How And When To Be Your Own Doctor
By: Dr. Isabelle A. Moser, With: Steve Solomon
PART 2
Common Fasting Complaints And Discomforts
The most frequently heard complaints of fasters are headaches, dry, cracked
lips, dizziness, blurred vision with black spots that float, skin rashes, and
weakness in the first few days plus what they think is intense hunger.
The dizziness and weakness are real, and are due to increased levels of
toxins circulating in the blood and from unavoidably low blood sugar, which
is a natural consequence of the cessation of eating.
The blood sugar does reestablish a new equilibrium in the second and third
week of the fast and then, the dizziness may cease, but still, it is important to
expect dizziness at the beginning.
It always takes more time for the blood to reach the head on a fast because
everything has slowed down, including the rate of the heartbeat, so blood
pressure probably has dropped as well.
If you stand up very quickly you may faint. I repetitively instruct all of my
clients to stand up very slowly, moving from a lying to a sitting position,
pausing there for ten or twenty seconds, and then rising slowly from a sitting
to a standing position.
They are told that at the first sign of dizziness they must immediately put
their head between their knees so that the head is lower than the heart, or
squat/sit down on the floor, I once had a faster who forgot to obey my
frequent warnings.
About two weeks into a long fast, she got up rapidly from the toilet and felt
dizzy. The obvious thing to do was to sit back down on the toilet or lie down
on the bath rug on the floor, but no, she decided that because she was dizzy
she should rush back to her bed in the adjoining room.
She made it as far as the bathroom door and fainted, out cold, putting a deep
groove into the drywall with her pretty nose on the way down. We then had
to make an unscheduled visit to a nose specialist, who calmly put a tape-
wrapped spoon inside her bent-over nose and pried it back to dead center.
This was not much fun for either of us; it is well worthwhile preventing such
complications.
Other common complaints during the fast include coldness, due to low blood
sugar as well as a consequence of weight loss and slowed circulation due to
lessened physical activity.
People also dislike inactivity, which seems excruciatingly boring, and some
are upset by weight loss itself. Coldness is best handled with lots of clothes,
bedding, hot water bottles or hot pads, and warm baths.
Great Oaks School of Health was in Oregon, where the endlessly rainy
winters are chilly and the concrete building never seemed to get really warm.
I used to dream of moving my fasters to a tropical climate where I could also
get the best, ripest fruits to wean them back on to food.
If the fast goes on for more than a week or ten days, many people complain
of back discomfort, usually caused by over-worked kidneys. This passes.
Hot baths or hot water bottles provide some relief. Drinking more fluids may
also help a bit.
Nausea is fairly common too, due to toxic discharges from the gall bladder.
Drinking lots of water or herbal tea dilutes toxic bile in the stomach and
makes it more tolerable.
Very few fasters sleep well and for some reason they expect to, certainly
fasters hope to, because they think that if they sleep all night they will better
survive one more deadly dull day in a state of relative unconsciousness.
They find out much to their displeasure that very little sleep is required on a
fast because the body is at rest already. Many fasters sleep only two to four
hours but doze frequently and require a great deal of rest.
Being mentally prepared for this change of habit is the best handling.
Generalized low-grade aches and pains in the area of the diseased organs or
body parts are common and can often be alleviated with hot water bottles,
warm but not hot bath water and massage.
If this type of discomfort exists, it usually lessens with each passing day until
it disappears altogether.
Many fasters complain that their vision is blurred, and that they are unable to
concentrate. These are really major inconveniences because then fasters
can’t read or even pay close attention to video-taped movies, and if they can’
t divert themselves some fasters think they will go stir crazy.
They are so addicted to a hectic schedule of doingness, and/or being
entertained that they just can’t stand just being with themselves, forced to
confront and deal with the sensations of their own body, forced to face their
own thoughts, to confront their own emotions, many of which are negative.
People who are fasting release a lot of mental/emotional garbage at the same
time as they let go of old physical garbage. Usually the psychological stuff
contributed greatly to their illness and just like the physical garbage and
degenerated organs, it all needs to be processed.
One of the most distressing experiences that happen occasionally is hair
loss. Deprived of adequate nutrition, the follicles cannot keep growing hair,
and the existing hair dies.
However, the follicles themselves do not die and once the fast has ended
and sufficient nutrition is forthcoming, hair will regrow as well or better than
before.
There are also complaints that occur after the fast has been broken. Post-
fast cravings, even after only two weeks of deprivation, are to be expected.
These may take the form of desires for sweet, sour, salt, or a specific food
dreamed of while fasting, like chocolate fudge Sundays or just plain toast.
Food cravings must be controlled at all costs because if acted upon, each
indulgence chips away the health gains of the previous weeks. A single
indulgence can be remedied by a day of restricting the diet to juice or raw
food.
After the repair, the person feels as good as they did when the fast ended.
Repeated indulgences will require another extended bout of fasting to repair.
It is far better to learn self-control.
The Healing Crisis And Retracing
Certain unpleasant somatics that occur while fasting (or while on a healing
diet) may not be dangerous or "bad."
Two types, the healing crisis, and retracing, are almost inevitable. A well
educated faster should welcome these discomforts when they happen. The
healing crisis (but not retracing) also occurs on a healing diet.
The healing crisis can seem a big surprise to a faster who has been
progressing wonderfully. Suddenly, usually after a few days of noticeably
increased well being, they suddenly experience a set of severe symptoms
and feel just awful.
This is not a setback, not something to be upset or disappointed about, but a
healing crisis is actually a positive sign
Healing crises always occur after a period of marked improvement. As the
vital force builds up during the healing process, the body decides it now has
obtained enough energy to throw off some accumulated toxins, and
forcefully pushes them out through a typical and usually previously used
route of secondary elimination, such as the nose, lungs, stomach, intestines,
skin, or perhaps produces a flu-like experience with fever chills, sweat, aches
and pains, etc.
Though unpleasant, this experience is to be encouraged; the body has
merely accelerated its elimination process. Do not attempt to suppress any
of these symptoms; don’t even try to moderate fever, which is the body’s
effective way to burn out a virus or bacteria infection, unless it is a
dangerously high fever (over 102° Fahrenheit).
Fever can be lowered without drugs by putting the person into a cool/cold
bath, or using cold towel wraps and cold-water sponge baths.
(Editors Note: this procedure is not recommended by Shelton, he thinks the
patient should be made as comfortable as possible and should not be given
cold baths to bring down a fever.)
The good news is that healing crises usually do not last long, and when they
pass you feel better than you did before the crisis.
Asthmatics seem to have the worst crises. I have had asthmatics bring up a
quart of obnoxious mucous from their lungs every night for weeks. They
have stayed awake all night for three nights continuously coughing and
choking on the material that was being eliminated.
After that clearing-out process they were able to breath much more freely.
Likewise I have had people who have had sinusitis have nothing but non-
stop pussy discharge from their sinuses for three weeks. Some of this
would run down the throat and cause nausea.
All I could say to encourage the sufferer was that it needed to come out and
to please stand aside and let the body work its magic. These fasters were
not grateful until the sinus problem that had plagued them since childhood
disappeared.
The interesting thing about healing crises is that the symptoms produced
retrace earlier complaints; they are almost never something entirely
unknown to the patient.
Usually they are old, familiar somatics, often complaints that
haven’t bothered the faster for many years. The reason the symptom is
familiar but is not currently a problem is because as the body degenerates it
loses vital force; with less vital force it loses the ability to create such acute
detoxification episodes in non-life-threatening secondary elimination routes.
The degenerated body makes less violent efforts to cleanse, efforts that aren’
t as uncomfortable. The negative side of this is that instead of creating acute
discomfort in peripheral systems, the toxemia goes to more vital organs
where it hastens the formation of life-threatening conditions.
There is a very normal and typical progress for each person’s fatal illness.
Their ultimate disease starts out in childhood or adolescence as acute
inflammations of skin-like organs, viral or bacterial infections of the same.
Then, as vital force weakens, secondary eliminations are shifted to more vital
organs.
Allergies or colds stop happening so frequently; the person becomes
rheumatic, arthritic or experience weakness in joints, tendons, ligaments, or
to have back pains, or to have digestive upsets.
These new symptoms are more constant but usually less acute. Ultimately,
vital organs begin to malfunction, and serious disease develops. But a
hygienist sees the beginning of fatal diseases such as cancer in adolescent
infections and allergies.
Retracing is generally seen only on water fasts, not on extended cleansing
diets. The body begins to repair itself by healing conditions in the reverse
order to that which they occurred originally. This means that the body would
first direct healing toward the lungs if the most recently serious illness was
an attack of pneumonia six months previously.
In this case you would expect to quickly and intensely experience a mini-
case of pneumonia while the body eliminates residues in the lungs that were
not completely discharged at the time.
Next the body might take you through a period of depression that you had
experienced five years in the past. The faster may be profoundly depressed
for a few days and come out of it feeling much better.
You could then re-experience sensation-states like those caused by
recreational drugs you had playfully experimented with ten years previously
along with the "trippiness" if it were a hallucinogen, speediness if it was
"speed" or the dopiness if it was heroin.
Retracing further, the faster might then experience something similar to a
raging attack of tonsillitis which you vaguely remember having when you
were five years old, but fortunately this time it passes in three days (or maybe
six hours), instead of three weeks. This is retracing.
Please do not be surprised or alarmed if it happens to you on a fast, and
immediately throw out the baby with the bath water thinking that you are
doing the wrong thing because all those old illnesses are coming back to
haunt you.
It is the body’s magnificent healing effort working on your behalf, and for
doing it your body deserves lots of "well done", "good body" thoughts rather
than gnashing of teeth and thinking what did I do to deserve this. The body
won’t tell you what you did to deserve this, but it knows and is trying its
darndest to undo it.
The Unrelenting Boredom Of Fasting
Then there’s the unrelenting boredom of fasting. Most people have been
media junkies since they were kids; the only way they believe they can
survive another day of fasting is by diverting their minds with TV.
This is far from ideal because often the emotions of a faster are like an open
wound and when they resonate with the emotions portrayed on most TV
shows, the faster gets into some very unpleasant states that interfere with
healing.
And the emotions many movies prompt people to sympathetically generate
are powerful ones, often highly negative, and contrary to healing. Especially
unhelpful are the adrenaline rushes in action movies.
But if TV is the best a faster can do, it is far better that someone fast with
television programming filling their minds than to not fast at all. I keep a
library of positive VHS tapes for these addicts–comedies, stories of heroic
over-comings, depictions of humans at their best.
Boredom is probably the most limiting factor to fasting a long time. That is
because boredom is progressive; it gets worse with each slowly passing
day. But concurrently, the rate of healing is accelerating with each slowly
passing day.
Every day the faster gets through does them considerably more good than
the previous day. However, fasters rarely are motivated enough to overcome
boredom for more than two weeks or so, unless they started the fast to solve
a very serious or life-threatening condition.
For this reason, basically well people should not expect to be able to fast for
more than a couple of weeks every six months or year, no matter how much
good a longer fast might do.
Exercise While Fasting
The issue of how much activity is called for on a fast is controversial. Natural
Hygienists in the Herbert Shelton tradition insist that all fasters absolutely
must have complete bed rest, with no books, no TV, no visitors, no enemas,
no exercise, no music, and of course no food, not even a cup of herb tea.
In my many years of conducting people through fasts, I have yet to meet an
individual that could mentally tolerate this degree of nothingness. It is too
drastic a withdrawal from all the stimulation people are used to in the
twentieth century.
I still don’t know how Shelton managed to make his patients do it, but my
guess is that he must have been a very intimidating guy. Shelton was a body
builder of some renown in his day. I bet Shelton’s patients kept a few books
and magazines under their mattress and only took them out when he wasn’t
looking.
If I had tried to enforce this type of sensory deprivation, I know my patients
would have grabbed their clothes and run, vowing never to fast again.
I think it is most important that people fast, and that they feel so good about
the experience that they want to do it again, and talk all their sick friends into
doing the same thing.
In contrast to enforced inactivity, Russian researchers who supervised
schizophrenics on 30-day water fasts insisted that they walk for three hours
every day, without stopping.
I would like to have been there to see how they managed to enforce that. I
suspect some patients cheated. I lived with schizophrenics enough years to
know that it is very difficult to get them to do anything that they don’t want to
do, and very few of them are into exercise, especially when fasting.
In my experience both of these approaches to activity during the fast are
extremes. The correct activity level should be arrived at on an individual
basis. I have had clients who walked six miles a day during an extended
water fast, but they were not feeling very sick when they started the fast, and
they were also physically fit.
In contrast I have had people on extended fasts who were unable to walk for
exercise, or so weak they were unable to even walk to the bathroom, but
these people were critically ill when they started fasting, and desperately
needed to conserve what little vital force they had for healing.
Most people who are not critically ill need to walk at least 200 yards twice a
day, with assistance if necessary, if only to move the lymph through the
system.
The lymphatic system is a network of ducts and nodes, which are distributed
throughout the body, with high concentrations of nodes in the neck, chest,
armpits, and groin.
Its job is to carry waste products from the extremities to the center of the
body where they can be eliminated. The blood is circulated through the
arteries and veins in the body by the contractions of the heart, but the
lymphatic system does not have a pump.
Lymphatic fluid is moved by the contractions of the muscles, primarily those
of the arms and legs. If the faster is too weak to move, massage and assisted
movements are essential.
Lymph nodes are also a part of our immune system and produce white blood
cells to help control invading organisms. When the lymph is overloaded with
waste products the ducts and nodes swell, and until the source of the local
irritation is removed, are incapable of handling further debris.
If left in this condition for years they become so hard they feel like rocks
under the skin. Lumps in the armpits or the groin are prime sites for the
future development of a cancer.
Fasting, massage, and poultices will often soften overloaded lymph nodes
and coax them back into operation.
The Stages Of Fasting
The best way to understand what happens when we fast is to break up the
process into six stages: preparation for the fast, loss of hunger, acidosis,
normalization, healing, and breaking the fast.
A person that has consumed the typical American diet most of their life and
whose life is not in immediate danger would be very wise to gently prepares
their body for the fast. Two weeks would be a minimum amount of time, and
if the prospective faster wants an easier time of it, they should allow a month
or even two for preliminary housecleaning.
During this time, eliminate all meat, fish, dairy products, eggs, coffee, black
tea, salt, sugar, alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, and greasy foods. This de-
addiction will make the process of fasting much more pleasant, and is
strongly recommended.
However, eliminating all these harmful substances is withdrawal from
addictive substances and will not be easy for most. I have more to say about
this later when I talk about allergies and addictions.
The second stage, psychological hunger, usually is felt as an intense desire
for food. This passes within three or four days of not eating anything.
Psychological hunger usually begins with the first missed meal.
If the faster seems to be losing their resolve, I have them drink unlimited
quantities of good-tasting herb teas, (sweetened –only if absolutely
necessary–with nutrisweet).
Salt-free broths made from meatless instant powder (obtainable at the health
food store) can also fend off the desire to eat until the stage of hunger has
passed.
Acidosis, the third stage, usually begins a couple of days after the last meal
and lasts about one week. During acidosis the body vigorously throws off
acid waste products.
Most people starting a fast begin with an overly acid blood pH from the
typical American diet that contains a predominance of acid-forming foods.
Switching over to burning fat for fuel triggers the release of even more acidic
substances.
Acidosis is usually accompanied by fatigue, blurred vision, and possibly
dizziness. The breath smells very bad, the tongue is coated with bad-tasting
dryish mucus, and the urine may be concentrated and foul unless a good
deal of water is taken daily. Two to three quarts a day is a reasonable
amount.
Mild states of acidosis are a common occurrence. While sleeping after the
last meal of the day is digested bodies normally work very hard trying to
detoxify from yesterday’s abuses. So people routinely awaken in a state of
acidosis.
