Hiya everybody - I'm starting today too. I can't tell you how many times I've "started" over the years, only to cave in sometimes that day, otherwise on Day 3 or 4 or 5. Isn't it simply WONDERFUL we have this support forum? I discovered it yesterday and suddenly it seemed as though what's always been psychologically impossible becomes...possible! Perhaps easy! I had a bad experience earlier this year - I was really ready for a long fast (like three months) and got in with this website business called Fasting International where you pay a huge amount of money for what is promised to be and touted as support; after you pays yer money, you find out the person running it is a pompous priggish really really nasty and megalomaniacal jerk, to put it mildly (you don't get contact with other fasters, just copies of their email to him and his to them) - it was so unsupportive both in tone/ content, and environment and the "support" was in the form of slogans and catchphrases trotted out just the same for everybody (obsessive use of your first name, even if you don't like that, obsessive calling you "dear", "friend", etc. - depending on whether you're male or female) - besides, the Science of it is so highly questionable: the site supported fasting on cooked bottled juices, as long as they were so strained not a single strain of pulp got through or nothing about the fast would supposedly work - it was completely dictatorial and "guru"-y in a most unhealthy sense - I'm afraid it must put many people off fasting, as it did me - in fact, the person is so nasty I bet he sends a lot of people to a binge, and also gives veganism, which this person _supposedly_ espouses, a bad rep! Anyway, isn't this so much friendlier and healthy in spirit - we can help and encourage one another, without stock phrases and plastered facial expressions, but real concern - we're not paying one another to act as if we care - we really do care. At all events, I care about all of you out there doing this with me - I was lying in bed this morning with a sinking feeling, thinking "Yoou can do this - someone out there in the world is doing the exact same thing as you today" - and you know what? It helps. We so creepily and insidiously believe the limitations and internalize the crippled, clipped-wing belief systems of those around us, those we come in contact with during the day or have been "reared by", that we need to pinch ourselves into feeling and seeking the real community of people who are not bound by such despondent desperate life-visions (and self-visions and health-visions). So here we are. I'm grandiosely setting out to go for as long as I can, hoping that's forever - addicted as I am to (vegan) food, I'm - so - sick of it, you know what I mean? (Tell me I said that later this afternoon, okay?!!!) Anyway I want to go until I'm not sick of food, because it becomes a healthy life-supportive thing not a torment. I feed by bottle orphaned baby kittens and it's amazing for me to see how healthy their attitude to food is - I mean, how healthy food is for them - how healthy it is for them to eat (healthy=eat, in orphan kitten land!). I can't imagine that being so for me, however many health regime dietaries I've tried to get into.

I'd like to lose weight, not least in my face but also body as the weather's getting warmer and it's getting less feasible to walk around in a jacket! I'd really like to have a nice complexion - it doesn't seem to respond to any amount of algae-taking, etc. - all that stuff, you know. A healthy glow around the eyes and lips and skin would be awesome, wouldn't it? I'd like to soothe my GI tract so that I could eat an apricot without digestive extreme insult. And oh I'd like so much to clear my mind and have a happiness just in living - not in doing anything or being anything, just in being alive! Not unhappy all the time from toxins and dirty blood and undernutrition - and, of course, the chronic sense of failure and lack of worth that comes when we never manage to do something like this.

I'm doing my own "spin" - using fresh organic lemons, raw organic agave nectar which has a very low glycaemic index, and a mixture from E3 (the algae people) that they make - it's got cayenne, sulfur (supposedly so great for skin, hair, etc.), Vitamin C (yes, as an isolate...), plus a little bit of AFA and spirulina algae, our ancestor, the first life-form on the planet if you're in a mystical schmystical mood and think that matters...They are very proud of the product and of course get "testimonials" of its miraculousness - as an adjunct to a crap vegan diet, it hasn't been found miraculous by me, but let's see what it can do when the coast is a bit clearer for it!

Good luck to everyone, whatever day you are on of the Cleanse - if you care to write: health@earthtones.com - I absolutely promise I won't call you "dear" or "friend" but would be very eager to help and give support.

http://e3live.com