It was the middle of the South Korean summer, and I was feeling a little bit restless and in need of something to liven up our rainy summer days.

Then as if it were by Providence, I got a call from a good friend in Seattle, who had my answer. She had just spent 14-day drinking only water and fresh vegetable/fruit juice. After the fast, she felt renewed like she was 15 years old again.

She explained that when you juice you drink enormous amounts of nutrients that come from the plants and vegetables that you juice, like spinach, carrots, kale, parsley, etc. Juicing is similar to drinking 2-3 salads every meal, 5 times daily. Also drinking fresh juices, allows your digestive system to rest and now your body has more energy to heal itself.

This sounded amazing. I thought my husband and I had to try it immediately. We just needed to stop at the fresh market to get ourselves ready to rest and heal bodies.

But before we get too far, I think I should give you some background on my husband, Juan, and myself. Juan comes from the Dominican Republic, a wee Spanish-speaking Caribbean island. When it comes to eating habits, Juan is the typical guy, he plays sports, and he thinks that he can eat whatever he can chew without consequences. Which means a diet of chicken with rice, burgers with rice, steak with rice, beans with rice, and an extra serving of rice, just incase there isn’t enough rice in his diet.

I am from Tennessee. I’m a Southern girl from a family of 9 children, we lived in the woods, walked barefoot, and I can turn on a mean Southern drawl whenever duty calls. Tennessee is home to deep-fried everything with gravy on top. We fry whole turkeys, macaroni and cheese and even Oreos. However my family never had anything deep-fried on our dinner table. Big salads and lentil soup were more our style. If salads weren’t healthy enough, we would periodically drink carrot juice, do parasitical cleanses and home enemas to keep healthy.

Juan and I met in South Korea, I was a teaching and he was studying internet business. We became friends and fought for the first 2 years of our friendship. After 2 years of fighting, we realized that we were madly in love, and we decided to get married 10 days after we got engaged.

After marriage, Juan fought my healthy mantras of no rice, no soda, no sugar, and no dairy. Until he noticed something curious, he was the strong man yet, he kept getting sick, and I was always full of energy no matter how hard he tried to pass his germs onto me. I was invincible. One day he asked me why I was so healthy, and I told him that it was how I ate. After this he stopped consuming so much soda, dairy, sugar and rice, and what do you know? He stopped getting sick.

Coming back to the juice fast, I hoped Juan would join me in the fast so that we could improve our health together. I introduced the idea to him through the documentary Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead.” At first Juan wasn’t excited to watching it, but he did. The documentary is about Joe Cross, a 40-year-old overweight Australian man with a strange skin rash triggered by his autoimmune disease. Under doctor’s supervision, Joe does a 60-day juice fast, and after 60 days, Joe looses 80 pounds (36 kg), his rash disappears and after the fast he continued to loose weight and improve his health.

After we watched documentary, Juan liked it, but he didn’t feel like he needed the fast because he wasn’t sick or overweight. Also he also hates fasting, but in the end he decided to do it to for the challenge factor and to join me.

After we did a few weeks of research, it was time to start. We chose to juice for 15 days.

We began juicing on a Friday, so that we could detox over the weekend. I was particularly eager to detox. Growing up, I had studied about the horrific parasites and toxins that live inside your body. The thought of exterminating all of these little monsters was exciting. I was anticipating the detox headaches, the body aches, the acne, and the flu. How thrilling it would surely be to be so clean!

We had started but I felt absolutely nothing detoxing. I only felt really good and energetic. I felt so good that I was cleaning the whole house. Juan, on the other hand, had a fever and was achy, and he was bed-ridded for the entire morning. He asked me why I wasn’t suffering with him. I replied that I probably was just cleaner than he was. He didn’t appreciate my snarky remark.

The second day, again there was only a little detox for me, but Juan was achy, feverish, and craving everything. The third and the fourth days came, and I just knew these would be my days of intense detox. Nope, nothing! I didn’t have many food cravings either, my energy was pretty good. I only had an intense desire to masticate every once in awhile. Juan continued having the most amazing detox, and leaving me out of it all. He had fevers, headaches, and body aches; he craved chicken, pizza, more chicken, and rice. The cravings never ended. It wasn’t that he was hungry; it was just that he missed food. One day I came home, and I found him on the floor, just sniffing a bar of chocolate. I told him not to torture himself. He replied that it was not torture, and he was just truly enjoying the chocolate’s fragrance.

“Sure you are,” I replied.