Their tongue is coated; their breath foul and they feel poorly. They end their
brief overnight fast with breakfast, bringing the detoxification process to a
screeching halt and feel much better.
Many people think they awaken hungry and don’t feel well until they eat.
They confuse acidosis with hunger when most have never experienced real
hunger in their entire lives.
If you typically awaken in acidosis, you are being given a strong sign by your
body that it would like to continue fasting far beyond breakfast. In fact, it
probably would enjoy fasting long beyond the end of acidosis.
Most fasters feel much more comfortable by the end of the first seven to ten
days, when they enter the normalization phase; here the acidic blood
chemistry is gradually corrected. This sets the stage for serious healing of
body tissues and organs.
Normalization may take one or two more weeks depending on how badly the
body was out of balance.
As the blood chemistry steadily approaches perfection, the faster usually
feels an increasing sense of well-being, broken by short spells of discomfort
that are usually healing crises or re-tracings.
The next stage, accelerated healing, can take one or many weeks more,
again depending on how badly the body has been damaged.
Healing proceeds rapidly after the blood chemistry has been stabilized, the
person is usually in a state of profound rest and the maximum amount of vital
force can be directed toward repair and regeneration of tissues.
This is a miraculous time when tumors are metabolized as food for the body,
when arthritic deposits dissolve, when scar tissues tend to disappear, when
damaged organs regain lost function (if they can).
Seriously ill people who never fast long enough to get into this stage (usually
it takes about ten days to two weeks of water fasting to seriously begin
healing) never find out what fasting can really do for them.
Breaking the fast is equally or more important a stage than the fast itself. It is
the most dangerous time in the entire fast. If you stop fasting prematurely,
that is, before the body has completed detoxification and healing, expect the
body to reject food when you try to make it eat, even if you introduce foods
very gradually.
The faster, the spiritual being running the body, may have become bored and
want some action, but the faster’s body hasn’t finished. The body wants to
continue healing.
By rejection, I mean that food may not digest, may feel like a stone in your
stomach, make you feel terrible. If that happens and if, despite that clear
signal you refuse to return to fasting, you should go on a juice diet, take as
little as possible, sip it slowly (almost chew it) and stay on juice until you find
yourself digesting it easily.
Then and only then, reintroduce a little solid raw food like a green salad.
Weaning yourself back on to food should last just as long as the fast. Your
first tentative meals should be dilute, raw juices. After several days of slowly
building up to solid raw fruit, small amounts of raw vegetable foods should
be added.
If it has been a long fast, say over three weeks, this reintroduction should be
done gingerly over a few weeks. If this stage is poorly managed or ignored
you may become acutely ill, and for someone who started fasting while
dangerously ill, loss of self-control and impulsive eating could prove fatal.
Even for those fasting to cure non-life-threatening illnesses it is pointless to
go through the effort and discipline of a long fast without carefully
establishing a correct diet after the fast ends, or the effort will have largely
been wasted.
Less-Rigorous-Than-Water Fasts
There are gradations of fasting measures ranging from rigorous to relatively
casual. Water fasting is the most rapid and effective one. Other methods
have been created by grasping the underlying truth of fasting, namely
whenever the digestive effort can be reduced, by whatever degree, whenever
the formation of the toxins of misdigestion can be reduced or prevented, to
that extent the body can divert energy to the healing process.
Thus comes about assorted famous and sometimes notorious monodiet
semi-fasts like the grape cure where the faster eats only grapes for a month
or so, or the lemon cure, where the juice of one or more lemons is added to
water and nothing else is consumed for weeks on end.
Here I should also mention the "lemon juice/cayenne pepper/maple syrup
cure" the various green drink cures using spirulina, chlorella, barley green or
wheat grass, and the famous Bieler broths–vegetable soups made of
overcooked green beans or zucchini.
I do not believe that monodiets work because of some magical property of a
particular food used. They work because they are semi-fasts and may be
extremely useful, especially for those individuals who cannot or will not
tolerate a water fast.
The best foods for monodiet fasting are the easiest ones to digest: juices of
raw fruits and non-starchy vegetables with all solids strained out. Strained
mineral broths made of long-simmered non-starchy vegetables (the best of
them made of leafy green vegetables) fall in the same category.
So if you are highly partial to the flavor of grapes or lemons or cayenne and
(highly diluted) maple syrup, a long fast on one of these would do you a
world of good, just not quite as much good as the same amount of time
spent on water alone.
If you select something more "solid" for a long monodiet fast, like pureed
zucchini, it is essential that you not overeat. Dr. Bieler gave his fasting
patients only one pint of zucchini soup three or four times a day.
The way to evaluate how much to eat is by how much weight you are losing.
When fasting, you must lose weight. And the faster the better.
Pure absolute water fasting while not taking any vitamins or other nutritional
supplementation has a very limited maximum duration, perhaps 45 days.
The key concept here is nutritional reserves. Body fat is stored, surplus
energy fuel. But energy alone cannot keep a body going. It needs much
more than fuel to rebuild and repair and maintain its systems.
So the body in its wisdom also stores up vitamins and minerals and other
essential substances in and in-between all its cells.
Bodies that have been very well nourished for a long time have very large
reserves; poorly nourished ones may have very little set aside for a rainy
day.
And it is almost a truism that a sick person has, for quite some time, been a
poorly nourished one, with low nutritional reserves. This fact alone can
make it difficult for a sick person to water fast for enough time to completely
heal their damaged organs and other systems.
Obese people have fat reserves sufficient to provide energy for long periods,
but rarely can anybody, no matter how complete its nutrition was for years
previously, contain sufficient nutritional reserves to support a water fast of
over six weeks.
To water fast the very obese down to normal weight can take months but to
make this possible, rather diverse and concentrated nutrition containing few
calories must be given.
It is possible to fast even a very slim a person for quite a bit longer than a
month when their body is receiving easily assimilable vitamins and minerals
and small amounts of sugars or other simple carbohydrates.
I estimate that fasting on raw juices and mineral broths will result in healing at
25 to 75 percent of the efficiency of water fasting, depending on the amount
of nutrition taken and the amount the juices or broths are diluted.
But juice fasting can permit healing to go on several times longer than water
might.
Fasting on diluted juice and broth can also save the life of someone whose
organs of elimination are insufficiently strong to withstand the workload
created by water fasting.
In this sense, juices can be regarded as similar to the moderators in a nuclear
reactor, slowing the process down so it won’t destroy the container.
On a fast of undiluted juice, the healing power drops considerably, but a
person on this regimen, if not sick, is usually capable of working.
Duration of juice fasts can vary greatly. Most of the time there is no need to
continue fasting after the symptoms causing concern have been eliminated,
and this could happen as quickly as one week or take as long as 60 days if
the person is very obese.
Fasters also lose their motivation once the complaint has vanished. But
feeling better is no certain indication that the need to fast has ended.
This points up one of the liabilities of juice fasting; the person is already
eating, their digestive system never shut down and consequently, it is much
easier for them to resume eating.
The thing to keep in mind is that if the symptoms return, the fast was not long
enough or the diet was not properly reformed after the fast.
During a long fast on water or diluted juice, if the body has used up all of it’s
reserves and/or the body has reached skeletal condition, and the condition
or symptoms being addressed persists the fast should be ended, the person
should go on a raw food healing diet.
If three to six months on raw food don’t solve the complaint then another
spell of water or diluted juice fasting should be attempted.
Most fasters are incapable of persisting until the body reserves have been
used up because social conditioning is telling them their emaciated-looking
body must be dying when it is actually far from death, but return of true
hunger is the critical indicator that must not be ignored.
True hunger is not what most people think of when they think they are
hungry. Few Americans have ever experienced true hunger. It is not a
rumbling in the stomach or a set of uncomfortable sensations (caused by the
beginning of detoxification) you know will go away after eating.
True hunger is an animal, instinctual feeling in the back of one’s throat (not
in the stomach) that demands you eat something, anything, even grass or
shoe leather.
Seriously ill people inevitably start the cleansing process with a pre-existing
and serious mineral deficiencies. I say inevitably because they likely would
not have become ill had they been properly nourished.
Sick fasters may be wise to take in minerals from thin vegetable broths or
vitamin-like supplements in order to prevent uncomfortable deficiency
states.
For example calcium or magnesium deficiencies can make water fasters
experience unpleasant symptoms such as hand tremors, stiff muscles,
cramps in the hands, feet, and legs, and difficulty relaxing.
I want to stress here that fasting itself does not create deficiencies. But a
person already deficient in minerals should watch for these symptoms and
take steps to remedy the deficiencies if necessary.
Raw Food Healing Diets
Next in declining order of healing effectiveness is what I call a raw food
healing diet or cleansing diet. It consists of those very same watery fruits
and non-starchy vegetables one juices or makes into vegetable broths, but
eaten whole and raw.
Heating food does two harmful things: it destroys many vitamins, enzymes
and other nutritional elements and it makes many foods much harder to
digest.
So no cooked vegetables or fruits are allowed because to maintain health on
this limited regimen it is essential that every possible vitamin and enzyme
present in the food be available for digestion.
Even though still raw, no starchy or fatty vegetables or fruits are allowed that
contain concentrated calories like potatoes, winter squash, avocados, sweet
potatoes, fresh raw corn, dates, figs, raisins, or bananas.
And naturally, no salad dressings containing vegetable oils or (raw) ground
seeds are allowed. Nor are raw grains or other raw concentrated energy
sources.
When a person starts this diet they will at first experience considerable
weight loss because it is difficult to extract a large number of calories from
these foods (though I have seen people actually gain weight on a pure melon
diet, so much sugar do these fruits have, and well-chewed watermelon seeds
are very nourishing).
Eating even large quantities of only raw fruit and raw non-starchy vegetables
results in a slow but steady healing process about 10 to 20 percent as rapid
as water fasting.
A raw food cleansing diet has several huge advantages. It is possible to
maintain this regimen and regularly do non-strenuous work for many
months, even a year or more without experiencing massive weight loss and,
more important to some people, without suffering the extremes of low blood
sugar, weakness and loss of ability to concentrate that happen when water
fasting.
Someone on a raw food cleanse will have periods of lowered energy and
strong cravings for more concentrated foods, but if they have the self-
discipline to not break their cleansing process they can accomplish a great
deal of healing while still maintaining more or less normal (though slower
paced) life activities.
However, almost no one on this diet is able to sustain an extremely active life-
style involving hard physical labor or competitive sports. And from the very
beginning someone on a raw food cleanse must be willing and able to lie
down and rest any time they feel tired or unable to face their responsibilities.
Otherwise they will inevitably succumb to the mental certainty that their
feelings of exhaustion or overwhelm can be immediately solved by eating
some concentrated food to "give them energy." Such low-energy states will,
however, pass quickly after a brief nap or rest.
Something else gradually happens to a body when on such a diet. Do you
recall that I mentioned that after my own long fast I began to get more
"mileage" out of my food.
A cleansed, healed body becomes far more efficient at digestion and
assimilation; a body that is kept on a raw food cleansing diet will initially lose
weight rapidly, but eventually weight loss slows to virtually nothing and then
stabilizes. However, long-term raw fooders are usually thin as toothpicks.
Once starchy vegetables like potatoes or winter squash, raw or cooked, or
any cereals, raw or cooked, are added to a cleansing diet, the detoxification
and healing virtually ceases and it becomes very easy to maintain or even
gain weight, particularly if larger quantities of more concentrated foods like
seeds and nuts are eaten.
Though this diet has ceased to be cleansing, few if any toxins from
misdigestion will be produced and health is easy to maintain.
"Raw fooders" are usually people who have healed themselves of a serious
disease and ever after continue to maintain themselves on unfired food,
almost as a matter of religious belief.
They have become convinced that eating only raw, unfired food is the key to
extraordinarily long life and supreme good health. When raw fooders wish to
perform hard physical work or strenuous exercise, they’ll consume raw nuts
and some raw grains such as finely-ground oats soaked overnight in warm
water or deliciously sweet "Essene bread" made from slightly sprouted
wheat that is then ground wet, made into cakes, and sun baked at
temperatures below about 115 degrees Fahrenheit.
Essene bread can be purchased in some health food stores. However, little
or no healing or detoxification can happen once concentrated energy
sources are added to the diet, even raw ones.
During my days at Great Oaks School I was a raw fooder for some years,
though I found it very difficult to maintain body heat on raw food during
chilly, rainy Oregon winters and eventually struck a personal compromise
where I ate about half my diet raw and the rest fired. I have listed some
books by raw fooders in the Bibliography. Joe Alexander’s is the most fun.
Complete Recovery Of The Seriously Ill
Its a virtual certainty that to fully recover, a seriously ill person will have to
significantly rebuild numerous organs.
They have a hard choice: to accept a life of misery, one that the medical
doctors with drugs and surgery may be able to prolong into an interminable
hell on earth, or, spend several years working on really healing their body,
rotating between water fasting, juice or broth fasting, extended periods on a
cleansing raw food diet, and periods of no-cleansing on a more complete diet
that includes moderate amounts of cooked vegetables and small quantities
of cooked cereals.
And even after recovery someone who was quite ill may have to live the rest
of their life on a rather restricted regimen.
It is unrealistic to expect one fast to fix everything. The body will heal as
much as it can in the allotted time, but if a dangerous illness has not been
fully remedied by the first intense fast, a raw food diet must be followed for
three to six months until weight has been regained, nutritional reserves have
been rebuilt and it is safe to undertake another extended fast.
More than two water or juice fasts a year of thirty continuous days are not
recommended nor should they be necessary unless the life is in imminent
danger and there is no other option.
The story of Jake’s catastrophic illness and almost-cure is a good example
of this type of program. Jake was from back East. He phoned me because
he had read a health magazine article I had written, his weak voice faintly
describing a desperate condition.
He was in a wheelchair unable to walk, unable to control his legs or arms
very well, was unable to control his bladder and required a catheter. He had
poor bowel control, had not the strength to talk much or loudly and most
frightening to him, he was steadily losing weight although he was eating
large amounts of cooked vegetables and grains.
Jake had wasted away to 90 pounds at 5"10" and looked pathetic when I first
saw him wheeled off an airplane at my local airport.
Jake had seen a lot of medical doctors and had variously been diagnosed as
having chronic fatigue syndrome, chronic (whatever that is) meningitis, and
multiple sclerosis.
He had been treated by virtually every medical expert and many famous
alternative practitioners, utilizing a host of old and new techniques, all to no
avail.
He had even tried intravenous chelation therapy and colonics. It had also
been suggested that he enter a hospital for the treatment of eating disorders
and/or see a psychiatrist.
He had tried to gain admittance to a number of holistic fasting institutions
back east, but they all refused him because they considered the risk was too
high to fast a person at such a low body weight.
But I had previously fasted emaciated people like Jake, and there was
something I liked about his telephone presence. Perhaps this is why I
foolishly decided I knew better than the other experts.
People commonly waste away and die while eating large amounts of food.
Obviously they are unable to digest or assimilate nutrients or they wouldn’t
be wasting.
Eating further increases their toxic burden from undigested meals, further
worsening their already failing organs. The real solution is to stop feeding
them altogether so that their digestive functions can heal.
In Jake’s case, his body’s nutritional reserves had already become sadly
depleted due to poor absorption over such an extended period, so I could
not fast him on water.
I immediately put Jake on a rich mineral broth prepared from everything left
alive in our garden at the end of winter–leaves of kale, endive plants, whole
huge splitting Savoy cabbages, garlic, huge leeks including their green tops,
the whole stew fortified with sea weed.
It did not matter too much what vegetables I used as long as there were lots
of leafy greens containing lots of chlorophyll (where the most concentrated
mineral nutrition is located).
Jake was given colonics every day, but had to be carried to the colonic table
because he could not support his own weight. Whoever had given him
colonics previously had not accomplished much for I must say that Jake had
the most foul smelling discharges that I had ever encountered in
administering over 6,000 colonics over many years. It was as if his body was
literally rotting from the inside out.
