I am craving grapefruits...anybody have any experience with "fasting" on grapefruits for 2-3 days?
Thanks in advance!
Kerensa

Lovers don't finally meet somewhere...they are in each other all along
Rumi

-No, but I have fasted on other citrus for quite some time. It certainly is very cleansing, and will go a long way (in conjunction with healthy and loving practices) to speed detox. Strength to you!

-David Z. Mason

I go whole seasons on grapfruits or oranges, if it's what you want then go for it....

Have fun!!!

I start today!
So happy to have somewhere to "talk" to folks about my whims..lol.

Lovers don't finally meet somewhere...they are in each other all along
Rumi

wow that is great fruitarian one, only ornages for a whole season. What did you eat today?

I can go for a while on certain foods like bananas or watermelon, but it seems like if i eat too much citrus i start to feel acidified and need greens or need to switch to a different fruit. Maybe this is just a mental thing. David did you ever experience aversion to too much citrus before you were able to do this?

Love,
Uma

acified? you mean like PH? I don't think acid fruits do this. from what I hear bananas are actually very acid forming (as far as fruits go). citrus is one of those things that its really important to be 'close from the tree' I think.

I've heard people on this site talk about mono-diets. I'm guessing it means eat nothing but one food. I thought maybe it meant only vegetables or only fruit, but now I'm thinking it means one specific food. Such as, only grapefruit and nothing else.

So....here's my questions.

1. What is the purpose of going on a mono-diet?

2. Are certain mono-diets used for specific reasons? Such as one for cleansing, another for parasites, another for liver cleansing, etc.?

i am also curious in regards to adfinder's question.

when i was "anorexic" i "mono ate" melons. I stopped getting my periods, but i felt so clean and fresh and clear... moreso then i ever have. i went to the doctor and they gave me some blood tests and they all came back normal except my electrolite balance was off by two or something. not sure what that means? at what point is mono eating one fruit unhealthy instead of healthy? as great as cleansing is, at what point does the body end up lacking the nutrients it needs?

Uma:

I have gone one day eating only oranges and the next day I felt very nausiated. I picked the oranges fresh from the tree that day. the next day alls i did was drink water. i couldn't hang on just oranges.

The Fruitarian One Wrote:
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> I go whole seasons on grapfruits or oranges, if
> it's what you want then go for it....
Mono eating, seasonal eating, fruitarianims, and pretty soon breatharianism . Is there a deliberate attempt too look sensational or are people telling the truth on what their real diet is. In another thread it was written that NFL gurus do not practice what they teach.
There are no animals in the wild that mono eat or live on fruit alone or grape fruit for a whole season. These practices may be fine in the short run as a cleanser, the body can then feed on the reserve of nutrients lacking in the restrictive diet.

Kerensa: I haven't mono eaten grapefruit either, but I hope you'll try it and share your experience with us. I have had periods where I eat several a day when they are really sweet and not too acidic.

Mono eating can be for just a meal or for longer periods of time. Not combining a variety of foods at one meal can be very gentle on the digestion. Some people mono eat one thing as a fast. Others do it to break addictions to preferences for a variety of foods at each meal.

Breaking the conditioning a lot of us were taught as children for having the "right" amount daily from each of the "basic food groups pyramid" is important in my own process. That pyramid guide to eating was a marketing strategy invented by a governmental agency, the USDA, whose true responsibility is to promote the consumption of products grown by agri businesses like meat, dairy and grains through that simple mind-conditioning scheme.

Some fruits are very cleansing like citrus and watermelon, but may be difficult to meet your daily calorie needs over an extended period if you haven't conditioned yourself to eating the volume necessary to meet your daily energy needs. Your previous diet and state of health present a lot a variables as far as predicting what your experience might be.

I don't know exactly how long one can go eating one thing before it becomes necessary to acquire nutrients from other foods, but I have experienced water only fasts for up to 3 weeks with no overt detrimental symptoms, so I personally wouldn't worry about mono eating for that amount of time.

Jen: What you experienced with oranges may have been the release of toxins. From my own experience and what has been shared with me, when fasting or resting the digestive system the body uses the opportunity to do house cleaning and deal with moving out built up residues in the tissues. The body has an order of priorities for the allocation of its energies and digestion takes priority over detoxifying up to a certain point when critical mass is reached and the body rejects food, sometimes violently, in favor of the detox process.

The only undesirable effect I've experienced from mono eating was with an apple juice fast. My teeth became uncomfortably sensitive after several days.

The detox discomforts are desirabe to me and are a sign that what I'm doing is cleansing and beneficial. I try to remember to be grateful and see the bigger picture as improving my health and becoming a well-loved being. As a friend of mine says, "One thing God never gets too much of is a well-loved being." And that's where I try to keep my focus with my raw food diet experiences.

I had only oranges and freeshly squeezed orange juice for 2 weeks shortly after beginning raw last year. It was the best I've ever felt. I wish that I was strong/ dedicated enough to try this again.

