tools that we have access to in terms of self-diagnosis. After writing the recently released There is a Cure for Diabetes with Dr. Gabriel Cousens, David became acutely aware of just how important it is to keep one’s blood sugar at a healthy level. Chronically high blood sugar, even when it doesn’t develop into diabetes, causes all kinds of health challenges for people in their later years. It is now generally recognized that alzheimer’s disease, among other health complications, is due largely in part to high blood sugar levels.

There is no longer any reason to feel fear about high blood sugar, we know exactly how to get it down to normal levels with a low-glycemic, low-fat plant based diet. Also, on your Juice Feast, you are going to create the health habits necessary for a life time of healthy blood sugar. So, today or tomorrow, go out and get yourself a blood sugar monitor! They are very en-expensive, in fact today David and I saw one that was FREE after mailing in a rebate form. If you do not have the free option in your local drug store, you won’t have to spend more than $10-20 on a monitor with 10 test strips, which is all you need for our purposes. Where the company really makes money is by selling you more test strips, which are about $1 each!

When we test our blood sugar, we are going to be learning what amount of fruit juice will be most healing for us to add into our Juice Feast. If you are someone with a high FBS, for example, you will want to keep your fruit juice intake to a minimum. For someone with a normal FBS, you can drink up to two quarts of fruit juice per day.

Exercise
Looking for exercise that is not only tons of fun, but also very effective? Add in Rebounding! Who doesn't love jumping on a trampoline? Well, rebounding is just that accept you get your own personal mini trampoline. According to Nasa "Rebound exercise is the most efficient and effective form of exercise yet devised by man" That being said, it is the perfect "busy person" exercise, and according to rebounder manufacturers, 10 minutes of rebounding produces the same results as 30 minutes of jogging! I (Katrina) find it hard to bounce for only 10 minutes though, and have been known to jump around for over an hour. Our favorite rebounder is by far the Bellicon Rebounder, found here http://www.qibounding.com, but any rebounder will do the trick.

For a little video on how to properly rebound, see Sylvia’s “Pronating/Supinating” info and video clip.

You can bounce, jump, run on the spot, dance, do jumping jacks, wave your arms around, what ever you like really! All the while you will be improving your lymphatic flow, bone density, coordination, joint flexibility, muscle tone, vascular strength, and much more. Shazzie says about rebounding "As rebounding affects every single cell, muscle and organ all at the same time, your body quickly undergoes noticeable positive changes." Hooray. Like yoga and walking, rebounding can be implemented in the early days of your Feast, just be sure to listen to your body and give it the intensity of bouncing that it is happy with.

For a fun, old-school rebounding video follow this link and this one.


What’s Ahead

Tomorrow we will speak a little more about the importance of reading. We will also address skin brushing, shower filters, soap, and aloe vera gel. And we'll throw some strength training in there too!