After 30 days on mineral broth Jake, who really did weigh 90 pounds when
he arrived, was only down to 85. When a person already close to skeletal
weight starts fasting, to conserve vital tissue the body goes rapidly into a
state of profound rest so it uses very little energy, thus it loses very little
weight each day.
This degree of resting also helps heal abnormal body parts easier. After one
month on mineral broth Jake began to show signs of mineral deficiencies in
the form of a fine tremor of the hands, and cramps in the feet, so I put him on
mineral supplements too.
Jake was in my house for a long time. At the end of the second month on
broth he started two weeks on raw carrot juice with a lot of chlorophyll added
from sources such as algae (spirulina), wheat grass juice, alfalfa, etc.
This was followed by two more weeks on small quantities of raw fruits and
vegetables, and then followed by two weeks with added steamed vegetables,
and finally, he achieved a diet, which included small amounts of grain,
cooked legumes and raw nuts, plus the fruits and vegetables previously
mentioned.
Jake’s health steadily improved. He gained control of his bladder, bowels,
speech, hands, and legs. He began to exercise in the living room on a
stationary bike, and walked slowly up and down our long driveway, picking
daffodils in the beautiful spring weather.
Sadly, though I could help his body to heal it was next to impossible to stem
the tides of Jake’s appetites or to pleasantly withstand his tantrums when he
was denied; he always wanted more in terms of quantity, more in terms of
variety, and at more frequent intervals.
Though his organs had healed significantly, his digestive capacity was not
nearly as large as he remembered himself enjoying before he got sick. And
never would be.
Jake was not happy about the dietary restrictions necessary for him to retain
his newly attained health, and unwilling to stay within the limits of his
digestive system’s ability to process foods.
He had gained weight and was back up to 120 pounds. It was time for him to
go home before I lost my good humor.
Jake left with a lot of "good lucks" and stern admonitions to stick to his
stringent diet and supplement program. It was a big moment for Jake. He
had arrived in a wheelchair three months before.
Now he walked unaided to the airplane, something he had not been able to
do for two years.
Back at home Jake had no one courageous enough to set limits for him. His
immediate family and every one of his brow beaten associates were
compelled to give him everything that he wanted.
So his appetite and lack of personal discipline got the better of him. He
started eating lots of dates and figs. These had been eliminated from his diet
because he was unable to process foods with such a high sugar content.
He also ate larger and larger quantities of grains, nuts and avocados,
although I had warned him of specific quantity limits on rich foods. Most
sadly, he returned to enjoying spaghetti with lots of cheese grated on top.
Within months of leaving my care his paralysis and weakness returned,
except that unfortunately for him, he still retained the ability to assimilate
food and maintain his body weight.
Ironically, the only ultimate benefit of his fasting with me was to permit him to
suffer a far longer existence in a wheelchair without wasting away and
escaping into death.
I would be failing my readers if I did not explain why Jake became ill in the
first place. Jake had started what grew to become a very successful chain of
spaghetti restaurants with a unique noodles and sauces made to his own
formula.
He ate a lot of his own spaghetti over the years, and had been reared in a
good Italian family with lots of other kinds of rich food. Jake had a reputation
for being able to out eat everybody in terms of quantity and in the amount of
time spent eating.
In childhood, this ability had made his Italian mother very happy because it
showed appreciation for her great culinary skill.
Secondly, Jake the adult was still at his core, Jake the spoiled brat child, with
a bad, unregulated temper. He was in the habit of dumping his temper on
other people whether they needed a helping of his angry emotions or not.
A lot of people in his employ and in his extended family tiptoed around Jake,
always careful of triggering his wrath. At my place as Jake began to get well
he began to use his increased energy and much stronger voice to
demonstrate his poor character.
At meal times Jake would bang the table with a fork hard enough to leave
dents in the wood table top while yelling for more, complaining loudly about
the lack of rich sauces and other culinary delights he craved.
This was a character problem that Jake could not seem to overcome, even
with a lot of intervention from the local minister on his behalf and my
counseling. Jake was a Catholic who went to church regularly, but acted like
a Christian only while he was in church.
On some level Jake knew that he was not treating others fairly, but he would
not change his habitual responses.
His negative thoughts and actions interfered with his digestive capacity to
the extent that his gluttonous eating habits produced illness, a vegetative
paralyzing illness, but not death. To me this seems almost a form of karmic
justice.
It is common for people who have been very ill for extended periods of time
to realize what a wonderful gift life is and arrive at a willingness to do almost
anything to have a second chance at doing "life" right.
Some succeed with their second chance and some don’t. If they don’t
succeed in changing their life and relationships, they frequently relapse.
Luigi Cornaro left the world his story of sickness and rejuvenation. His little
book may be the world’s first alternative healing text. It is a classic example
of the value of abstentousness.
Had Jake taken this story to heart he would have totally recovered. Cornaro
was a sixteenth century Venetian nobleman. He, like Jake the spaghetti
baron, was near death at the young age of forty. (Jake was also in his early
40s when he broke down.)
Cornaro’s many doctors were unable to cure him. Finally he saw a doctor
who understood the principles of natural healing. This wise physician
determined that this illness was caused by a mismatch between Cornaro’s
limited digestive capacity and the excessive amount of food he was eating.
So Cornaro was put on a diet of only 12 ounces of solid food and fourteen
ounces of liquid a day. Any twelve ounces of any solids he wanted and any
fourteen ounces of liquid. It could be meat and wine, salad or orange juice,
no matter.
Cornaro soon regained his health and he continued to follow the diet until
the age of 78. His health was so outstanding during this period that people
who were much younger in terms of years were unable to keep up with him.
At 78 his friends, worried about how thin he was (doesn’t it always seem that
it is your so-called friends who always ruin a natural cure) persuaded him to
increase his daily ration by two ounces a day.
His delicate and weak digestive system, which had operated perfectly for
many years, was unable to deal with the additional two ounces, and he
became very ill after a very short period of over eating.
Worse, his recent indulgence had even further damaged the organs of
digestion and to survive Cornaro had to cut his daily ration to eight ounces
of solid food and eleven of liquids.
On this reduced dietary he again regained his health and lived to be 100.
Cornaro wrote four books on the value of abstinence or "sober living" as he
called it, writing the last and perhaps the most interesting at 96 years of age.
Had my patient Jake been able to confine his food intake to the level of his
body’s ability to digest, he might still be walking and enjoying life. But try as
I might I could not make him understand. Perhaps he enjoys doing penance
in his wheel chair more than he would enjoy health and life.
Starvation
It is true that ethical medical doctors use the least-risky procedure they are
allowed to use. But this does not mean there are no risks to allopathic
treatment.
The medical doctor justifies taking the risks by saying that the risk/reward
ratio is the best possible. Any sick person is already at risk. Life comes with
only one guarantee: that none of us gets out of it alive.
Compared to the risks of allopathic medicine, fasting is a far safer method of
treating disease. The oft-repeated scare stories medical doctors and their
allies circulate about fasting are not true, and it is important to remember that
none of these people portraying fasting as evil and dangerous have never
fasted themselves–I’ll put money on that one.
Or, on the slim possibility that someone telling fasting horror stories did
actually not eat for 24 hours (probably because some accident or acute
illness prevented them), they had a terrible experience because they didn’t
understand the process, were highly toxic, and were scared to death the
whole time.
Or worse yet they fasted for a short period with an "open mind"–a very
dangerous state in which to approach anything new. I have found through
considerable experience with people professing to have open minds that the
expression "I’m open minded" usually means that someone has already
made up their mind and new data just passes straight through their open
mind–in one ear and out the other.
Or sometimes, the phrase "open mind" means a person that does not believe
any information has reality and is entirely unable to make up their mind.
The most commonly leveled criticism of fasting is that in its efforts to survive
self-imposed starvation the body metabolizes vital tissue, not just fat, and
therefore, fasting is damaging, potentially fatally damaging.
People who tell you this will also tell you that fasters have destroyed their
heart muscle or ruined their nervous system permanently.
But this kind of damage happens only when a person starves to death or
starves to a point very close to death, not when someone fasts.
There is a huge difference between fasting and starvation. Someone
starving is usually eating, but eating poorly and inadequately, eating scraps
of whatever is available such as sugar, white flour, rancid grease, shoe
leather, or even dirt.
Frequently a starving person is forced to exercise a great deal as they
struggle to survive and additionally is highly apprehensive. Or someone
starving to death is confined to a small space, may become severely
dehydrated too and is in terror.
Fear is very damaging to the digestive process, and to the body in general;
fear speeds up the destruction of vital tissue.
People starve when trekking vast distances through wastelands without
food to eat, they starved in concentration camps, buried in mine disasters,
they starve during famines and starve while being tortured in prisons.
Until water fasting goes on past the point where all fatty tissues and all
abnormal deposits have been burned for fuel and recycled for the nutritional
elements they contain, vital muscle tissues and organs are not consumed.
And as long as the body contains sufficient nutritional reserves, vital organs
and essential tissues are rebuilt and maintained. In fact the body has a great
deal of intelligence that we don’t give it credit for.
It knows exactly which cells are essential to survival, which ones are not.
The body knows which cells are abnormal deposits, and it goes to work to
metabolize them first.
For example, the body recognizes arthritic deposits, cysts, fibroids, and
tumors as offensive parts of the landscape, and obligingly uses them for
foods in preference to anything else.
A starving (not fasting) body also knows precisely in what order of priority
body cells should be metabolized to minimize risk of death or permanent
disability.
After a starving body has reached skeletal condition, or where some small
amount of fat remains but nutritional reserves (vitamins and minerals) are
exhausted and there is insufficient nourishment forthcoming, the body
begins to consume nutrient-rich muscle and organ tissue in a last-ditch effort
to stay alive.
Under these dire circumstances, the least essential muscles and organs from
the standpoint of survival are metabolized first.
For example, muscles in the arms and legs would be consumed early in the
process, the heart muscle used only toward the very end. The very last part
of the body to be metabolized when one is starving and as has come very
close to death would be the brain and the nervous system.
Starvation begins where fasting ends, which is when real hunger begins. If
the return of hunger is ignored whenever it takes place, whether it is in 30, 60,
or 90 days depending upon body weight and type of fast, at that point
exactly, not a day before, starvation begins very slowly.
Usually it takes a considerable period of time after that before death occurs.
It is important to note that this discussion applies only to the abstention from
food, not water. Death takes place very quickly in the absence of water.
The chart on the previous page shows numerically the phenomenal ability of
the body to protect the most essential tissues of the body right up to the time
of death.
If a person fasted for 30 days, the average time it takes for the return of
hunger in a person that is not overweight, and then ignored the return of
hunger, and continued to abstain from food–if the person could avoid forced
exercise, keep warm, and had enough hydration, it could take as much as an
additional 20 to 60 days to die of starvation.
At death the body would have experienced losses of 40 to 60 percent of its
starting body weight. (Ancel Keys et al, 1950)
An emaciated person cannot afford to lose nearly as much weight as an
obese person, and death under conditions of starvation will occur earlier. In
all cases of starvation the brain, nerves, heart, lungs, kidneys and liver
remain largely intact and functional to the very end.
During a fast, it is almost impossible to damage essential organs, unless of
course the person creates the damage by fears about the process, or by
internalizing the fears of others. If those fears are present, the fast should
not be attempted.
Weight Loss By Fasting
Loss of weight indicates, almost guarantees that detoxification and healing is
occurring. I can’t stress this too much. Of all the things I find my patients
seem to misunderstand or forget after being told, it is that they can’t heal in a
rapid manner without getting smaller.
This reality is especially hard for the family and friends of someone who is
fasting, who will say, you’re looking terrible dear, so thin. Your skin is
hanging on your bones. You’re not eating enough protein or nutrient food to
be healthy and you must eat more or you’re going to develop serious
deficiencies.
You don’t have any energy, you must be getting sicker. You’re doing the
wrong thing, obviously. You have less energy and look worse every day. Go
and see a doctor before it is too late.
To succeed with friends like this, a faster has to be a mighty self-determined
person with a powerful ability to disagree with others.
Medical personnel claim that rapid weight loss often causes dangerous
deficiencies; these deficiencies force the person to overeat and regain even
more weight afterward.
This is largely untrue, though there is one true aspect to it: a fasted,
detoxified body becomes a much more efficient digester and assimilator,
extracting a lot more nutrition from the same amount food is used to eat.
If, after extended fasting a person returns to eating the same number of
calories as they did before; they will gain weight even more rapidly than
before they stated fasting.
When fasting for weight loss, the only way to keep the weight off is to greatly
reform the diet; to go on, and stay on, a diet made up largely of non-starchy,
watery fruits and vegetables, limited quantities of cooked food, and very
limited amounts of highly concentrated food sources like cereals and cooked
legumes.
Unless, of course, after fasting, one’s lifestyle involves much very hard
physical labor or exercise. I’ve had a few obese fasters become quite angry
with me for this reason; they hoped to get thin through fasting and after the
fast, to resume overeating with complete irresponsibility as before, without
weight gain.
People also fear weight loss during fasting because they fear becoming
anorexic or bulimic. They won’t. A person who abstains from eating for the
purpose of improving their health, in order to prevent or treat illness, or even
one who fasts for weight loss will not develop an eating disorder.
Eating disorders mean eating compulsively because of a distorted body
image. Anorexics and bulimics have obsessions with the thinner-is-better
school of thought.
The anorexic looks at their emaciated frame in the mirror and thinks they are
fat. This is the distorted perception of a very insecure person badly in need
of therapy.
A bulimic, on the other hand stuffs themselves, usually with bad food, and
then purges it by vomiting, or with laxatives.
Anorexics and bulimics are not accelerating the healing potential of their
bodies; these are life-threatening conditions. Fasters are genuinely trying to
enhance their survival potential.
Occasionally a neurotic individual with a pre-existing eating disorder will
become obsessed with fasting and colon cleansing as a justification to
legitimize their compulsion. During my career while monitoring hundreds of
fasters, I’ve known two of these.
I discourage them from fasting or colon cleansing, and refuse to assist them,
because they carry the practices to absurd extremes, and contribute to bad
press about natural medicine by ending up in the emergency ward of a
hospital with an intravenous feeding tube in their arm.
Cases Beyond The Remedy Of Fasting
Occasionally, very ill people have a liver that has become so degenerated it
cannot sustain the burden of detoxification. This organ is as vital to survival
as the brain, heart and lungs.
We can get along with only one kidney, we can live with no spleen, with no
gallbladder, with only small parts of the stomach and intestines, but we
cannot survive without a liver for more than a day or so.
The liver is the most active organ in the body during detoxification. To reach
an understanding of detoxification, it helps to know just what the liver does
for us on an ongoing basis.
The liver is a powerful chemical filter where blood is refined and purified. The
liver passes this cleansed blood out through the superior vena cava, directly
to the heart. The blood is then pumped into general and systemic circulation,
where it reaches all parts of the body, delivering nutrition and oxygen at a
cellular level.
On its return flow, a large proportion of the depleted blood is collected by the
gastric, splenic and superior and inferior mesenteric veins that converge to
form the large portal vein, which enters the liver.
Thus a massive flow of waste from all the cells of the body is constantly
flowing into the liver. The huge hepatic artery also enters the liver to supply
oxygen and nutrients with which to sustain the liver cells themselves.
The liver is constantly at work refining the blood. It is synthesizing, purifying,
renovating, washing, filtering, separating, and detoxifying. It works day and
night without stopping.
Many toxins are broken down by enzymes and their component parts are
efficiently reused in various parts of the body. Some impurities are filtered
out and held back from the general circulation.
These debris are collected and stored in the gall bladder, which is a little sack
appended to the liver. After a meal, the contents of the gall bladder (bile) are
discharged into the duodenum, the upper part of the small intestine just
beyond the stomach.