If you go mono to detox, like on grapefruits, quite frankly do you nee to be able to go to the bathroom frequently, like on a lemonade cleanse? I am curious about cleanses, but my job would not make it feasible to have to run out a lot~Kate

This is where I think blindly following Graham creates a few problems. according to D.: "fruits don't cleanse. vegetables don't build". Most people on this forum it seems has had different experience.

eating LIGHTER will speed your detox eating DENSER or cooked and slow detox. eating simple or mono will ease digestion and therefore free up more energy for healing. If someone has cleansed and is healthy they can go for longer periods on a particular fruit, while going hardcore on the fruit will be intense/possibly detrimental for someone at a different level of healing IMO.

djatchi we don't always have to compare ourselves to a 'natural' paradigm. I think people on Grahams perspective are guilty of this as well.

kategreen: I've never done MC, there are many arguments against it, but also many people in support of it because they can continue with their work etc..like you require. I can only guess doing grapefruit-only would be not only different but pretty intense for you body and maybe even psycologically difficult to sustain.

there was a thread pretty recently about fasting/cleansing. Eating more fresh fruits and vegetables will serve as a detox/cleanse, removing dense and cooked foods entirely will speed this along. This type of approach I think would be superior to the MC.

Thanks, uti. that was totally insightful.

OK!
So, it's my second day of all grapefruits.
They are so delicious!
I think I am craving vitamin C or something...I could just eat these for days. I really felt like I was jettisoned into a detox...within a few hours yesterday I had a runny nose, and went back to sleep. NOT my hyper norm, lol.
Today, I felt kinda spacy, and had a (tmi) absolute bowel evacuation, and no smooth move tea or anything to make that happen.
Also, I have really let go of a ton of excess fluid in my body.
The dark circles under my eyes are already gone!!!
All this in around 60 hours!
Magic.
I think I may have some kale tonight, I am really wanting the bitterness of it.
Will report later!
I am wondering if maybe I should just grapefruit mono diet every weekend!
Peace,
Kerensa

Lovers don't finally meet somewhere...they are in each other all along
Rumi

anaken wrote:"This is where I think blindly following Graham creates a few problems. according to D.: "fruits don't cleanse. vegetables don't build". Most people on this forum it seems has had different experience."

Blindly misinterpreting what Doug Graham says can create problems as well. People are sharing their experience of cleansing while eating a simple fruit diet. According to Doug's perspective as much as I can tell (and Hygiene's in general), this is because the digestive load is lightened so the body has a chance to do some housecleaning. It's not the fruit in itself that does the cleansing. I don't remember hearing Doug say the 2nd part (about veggies) so I won't comment though I have an idea what he might have meant.

adfinder: thanks for asking. There have been several discussions recently on this board about mono-eating -- those of us who have been playing with it recently, talk of the benefits it can bring, reasons for doing it. Maybe you can do a search for mono. One day there might be a more organized archive where when someone asks a question that had been discussed recently (or a while back) we could direct the person to that section of the archives.

anaken: re my acidifying question, i'm not really sure what i mean. i guess i just start to feel weird after too much citrus and that's the word that comes to mind but i'm not sure if it's accurate. the feeling that i really want some greens or something to balance me out.

Love,
Uma

well, I wouldn't say I was blindly misinterpreting. I share the same belief about the cleansing taking place because of the lightness of the food in the absence of X with some addendum.

generally speaking a water fast would be more intense then a juice fast which is more intense than a whole food (mono diet) 'fast'.

but that isn't always the case. people can get all kind of weird symptoms from the act of eating the fruit (depending on their state of health) that wouldn't necessarily take place in the complete absence of food.

the citrus thing I think points to this issue. you can analyze using doug's own logic. is a feeling of being unbalanced a state of health? does an additional orange at that point increase health? If one feels fine eating 1200 calories form bananas but not 1200 calories from oranges, what would that be about? maybe using the terms: 'cleansing' 'more cleansing' etc isn't the most scientific explanation or semantic, but I think observation rules over science on this one.

correction: it was GREENS don't build - not vegetables.

I think my only point was that not all symptoms are a sign of healthy detox, which I think doug points out with the example of a high-fat raw diet. but there is quite a bit of myopia about the present condition of the human eating 'the ideal human diet'. and that jumping into a raw food diet through a grapefruit - mono 'cleanse' seems totally un-productive to me.

Perhaps it's just that oranges are more "cleansing"... not that they are magical but they are much juicier and lighter than bananas. I was surprised (after just having eating bananas for 10 days) how satiating they are. Maybe at this point citrus is too light for me to feel the same satiation or something, my body starts cleansing faster when that's all I've eaten and I get physically uncomfortable.

I don't know what the truth is. But the day I feel comfortable going a whole season on citrus, I will be in a different place!

Love,
Uma