Brown rice fast – day 10

This is really funny, yesterday I totally forgot to write my blogpost – about the last day of the rice fast! 😀 Maybe you can tell I was too excited at the prospect of starting to cook normal food again…

Yep, I just said it – the whole tenth day of the fast was just me focusing on the transition back to a regular macro diet. I must say that I was surprised though that until the very last day I managed to ENJOY my rice, especially in the form of the morning porridge, but even the regular rice, just with some gomasio and pickles. Yes, I did get bored and I did crave for some variety and especially for freshness and juiciness, but that doesn´t mean I started disliking rice…I was a bit afraid that might happen and that would be really sad because rice truly is the king of grains which I wish to love for the rest of my life. But luckily this went well – I still like rice, I just want to eat more than just rice from now on.

The discharge that the rice fast brought up was much milder than I expected, meaning that the rice fast is not a drastic measure to induce toxin flow out of your body… I did experience some minor aches and cramps in my middle organs (stomach, pancreas, spleen, liver), I did have some untypical bowel movements (both constipation and diarrhea),  some bigger skin breakouts than usual, some chest pain and quite a bit of mucus coming out from my sinuses. But none of that was very dramatic, just a bit unpleasant and annoying.

My mental state was for most of the time pretty calm and centered, with some slight depression at times, but also nothing really dramatic. What I felt more was general tightness, a bit like mentally shrinking, collapsing inwards. I must say I wasn´t very social during these ten days – I felt a much bigger urge to just stay at home, relax, do some light work, take a short walk or exercise, but nothing too exhausting. It was really a need to focus on myself and not interact too much with the outer world. I am really happy I didn´t have to go to town or to social meetings, except for some very few occasions which I handled just fine.

One of the best things that I learnt during the fast was chewing well – at first it was hell, resisting the urge to swallow and also my jaws hurt very much for a day or two, but then all improved. I stopped counting pretty quickly but I still paid a lot of attention to making my food liquid, I think.

I can´t say I´m absolutely thrilled by the results of the fast – I expected a bit more discharge and I also expected to feel and look really well after the ten days. Instead I am still kind of weak and tired and in the need of replenishing my energy.  And I am still discharging. I think it was not the very best idea to do this fast at this time of the year when energy in the environment is scarce and cannot support you. Also I would probably not feel so cold if I was doing this in a warmer time of the year.

But I don´t regret the experiment as it taught me a lot about myself, my eating habits, my real nutritional needs…I learnt to appreciate my food much more, chew my food better, I became better aware of the energy in the food. I think I finally stopped seeing food primarily as a source of sensory pleasure but more as a source of life energy and its manifestation in the complex web of nutrients it provides us with. So yes, I would do it again, and I probably will, when the weather gets warmer. I will probably eat not only rice, but also other grains, for example millet or barley.

Today I had my first bowl of miso soup, together with my rice porridge with gomasio and some olives and some fresh rucola. How exciting! Especially the freshness of the rucola was so wonderful! Now for lunch I´m gonna make adzuki beans with pumpkin (yes, pumpkiiiiiiin!), millet and probably some sauteed veg, can´t wait. I´m definitely not going to indulge in not-so-healthy meals for some time, at least for a week I want to be reeeeally careful…it´s a bit of a continuation of the fast actually, eating only very centered alkalizing foods 😀

 

Brown rice fast – day 9

Tomorrow is my last day, can you believe that?!? I can´t 😀

I really don´t know what to write anymore…today was remarkably uneventful…I was at home tidying and reading and making a new batch of gomasio, so I didn´t have to endure any cold or long walks as yesterday – on days like this fasting is really easy 😀

I must thank the rice fast for introducing me to long-cooked creamy rice porridges, I am hopelessly in love with them…especially with the mixed in goma shiso and umepaste…the perfect “morning cereal”. For lunch I had steamed rice with gomasio and takuan pickle and the same for dinner (but with salty pickles).

Tomorrow stay tuned for the wrap-up of this big experiment! I will definitely be fantasizing about what I´m gonna cook on Sunday!! 😀

Brown rice fast – day 8

Ok, this is getting old isn´t it? 😀 But – two more days to go!!

