Juice Feasting™ | The Preparation Course
The Juice Feasting Bath & Body Works
A major feature of Juice Feasting is re-establishing your connection with your body. You may have felt for a while like your body is something separate from YOU, that your body does what it wants, and you do what you want, and there is a tenuous relationship of misadventure with your body.
But Juice Feasting is going to re-establish that relationship in an constellation of ways and means. From the Juices you make with produce your body will clearly tell you it wants, to doing mindful movements, to the Morning Practices and getting deeper, earlier sleep, you and your body are about to reunify like old best friends.
Your body is the foundation of your life on earth, and the more you love it, the more it will love you back with joyful, healthy feelings. Most Juice Feasters find they feel better and more connected in their body/mind than they have in their adult life. I never get tired of hearing that from clients!
Beyond feeding your body well, here are some of our most skillful, accessible, straightforward means of loving up our bodies on the bathroom side of things while Juice Feasting.
Tongue Scraper: Stainless Steel
Oral hygiene is really important to keep in mind not only in the morning, but throughout the day. Even your Green Vegetable Juices are a about 60% carbohydrate, so you can get a coating of plaque in your mouth if you do not rinse after drinking juice.
You are going to want to use a Stainless Steel Tongue Scraper. During any cleanse, you will often find a yellow or white coating on your tongue, which many cleansing professionals over the years consider a reflection of your bowel toxicity. You may want to take your tongue scraper with you to work if that coating returns during the day.
Dr. Richard Anderson, in his excellent book Cleanse and Purify Thyself, has this to say about the tongue during a cleanse:
Many people notice that as they cleanse, their tongues turn whitish-gray and filmy, and the breath becomes more and more foul. This reflects what is happening in the digestive canal. As they drink fresh juice, mucoid layers will soften, and so they may notice that the abdomen swells. As more and more mucoid layers are removed, the swelling goes down, the tongue gradually becomes clearer, and the breath improves. This is a good gauge as to how clean a person is becoming, for when you are totally clean, the tongue will be shiny red (just like a newborn baby’s). It will be free of all whiteness or film, and the breath will be sweet (unless we eat onions or garlic).
Another question is brushing teeth. I like to use a capful of 3% hydrogen peroxide during a Juice Feast (do not swallow Hydrogen Peroxide – just swish and brush and rinse), or a little Baking Soda (sodium bicarbonate – NOT Baking Powder!) on my toothbrush. Both freshen your breath and do not have the taste of anything that might remind you of food. Also, many toothpastes have things in them you would rather not inject anyhow.
For much, much more on oral hygiene and Biological Dentistry, including important information and research on Root Canals, Mercury Fillings, and Fluoride, see Day 44: Biological Dentistry and Teeth in The 92-Day Juice Feasting Program.
Skin Brushing
As discussed in A Day in the Life of a Juice Feaster, before you get into the shower each morning, you will use a dry skin brush for just 90 seconds to support your organs of elimination. At first, it may be a little scratchy, but give it a few days, you will come to crave it! One of the best statements on skin brushing comes from Dr. Jensen’s Guide to Better Bowel Care:
“Your daily regimen should begin with skin brushing for a period of two to three minutes. We believe skin brushing is one of the finest of all “baths.” No soap can wash the skin as clean as the new skin that you have under the old. You make a new top layer of skin every twenty-four hours. Skin brushing removes the old top layer and lets this clean new layer come to the surface.”
The skin is one of the five main elimination channels of the body, throwing off about two pounds of toxic material each day in the form of perspiration. The skin has been called the third kidney because of its ability to rid the body of toxic waste material. Do not hinder the skin by using oils, cremes, or other noxious glop that serves only to clog it in the name of beauty. Instead, see what regular skin brushing can do for you.
Skin brushing is accomplished using a natural-bristle brush with a long handle to reach those hard-to-get-at places. The whole body (except the face) should be brushed one-half hour after rising and prior to the morning bath or shower. You may wish to skin brush again before retiring for the night. Note the powder that comes off your skin as you brush. These are crystals of uric acid and other dried waste products that came out with the perspiration.