This bile also contains digestive enzymes produced by the liver that permit
the breakdown of fatty foods in the small intestine.
Sometimes a large flow of bile finds its way into the stomach by pressure or
is sucked into the stomach by vomiting. Excessive biliary secretion and
excretion can also result from overeating, which overcrowds the area.
Sometimes colonics or massage can also stimulate a massive flow of bile.
Extremely bitter and irritating, when bile gets into the stomach the person
either vomits or wishes they could. And after vomiting and experiencing the
taste of bile, wishes they hadn’t.
When no food at all enters the system, the blood keeps right on passing
through the liver/filter just as it does when we are eating. When the liver does
not have to take care of toxins generated by the current food intake, each
passage through the liver results in a cleaner blood stream, with the debris
decreasing in quantity, viscosity, and toxicity, until the blood becomes
normalized.
During fasting, debris from the gallbladder still pass through the small
intestine and into the large intestine.
However, if the bowels do not move the toxins in the bile are reabsorbed into
the blood stream and get recirculated in an endless loop. This toxic
recycling makes a faster feel just terrible, like they had a flu or worse!
The bowels rarely move while fasting. During fasting only enemas or
colonics permit elimination from the large intestine. If done effectively and
frequently, enemas will greatly add to the well being and comfort of the
faster.
Many times when a faster seems to be retracing or experiencing a sudden
onset of acute discomfort or symptoms, these can be almost immediately be
relieved by an enema or colonic.
A person with major liver degeneration inevitably dies, with or without
fasting, with or without traditional medicine. Significantly impaired kidney
function can also bring about this same result.
Mercifully, death while fasting is usually accomplished relatively free of pain,
clear of mind and with dignity.
That often cannot be said of death in a hospital. There are much worse
experiences than death.
Fasting is not a cure-all. There are some conditions that are beyond the
ability of the body to heal. Ultimately, old age gets us all.
Dr. Linda Hazzard, one of the greats of natural hygiene, who practiced
Osteopathic medicine in the 1920s, had a useful way of categorizing
conditions that respond well to fasting. These she labeled "acute conditions"
and "chronic degenerative conditions."
A third classification, "chronic conditions with organic damage" does not
respond to fasting. Acute conditions, are usually inflammations or infections
with irritated tissue, with swelling, redness, and often copious secretions of
mucous and pus, such as colds, flu, a first time case of pneumonia, inflamed
joints as in the early stages of arthritis, etc.
These acute conditions usually remedy in one to three weeks of fasting.
Acute conditions are excellent candidates for self-doctoring. Chronic
degenerative conditions are more serious and the patient usually requires
supervision.
These include conditions such as cancer, aids, chronic arthritis, chronic
pneumonia, emphysema and asthma. Chronic degenerative conditions
usually respond within a month to three months of fasting.
The fasting should be broken up into two or three sessions if the condition
has not been relieved in one stint of supervised fasting.
Each successive fast will produce some improvement and if a light, largely
raw-food diet is adhered to between fasts the patient should not worsen and
should be fairly comfortable between fasting.
If there has been major functional damage to an organ as a result of any of
these degenerative conditions, healing will not be complete, or may be
impossible.
By organic damage, I mean that a vital part of the body has ceased to
function due to some degenerative process, injury, or surgery–so badly
damaged that the cells that make up the organ cannot be replaced.
I once had a twenty five year old man come to my spa to die in peace
because he had been through enough diagnostic procedures in three
hospitals to know that his liver was beyond repair.
He had been working on an apple farm in between terms at university when
he was poisoned several times with insecticide from an aerial spray on the
whole orchard. He absorbed so much insecticide that his liver incurred
massive organic damage.
When he came to me his body had reached the point where it was incapable
of digesting, and because of lack of liver function, it was incapable of healing
while fasting, a condition in which death is a certainty.
He was a Buddhist, did not fear death and did not want to be kept alive in
agony or in prolonged unconsciousness by any extraordinary means, nor
did he want to die with tubes in every orifice.
I was honored to be a supportive participant in his passing. He died fasting,
in peace, and without pain, with a clear mind that allowed him to consciously
prepare for the experience.
He was not in a state of denial or fear, and made no frantic attempts to
escape the inevitable. He went quietly into that still dark night with a tranquil
demeanor and a slight smile.
Fortunately, in my many years of practice I had the pleasure of seeing the
majority of the people totally regain their health or at least greatly improve it
by means of the fasting and healing diets.
Many cancer patients watched with amazement as their tumors disappeared
before their eyes, many arthritics regained their function, serious skin
conditions such as psoriasis disappeared, mental conditions improved,
addictions vanished, fatigue was replaced by energy, and fat dissolved
revealing the hidden sculpture beneath.
I will talk more about procedures and the particular reasons bodies develop
specific conditions in later chapters.
Social Cultural Psychological Obstacles To Fasting
Numerous attitudes make it difficult to fast or to provide moral support to
friends or loved ones that are fasting.
Many people harbor fears of losing weight because they think that if times
were really tough, if there was a famine or they became ill and lost a lot of
weight they would have no reserves and would certainly perish.
These people have no idea how much fat can be concealed on an even
skinny body, nor of how slowly a skinny body loses weight while fasting.
Substantial fat reserves are helpful as heat-retaining insulation in those rare
accidents when someone is dropped into a cold ocean and must survive
until the rescue boat arrives.
Being fat might keep a person alive longer who is lost in the wilderness
awaiting rescue with no supplies, no means of procuring food, and no
means of keeping warm.
On the other hand, fat people would have a far harder time walking out of the
wilderness. And extensive fat deposits are merely fuel and do not contain
extensive nutritional reserves.
An obese person fasting without significant nutritional supplementation
would begin starving long before they became really skinny.
On the balance, carrying excess weight is a far greater liability than any
potential prosurvival aspects it might have.
There are other attitudes associated with weight loss that make it difficult for
people to fast. People hold rather stereotypical notions about what
constitutes an attractive person; usually it involves having some meat on
ones bones.
Hollywood and Hugh Hefner have both influenced the masses to think that
women should have hourglass figures with large, up thrust, firm breasts.
Since breasts are almost all useless fatty tissue supporting some milk-
producing glands that do not give a breast much volume except when
engorged, most women fasters loose a good percentage of their breast
mass.
If the fast is extensive, there should also develop an impressive showing of
ribs and hipbones; these are not soft and cuddly.
Husbands, lovers, parents, and friends frequently point out that you don’t
look good this way and exhort you to put on weight. Most people think
pleasantly plump is healthy.
Skinny men, especially those who had lost a lot of weight during an illness,
are pressured by associates to put on weight to prove that they are healthy. I
had a client who was formerly a college varsity football player.
Before his illness he had lifted weights and looked like a hunk. His family
and friends liked to see him that way and justifiably so. Then he got
seriously ill. On a long extended healing diet he lost a significant amount of
weight and seemed down right skinny, causing all who knew him well and
cared about him to tempt him with all kinds of scrumptious delicacies from
the best of kitchens.
But this case was like Luigi Cornaro, a man who never again could look like a
hunk. His "friends" made an absolutely necessary change in life style and
appearance far more difficult than it was already.
My client was torn between a desire to please others, and a desire to regain
and retain his health. This is a problem a sick person doesn’t need.
If you have the independence to consider following an alternative medical
program in a culture that highly values conformity and agreement, you are
also going to have to defend your own course of self-determined action
based on the best available data that you have.
But fasters are usually in fragile emotional condition, so I advise my clients
who are subjected to this kind of pressure to beg their friends and
associates to refrain from saying anything if they can’t support the course of
action you have chosen.
After this, if friends or relatives are still incapable of saying nothing (even non-
verbally), it is important to exclude them from your life until you have
accomplished your health goals, have regained some weight and have
returned to eating a maintenance diet, rather than getting skinnier on a
healing one.
The very worst aspect of our culture’s eating programming is that people
have been wrongfully taught that when ill they must eat to keep up their
strength.
Inherent in this recommendation is an unstated belief that when the body is
weakened by a disease state, the weakness can somehow be overcome with
food, and that the body needs this food to kill the virus, bacteria, or invading
yeast, and uses the protein to heal or rebuild tissue.
Sadly, the exact opposite is the case. Disease organisms feed and multiply
on the toxic waste products of misdigestion, and the body is unable to digest
well when it is weak or ill.
There’s an old saying about this: “feed a cold, starve a fever.” Most people
think this saying means you should eat when you have a cold. What the
saying really means is if you feed a cold then you will soon have to starve a
fever.
Protein foods especially are not digested by a diseased body, and as
mentioned before, the waste products of protein indigestion are especially
poisonous. That is all the body needs when it is already down, another load
of poison, which it can’t eliminate due to weakness and enervation.
Weight loss is usually associated with illness, as it should be! In times of
acute illness an otherwise healthy body loses its appetite for food because it
is prosurvival to stop eating. It is very hard to coax a sick animal to eat. Their
bodies, not controlled by a mind full of complex learned responses and false
ideas, automatically know that fasting is nature’s method of healing.
Contrary to popular understanding, digestion, assimilation, and elimination
require the expenditure of considerable energy. This fact may contradict the
reader’s experience because everyone has become tired when they have
worked a long time without eating, and then experienced the lift after eating.
But an ill body cannot digest efficiently so instead of providing energy
extracted from foods, the body is further burdened by yet another load of
toxic material produced by fermented and putrefied food. This adds insult to
injury in a sick body that is already drowning in its own garbage.
Worse, during illness most available vital force is already redirected into
healing; it is not available for digestion. It is important to allow a sick body to
proceed with healing and not to obstruct the process with unnecessary
digestion or suppress the symptoms (which actually are the healing efforts)
with drugs.
If you have an acute illness, and you stop all food intake except for pure
water and herb teas, and perhaps some vegetable broth, or dilute non-sweet
juice, you have relieved your body of an immense effort.
Instead of digesting, the body goes to work on catching up on healing. The
body can and will almost inevitably heal itself if the sick person will have faith
in it, cooperate with the body’s efforts by allowing the symptoms of healing
to exist, reduce or eliminate the intake of food to allow the body to marshal its
energies, maintain a positive mental attitude and otherwise stay out of the
way.
Many people intensely dread missing even one meal. These folks usually are
and have been so toxic that their bodies had been stashing un-eliminated
toxins in their fat for years.
They are usually so addicted to caffeine, cigarettes, alcohol, and so forth,
that when they had fasted, even briefly, their bodies were forced to dip into
highly polluted fat reserves while simultaneously the body begins
withdrawal.
People like this who try to fast experience highly unpleasant symptoms
including headache, irritability, inability to think or concentrate, blurred
vision, profound fatigue, aches, etc.
Most of these symptoms come from low blood sugar, but combined with the
toxins being released from fat and combined with going through multiple
addictive withdrawals, the discomforts are more than most people are willing
to tolerate.
Fasting on juice is much more realistic for cases like this. It is little wonder
that when a hygienist suggests a fast to improve health, this type of case
asserts positively that fasting is quite impossible, they have tried it, it is
absolutely terrible and know that they can’t do it.
This rejection is partly due to a cultural expectation (one reinforced by
western medicine) that all unpleasant symptoms should be avoided or
suppressed.
To voluntarily experience unpleasant sensations such as those mentioned
above is more than the ordinary timid person will subject themselves to, even
in order to regain health.
They will allow surgery, drugs with violent and dangerous side effects,
painful and invasive testing procedures and radiation–all unpleasant and
sometimes extremely uncomfortable.
These therapies are accepted because someone else with authority is doing
it to them. And, they have been told that it they don’t submit they will not
ever feel better and probably will die in the near future.
Also people think that they have no alternative, that the expert in front of
them knows what is best, so they feel relieved to have been relieved of the
responsibility for their own condition and its treatment.
Preventative Fasting
During the years it takes for a body to degenerate enough to prompt a fast,
the body has been storing up large quantities of unprocessed toxins in the
cells, tissues, fat deposits, and organs.
The body in its wisdom will always choose to temporarily deposit
overwhelming amounts of toxins somewhere harmless rather than permit the
blood supply to become polluted or to use secondary elimination routes.
A body will use times when the liver is less burdened to eliminate these
stored toxic debris. The hygienists paradigm asserts that the manifestation
of symptoms or illness are all by themselves, absolute, unassailable proof
that further storage of toxic wastes in the cells, tissues, fat deposits, and
organs is not possible and that an effort toward elimination is absolutely
necessary.
Thus the first time a person fasts a great quantity of toxins will normally be
released. Being the resident of a body when this is happening can be quite
uncomfortable. For this reason alone, preventative fasting is a very wise
idea.
Before the body becomes critically ill, clean up your reserve fuel supply (fat
deposits) by burning off some accumulated fat that is rich in toxic deposits
and then replace it with clean, non-toxic fat that you will make while eating
sensibly.
If you had but fasted prophylactically as a preventative or health-creating
measure before you became seriously ill, the initial detoxification of your
body could have been accomplished far more comfortably, while you were
healthy, while your vital force was high and while your body otherwise more
able to deal with detoxification.
Each time you fast, even if it is only one day, you allow your body to go
through a partial detox, and each time it becomes easier and more
comfortable than the last time.
The body learns how to fast. Each time you fast it, your body slips into a
cleansing mode more quickly, and each time you fast you lighten the load of
stored toxins.
Perhaps you have already eliminated the caffeine your body had stored,
which frequently causes severe headaches on withdrawal, not to mention
fatigue.
It certainly helps to have this behind you before you go on to the elimination
of other irritating substances.
Many people have gone through alcohol or tobacco withdrawal, and
understand that it is very unpleasant, and also that it must be done in the
pursuit of health.
Why not withdraw from the rest of the irritating and debilitating substances
we take into our system on an ongoing basis, and why not grit your way
through the eliminative process, withdraw, from food addictions such as
sugar or salt, and from foods that you may be allergic to like wheat, dairy
products or eggs.
It is very wise to invest in your own insurance plan by systematically
detoxifying while you are still healthy. Plan it into your life, when it is
convenient, such as once a week on Sunday, or even once a month on a
quiet day.
Take a few days of vacation, go to a warm, beautiful place and devote part or
all of it to cleansing. Treat yourself by taking an annual trip to Hawaii, fasting
at a hotel on the beach–do whatever it takes to motivate yourself. And
consider this: vacations are enormously cheaper when you stay out of
restaurants.
If you have accustomed your body to 24-hour fasts, then you can work on 48-
hour fasts, and overtime work up to 72-hour fasts, all on a continuum.
You may find it becoming increasingly comfortable, perhaps even pleasant,
something you look forward to.
Fasting a relatively detoxified body feels good, and people eventually really
get into the clean, light, clear headed, perhaps spiritually aware state that
goes along with it.
By contrast, fasting when you are sick is much more difficult because your
vitality or vital force is very low, you already have no energy, and probably
have unpleasant symptoms that must be dealt with at the same time.
There may be the added stress of being forced into a cleanse because you
are too nauseous to eat. Most people let their health go until they are forced
into dealing with it; they are too busy living, so why bother.
The truth is that our body does age, and over time becomes less able to deal
with insults; the accumulated effect of insults and aging eventually leads
most of us to some serious degenerative illness.
Normally this begins happening around age 50 if not sooner. Some of us
that were gifted with good genes or what I call "a good start" may have
reached the age of 60 or 75 or even 90 without serious illness, but those
people are few and far between.
Why not tip the scales in your favor by preventing or staving off health
problems with systematic detoxification at your own convenience.
Climb into the drivers seat and start to take control and gain confidence in
your own ability to deal with your body, your own health, and your own life.
When it gets right down to the bottom line, there is really only one thing in the
world that is really yours, and that is your life. Take control and start
managing it. The reward will be a more qualitative life.
