Day 26 - Are Low Carb Fruits The Key?

Hi, Tim here with my Day 26 update.

For those who haven't seen previous videos, I am releasing a video every day of my juice fast. I am attempting to lose a total of 32 kilograms, which is around 70 pounds, in a 56 day juice fast. So today is Day 26, and my 26th video about the whole process. So feel free to look at my other videos and go back and see how I went on a particular day.

The reason that I'm doing this very day - a couple of reasons I guess. Reason #1 is for self motivation. I am pushing myself by getting myself out there in the public spectrum. I'm to a large degree forcing myself to stay on it, even though I'm not really finding it a hard thing to do. But early on I thought it was important to make sure I wasn't going to give up after a few days. Being out there, people are hopefully more inclined to be watching what I'm doing and hopefully encouraging me, and that certainly works so far. I am getting more and more people following what I am doing, leaving comments. And look, those comments are inspiring me as well. So please do click that Like button and leave some comments. It helps me on my journey, and hopefully other people down the track who are watching these videos, they can look at the videos or read the comments, and they are actually going to be enthused by this process as well.

So, overnight, or since yesterday, I lost .2 kg, which is around 1/2 pound, bringing my total weight loss to a total of 12.3kg (27 pounds). So everything is still going good. As I said before in previous videos, I have lost weight every single day since I started my juice fast. There you go, pretty amazing isn't it!

Now, as promised I wanted to talk about a couple of things: about water first. If you are on a juice fast, are you drinking enough water? Because you need to be drinking quite a bit of water. The thing with water is that people can survive for weeks without food, but you can't survive for more than up to 10 days at the most without water. Water is realy the essential thing in our body, and as we grow up and get older and become adults, we are not able to figure out in most cases when we are thirsty. Particularly when you're overweight. It's very, very common for overweight people to confuse thirst with hunger. That's one of the things now that I'm finding with this juice fast, is that I'm now getting a better idea of what hunger is, and I'm not actually experiencing hunger very often.

I get a little bit of minor: "Oh, it would be nice to eat" but before this when I was eating the wrong types of food, the fast foods, I would go very much: "Oh, I have to eat this now" - an urgent type thing. And, let's face it, it was an addiction. It was the sugars, and the trans fats, and and other unhealthy stuff they were putting into those foods, which was basically what my body was addicted to, I was addicted to. And now that I've gone onto a juice fast I'm not getting those anymore.

So I'm clearer now on what my feeling of thirst is, and consequently I'm drinking plenty of this stuff: water. So I suggest you do that. It's very very important to be doing that. Now, it's not just drinking water, but obviously the types of food you eat will affect your dehydration, whether you are dehydrated or not.

Here are a few stats of a few low carb vegetables, cucumber 96% water, celery 94%, spinach 92%, carrot 90% and apples 85%. Just a rough idea there. So you see that's one of the reasons why juice fasts are good for you, because those fruits and vegies that I have just read out are key components of a juice fast, and they have got lots of water in them. So you are helping by drinking that.

But don't think that just because you're juicing (if you are following along) that that's enough. You need to have quite a bit of water. I'm having one to two litres a day, plus. I'm really quite drinking a lot.

I'm not gulping it down. What I do is use about a 500ml glass of water (17 fluid ounces), and I'm filling one of those up and drinking it over time. I think that's a lot better than gulping it down and thinking, well, I've only got two times in this day available, I'm going to scull 500mls at a time. Rather, it's better to sip it over the course of a day.

Now the other thing that I wanted to talk about, I have been meaning to talk about this for quite some time, is alkalis. The body ranges between acidic and alkaline. Basically sick people are traditionally almost always very acidic. I'm talking about the pH level in your blood.

Note: Warning: I am NOT a Doctor! You need to do your own research to back this up.

Now the thing is generally speaking the scale of pH in your blood between 7.25 and 7.45. A very small range.

In fact if your blood pH level goes below 6, or above 8, you can actually die from organ failure. So, consequently your body is doing all this automatically. It's trying to maintain that healthy level, keeping you alive basically. So the more bad foods you put in your body, you're lowering it to a more acidic state, causing dramatic problems in your body, because it has to over-compensate and try work out how to deal with this more acidic food. It has to find a way to deal with it basically. It might rob Peter to pay Paul, so to speak. To keep you alive it might have to damage another part of your body. That's how it works, because the pH level is so critical to be maintained.

By the way, pH level, if you have a swimming pool and you check your pH level - same sort of level, but we're talking obviously about your bloodstream here.