Always brush the skin when it is dry, and never expose the brush to water. Although the bristles may seem a bit stiff at first, this is because the brush is new and your skin is not yet used to the brushing. If you find the brush is too stiff, you may, just once, hold the bristles in hot water for no longer than one minute and no deeper than one-half inch. This will soften the bristles a little. However, it will not be long before you desire a stiffer brush! Your skin will love you for brushing it regularly, and you will love the way your skin feels and looks, too.
This is a great life practice! Please continue to skin brush each morning after the Juice Feast!
Most tap water is loaded with chlorine, heavy metals, fluoride, and microorganisms. Being that your skin “eats” what ever it comes into contact with, it is wise to install a shower filter in most major cities.
Chlorine is probably the most damaging chemical of them all, funny, because it is put in our water to “protect” us from other nasties such as harmful bacteria. Chlorine can seriously affect your health when absorbed over a long period of time. When you are in a hot shower, you are not just absorbing it through your skin, but into your lungs as well through steam. Chlorine has been linked to many types of cancers, as well as allergic reactions, anemia, atherosclerosis, and heart disease. Chlorine also has adverse effects on skin and hair because it destroys proteins, thus damaging the proteins of your skin and hair.
Once you have installed this 12-Stage shower filter, you will notice that smoother, itch-free skin replaces dry and itchy skin. Your hair will become softer, smoother, and stronger too as chlorine is no longer stripping it of its vitality. Eye irritation can also disappear.
And, you can fill your Enema Kit with water right out of the shower head, making your Morning Practices that much easier and efficient.
An enema kit is very, very important. Have you ever heard the phrase, “Nature abhors a vacuum?” It does, and as your bowel empties out of years-old fecal matter and childhood toys that were left up in there, every cell in your body gets the message that it, too can release old waste and move it to the bowel for elimination. You do not want to slow the progress of old matter leaving your body. Doing so by not doing enemas, or any of the other aids to elimination will ensure a back-up and re-absorption of old toxic matter that will make you feel weak, and ill. The Juice Feast is designed to nearly eliminate this possibility, provided that you do the necessary things.
You want to do an enema as part of your Morning Practices because your body has done a lot of work processing stuff during the night that is ready for release. You do not want to carry this stuff around any longer than necessary. Doing an enema in the morning will be a great boost to your energy level, and to the efficiency of the cleansing aspect of the Juice Feast.
To learn how to do an enema, please see A Day in the Life of a Juice Feaster in the Prep Course.
Once you have completed your Juice Feast, your enema kit will still be a great addition to your bathroom. We also like to take one with us when we travel. The Kit we have linked for you comes with 2 Travel enema kits. Sitting for long hours is often involved with travel and this tends to lead to constipation, which can bring on undesirable side affects such as headaches, irritability, low energy, bloating, etc. If you do find yourself constipated at your location of destination, just pull out your trusty enema kit, find a quiet bathroom, and soon you will feel fresh as a daisy. :)
Don’t worry about this one! Soon doing an enema will be a healthy life practice that is easy to do, which you can access when the need arises. For many people, having this practice as an option in their health toolkit has has been significantly life changing.
Even though you start to smell sweeter and sweeter the longer you cleanse, we still like a little soap once in awhile. What we find we don’t have a need for is deodorant, we just don’t use it. It is wonderful to not need it, and a bonus that we are not using a plastic packaged, often chemical laced product. If you are using a run of the mill, drug store deodorant, this is when you can leave that one behind. Look into getting a natural crystal deodorant or some equivalent from your local health food store.
Dr. Bronner’s Soap is our favorite soap for many reasons. It suds, it gets you squeaky clean, it comes in re-fill-able 100% post-consumer recycled bottles, it has no chemical additives, no animal products, and no synthetic ingredients, it is all 100% organic, and the label is always there to remind us that “We’re all one or none.” It is the only cosmetic we need! If you don’t count sleep, raw foods, and exercise that is.
Take your pick of Almond, Peppermint, Eucalyptus, Baby-Mild, Tea Tree, or Lavender. All come in either liquid form or in bar form. Our favorite is the Liquid Peppermint, which really does make you feel minty and clean, watch out! It is great on a hot day or after a hot yoga class, as peppermint has a mild cooling action.
Cold-Pressed Coconut Oil has been used as a food and a medicine since the dawn of history. Ayurveda (the medicine of India) has long advocated its therapeutic and cosmetic properties.