By: Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
http://soilandhealth.org/02/0201hyglibcat/020102moser/020102Moser00toc.
html
By: Dr. Isabelle A. Moser, With: Steve Solomon
PART 2
Common Fasting Complaints And Discomforts
The most frequently heard complaints of fasters are headaches, dry, cracked
lips, dizziness, blurred vision with black spots that float, skin rashes, and
weakness in the first few days plus what they think is intense hunger.
The dizziness and weakness are real, and are due to increased levels of
toxins circulating in the blood and from unavoidably low blood sugar, which
is a natural consequence of the cessation of eating.
The blood sugar does reestablish a new equilibrium in the second and third
week of the fast and then, the dizziness may cease, but still, it is important to
expect dizziness at the beginning.
It always takes more time for the blood to reach the head on a fast because
everything has slowed down, including the rate of the heartbeat, so blood
pressure probably has dropped as well.
If you stand up very quickly you may faint. I repetitively instruct all of my
clients to stand up very slowly, moving from a lying to a sitting position,
pausing there for ten or twenty seconds, and then rising slowly from a sitting
to a standing position.
They are told that at the first sign of dizziness they must immediately put
their head between their knees so that the head is lower than the heart, or
squat/sit down on the floor, I once had a faster who forgot to obey my
frequent warnings.
About two weeks into a long fast, she got up rapidly from the toilet and felt
dizzy. The obvious thing to do was to sit back down on the toilet or lie down
on the bath rug on the floor, but no, she decided that because she was dizzy
she should rush back to her bed in the adjoining room.
She made it as far as the bathroom door and fainted, out cold, putting a deep
groove into the drywall with her pretty nose on the way down. We then had
to make an unscheduled visit to a nose specialist, who calmly put a tape-
wrapped spoon inside her bent-over nose and pried it back to dead center.
This was not much fun for either of us; it is well worthwhile preventing such
complications.
Other common complaints during the fast include coldness, due to low blood
sugar as well as a consequence of weight loss and slowed circulation due to
lessened physical activity.
People also dislike inactivity, which seems excruciatingly boring, and some
are upset by weight loss itself. Coldness is best handled with lots of clothes,
bedding, hot water bottles or hot pads, and warm baths.
Great Oaks School of Health was in Oregon, where the endlessly rainy
winters are chilly and the concrete building never seemed to get really warm.
I used to dream of moving my fasters to a tropical climate where I could also
get the best, ripest fruits to wean them back on to food.
If the fast goes on for more than a week or ten days, many people complain
of back discomfort, usually caused by over-worked kidneys. This passes.
Hot baths or hot water bottles provide some relief. Drinking more fluids may
also help a bit.
Nausea is fairly common too, due to toxic discharges from the gall bladder.
Drinking lots of water or herbal tea dilutes toxic bile in the stomach and
makes it more tolerable.
Very few fasters sleep well and for some reason they expect to, certainly
fasters hope to, because they think that if they sleep all night they will better
survive one more deadly dull day in a state of relative unconsciousness.
They find out much to their displeasure that very little sleep is required on a
fast because the body is at rest already. Many fasters sleep only two to four
hours but doze frequently and require a great deal of rest.
Being mentally prepared for this change of habit is the best handling.
Generalized low-grade aches and pains in the area of the diseased organs or
body parts are common and can often be alleviated with hot water bottles,
warm but not hot bath water and massage.
If this type of discomfort exists, it usually lessens with each passing day until
it disappears altogether.
Many fasters complain that their vision is blurred, and that they are unable to
concentrate. These are really major inconveniences because then fasters
can’t read or even pay close attention to video-taped movies, and if they can’
t divert themselves some fasters think they will go stir crazy.
They are so addicted to a hectic schedule of doingness, and/or being
entertained that they just can’t stand just being with themselves, forced to
confront and deal with the sensations of their own body, forced to face their
own thoughts, to confront their own emotions, many of which are negative.
People who are fasting release a lot of mental/emotional garbage at the same
time as they let go of old physical garbage. Usually the psychological stuff
contributed greatly to their illness and just like the physical garbage and
degenerated organs, it all needs to be processed.
One of the most distressing experiences that happen occasionally is hair
loss. Deprived of adequate nutrition, the follicles cannot keep growing hair,
and the existing hair dies.
However, the follicles themselves do not die and once the fast has ended
and sufficient nutrition is forthcoming, hair will regrow as well or better than
before.
There are also complaints that occur after the fast has been broken. Post-
fast cravings, even after only two weeks of deprivation, are to be expected.
These may take the form of desires for sweet, sour, salt, or a specific food
dreamed of while fasting, like chocolate fudge Sundays or just plain toast.
Food cravings must be controlled at all costs because if acted upon, each
indulgence chips away the health gains of the previous weeks. A single
indulgence can be remedied by a day of restricting the diet to juice or raw
food.
After the repair, the person feels as good as they did when the fast ended.
Repeated indulgences will require another extended bout of fasting to repair.
It is far better to learn self-control.
The Healing Crisis And Retracing
Certain unpleasant somatics that occur while fasting (or while on a healing
diet) may not be dangerous or "bad."
Two types, the healing crisis, and retracing, are almost inevitable. A well
educated faster should welcome these discomforts when they happen. The
healing crisis (but not retracing) also occurs on a healing diet.
The healing crisis can seem a big surprise to a faster who has been
progressing wonderfully. Suddenly, usually after a few days of noticeably
increased well being, they suddenly experience a set of severe symptoms
and feel just awful.
This is not a setback, not something to be upset or disappointed about, but a
healing crisis is actually a positive sign
Healing crises always occur after a period of marked improvement. As the
vital force builds up during the healing process, the body decides it now has
obtained enough energy to throw off some accumulated toxins, and
forcefully pushes them out through a typical and usually previously used
route of secondary elimination, such as the nose, lungs, stomach, intestines,
skin, or perhaps produces a flu-like experience with fever chills, sweat, aches
and pains, etc.
Though unpleasant, this experience is to be encouraged; the body has
merely accelerated its elimination process. Do not attempt to suppress any
of these symptoms; don’t even try to moderate fever, which is the body’s
effective way to burn out a virus or bacteria infection, unless it is a
dangerously high fever (over 102° Fahrenheit).
Fever can be lowered without drugs by putting the person into a cool/cold
bath, or using cold towel wraps and cold-water sponge baths.
(Editors Note: this procedure is not recommended by Shelton, he thinks the
patient should be made as comfortable as possible and should not be given
cold baths to bring down a fever.)
The good news is that healing crises usually do not last long, and when they
pass you feel better than you did before the crisis.
Asthmatics seem to have the worst crises. I have had asthmatics bring up a
quart of obnoxious mucous from their lungs every night for weeks. They
have stayed awake all night for three nights continuously coughing and
choking on the material that was being eliminated.
After that clearing-out process they were able to breath much more freely.
Likewise I have had people who have had sinusitis have nothing but non-
stop pussy discharge from their sinuses for three weeks. Some of this
would run down the throat and cause nausea.
All I could say to encourage the sufferer was that it needed to come out and
to please stand aside and let the body work its magic. These fasters were
not grateful until the sinus problem that had plagued them since childhood
disappeared.
The interesting thing about healing crises is that the symptoms produced
retrace earlier complaints; they are almost never something entirely
unknown to the patient.
Usually they are old, familiar somatics, often complaints that
haven’t bothered the faster for many years. The reason the symptom is
familiar but is not currently a problem is because as the body degenerates it
loses vital force; with less vital force it loses the ability to create such acute
detoxification episodes in non-life-threatening secondary elimination routes.
The degenerated body makes less violent efforts to cleanse, efforts that aren’
t as uncomfortable. The negative side of this is that instead of creating acute
discomfort in peripheral systems, the toxemia goes to more vital organs
where it hastens the formation of life-threatening conditions.
There is a very normal and typical progress for each person’s fatal illness.
Their ultimate disease starts out in childhood or adolescence as acute
inflammations of skin-like organs, viral or bacterial infections of the same.
Then, as vital force weakens, secondary eliminations are shifted to more vital
organs.
Allergies or colds stop happening so frequently; the person becomes
rheumatic, arthritic or experience weakness in joints, tendons, ligaments, or
to have back pains, or to have digestive upsets.
These new symptoms are more constant but usually less acute. Ultimately,
vital organs begin to malfunction, and serious disease develops. But a
hygienist sees the beginning of fatal diseases such as cancer in adolescent
infections and allergies.
Retracing is generally seen only on water fasts, not on extended cleansing
diets. The body begins to repair itself by healing conditions in the reverse
order to that which they occurred originally. This means that the body would
first direct healing toward the lungs if the most recently serious illness was
an attack of pneumonia six months previously.
In this case you would expect to quickly and intensely experience a mini-
case of pneumonia while the body eliminates residues in the lungs that were
not completely discharged at the time.
Next the body might take you through a period of depression that you had
experienced five years in the past. The faster may be profoundly depressed
for a few days and come out of it feeling much better.
You could then re-experience sensation-states like those caused by
recreational drugs you had playfully experimented with ten years previously
along with the "trippiness" if it were a hallucinogen, speediness if it was
"speed" or the dopiness if it was heroin.
Retracing further, the faster might then experience something similar to a
raging attack of tonsillitis which you vaguely remember having when you
were five years old, but fortunately this time it passes in three days (or maybe
six hours), instead of three weeks. This is retracing.
Please do not be surprised or alarmed if it happens to you on a fast, and
immediately throw out the baby with the bath water thinking that you are
doing the wrong thing because all those old illnesses are coming back to
haunt you.
It is the body’s magnificent healing effort working on your behalf, and for
doing it your body deserves lots of "well done", "good body" thoughts rather
than gnashing of teeth and thinking what did I do to deserve this. The body
won’t tell you what you did to deserve this, but it knows and is trying its
darndest to undo it.
The Unrelenting Boredom Of Fasting
Then there’s the unrelenting boredom of fasting. Most people have been
media junkies since they were kids; the only way they believe they can
survive another day of fasting is by diverting their minds with TV.
This is far from ideal because often the emotions of a faster are like an open
wound and when they resonate with the emotions portrayed on most TV
shows, the faster gets into some very unpleasant states that interfere with
healing.
And the emotions many movies prompt people to sympathetically generate
are powerful ones, often highly negative, and contrary to healing. Especially
unhelpful are the adrenaline rushes in action movies.
But if TV is the best a faster can do, it is far better that someone fast with
television programming filling their minds than to not fast at all. I keep a
library of positive VHS tapes for these addicts–comedies, stories of heroic
over-comings, depictions of humans at their best.
Boredom is probably the most limiting factor to fasting a long time. That is
because boredom is progressive; it gets worse with each slowly passing
day. But concurrently, the rate of healing is accelerating with each slowly
passing day.
Every day the faster gets through does them considerably more good than
the previous day. However, fasters rarely are motivated enough to overcome
boredom for more than two weeks or so, unless they started the fast to solve
a very serious or life-threatening condition.
For this reason, basically well people should not expect to be able to fast for
more than a couple of weeks every six months or year, no matter how much
good a longer fast might do.
Exercise While Fasting
The issue of how much activity is called for on a fast is controversial. Natural
Hygienists in the Herbert Shelton tradition insist that all fasters absolutely
must have complete bed rest, with no books, no TV, no visitors, no enemas,
no exercise, no music, and of course no food, not even a cup of herb tea.
In my many years of conducting people through fasts, I have yet to meet an
individual that could mentally tolerate this degree of nothingness. It is too
drastic a withdrawal from all the stimulation people are used to in the
twentieth century.
I still don’t know how Shelton managed to make his patients do it, but my
guess is that he must have been a very intimidating guy. Shelton was a body
builder of some renown in his day. I bet Shelton’s patients kept a few books
and magazines under their mattress and only took them out when he wasn’t
looking.
If I had tried to enforce this type of sensory deprivation, I know my patients
would have grabbed their clothes and run, vowing never to fast again.
I think it is most important that people fast, and that they feel so good about
the experience that they want to do it again, and talk all their sick friends into
doing the same thing.
In contrast to enforced inactivity, Russian researchers who supervised
schizophrenics on 30-day water fasts insisted that they walk for three hours
every day, without stopping.
I would like to have been there to see how they managed to enforce that. I
suspect some patients cheated. I lived with schizophrenics enough years to
know that it is very difficult to get them to do anything that they don’t want to
do, and very few of them are into exercise, especially when fasting.
In my experience both of these approaches to activity during the fast are
extremes. The correct activity level should be arrived at on an individual
basis. I have had clients who walked six miles a day during an extended
water fast, but they were not feeling very sick when they started the fast, and
they were also physically fit.
In contrast I have had people on extended fasts who were unable to walk for
exercise, or so weak they were unable to even walk to the bathroom, but
these people were critically ill when they started fasting, and desperately
needed to conserve what little vital force they had for healing.
Most people who are not critically ill need to walk at least 200 yards twice a
day, with assistance if necessary, if only to move the lymph through the
system.
The lymphatic system is a network of ducts and nodes, which are distributed
throughout the body, with high concentrations of nodes in the neck, chest,
armpits, and groin.
Its job is to carry waste products from the extremities to the center of the
body where they can be eliminated. The blood is circulated through the
arteries and veins in the body by the contractions of the heart, but the
lymphatic system does not have a pump.
Lymphatic fluid is moved by the contractions of the muscles, primarily those
of the arms and legs. If the faster is too weak to move, massage and assisted
movements are essential.
Lymph nodes are also a part of our immune system and produce white blood
cells to help control invading organisms. When the lymph is overloaded with
waste products the ducts and nodes swell, and until the source of the local
irritation is removed, are incapable of handling further debris.
If left in this condition for years they become so hard they feel like rocks
under the skin. Lumps in the armpits or the groin are prime sites for the
future development of a cancer.
Fasting, massage, and poultices will often soften overloaded lymph nodes
and coax them back into operation.
The Stages Of Fasting
The best way to understand what happens when we fast is to break up the
process into six stages: preparation for the fast, loss of hunger, acidosis,
normalization, healing, and breaking the fast.
A person that has consumed the typical American diet most of their life and
whose life is not in immediate danger would be very wise to gently prepares
their body for the fast. Two weeks would be a minimum amount of time, and
if the prospective faster wants an easier time of it, they should allow a month
or even two for preliminary housecleaning.
During this time, eliminate all meat, fish, dairy products, eggs, coffee, black
tea, salt, sugar, alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, and greasy foods. This de-
addiction will make the process of fasting much more pleasant, and is
strongly recommended.
However, eliminating all these harmful substances is withdrawal from
addictive substances and will not be easy for most. I have more to say about
this later when I talk about allergies and addictions.
The second stage, psychological hunger, usually is felt as an intense desire
for food. This passes within three or four days of not eating anything.
Psychological hunger usually begins with the first missed meal.
If the faster seems to be losing their resolve, I have them drink unlimited
quantities of good-tasting herb teas, (sweetened –only if absolutely
necessary–with nutrisweet).
Salt-free broths made from meatless instant powder (obtainable at the health
food store) can also fend off the desire to eat until the stage of hunger has
passed.
Acidosis, the third stage, usually begins a couple of days after the last meal
and lasts about one week. During acidosis the body vigorously throws off
acid waste products.
Most people starting a fast begin with an overly acid blood pH from the
typical American diet that contains a predominance of acid-forming foods.
Switching over to burning fat for fuel triggers the release of even more acidic
substances.
Acidosis is usually accompanied by fatigue, blurred vision, and possibly
dizziness. The breath smells very bad, the tongue is coated with bad-tasting
dryish mucus, and the urine may be concentrated and foul unless a good
deal of water is taken daily. Two to three quarts a day is a reasonable
amount.
Mild states of acidosis are a common occurrence. While sleeping after the
last meal of the day is digested bodies normally work very hard trying to
detoxify from yesterday’s abuses. So people routinely awaken in a state of
acidosis.