Me, I was fine, no big craving, my energy was steady. Every once in awhile, I did want something salty and dry like crackers, because I felt much too hydrated. The only thing amiss was that my dreams were all about the foods that I couldn’t eat.

The days continued to pass, and I got a finally got a few detox symptoms on days 5 and 6, but nothing too thrilling. Juan kept flying the detox banner high, sneezing and achy, while I fluttered along like nothing was happening.

I wasn’t very empathetic of him and his sicknesses, and he didn’t understand how I could be so cheery when I hadn’t eaten a morsel of chicken or rice in days. It was as if I was not human, and I had no feelings.

Even though he was often in pain and I was just fine, we both noticed that our skin started to get softer and our digestion was getting better, and the pounds were just melting off of Juan. Every morning the scale said a lower number, and everyone around us was complementing him on how healthy and handsome he was looking. This gave his ego just the right boost to keep him going.

Day 8 arrived and we decided to try our first coffee enemas to ease the detox process. They sounded rather scary, but my sister assured me that they were easy, and I thought Juan needed some detox help.

The enemas were easy enough. I held my enema for 15 minutes as recommended, and Juan held his for about 1 minute and 57 seconds, then he had to run to the toilet screaming. He left me in the living room, rolling with laughter. This was the best entertainment I had had in days. I asked him how he felt after his first enema “empty,” he said.

Because we unwisely did the coffee enemas around 7 at night, Juan didn’t fall asleep until 3 am. At 4 am he woke up and his entire body was itchy. He felt as if bugs were crawling all over his skin. He was scratching himself, hitting our mattress, yelling and pounding his chest. It was unbearable so he ran out of the house to go walk it off. I ran after him, but he was nowhere to be found. He came back about an hour and a half later, drank some juice and fell asleep, thoroughly exhausted.

I had read up on the detox symptoms associated with juicing, but I had never heard of crawling skin happen while juicing. Usually this symptom is reserved for menopausal women and those withdrawing from cocaine. Oh my, this sounded serious. He is neither a drug user nor a woman. What was wrong? Perhaps his dependence on chicken was more serious than I had realized?

Upon more research, I learned that he was simply detoxing too quickly, and that he could slow it down by doing more enemas, drinking more water, exercising and eating vegetables along with drinking juice. So he did another enema, and I started to fix him steamed vegetables for dinner. Thankfully this worked wonders. He was still experiencing flu-like symptoms, and achiness, but never any more crawling skin.

As the days rolled on, we continued to see our health improve, but the lack of solid foods made us more sensitive than usual. Juan was moody because he couldn’t eat chicken, and I would get frustrated that he was craving chicken. I just wanted him to suck it up, and then he would get frustrated that I wasn’t sympathizing with him.

Then day 14 came and it was my turn to have a breakdown. Throughout the fast, I had been pretty strong, and I hadn’t expressed even any hint of having one little craving. However when Juan handed me a fifty-dollar bill, I crumbled in self-pity.

“I don’t want your money,” I moaned. “I can’t buy anything!”

“What do you mean?” He asked, confused. I had never rejected money before.

“I can’t buy coffee!” I exclaimed.

To which he responded gleefully, “Ah-ha! So you are a human, you do crave something, finally!”

Yes, apparently I was no super-human. It was disappointing. Bitter coffee was my weakness.

Day 15 came at last, success was ours and despite all the challenges we faced in between, we were so glad that we had done it. I remember the first thing I ate. It was a yellow Asian melon. I chewed it so carefully, savoring every crunchy morsel of the fruit. I didn’t know how delightful chewing was until that moment.

In the end of it all, I am 7 pounds (3kg) lighter; I have more energy, baby-smooth skin, better digestion, and fewer coffee cravings. Juan is 13 pounds (6 kg) lighter; his skin is brighter, digestion is better, his immune system is stronger and recently random people have started to tell him tell him that he looks much younger than his age. This is a true accomplishment because everyone in Korea looks 10 years younger than their age.

Yet the best part of all is that now we both understand more clearly how we can live a healthier lifestyle. It has been three weeks since we finished the juice cleanse, and we haven’t gained back the weight, because we are changing the way we eat. We juice at least once a day, eat 2-3 salads a day and eat less grains and red meats. We now crave juice, raw vegetables, and fruits more than before. It seems as though the juice cleanse reprogramed our taste buds, and now we prefer to eat raw foods and not processed ones. The juice must have tricked our brains into thinking healthy foods actually taste good.

Even Juan avoids rice without me saying a thing.

Now that is a true miracle.

Text by Inge Kathleen Hooker