Are Juice Fasts Safer Than Water Fasting?

If you’ve ever considered doing a fast for your health and even for your weight loss goals, then you may want to understand the potential dangers of doing a simple water fast before you go into it blindly.  Many people choose to do a water fast, thinking that it is the quickest way to get healthy again because they aren’t taking any form of nutrients in, and they aren’t taxing the body with any digestion demands as they would be in a juice type fast.

Well, actually, you may be doing more harm than good if you choose to do this type of fast where there are no natural sugars or nutrients being filtered into your body. The reason is, fasting in this manner is actually hugely taxing on your body.

You are essentially running on empty.  Yes, you are training your body on how to suppress hunger, but at the cost of potentially setting a slower metabolism for the future. Your body needs calories, nutrients and carbohydrates to run as fuel, and without them, your body goes through a pretty wicked transitional phase that can feel close to torture.

When you fast on freshly juiced vegetable and fruit juice, they provide you not only with the nutrients and vitamins you need, but they also provide much needed energy to get you and your brain through the taxing day.  Also, this sort of fasting is super easy on the digestive system, so you need not worry that you aren’t truly cleansing because you are taking in “food” of some sort. Juice fasts are actually deeply cleansing and beneficial, without the dangers and terrible discomfort of a water only fast.

All those natural enzymes and live nutrients are scrubbing and cleansing the digestive tract, probably way better than water would anyways.  Freshly sqeezed and purreed fruits and veggies also help move things along, so if you have any old waste, this gets shoved through the elimination tract.

Plus, when you water fast only, you are risking having a toxic overload, because the toxins in the body are actually eliminated too quickly, burdening the system, and creating very unpleasant side effects for you such as nausea, foggy thinking and a generally horrible demeanor since you have no nutrients or fuel in you system and your blood sugar is all out of whack.  I personally think that a juice fast is the way to go, no water fasts for me!