I am really looking forward to the end of this experiment, today has proved that it´s not the very best idea to be doing a rice fast when it´s a) cold, b) you need to be a little bit active. We went on a trip to Gouda to see a mutual friend and it was effing cooooold, windy and rainy!! I was literally freezing my butt off. Plus I feel the rice just isn´t giving me the energy I need for anything else than sitting quietly at home – perhaps the lack of protein? Of course, even rice, just as any other grain, contains some protein, but it´s not a complete protein like for example quinoa. I miss some good old beans…besides the veggies, of course. Oh and miso!! I am used to having miso soup once, often even twice a day, and miso is a real powerhouse of energy and also protein. I was hungry pretty much all day, as we were walking a lot, so I kept eating several times from my big tub of rice 😀

I did make very yummy supercreamy rice porridge for breakfast though! With goma shiso condiment and ume paste. For lunch and snacks cold rice, ick! And for dinner a teeeeny bit of leftover porridge, and as a main course oven-baked rice with tamari spray and some pickles – I needed something warming!!

It´s kind of hard, these very last days, as I am already thinking what I need to buy and what I want to cook on Sunday and the following days…I am soooo looking forward to vegetables, beans and miso soup! I need to take it really easy, to transition back to a normal macro diet without it being too big a shock.

One thing is for sure – a rice fast makes you appreciate even a simple but varied mb diet very, very, very much 🙂

Brown rice fast – day 7

Wow, already a week of eating brown rice! 😀 We´re coming to the end soon, my friends…

Today: creamy porridge with gomasio and umeboshi for breakfast (why oh why does the precious cream always have to escape from the unattended pot on the stove?? 😦 ), steamed rice with gomasio and takuan pickle for lunch and steamed rice with goma shiso and tekka and salty water pickles for dinner.

Yesterday evening and during part of the night I had a reeeeally strange intense tension in my chest, very unpleasant. Last night I also had a massive mucus attack which (together with some weird insomnia) kept me awake for about 4 hours, so I slept very little…what a night! :-p On the other hand I DID have some brilliant ideas concerning my future life, how to organize my macro business one day etc. so I had a lot of creative juices flowing 😀 But I admit that today I am a bit of a zombie and I certainly hope I sleep better this night… And please, no more mucus discharge from my sinuses, it is incredibly annoying! And yes, I know that I aimed for discharge during this fast…Oh, and in the morning I woke up with some cramps/tightness (again) in my middle area – stomach, pancreas, spleen, liver…all of that is very tender, not nice. Oh how I am looking forward to veggies…and PUMPKIN!!!!

Today the weather was sucky, grey with a lot of rain, so I didn´t even go out…I did a fair amount of reading at least… Tomorrow we are off to a trip to see a friend so I gotta bring a big tub of rice with me! 😀

Brown rice fast – day 6

Not much to report other than – 4 more days to go, yay!

I´m so used to the brown rice by now that it seems like there is nothing else to be eaten, ever 😀 I don´t actually mind preparing “normal” macro food for my boyfriend, which is really weird, right? The pickles miraculously give me quite enough of the fresh juicy feeling that I was craving…all hail the pickles! In the morning I had supercreamy porridge with an umeboshi and gomasio. For lunch I decided to try out dumplings made of a rice flour/water/salt mixture. I cooked them for about 45 minutes, yet they didn´t become nice and soft and fluffy inside as I was hoping 😦 Apparently you can´t make dumplings out of rice flour alone…they were actually quite horrible, even though I made a not too bad miso/kuzu sauce with them and added some little takuan pieces to garnish. Ok, no more experimenting with rice flour for me, it makes me feel all sticky and yucky inside…I did have an oven baked slice of mochi afterwards, sprayed with some tamari, and that was yummy, but then, mochi is a whole different story 😀 For dinner I had freshly cooked rice with salty pickles and gomasio, also very nice! YES, I am still able to appreciate the rice even after 6 days!

There´s not too much going on though, as  far as discharge goes, still the same old…My period is very very…insignificant, which is not too good, but it makes sense – the vital organs use the energy for healing, not the reproductive organs. My skin sucks still, let´s keep it at that 😀 I´m starting to wonder whether 10 days can be enough to really relieve me of my symptoms (at least for a big part), but I don´t want to go over the 10 day mark, as that is not generally recommended…let´s hope the next 4 days are meaningful!!