Their tongue is coated; their breath foul and they feel poorly. They end their
brief overnight fast with breakfast, bringing the detoxification process to a
screeching halt and feel much better.
Many people think they awaken hungry and don’t feel well until they eat.
They confuse acidosis with hunger when most have never experienced real
hunger in their entire lives.
If you typically awaken in acidosis, you are being given a strong sign by your
body that it would like to continue fasting far beyond breakfast. In fact, it
probably would enjoy fasting long beyond the end of acidosis.
Most fasters feel much more comfortable by the end of the first seven to ten
days, when they enter the normalization phase; here the acidic blood
chemistry is gradually corrected. This sets the stage for serious healing of
body tissues and organs.
Normalization may take one or two more weeks depending on how badly the
body was out of balance.
As the blood chemistry steadily approaches perfection, the faster usually
feels an increasing sense of well-being, broken by short spells of discomfort
that are usually healing crises or re-tracings.
The next stage, accelerated healing, can take one or many weeks more,
again depending on how badly the body has been damaged.
Healing proceeds rapidly after the blood chemistry has been stabilized, the
person is usually in a state of profound rest and the maximum amount of vital
force can be directed toward repair and regeneration of tissues.
This is a miraculous time when tumors are metabolized as food for the body,
when arthritic deposits dissolve, when scar tissues tend to disappear, when
damaged organs regain lost function (if they can).
Seriously ill people who never fast long enough to get into this stage (usually
it takes about ten days to two weeks of water fasting to seriously begin
healing) never find out what fasting can really do for them.
Breaking the fast is equally or more important a stage than the fast itself. It is
the most dangerous time in the entire fast. If you stop fasting prematurely,
that is, before the body has completed detoxification and healing, expect the
body to reject food when you try to make it eat, even if you introduce foods
very gradually.
The faster, the spiritual being running the body, may have become bored and
want some action, but the faster’s body hasn’t finished. The body wants to
continue healing.
By rejection, I mean that food may not digest, may feel like a stone in your
stomach, make you feel terrible. If that happens and if, despite that clear
signal you refuse to return to fasting, you should go on a juice diet, take as
little as possible, sip it slowly (almost chew it) and stay on juice until you find
yourself digesting it easily.
Then and only then, reintroduce a little solid raw food like a green salad.
Weaning yourself back on to food should last just as long as the fast. Your
first tentative meals should be dilute, raw juices. After several days of slowly
building up to solid raw fruit, small amounts of raw vegetable foods should
be added.
If it has been a long fast, say over three weeks, this reintroduction should be
done gingerly over a few weeks. If this stage is poorly managed or ignored
you may become acutely ill, and for someone who started fasting while
dangerously ill, loss of self-control and impulsive eating could prove fatal.
Even for those fasting to cure non-life-threatening illnesses it is pointless to
go through the effort and discipline of a long fast without carefully
establishing a correct diet after the fast ends, or the effort will have largely
been wasted.
Less-Rigorous-Than-Water Fasts
There are gradations of fasting measures ranging from rigorous to relatively
casual. Water fasting is the most rapid and effective one. Other methods
have been created by grasping the underlying truth of fasting, namely
whenever the digestive effort can be reduced, by whatever degree, whenever
the formation of the toxins of misdigestion can be reduced or prevented, to
that extent the body can divert energy to the healing process.
Thus comes about assorted famous and sometimes notorious monodiet
semi-fasts like the grape cure where the faster eats only grapes for a month
or so, or the lemon cure, where the juice of one or more lemons is added to
water and nothing else is consumed for weeks on end.
Here I should also mention the "lemon juice/cayenne pepper/maple syrup
cure" the various green drink cures using spirulina, chlorella, barley green or
wheat grass, and the famous Bieler broths–vegetable soups made of
overcooked green beans or zucchini.
I do not believe that monodiets work because of some magical property of a
particular food used. They work because they are semi-fasts and may be
extremely useful, especially for those individuals who cannot or will not
tolerate a water fast.
The best foods for monodiet fasting are the easiest ones to digest: juices of
raw fruits and non-starchy vegetables with all solids strained out. Strained
mineral broths made of long-simmered non-starchy vegetables (the best of
them made of leafy green vegetables) fall in the same category.
So if you are highly partial to the flavor of grapes or lemons or cayenne and
(highly diluted) maple syrup, a long fast on one of these would do you a
world of good, just not quite as much good as the same amount of time
spent on water alone.
If you select something more "solid" for a long monodiet fast, like pureed
zucchini, it is essential that you not overeat. Dr. Bieler gave his fasting
patients only one pint of zucchini soup three or four times a day.
The way to evaluate how much to eat is by how much weight you are losing.
When fasting, you must lose weight. And the faster the better.
Pure absolute water fasting while not taking any vitamins or other nutritional
supplementation has a very limited maximum duration, perhaps 45 days.
The key concept here is nutritional reserves. Body fat is stored, surplus
energy fuel. But energy alone cannot keep a body going. It needs much
more than fuel to rebuild and repair and maintain its systems.
So the body in its wisdom also stores up vitamins and minerals and other
essential substances in and in-between all its cells.
Bodies that have been very well nourished for a long time have very large
reserves; poorly nourished ones may have very little set aside for a rainy
day.
And it is almost a truism that a sick person has, for quite some time, been a
poorly nourished one, with low nutritional reserves. This fact alone can
make it difficult for a sick person to water fast for enough time to completely
heal their damaged organs and other systems.
Obese people have fat reserves sufficient to provide energy for long periods,
but rarely can anybody, no matter how complete its nutrition was for years
previously, contain sufficient nutritional reserves to support a water fast of
over six weeks.
To water fast the very obese down to normal weight can take months but to
make this possible, rather diverse and concentrated nutrition containing few
calories must be given.
It is possible to fast even a very slim a person for quite a bit longer than a
month when their body is receiving easily assimilable vitamins and minerals
and small amounts of sugars or other simple carbohydrates.
I estimate that fasting on raw juices and mineral broths will result in healing at
25 to 75 percent of the efficiency of water fasting, depending on the amount
of nutrition taken and the amount the juices or broths are diluted.
But juice fasting can permit healing to go on several times longer than water
might.
Fasting on diluted juice and broth can also save the life of someone whose
organs of elimination are insufficiently strong to withstand the workload
created by water fasting.
In this sense, juices can be regarded as similar to the moderators in a nuclear
reactor, slowing the process down so it won’t destroy the container.
On a fast of undiluted juice, the healing power drops considerably, but a
person on this regimen, if not sick, is usually capable of working.
Duration of juice fasts can vary greatly. Most of the time there is no need to
continue fasting after the symptoms causing concern have been eliminated,
and this could happen as quickly as one week or take as long as 60 days if
the person is very obese.
Fasters also lose their motivation once the complaint has vanished. But
feeling better is no certain indication that the need to fast has ended.
This points up one of the liabilities of juice fasting; the person is already
eating, their digestive system never shut down and consequently, it is much
easier for them to resume eating.
The thing to keep in mind is that if the symptoms return, the fast was not long
enough or the diet was not properly reformed after the fast.
During a long fast on water or diluted juice, if the body has used up all of it’s
reserves and/or the body has reached skeletal condition, and the condition
or symptoms being addressed persists the fast should be ended, the person
should go on a raw food healing diet.
If three to six months on raw food don’t solve the complaint then another
spell of water or diluted juice fasting should be attempted.
Most fasters are incapable of persisting until the body reserves have been
used up because social conditioning is telling them their emaciated-looking
body must be dying when it is actually far from death, but return of true
hunger is the critical indicator that must not be ignored.
True hunger is not what most people think of when they think they are
hungry. Few Americans have ever experienced true hunger. It is not a
rumbling in the stomach or a set of uncomfortable sensations (caused by the
beginning of detoxification) you know will go away after eating.
True hunger is an animal, instinctual feeling in the back of one’s throat (not
in the stomach) that demands you eat something, anything, even grass or
shoe leather.
Seriously ill people inevitably start the cleansing process with a pre-existing
and serious mineral deficiencies. I say inevitably because they likely would
not have become ill had they been properly nourished.
Sick fasters may be wise to take in minerals from thin vegetable broths or
vitamin-like supplements in order to prevent uncomfortable deficiency
states.
For example calcium or magnesium deficiencies can make water fasters
experience unpleasant symptoms such as hand tremors, stiff muscles,
cramps in the hands, feet, and legs, and difficulty relaxing.
I want to stress here that fasting itself does not create deficiencies. But a
person already deficient in minerals should watch for these symptoms and
take steps to remedy the deficiencies if necessary.
Raw Food Healing Diets
Next in declining order of healing effectiveness is what I call a raw food
healing diet or cleansing diet. It consists of those very same watery fruits
and non-starchy vegetables one juices or makes into vegetable broths, but
eaten whole and raw.
Heating food does two harmful things: it destroys many vitamins, enzymes
and other nutritional elements and it makes many foods much harder to
digest.
So no cooked vegetables or fruits are allowed because to maintain health on
this limited regimen it is essential that every possible vitamin and enzyme
present in the food be available for digestion.
Even though still raw, no starchy or fatty vegetables or fruits are allowed that
contain concentrated calories like potatoes, winter squash, avocados, sweet
potatoes, fresh raw corn, dates, figs, raisins, or bananas.
And naturally, no salad dressings containing vegetable oils or (raw) ground
seeds are allowed. Nor are raw grains or other raw concentrated energy
sources.
When a person starts this diet they will at first experience considerable
weight loss because it is difficult to extract a large number of calories from
these foods (though I have seen people actually gain weight on a pure melon
diet, so much sugar do these fruits have, and well-chewed watermelon seeds
are very nourishing).
Eating even large quantities of only raw fruit and raw non-starchy vegetables
results in a slow but steady healing process about 10 to 20 percent as rapid
as water fasting.
A raw food cleansing diet has several huge advantages. It is possible to
maintain this regimen and regularly do non-strenuous work for many
months, even a year or more without experiencing massive weight loss and,
more important to some people, without suffering the extremes of low blood
sugar, weakness and loss of ability to concentrate that happen when water
fasting.
Someone on a raw food cleanse will have periods of lowered energy and
strong cravings for more concentrated foods, but if they have the self-
discipline to not break their cleansing process they can accomplish a great
deal of healing while still maintaining more or less normal (though slower
paced) life activities.
However, almost no one on this diet is able to sustain an extremely active life-
style involving hard physical labor or competitive sports. And from the very
beginning someone on a raw food cleanse must be willing and able to lie
down and rest any time they feel tired or unable to face their responsibilities.
Otherwise they will inevitably succumb to the mental certainty that their
feelings of exhaustion or overwhelm can be immediately solved by eating
some concentrated food to "give them energy." Such low-energy states will,
however, pass quickly after a brief nap or rest.
Something else gradually happens to a body when on such a diet. Do you
recall that I mentioned that after my own long fast I began to get more
"mileage" out of my food.
A cleansed, healed body becomes far more efficient at digestion and
assimilation; a body that is kept on a raw food cleansing diet will initially lose
weight rapidly, but eventually weight loss slows to virtually nothing and then
stabilizes. However, long-term raw fooders are usually thin as toothpicks.
Once starchy vegetables like potatoes or winter squash, raw or cooked, or
any cereals, raw or cooked, are added to a cleansing diet, the detoxification
and healing virtually ceases and it becomes very easy to maintain or even
gain weight, particularly if larger quantities of more concentrated foods like
seeds and nuts are eaten.
Though this diet has ceased to be cleansing, few if any toxins from
misdigestion will be produced and health is easy to maintain.
"Raw fooders" are usually people who have healed themselves of a serious
disease and ever after continue to maintain themselves on unfired food,
almost as a matter of religious belief.
They have become convinced that eating only raw, unfired food is the key to
extraordinarily long life and supreme good health. When raw fooders wish to
perform hard physical work or strenuous exercise, they’ll consume raw nuts
and some raw grains such as finely-ground oats soaked overnight in warm
water or deliciously sweet "Essene bread" made from slightly sprouted
wheat that is then ground wet, made into cakes, and sun baked at
temperatures below about 115 degrees Fahrenheit.
Essene bread can be purchased in some health food stores. However, little
or no healing or detoxification can happen once concentrated energy
sources are added to the diet, even raw ones.
During my days at Great Oaks School I was a raw fooder for some years,
though I found it very difficult to maintain body heat on raw food during
chilly, rainy Oregon winters and eventually struck a personal compromise
where I ate about half my diet raw and the rest fired. I have listed some
books by raw fooders in the Bibliography. Joe Alexander’s is the most fun.
Complete Recovery Of The Seriously Ill
Its a virtual certainty that to fully recover, a seriously ill person will have to
significantly rebuild numerous organs.
They have a hard choice: to accept a life of misery, one that the medical
doctors with drugs and surgery may be able to prolong into an interminable
hell on earth, or, spend several years working on really healing their body,
rotating between water fasting, juice or broth fasting, extended periods on a
cleansing raw food diet, and periods of no-cleansing on a more complete diet
that includes moderate amounts of cooked vegetables and small quantities
of cooked cereals.
And even after recovery someone who was quite ill may have to live the rest
of their life on a rather restricted regimen.
It is unrealistic to expect one fast to fix everything. The body will heal as
much as it can in the allotted time, but if a dangerous illness has not been
fully remedied by the first intense fast, a raw food diet must be followed for
three to six months until weight has been regained, nutritional reserves have
been rebuilt and it is safe to undertake another extended fast.
More than two water or juice fasts a year of thirty continuous days are not
recommended nor should they be necessary unless the life is in imminent
danger and there is no other option.
The story of Jake’s catastrophic illness and almost-cure is a good example
of this type of program. Jake was from back East. He phoned me because
he had read a health magazine article I had written, his weak voice faintly
describing a desperate condition.
He was in a wheelchair unable to walk, unable to control his legs or arms
very well, was unable to control his bladder and required a catheter. He had
poor bowel control, had not the strength to talk much or loudly and most
frightening to him, he was steadily losing weight although he was eating
large amounts of cooked vegetables and grains.
Jake had wasted away to 90 pounds at 5"10" and looked pathetic when I first
saw him wheeled off an airplane at my local airport.
Jake had seen a lot of medical doctors and had variously been diagnosed as
having chronic fatigue syndrome, chronic (whatever that is) meningitis, and
multiple sclerosis.
He had been treated by virtually every medical expert and many famous
alternative practitioners, utilizing a host of old and new techniques, all to no
avail.
He had even tried intravenous chelation therapy and colonics. It had also
been suggested that he enter a hospital for the treatment of eating disorders
and/or see a psychiatrist.
He had tried to gain admittance to a number of holistic fasting institutions
back east, but they all refused him because they considered the risk was too
high to fast a person at such a low body weight.
But I had previously fasted emaciated people like Jake, and there was
something I liked about his telephone presence. Perhaps this is why I
foolishly decided I knew better than the other experts.
People commonly waste away and die while eating large amounts of food.
Obviously they are unable to digest or assimilate nutrients or they wouldn’t
be wasting.
Eating further increases their toxic burden from undigested meals, further
worsening their already failing organs. The real solution is to stop feeding
them altogether so that their digestive functions can heal.
In Jake’s case, his body’s nutritional reserves had already become sadly
depleted due to poor absorption over such an extended period, so I could
not fast him on water.
I immediately put Jake on a rich mineral broth prepared from everything left
alive in our garden at the end of winter–leaves of kale, endive plants, whole
huge splitting Savoy cabbages, garlic, huge leeks including their green tops,
the whole stew fortified with sea weed.
It did not matter too much what vegetables I used as long as there were lots
of leafy greens containing lots of chlorophyll (where the most concentrated
mineral nutrition is located).