For use as a skin moisturizer, nothing compares to coconut oil. It not only makes you smell and taste good, like a tropical beach, but it prevents stretch marks, heals existing ones, has antiseptic elements that keep the skin young and healthy, and relatively free from infections. We also use it as a lip balm if our lips get parched and cracked from too much sun and dry heat, or cold and icy wind. It will make your lips very yummy and inviting! It makes a great erotic oil as well, provided you do not put it on latex. Thinking of giving or receiving a massage? Bring out the coconut oil!
Use coconut oil for your enemas, because it acts as an anti-microbial, anti-bacterial, anti-fungal agent, and is very resistant to rancidity, as opposed to olive oil or sesame oil, which are commonly used for enemas, but tend to photoxidize and go rancid. Stick with coconut for your enemas.
I (Katrina) have used coconut oil several times to aid in the rapid healing of some epic scrapes and cuts. I can’t imagine being with out coconut oil now. It is a multi-purpose wonder oil.
For more on eating coconut oil, please see the Supplements and Superfoods section here in the Juice Feasting Prep Course.
And on Day 18 of The 92-Day Juice Feasting Program, we go deep on Coconuts for Health and Healing. Enjoy!
This is for Oil Pulling. This is perhaps the most important oral health practice you have never encountered. At this early time in the morning, you have had your water, and are about to sweep into the bathroom and do a few things – let’s make the most of your time.
Oil pulling is also known as Oil Swishing. Have you ever used a Water Pic? The idea is that the water goes in between your gums and your teeth – up in the pockets where dental floss can’t reach – and removes bacteria that cause tooth decay. But some of those bacteria are best removed with fats, not water.
So, a very effective practice is swishing Sesame Oil, Olive Oil, or Coconut Oil in your mouth – without swallowing the oil – for 20 minutes. Yes, you will swallow a tiny amount of saliva – but you don’t swallow the oil.
What this 20 minutes achieves is deep pulling of bacteria from the pockets between your gums and your teeth.
Benefits? I was skeptical of this practice at first. I watched the interwebs for the experience of others, and did the practice myself. The preponderance of evidence on this practice is that it significantly reduces or eliminates gingivitis, whitens teeth, helps loose teeth to harden up, and reverses small dental caries.
This is well worth doing. Our favorite oil to use is Sesame, but people also experience huge benefits from using Coconut Oil. Both have a nice flavor and are very soothing. Simply put a Tablespoon of Sesame Oil on the spoon, place it in your mouth, and swish while you are doing the next Morning Practices in the bathroom.
Aloe Vera Gel (Organic)
As with coconut oil, Organic Aloe Vera Gel can be used both internally and externally. For the external use, organic gel is fantastic when we don’t have any fresh aloe leaves on hand. Putting aloe on your face is like getting a face-lift, and you will actually feel your skin pulling tighter and firmer. I (Katrina) like to put aloe on my face at night before bed, and then allow it to do its magic while I am sleeping.
The legendary beauty of Cleopatra is sometimes attributed to the practice of massaging fresh aloe vera gel onto her skin every day. It is great for relief from sunburn, skin blemishes (zits or detox breakouts), cold sores and rashes. Aloe is very high in MSM, and for this reason works as an amazing anti-inflammatory, making it the best sunburn and burn relief ever. It also makes an excellent shaving gel for both men and women.
If you are using fresh aloe leaves, you can slice them lengthwise to access the healing gel inside to use as lotion or in your juices. David Wolfe suggests using fresh aloe blended with orange juice as a wonderful beauty tonic.
We’ve posted some beautiful pictures and peroxide use info above, and if you’re ordering online, its a great product.
But all you need 3% Hydrogen Peroxide from the drug store – the stuff in the brown bottle. You can brush your teeth with it and put your toothbrush in it when you are not using it.
Peroxide is great for rinsing your mouth.
And perhaps most important during your Juice Feast – you can soak your Nut Mylk Bag in it that you are using for making juices with your high speed blender. Please, please, please do this.
Just rinsing your Bags in water will not do it long-term. Once a week, just pour some 3% Hydrogen Peroxide in a glass or bowl, and submerse your nut mylk bag in there entirely. It will probably foam up, which tells you that anaerobic bacteria are being taken out. That is a good thing, and key to keeping your digestive system happy for the duration of your Juice Feast!
