Day 3

I had a minor melt down yesterday.  I was supper crabby towards Kong last night.  I wasn't feeling hungry, just everything he did bothered me.  Not sure what happened. 

I lost 2 more pounds.  In two days I have lost a total of 6 pounds.  I am certain this is not a sustainable rate.  That said I feel great, have not had cravings, and have a ton of energy.

I have been asked by a lot of people why I am doing this.  Compared to most people I eat a healthy diet and I exercise.  It may help if people understood my history.

I developed an autoimmune disease affecting my kidneys when I was just 16.  With kidney disease you feel absolutely normal until you go into failure so for many years I lived as if I had no issue.

When I was 29 I became pregnant with Ayden.  Though I had no complications with my first pregnancy, my second one was a different story.  I was pre-eclamptic, Ayden had issues with her heart, and I delivered prematurely.  After the delivery the doctors told me I would go into kidney failure within six months.

I was put on high dosages of perdinsone (steriod), cellcept, and a whole host of other drugs that made me toxic.  I became very ill and when I almost lost hope, through God's grace, I found my way to natural healing.  I started acupuncture, homeopathic remedies and changed my diet (cut out red meats and processed foods).  I started to get better.  After two year of natural healing my kidney disease went into remission.  A rare case as only 20% of people with my condition go into remission.  The doctors attributed it to their medicine but I knew better.  I was on to something.

Fast forward 8 years later.  I am nearly medication free but I am over weight (clinically obese really) despite a vegan diet and regular exercise.  I have a resting heart beat of 45 beats per minute.  Based on my physical appearance this was an early sign of heart disease.  After putting me through a number of heart tests and making me run on a treadmill, they determined they were wrong.  It seemed the low heart beat was a sign of a healthy heart.  A medical anomaly really.

So what's the problem?  If I am healthy, why am I so grossly over weight?

For many years I asked the question of when I would return to my normal self.  I just knew and felt like things had been forever changed in my cells after the medication.  Then I met a natural path doctor who confirmed what I had been thinking and explained to me why this is.  Ah yes, the universe was finally lining everything up for me.

First and foremost, a diet of meat and white rice for the majority of my child hood was probably what wrecked havoc on my body.  Although my family cooked traditional Hmong food, I rarely ate vegetables or fruits.  Add on years of working in my family's restaurant drinking coke as my only source of fluid intake and eating high sodium, high MSG food and presto, you have a body that is so thrown out of wack that it no longer knows how to regulate itself.

It's no wonder that I can hit the gym for an hour, practice martial arts for an hour, play tennis for 1.5 hours, and bike 10 miles in a day and still only maintain my weight.  It's no wonder that I cut out meats, dairy and processed foods and only lose 20 pounds to come down from being obese to greatly over weight.  So what to do?  Heal my body at the cellular level.  Infuse my body with a concentration of plant nutrients so that my cells heal.  Re-teach my body how to do what it is suppose to do.

So far, in the days that I have been juicing, I have noticed that I sweat profusely when I work out.  This is a big deal.  I rarely broke a sweat for the first 30 years of my life.  I kid you not.  Your skin is the largest organ you have.  If it doesn't function normally, you can't excrete the toxins you build up inside your body. 

I don't expect that after the cleanse I will be "cured".  I know that this is a life style change.  No going back to eating meats, foods high in fat and calories, or foods that are processed.  No dairy, no sugar, no glutens.  If I want to live life to its fullest I will need to rethink how I look at food.

Resources/Documentaries that helped me move to this way of thinking:
Forks Over Knives
Super Size Me
Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead
Food Inc
Hungry for Change
My MD brother-in-law and sister-in-law (who also went vegan and started juicing)  Their story is amazing.