Jake was given colonics every day, but had to be carried to the colonic table
because he could not support his own weight. Whoever had given him
colonics previously had not accomplished much for I must say that Jake had
the most foul smelling discharges that I had ever encountered in
administering over 6,000 colonics over many years. It was as if his body was
literally rotting from the inside out.
After 30 days on mineral broth Jake, who really did weigh 90 pounds when
he arrived, was only down to 85. When a person already close to skeletal
weight starts fasting, to conserve vital tissue the body goes rapidly into a
state of profound rest so it uses very little energy, thus it loses very little
weight each day.
This degree of resting also helps heal abnormal body parts easier. After one
month on mineral broth Jake began to show signs of mineral deficiencies in
the form of a fine tremor of the hands, and cramps in the feet, so I put him on
mineral supplements too.
Jake was in my house for a long time. At the end of the second month on
broth he started two weeks on raw carrot juice with a lot of chlorophyll added
from sources such as algae (spirulina), wheat grass juice, alfalfa, etc.
This was followed by two more weeks on small quantities of raw fruits and
vegetables, and then followed by two weeks with added steamed vegetables,
and finally, he achieved a diet, which included small amounts of grain,
cooked legumes and raw nuts, plus the fruits and vegetables previously
mentioned.
Jake’s health steadily improved. He gained control of his bladder, bowels,
speech, hands, and legs. He began to exercise in the living room on a
stationary bike, and walked slowly up and down our long driveway, picking
daffodils in the beautiful spring weather.
Sadly, though I could help his body to heal it was next to impossible to stem
the tides of Jake’s appetites or to pleasantly withstand his tantrums when he
was denied; he always wanted more in terms of quantity, more in terms of
variety, and at more frequent intervals.
Though his organs had healed significantly, his digestive capacity was not
nearly as large as he remembered himself enjoying before he got sick. And
never would be.
Jake was not happy about the dietary restrictions necessary for him to retain
his newly attained health, and unwilling to stay within the limits of his
digestive system’s ability to process foods.
He had gained weight and was back up to 120 pounds. It was time for him to
go home before I lost my good humor.
Jake left with a lot of "good lucks" and stern admonitions to stick to his
stringent diet and supplement program. It was a big moment for Jake. He
had arrived in a wheelchair three months before.
Now he walked unaided to the airplane, something he had not been able to
do for two years.
Back at home Jake had no one courageous enough to set limits for him. His
immediate family and every one of his brow beaten associates were
compelled to give him everything that he wanted.
So his appetite and lack of personal discipline got the better of him. He
started eating lots of dates and figs. These had been eliminated from his diet
because he was unable to process foods with such a high sugar content.
He also ate larger and larger quantities of grains, nuts and avocados,
although I had warned him of specific quantity limits on rich foods. Most
sadly, he returned to enjoying spaghetti with lots of cheese grated on top.
Within months of leaving my care his paralysis and weakness returned,
except that unfortunately for him, he still retained the ability to assimilate
food and maintain his body weight.
Ironically, the only ultimate benefit of his fasting with me was to permit him to
suffer a far longer existence in a wheelchair without wasting away and
escaping into death.
I would be failing my readers if I did not explain why Jake became ill in the
first place. Jake had started what grew to become a very successful chain of
spaghetti restaurants with a unique noodles and sauces made to his own
formula.
He ate a lot of his own spaghetti over the years, and had been reared in a
good Italian family with lots of other kinds of rich food. Jake had a reputation
for being able to out eat everybody in terms of quantity and in the amount of
time spent eating.
In childhood, this ability had made his Italian mother very happy because it
showed appreciation for her great culinary skill.
Secondly, Jake the adult was still at his core, Jake the spoiled brat child, with
a bad, unregulated temper. He was in the habit of dumping his temper on
other people whether they needed a helping of his angry emotions or not.
A lot of people in his employ and in his extended family tiptoed around Jake,
always careful of triggering his wrath. At my place as Jake began to get well
he began to use his increased energy and much stronger voice to
demonstrate his poor character.
At meal times Jake would bang the table with a fork hard enough to leave
dents in the wood table top while yelling for more, complaining loudly about
the lack of rich sauces and other culinary delights he craved.
This was a character problem that Jake could not seem to overcome, even
with a lot of intervention from the local minister on his behalf and my
counseling. Jake was a Catholic who went to church regularly, but acted like
a Christian only while he was in church.
On some level Jake knew that he was not treating others fairly, but he would
not change his habitual responses.
His negative thoughts and actions interfered with his digestive capacity to
the extent that his gluttonous eating habits produced illness, a vegetative
paralyzing illness, but not death. To me this seems almost a form of karmic
justice.
It is common for people who have been very ill for extended periods of time
to realize what a wonderful gift life is and arrive at a willingness to do almost
anything to have a second chance at doing "life" right.
Some succeed with their second chance and some don’t. If they don’t
succeed in changing their life and relationships, they frequently relapse.
Luigi Cornaro left the world his story of sickness and rejuvenation. His little
book may be the world’s first alternative healing text. It is a classic example
of the value of abstentousness.
Had Jake taken this story to heart he would have totally recovered. Cornaro
was a sixteenth century Venetian nobleman. He, like Jake the spaghetti
baron, was near death at the young age of forty. (Jake was also in his early
40s when he broke down.)
Cornaro’s many doctors were unable to cure him. Finally he saw a doctor
who understood the principles of natural healing. This wise physician
determined that this illness was caused by a mismatch between Cornaro’s
limited digestive capacity and the excessive amount of food he was eating.
So Cornaro was put on a diet of only 12 ounces of solid food and fourteen
ounces of liquid a day. Any twelve ounces of any solids he wanted and any
fourteen ounces of liquid. It could be meat and wine, salad or orange juice,
no matter.
Cornaro soon regained his health and he continued to follow the diet until
the age of 78. His health was so outstanding during this period that people
who were much younger in terms of years were unable to keep up with him.
At 78 his friends, worried about how thin he was (doesn’t it always seem that
it is your so-called friends who always ruin a natural cure) persuaded him to
increase his daily ration by two ounces a day.
His delicate and weak digestive system, which had operated perfectly for
many years, was unable to deal with the additional two ounces, and he
became very ill after a very short period of over eating.
Worse, his recent indulgence had even further damaged the organs of
digestion and to survive Cornaro had to cut his daily ration to eight ounces
of solid food and eleven of liquids.
On this reduced dietary he again regained his health and lived to be 100.
Cornaro wrote four books on the value of abstinence or "sober living" as he
called it, writing the last and perhaps the most interesting at 96 years of age.
Had my patient Jake been able to confine his food intake to the level of his
body’s ability to digest, he might still be walking and enjoying life. But try as
I might I could not make him understand. Perhaps he enjoys doing penance
in his wheel chair more than he would enjoy health and life.
Starvation
It is true that ethical medical doctors use the least-risky procedure they are
allowed to use. But this does not mean there are no risks to allopathic
treatment.
The medical doctor justifies taking the risks by saying that the risk/reward
ratio is the best possible. Any sick person is already at risk. Life comes with
only one guarantee: that none of us gets out of it alive.
Compared to the risks of allopathic medicine, fasting is a far safer method of
treating disease. The oft-repeated scare stories medical doctors and their
allies circulate about fasting are not true, and it is important to remember that
none of these people portraying fasting as evil and dangerous have never
fasted themselves–I’ll put money on that one.
Or, on the slim possibility that someone telling fasting horror stories did
actually not eat for 24 hours (probably because some accident or acute
illness prevented them), they had a terrible experience because they didn’t
understand the process, were highly toxic, and were scared to death the
whole time.
Or worse yet they fasted for a short period with an "open mind"–a very
dangerous state in which to approach anything new. I have found through
considerable experience with people professing to have open minds that the
expression "I’m open minded" usually means that someone has already
made up their mind and new data just passes straight through their open
mind–in one ear and out the other.
Or sometimes, the phrase "open mind" means a person that does not believe
any information has reality and is entirely unable to make up their mind.
The most commonly leveled criticism of fasting is that in its efforts to survive
self-imposed starvation the body metabolizes vital tissue, not just fat, and
therefore, fasting is damaging, potentially fatally damaging.
People who tell you this will also tell you that fasters have destroyed their
heart muscle or ruined their nervous system permanently.
But this kind of damage happens only when a person starves to death or
starves to a point very close to death, not when someone fasts.
There is a huge difference between fasting and starvation. Someone
starving is usually eating, but eating poorly and inadequately, eating scraps
of whatever is available such as sugar, white flour, rancid grease, shoe
leather, or even dirt.
Frequently a starving person is forced to exercise a great deal as they
struggle to survive and additionally is highly apprehensive. Or someone
starving to death is confined to a small space, may become severely
dehydrated too and is in terror.
Fear is very damaging to the digestive process, and to the body in general;
fear speeds up the destruction of vital tissue.
People starve when trekking vast distances through wastelands without
food to eat, they starved in concentration camps, buried in mine disasters,
they starve during famines and starve while being tortured in prisons.
Until water fasting goes on past the point where all fatty tissues and all
abnormal deposits have been burned for fuel and recycled for the nutritional
elements they contain, vital muscle tissues and organs are not consumed.
And as long as the body contains sufficient nutritional reserves, vital organs
and essential tissues are rebuilt and maintained. In fact the body has a great
deal of intelligence that we don’t give it credit for.
It knows exactly which cells are essential to survival, which ones are not.
The body knows which cells are abnormal deposits, and it goes to work to
metabolize them first.
For example, the body recognizes arthritic deposits, cysts, fibroids, and
tumors as offensive parts of the landscape, and obligingly uses them for
foods in preference to anything else.
A starving (not fasting) body also knows precisely in what order of priority
body cells should be metabolized to minimize risk of death or permanent
disability.
After a starving body has reached skeletal condition, or where some small
amount of fat remains but nutritional reserves (vitamins and minerals) are
exhausted and there is insufficient nourishment forthcoming, the body
begins to consume nutrient-rich muscle and organ tissue in a last-ditch effort
to stay alive.
Under these dire circumstances, the least essential muscles and organs from
the standpoint of survival are metabolized first.
For example, muscles in the arms and legs would be consumed early in the
process, the heart muscle used only toward the very end. The very last part
of the body to be metabolized when one is starving and as has come very
close to death would be the brain and the nervous system.
Starvation begins where fasting ends, which is when real hunger begins. If
the return of hunger is ignored whenever it takes place, whether it is in 30, 60,
or 90 days depending upon body weight and type of fast, at that point
exactly, not a day before, starvation begins very slowly.
Usually it takes a considerable period of time after that before death occurs.
It is important to note that this discussion applies only to the abstention from
food, not water. Death takes place very quickly in the absence of water.
The chart on the previous page shows numerically the phenomenal ability of
the body to protect the most essential tissues of the body right up to the time
of death.
If a person fasted for 30 days, the average time it takes for the return of
hunger in a person that is not overweight, and then ignored the return of
hunger, and continued to abstain from food–if the person could avoid forced
exercise, keep warm, and had enough hydration, it could take as much as an
additional 20 to 60 days to die of starvation.
At death the body would have experienced losses of 40 to 60 percent of its
starting body weight. (Ancel Keys et al, 1950)
An emaciated person cannot afford to lose nearly as much weight as an
obese person, and death under conditions of starvation will occur earlier. In
all cases of starvation the brain, nerves, heart, lungs, kidneys and liver
remain largely intact and functional to the very end.
During a fast, it is almost impossible to damage essential organs, unless of
course the person creates the damage by fears about the process, or by
internalizing the fears of others. If those fears are present, the fast should
not be attempted.
Weight Loss By Fasting
Loss of weight indicates, almost guarantees that detoxification and healing is
occurring. I can’t stress this too much. Of all the things I find my patients
seem to misunderstand or forget after being told, it is that they can’t heal in a
rapid manner without getting smaller.
This reality is especially hard for the family and friends of someone who is
fasting, who will say, you’re looking terrible dear, so thin. Your skin is
hanging on your bones. You’re not eating enough protein or nutrient food to
be healthy and you must eat more or you’re going to develop serious
deficiencies.
You don’t have any energy, you must be getting sicker. You’re doing the
wrong thing, obviously. You have less energy and look worse every day. Go
and see a doctor before it is too late.
To succeed with friends like this, a faster has to be a mighty self-determined
person with a powerful ability to disagree with others.
Medical personnel claim that rapid weight loss often causes dangerous
deficiencies; these deficiencies force the person to overeat and regain even
more weight afterward.
This is largely untrue, though there is one true aspect to it: a fasted,
detoxified body becomes a much more efficient digester and assimilator,
extracting a lot more nutrition from the same amount food is used to eat.
If, after extended fasting a person returns to eating the same number of
calories as they did before; they will gain weight even more rapidly than
before they stated fasting.
When fasting for weight loss, the only way to keep the weight off is to greatly
reform the diet; to go on, and stay on, a diet made up largely of non-starchy,
watery fruits and vegetables, limited quantities of cooked food, and very
limited amounts of highly concentrated food sources like cereals and cooked
legumes.
Unless, of course, after fasting, one’s lifestyle involves much very hard
physical labor or exercise. I’ve had a few obese fasters become quite angry
with me for this reason; they hoped to get thin through fasting and after the
fast, to resume overeating with complete irresponsibility as before, without
weight gain.
People also fear weight loss during fasting because they fear becoming
anorexic or bulimic. They won’t. A person who abstains from eating for the
purpose of improving their health, in order to prevent or treat illness, or even
one who fasts for weight loss will not develop an eating disorder.
Eating disorders mean eating compulsively because of a distorted body
image. Anorexics and bulimics have obsessions with the thinner-is-better
school of thought.
The anorexic looks at their emaciated frame in the mirror and thinks they are
fat. This is the distorted perception of a very insecure person badly in need
of therapy.
A bulimic, on the other hand stuffs themselves, usually with bad food, and
then purges it by vomiting, or with laxatives.
Anorexics and bulimics are not accelerating the healing potential of their
bodies; these are life-threatening conditions. Fasters are genuinely trying to
enhance their survival potential.
Occasionally a neurotic individual with a pre-existing eating disorder will
become obsessed with fasting and colon cleansing as a justification to
legitimize their compulsion. During my career while monitoring hundreds of
fasters, I’ve known two of these.
I discourage them from fasting or colon cleansing, and refuse to assist them,
because they carry the practices to absurd extremes, and contribute to bad
press about natural medicine by ending up in the emergency ward of a
hospital with an intravenous feeding tube in their arm.
Cases Beyond The Remedy Of Fasting
Occasionally, very ill people have a liver that has become so degenerated it
cannot sustain the burden of detoxification. This organ is as vital to survival
as the brain, heart and lungs.
We can get along with only one kidney, we can live with no spleen, with no
gallbladder, with only small parts of the stomach and intestines, but we
cannot survive without a liver for more than a day or so.
The liver is the most active organ in the body during detoxification. To reach
an understanding of detoxification, it helps to know just what the liver does
for us on an ongoing basis.
The liver is a powerful chemical filter where blood is refined and purified. The
liver passes this cleansed blood out through the superior vena cava, directly
to the heart. The blood is then pumped into general and systemic circulation,
where it reaches all parts of the body, delivering nutrition and oxygen at a
cellular level.
On its return flow, a large proportion of the depleted blood is collected by the
gastric, splenic and superior and inferior mesenteric veins that converge to
form the large portal vein, which enters the liver.
Thus a massive flow of waste from all the cells of the body is constantly
flowing into the liver. The huge hepatic artery also enters the liver to supply
oxygen and nutrients with which to sustain the liver cells themselves.
The liver is constantly at work refining the blood. It is synthesizing, purifying,
renovating, washing, filtering, separating, and detoxifying. It works day and
night without stopping.
Many toxins are broken down by enzymes and their component parts are
efficiently reused in various parts of the body. Some impurities are filtered
out and held back from the general circulation.
