Eat To Live Diet

I thought that the Eat to Live Diet (Dr. Joel Fuhrman) would be sort of tasteless.  I was determined to improve my health, so I believe that I needed his delicious 4 and 5 star recipes to assure my success.  I had read his earlier edition of this book years before, but I was not committed to join his diet at the time.  However, with my high blood pressure, chest pains, obesity, lack of energy, aches and pains and huge sudden weight gains, not to mention a probable coming bout with diabetes, I was desperate to save my health.  I joined his website to get his daily emails of new and tasty recipes, so I could enjoy what I thought would be bland tasting foods: veggies, beans, fruits, plain old water and uncooked nuts.  Surely, I would need a whole arsenal of tasty ideas to survive with this diet. 

On January 15 th. 2012, I started reading Dr. Joel Fuhrman’s 2^nd edition book, “Eat to Live”.  My diet changed daily with the knowledge that I was absorbing from this book.  By the time that I got to the diet plan section (Chapter 9), I had already been on his diet for weeks.  When I finished the book, I had just got a second book of his that he had written in 1995, “Fasting and Eating for Health, a Medical Doctor‘s Program for Conquering Disease”.  I understood from the book that an eleven day water fast could permanently correct my blood pressure.  As quick as I could, I read this book to start my own 11 day water fast.  The book cautioned and warned about fasting without a doctor.  I didn’t have the money to afford a doctor’s supervision and didn’t know any that would help in this way anyway, so I tried a water fast on my own,  yet only to have hearth palpitations on day three.  I quickly stop the fast with a glass of vegetable juice to boost back up my potassium levels (something that I had read in the book).  I was still determine to try fasting again, but needed to figure out what went wrong.  I keep reading his book on fasting and also going online to help discover what had gone wrong.   What went wrong was my worry of my high blood pressure and taking its readings during the fast.  When I found it getting higher during the early part of the fast (day 2), I took my high blood pressure medicine.  This medicine, I found out online, can cause potassium levels in the body to decrease.  Your heart needs potassium to fire correctly its electrical jolts for its muscles.  After being fully convinced that this was the cause of the heart palpitations, I started back on the water fast.  This time, I ignored the slowly increasing high blood pressure, believing it would subside further into the fast.  It did.  After eleven days, I broke the fast with a small piece of watermelon and then oranges.  I do not advise anyone doing a water fast without their doctor, for it can be dangerous.  

To be continued in the next post...

This is a post by: Hubby Stephen