I made a bit of a habit out of my quick short walks around our little lake – I feel reeeeally restless being indoors all the time. I don´t get to go out shopping or seeing friends or anything, so I feel like a hermit 😀 It´s nice in a way, I really have the space to think about my life, my healing path, my plans for the future. But it´s also a bit lonely (at least when my boyfriend is at work during the day). I should be really grateful (and I am!) that I actually CAN do something like this, just fasting and being able to stay at home! 😀

 

Brown rice fast – day 5

Yay, half of my fast is behind me!! 5 more days to go! 😀

Today started out pretty bad – quite intense stomach cramps (plus some intestinal trouble), a sensation that my middle organs are really tight, depressed mood, increased feeling of being bored with the neverending rice, losing appetite…Oh and the horrendous skin breakouts intensified today 😦 The one overwhelming impression was : too tight/contracted/dry!! Not able to relax, with my mind spinning.

In the morning I attempted to make a rice cream out of brown rice flour (as written in Mme Riviere´s book “No.7 Diet” which is sort of a guidebook for the rice fast), but it came out extremely thin and watery, I can´t believe the recipe called for only 1 tablespoon per 1 cup of water…I might still try it once more with more flour mixed in, this way it was very much not appealing, so I had also some normal steamed rice with it. For lunch I made a soothing creamy porridge AND I had a few tiny pieces of takuan (daikon pickled in rice bran)!!! Mmmm, feeling again a vegetable in my mouth, though not fresh, was exciting. What a difference it makes! For dinner I had steamed rice with salty water pickles (daikon, carrot, cauliflower and broccoli), yummmmmy! I actually enjoyed my dinner.

The strange thing is that during the day everything calmed down – my stomach got ok, my skin got a little bit less inflamed and most of all my mood got stable again, I even had some important insights, finally! I started feeling content and not struggling with the fast so much anymore, whew! I hope this lasts till the end…There is DEFINITELY some icky elimination going on these days! I think what helped was that my (very late) period arrived, so more discharge, yippie! 😀

 

 

Brown rice fast – day 4

Yesterday evening my stomach and head were hurting after the oven-baked rice – either I just had a too big portion (very likely) or my stomach didn´t agree with the overly yang meal (baking+tamari+rice=very yang) or both. Anyway I found out that the baked rice, while the crispiness is generally nice, is too dry and contracting for me. In the morning today I was literally longing for a moist creamy rice porridge – I mixed my bowl of leftover rice with three cups of water and cooked it fairly long. The result was amazingly soothing and veeeery creamy, with a teaspoon of umepaste and a bit of gomasio, yum!! That will be my breakfast in the next days I am sure.  It also helped with the constipation problem 😀

For lunch I had steamed leftover rice and for dinner freshly cooked rice; with different types of gomasio (my homemade and a store-bought  one with added nori and shiso sprinkles) and also tekka (a condiment made from roasting miso with some root vegetables). I must say that today I had a bit of a crisis with cravings – I feel fed up with the rice, mostly because it´s so yang!! My pancreas is tight…I really want something juicy, preferrably a veggie 😦 I think tomorrow I might start adding some vegetable pickles…

This night/morning I had hardly any mucous discharge which was nice (yesterday it was really annoying), but since yesterday I am experiencing more skin breakouts – again yin coming out. My lips are dry and in general I feel thirsty, I´m trying to drink more…tonight I also made myself a special treat, chicory coffee!! I sleep hard lately, with a loooot of dreams and it´s a bit hard to wake up.

Today it was bright sunny weather and again I had an urge to move – so we went at least for a little walk to our park. It´s strange how sometimes it seems so easy to endure the 10 days and sometimes it´s sooo hard. Right now I feel not so motivated because I am not having any really dramatic discharge neither am I feeling amazingly great. Is that still coming? I want to feel the peaceful meditative state that people describe during the rice fasts but instead I´m kind of irritable, a little depressed, not so energetic or on the other hand restless and not knowing what to focus on. Well, maybe this IS the discharge I need 😀 Wondering what the next days will bring. My boyfriend is quitting the fast tonight so it´s gonna be a bit lonesome battle from now on. Almost a week to go.