These debris are collected and stored in the gall bladder, which is a little sack
appended to the liver. After a meal, the contents of the gall bladder (bile) are
discharged into the duodenum, the upper part of the small intestine just
beyond the stomach.
This bile also contains digestive enzymes produced by the liver that permit
the breakdown of fatty foods in the small intestine.
Sometimes a large flow of bile finds its way into the stomach by pressure or
is sucked into the stomach by vomiting. Excessive biliary secretion and
excretion can also result from overeating, which overcrowds the area.
Sometimes colonics or massage can also stimulate a massive flow of bile.
Extremely bitter and irritating, when bile gets into the stomach the person
either vomits or wishes they could. And after vomiting and experiencing the
taste of bile, wishes they hadn’t.
When no food at all enters the system, the blood keeps right on passing
through the liver/filter just as it does when we are eating. When the liver does
not have to take care of toxins generated by the current food intake, each
passage through the liver results in a cleaner blood stream, with the debris
decreasing in quantity, viscosity, and toxicity, until the blood becomes
normalized.
During fasting, debris from the gallbladder still pass through the small
intestine and into the large intestine.
However, if the bowels do not move the toxins in the bile are reabsorbed into
the blood stream and get recirculated in an endless loop. This toxic
recycling makes a faster feel just terrible, like they had a flu or worse!
The bowels rarely move while fasting. During fasting only enemas or
colonics permit elimination from the large intestine. If done effectively and
frequently, enemas will greatly add to the well being and comfort of the
faster.
Many times when a faster seems to be retracing or experiencing a sudden
onset of acute discomfort or symptoms, these can be almost immediately be
relieved by an enema or colonic.
A person with major liver degeneration inevitably dies, with or without
fasting, with or without traditional medicine. Significantly impaired kidney
function can also bring about this same result.
Mercifully, death while fasting is usually accomplished relatively free of pain,
clear of mind and with dignity.
That often cannot be said of death in a hospital. There are much worse
experiences than death.
Fasting is not a cure-all. There are some conditions that are beyond the
ability of the body to heal. Ultimately, old age gets us all.
Dr. Linda Hazzard, one of the greats of natural hygiene, who practiced
Osteopathic medicine in the 1920s, had a useful way of categorizing
conditions that respond well to fasting. These she labeled "acute conditions"
and "chronic degenerative conditions."
A third classification, "chronic conditions with organic damage" does not
respond to fasting. Acute conditions, are usually inflammations or infections
with irritated tissue, with swelling, redness, and often copious secretions of
mucous and pus, such as colds, flu, a first time case of pneumonia, inflamed
joints as in the early stages of arthritis, etc.
These acute conditions usually remedy in one to three weeks of fasting.
Acute conditions are excellent candidates for self-doctoring. Chronic
degenerative conditions are more serious and the patient usually requires
supervision.
These include conditions such as cancer, aids, chronic arthritis, chronic
pneumonia, emphysema and asthma. Chronic degenerative conditions
usually respond within a month to three months of fasting.
The fasting should be broken up into two or three sessions if the condition
has not been relieved in one stint of supervised fasting.
Each successive fast will produce some improvement and if a light, largely
raw-food diet is adhered to between fasts the patient should not worsen and
should be fairly comfortable between fasting.
If there has been major functional damage to an organ as a result of any of
these degenerative conditions, healing will not be complete, or may be
impossible.
By organic damage, I mean that a vital part of the body has ceased to
function due to some degenerative process, injury, or surgery–so badly
damaged that the cells that make up the organ cannot be replaced.
I once had a twenty five year old man come to my spa to die in peace
because he had been through enough diagnostic procedures in three
hospitals to know that his liver was beyond repair.
He had been working on an apple farm in between terms at university when
he was poisoned several times with insecticide from an aerial spray on the
whole orchard. He absorbed so much insecticide that his liver incurred
massive organic damage.
When he came to me his body had reached the point where it was incapable
of digesting, and because of lack of liver function, it was incapable of healing
while fasting, a condition in which death is a certainty.
He was a Buddhist, did not fear death and did not want to be kept alive in
agony or in prolonged unconsciousness by any extraordinary means, nor
did he want to die with tubes in every orifice.
I was honored to be a supportive participant in his passing. He died fasting,
in peace, and without pain, with a clear mind that allowed him to consciously
prepare for the experience.
He was not in a state of denial or fear, and made no frantic attempts to
escape the inevitable. He went quietly into that still dark night with a tranquil
demeanor and a slight smile.
Fortunately, in my many years of practice I had the pleasure of seeing the
majority of the people totally regain their health or at least greatly improve it
by means of the fasting and healing diets.
Many cancer patients watched with amazement as their tumors disappeared
before their eyes, many arthritics regained their function, serious skin
conditions such as psoriasis disappeared, mental conditions improved,
addictions vanished, fatigue was replaced by energy, and fat dissolved
revealing the hidden sculpture beneath.
I will talk more about procedures and the particular reasons bodies develop
specific conditions in later chapters.
Social Cultural Psychological Obstacles To Fasting
Numerous attitudes make it difficult to fast or to provide moral support to
friends or loved ones that are fasting.
Many people harbor fears of losing weight because they think that if times
were really tough, if there was a famine or they became ill and lost a lot of
weight they would have no reserves and would certainly perish.
These people have no idea how much fat can be concealed on an even
skinny body, nor of how slowly a skinny body loses weight while fasting.
Substantial fat reserves are helpful as heat-retaining insulation in those rare
accidents when someone is dropped into a cold ocean and must survive
until the rescue boat arrives.
Being fat might keep a person alive longer who is lost in the wilderness
awaiting rescue with no supplies, no means of procuring food, and no
means of keeping warm.
On the other hand, fat people would have a far harder time walking out of the
wilderness. And extensive fat deposits are merely fuel and do not contain
extensive nutritional reserves.
An obese person fasting without significant nutritional supplementation
would begin starving long before they became really skinny.
On the balance, carrying excess weight is a far greater liability than any
potential prosurvival aspects it might have.
There are other attitudes associated with weight loss that make it difficult for
people to fast. People hold rather stereotypical notions about what
constitutes an attractive person; usually it involves having some meat on
ones bones.
Hollywood and Hugh Hefner have both influenced the masses to think that
women should have hourglass figures with large, up thrust, firm breasts.
Since breasts are almost all useless fatty tissue supporting some milk-
producing glands that do not give a breast much volume except when
engorged, most women fasters loose a good percentage of their breast
mass.
If the fast is extensive, there should also develop an impressive showing of
ribs and hipbones; these are not soft and cuddly.
Husbands, lovers, parents, and friends frequently point out that you don’t
look good this way and exhort you to put on weight. Most people think
pleasantly plump is healthy.
Skinny men, especially those who had lost a lot of weight during an illness,
are pressured by associates to put on weight to prove that they are healthy. I
had a client who was formerly a college varsity football player.
Before his illness he had lifted weights and looked like a hunk. His family
and friends liked to see him that way and justifiably so. Then he got
seriously ill. On a long extended healing diet he lost a significant amount of
weight and seemed down right skinny, causing all who knew him well and
cared about him to tempt him with all kinds of scrumptious delicacies from
the best of kitchens.
But this case was like Luigi Cornaro, a man who never again could look like a
hunk. His "friends" made an absolutely necessary change in life style and
appearance far more difficult than it was already.
My client was torn between a desire to please others, and a desire to regain
and retain his health. This is a problem a sick person doesn’t need.
If you have the independence to consider following an alternative medical
program in a culture that highly values conformity and agreement, you are
also going to have to defend your own course of self-determined action
based on the best available data that you have.
But fasters are usually in fragile emotional condition, so I advise my clients
who are subjected to this kind of pressure to beg their friends and
associates to refrain from saying anything if they can’t support the course of
action you have chosen.
After this, if friends or relatives are still incapable of saying nothing (even non-
verbally), it is important to exclude them from your life until you have
accomplished your health goals, have regained some weight and have
returned to eating a maintenance diet, rather than getting skinnier on a
healing one.
The very worst aspect of our culture’s eating programming is that people
have been wrongfully taught that when ill they must eat to keep up their
strength.
Inherent in this recommendation is an unstated belief that when the body is
weakened by a disease state, the weakness can somehow be overcome with
food, and that the body needs this food to kill the virus, bacteria, or invading
yeast, and uses the protein to heal or rebuild tissue.
Sadly, the exact opposite is the case. Disease organisms feed and multiply
on the toxic waste products of misdigestion, and the body is unable to digest
well when it is weak or ill.
There’s an old saying about this: “feed a cold, starve a fever.” Most people
think this saying means you should eat when you have a cold. What the
saying really means is if you feed a cold then you will soon have to starve a
fever.
Protein foods especially are not digested by a diseased body, and as
mentioned before, the waste products of protein indigestion are especially
poisonous. That is all the body needs when it is already down, another load
of poison, which it can’t eliminate due to weakness and enervation.
Weight loss is usually associated with illness, as it should be! In times of
acute illness an otherwise healthy body loses its appetite for food because it
is prosurvival to stop eating. It is very hard to coax a sick animal to eat. Their
bodies, not controlled by a mind full of complex learned responses and false
ideas, automatically know that fasting is nature’s method of healing.
Contrary to popular understanding, digestion, assimilation, and elimination
require the expenditure of considerable energy. This fact may contradict the
reader’s experience because everyone has become tired when they have
worked a long time without eating, and then experienced the lift after eating.
But an ill body cannot digest efficiently so instead of providing energy
extracted from foods, the body is further burdened by yet another load of
toxic material produced by fermented and putrefied food. This adds insult to
injury in a sick body that is already drowning in its own garbage.
Worse, during illness most available vital force is already redirected into
healing; it is not available for digestion. It is important to allow a sick body to
proceed with healing and not to obstruct the process with unnecessary
digestion or suppress the symptoms (which actually are the healing efforts)
with drugs.
If you have an acute illness, and you stop all food intake except for pure
water and herb teas, and perhaps some vegetable broth, or dilute non-sweet
juice, you have relieved your body of an immense effort.
Instead of digesting, the body goes to work on catching up on healing. The
body can and will almost inevitably heal itself if the sick person will have faith
in it, cooperate with the body’s efforts by allowing the symptoms of healing
to exist, reduce or eliminate the intake of food to allow the body to marshal its
energies, maintain a positive mental attitude and otherwise stay out of the
way.
Many people intensely dread missing even one meal. These folks usually are
and have been so toxic that their bodies had been stashing un-eliminated
toxins in their fat for years.
They are usually so addicted to caffeine, cigarettes, alcohol, and so forth,
that when they had fasted, even briefly, their bodies were forced to dip into
highly polluted fat reserves while simultaneously the body begins
withdrawal.
People like this who try to fast experience highly unpleasant symptoms
including headache, irritability, inability to think or concentrate, blurred
vision, profound fatigue, aches, etc.
Most of these symptoms come from low blood sugar, but combined with the
toxins being released from fat and combined with going through multiple
addictive withdrawals, the discomforts are more than most people are willing
to tolerate.
Fasting on juice is much more realistic for cases like this. It is little wonder
that when a hygienist suggests a fast to improve health, this type of case
asserts positively that fasting is quite impossible, they have tried it, it is
absolutely terrible and know that they can’t do it.
This rejection is partly due to a cultural expectation (one reinforced by
western medicine) that all unpleasant symptoms should be avoided or
suppressed.
To voluntarily experience unpleasant sensations such as those mentioned
above is more than the ordinary timid person will subject themselves to, even
in order to regain health.
They will allow surgery, drugs with violent and dangerous side effects,
painful and invasive testing procedures and radiation–all unpleasant and
sometimes extremely uncomfortable.
These therapies are accepted because someone else with authority is doing
it to them. And, they have been told that it they don’t submit they will not
ever feel better and probably will die in the near future.
Also people think that they have no alternative, that the expert in front of
them knows what is best, so they feel relieved to have been relieved of the
responsibility for their own condition and its treatment.
Preventative Fasting
During the years it takes for a body to degenerate enough to prompt a fast,
the body has been storing up large quantities of unprocessed toxins in the
cells, tissues, fat deposits, and organs.
The body in its wisdom will always choose to temporarily deposit
overwhelming amounts of toxins somewhere harmless rather than permit the
blood supply to become polluted or to use secondary elimination routes.
A body will use times when the liver is less burdened to eliminate these
stored toxic debris. The hygienists paradigm asserts that the manifestation
of symptoms or illness are all by themselves, absolute, unassailable proof
that further storage of toxic wastes in the cells, tissues, fat deposits, and
organs is not possible and that an effort toward elimination is absolutely
necessary.
Thus the first time a person fasts a great quantity of toxins will normally be
released. Being the resident of a body when this is happening can be quite
uncomfortable. For this reason alone, preventative fasting is a very wise
idea.
Before the body becomes critically ill, clean up your reserve fuel supply (fat
deposits) by burning off some accumulated fat that is rich in toxic deposits
and then replace it with clean, non-toxic fat that you will make while eating
sensibly.
If you had but fasted prophylactically as a preventative or health-creating
measure before you became seriously ill, the initial detoxification of your
body could have been accomplished far more comfortably, while you were
healthy, while your vital force was high and while your body otherwise more
able to deal with detoxification.
Each time you fast, even if it is only one day, you allow your body to go
through a partial detox, and each time it becomes easier and more
comfortable than the last time.
The body learns how to fast. Each time you fast it, your body slips into a
cleansing mode more quickly, and each time you fast you lighten the load of
stored toxins.
Perhaps you have already eliminated the caffeine your body had stored,
which frequently causes severe headaches on withdrawal, not to mention
fatigue.
It certainly helps to have this behind you before you go on to the elimination
of other irritating substances.
Many people have gone through alcohol or tobacco withdrawal, and
understand that it is very unpleasant, and also that it must be done in the
pursuit of health.
Why not withdraw from the rest of the irritating and debilitating substances
we take into our system on an ongoing basis, and why not grit your way
through the eliminative process, withdraw, from food addictions such as
sugar or salt, and from foods that you may be allergic to like wheat, dairy
products or eggs.
It is very wise to invest in your own insurance plan by systematically
detoxifying while you are still healthy. Plan it into your life, when it is
convenient, such as once a week on Sunday, or even once a month on a
quiet day.
Take a few days of vacation, go to a warm, beautiful place and devote part or
all of it to cleansing. Treat yourself by taking an annual trip to Hawaii, fasting
at a hotel on the beach–do whatever it takes to motivate yourself. And
consider this: vacations are enormously cheaper when you stay out of
restaurants.
If you have accustomed your body to 24-hour fasts, then you can work on 48-
hour fasts, and overtime work up to 72-hour fasts, all on a continuum.
You may find it becoming increasingly comfortable, perhaps even pleasant,
something you look forward to.
Fasting a relatively detoxified body feels good, and people eventually really
get into the clean, light, clear headed, perhaps spiritually aware state that
goes along with it.
By contrast, fasting when you are sick is much more difficult because your
vitality or vital force is very low, you already have no energy, and probably
have unpleasant symptoms that must be dealt with at the same time.
There may be the added stress of being forced into a cleanse because you
are too nauseous to eat. Most people let their health go until they are forced
into dealing with it; they are too busy living, so why bother.
The truth is that our body does age, and over time becomes less able to deal
with insults; the accumulated effect of insults and aging eventually leads
most of us to some serious degenerative illness.
Normally this begins happening around age 50 if not sooner. Some of us
that were gifted with good genes or what I call "a good start" may have
reached the age of 60 or 75 or even 90 without serious illness, but those
people are few and far between.
Why not tip the scales in your favor by preventing or staving off health
problems with systematic detoxification at your own convenience.
Climb into the drivers seat and start to take control and gain confidence in
your own ability to deal with your body, your own health, and your own life.
When it gets right down to the bottom line, there is really only one thing in the
world that is really yours, and that is your life. Take control and start
managing it. The reward will be a more qualitative life.
By: Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
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