COUNTDOWN PLAN
Before starting your chosen fast, I recommend that you spend at least a week cleaning up your eating habits. This is especially important if your current diet is less than optimal. The bigger the change in your eating habits, the more likely it is that you’ll experience some temporary side-effects when you first start fasting. The Countdown Plan will help you to ease your body into fasting gradually.
With this plan, instead of eating a morning breakfast, you break the fast around noon. All your meals are concentrated in a narrow window between 12pm and 8pm (or 1pm and 9pm). An alternative is to skip dinner and have a more substantial breakfast and morning snack. Since you’re skipping a meal and a snack every day, be aware that your portions need to be slightly bigger than they would be on a typical weight-loss plan.
On this fasting pattern, you eat normally for five days of the week, then on the remaining two days you limit your daily calorie intake to 500. To keep your eating plan as close to that followed in scientific trials, we recommend that you leave a 20-hour gap in between your last meal and lunch on the fasting days. So, for example, eat dinner at 5.30pm on Day 7 then wait until 2pm to have lunch on Day 1.
This plan (see page 182) consists of five juices and a broth, spread evenly throughout each day. Feel free to pick and choose your juice recipes to suit your own preferences – if you want to keep shopping to a minimum then stick to a core of four or five ingredients and rotate them. However, make sure that the vegetable intake is at least equal to the fruit intake. In this plan the morning juices are a little sweeter and the afternoon juices are more vegetable based. The warm juice in the evenings is designed to taste as much as possible like pudding!
The plan is set for five days, the maximum duration I would recommend anyone should attempt on their own. However, feel free to stop after a day or two. Juice fasts are often undertaken as part of a retreat where your day would typically include yoga, walks or gentle hikes in lovely scenery, spa treatments and some educational workshops – in other words, not amidst the hustle and bustle of daily life. For this reason, most people like to try a juice fast over a weekend when they can make time and space to enjoy it.
Juices are taken at regular intervals during the day rather than sipped throughout. This is mainly for practical purposes but it’s also better for your teeth. I’ve suggested a timetable below, but you can change it to fit your own schedule. A simple vegetable broth or miso soup is a perfect accompaniment to a juice fast – I like to sit down to a bowl of broth around 6pm during a juice day so it feels like I’m having dinner.