Brown rice fast – day 2

 

Today I was feeling a little bit less tired and I had less tension in my head, yet my energy levels are still lower than usually. I did though have a bit of a restless feeling in the afternoon and a big urge to go outside (especially since there was sun shining at times), so I went for a quick walk into our park around the lake, which was really refreshing. Except that I feel quite cold even indoors, so outside I was nearly freezing 😀 I hope that the feeling of cold will subside in the next days of fasting. I feel less hungry than yesterday, which is good news! The bad news is that especially in the morning I had BIG trouble eating, because my jaw muscles hurt tremendously! It sounds funny but it actually ain´t funny! 😀 I had to massage my cheeks thoroughly and also during the eating process it got bearable, yet it´s my current biggest problem with this fast. Who would have thought…

I needed some variety today, so in the morning I added half an umeboshi to my usual bowl of rice with gomasio, for lunch I added a teaspoon of tamari and now for dinner I will bake the rice a bit in the oven 😀 I also prepared rice with an addition of 25% of sweet rice, mmmm!! Love that. Drinking a bit more than yesterday as I was a bit too thirsty – I don´t want to overdo it with minimizing the liquid.

There is one added bonus which surprised me a lot – my teeth feel extremely clean and even like polished! 🙂 Better than any toothpaste or dental treatment! That´s a side effect I didn´t expect, seems that the chewing of the whole grain works like a toothbrush taking away old plaque??

I do feel that the discharge is approaching…there is this “acid” feeling in my head, all the yin popping up…

Brown rice fast – day 1

Today is the start of my ten-day journey of accomplishing a brown rice cleanse/fast as per the recommendations of George Ohsawa, one of the pioneers, teachers and “grandfathers” of macrobiotics 😀 I was really looking forward to this fast because I wanted to experience a cleanse which is efficient, yet gentle and doable in the way that you are not depriving yourself totally of food…I can actually eat as much as I want, provided it´s a grain and I chew each mouthful at least 50 times. This is also called Ohsawa´s “no. 7” diet, which is a 100% grain-based diet. It has though several variations and levels of strictness, I am first starting with one of the most strict versions, that is consuming only brown rice and gomasio (or tamari, tekka and such condiments) and some roasted tea (today hojicha, but I think I will prefer the twig teas such as kukicha and genmaicha in the next days). Later on I plan to add some pickles and also some other grains so that I can transition back to a “normal” MB diet. But rice is the most cleansing grain, so I´m sticking to that one now – besides, it is my most favourite grain!

It saves me a lot of time spent in the kitchen, too 😀 In the morning I just made a huge pot (actually, pressure cooker) full of rice (4 cups of rice, as my boyfriend is fasting with me as well, at least for some time), and later on I just scooped some into a bowl or steamed it to reheat it a bit. I must admit that while I love the taste of the brown rice (especially with yummy homemade gomasio), I am already craving some soup or veggies 😀 But the cravings are not too bad – yet. I am sure it will get worse still…I just miss some freshness and variety of taste/structure/energy.

In the last days I was indulging, and yes, bingeing…knowing that I will soon be on a pretty strict regimen and that even afterwards I will have to come back to a more usual diet slowly, and perhaps I will want to maintain a more healing diet for weeks if not months. That thought made me eat stuff I normally avoid (especially since we lately went to eat out a lot, to all kinds of ethnic restaurants, which was all very tasty, but WAY too much oil, salt, spices, and even some small amounts of egg, dairy and sugar which you could not control, such as in sauces etc.). There is so much that I need to heal…IF this rice fast helps me improve my condition significantly, then I think I will be motivated to not slip so often to unhealthy food – that´s my theory at least 😀

The first day my impressions are mostly that it´s really long and tiring to chew each mouthful until the rice becomes liquid…Each time it took us one hour to finish a not too big bowl of rice!! I was first counting, but then I found out it´s easier to just always chew until I get the required porridge-like texture of the content of my mouth. I was fascinated to observe how much saliva my mouth can produce! 😀 Also I can confirm that rice really becomes sweet when chewed long. But man, do my jaws hurt from all the exercise!! I think at the end of this fast my jaw muscles will be made of steel…

In the morning I woke up with a lot of mucus coming out after the last indulgent days…congested nose and headache and sneezing and runny eyes…All day I am having a headache and a general tension in my head, plus I feel tired, but that is just the start of the discharge :-p And I would probably feel like that anyway, even without the fast, as my discharge mechanisms are quite strong. But I am expecting to experience still some more dramatic effects in time…

Well, eating just rice definitely makes me hungry after a few hours (and we were just home lazy all day!), so I am already looking forward to dinner! 😀