Anyway, as I said, the body tries to do anything it can to maintain that level, and whatever you eat and drink can affect that. As I said, sick people generally are very acidic. They are very low on the pH scale. The better and more fit that you are, the more alkaline (in general) that you are.

Generally speaking, if you believe in the alkaline diet, that is promoting for you to eat more alkaline food, foods with high amount of alkali in it. Because the theory is that "alkaline equals healthy", generally. So if you're putting more of that type of food into your body, your body is liking that and it is actually doing good for your body.

So that's the theory. I guess it's probably more important when you're overweight, and unfit, and/or unwell. Because you probably naturally are down the scale, being more acidic. So consequently you probably need more alkaline stuff. So just to give you and idea, some of the best alkaline type foods, avocado, which unfortunately don't juice too well, lemon and lime, which I have talked about before, tomato. They are also very high in alkali, lots of alkali in them basically. Even a typical apple juice recipe has some alkai in it. Kale is very good, and soy sprouts, just to give you a bit of an example. And there are lots of other ones. ANd you can find websites online that give you a good range of what these things are.

Lemon and lime, low carb fruits that I have talked quite a bit about before. Some of the other ones, which you might be interested to know, are highly acidic. Very, very highly acidic, very bad for you. Basically what they do when juicing vegetables of these types, they basically shock your body. So that response, that upper you're feeling when you have coffee or tea (especially when you haven't had it for a while) that is like a jolt. Your body is getting a negative jolt of acidic.

Incidentally herbal tea is actually better. It's in the middle. It's just a little bit alkaline. It's certainly a lot better than normal tea/coffee. But ideally it is probably better to be skipping those all the time. Did you know that most breads and dairy are acidic? Meat is acidic as well. Soft drink and fruit juice that you buy from your grocer or supermarket are very acidic normally as well.

But the message here I think is balance. Overweight people, certainly in my case, I can't speak for you, but I can speak for myself, I was eating very unhealthy foods. All those foods on the lists, the bad lists. Lots of dairy, I've always been a dairy person. Lots of breads and meats and so forth - all very acidic. So consequently, not only was I packing on all the kilos, but also it was very unhealthy for my body as well.

So I'm just thinking with the juice fast, the reason I'm using lots of lemon and lime and some of those other things where I can, where I can find them, is that it's actually pumping in good stuff and they are also the best detox juics. Not only am I getting the benefits of a traditional juice fast anyway, I am still putting in food that is very healthy, but I'm also getting an added bonus of the extra alkali.

And please don't think I'm saying that you shouldn't be eating any acidic type food, because that's certainly not the message. The research that I have done doesn't say that. But it talks about a balance, and it talks about increasing the use of alkali foods. We're not talking about getting rid of, permanently, bread and dairy and meats, although probably not a bad thing to do that if you can, and I am certainly going to consider if I can do that if I can at the end of the 56 days, but it's more a balance.

I think generally in the alkaline diets you see promoted on the internet, I think they are about 70/30. 70% of the stuff you eat should be alkaline. Because the body can obviously still use those things. Obviously meat has got a really good source of protein. So you don't necessarily want to get rid of meat, unless you are a vegetarian and you don't eat meat. Fish has got very good protein but it is still acidic. So it's that balance. You would probably be able to counter that by having a salad and having lots of greens with your meat, or whatever your main dish is, or your fish.

And by the way, the ones I mentioned, the lemons and limes and avocadoes, they give your body the most alkaline input than any of the other fruits and vegetables as well as being part of the low carb fruits group. There are still other ones on a sliding scale that can still help you, but just not on the range, not as much as those foods do.

And obviously some other foods are very healthy, grapefruit for example is not high in alkali, in fact it's slightly acidic, but it has got other benefits as well. Again I'm not focusing on alkaline only. That would be a mistake. Because that's not a balance. We are trying to balance what we're eating here.

And looking back at what you've eaten in the past, if you are like me, you have probably had very, very little alkaline based food. Because basically nothing in junk food is alkaline. No surprises there! It's all acidic and bad for you. Coffee, if you're like me. Softdrinks, diet sodas - very, very high in acid, very acidic. So very bad for you basically.

Alright, well I just wanted to go through and mention that. I have been trying to get the chance to do that for a few days. And I hope that helped. And I will be back tomorrow for my Day 27 update.

Thanks for watching, and I will talk to you then. Cheers for now.

You can watch a high definition version of this Low Carb Fruits here if you wish.