Mostreasonably healthy people have sufficient reserves to water fast for a month. LaterI will explain how a faster can somewhat resupply their nutritional reserves whilecontinuing to fast, and thus safely extend the fasting period. The second essential concern has to do with adjusting the intensity of the fast. Some individuals are so toxic that the waste products released during a fast aretoo strong, too concentrated or too poisonous for the organs of elimination tohandle safely, or to be handled within the willingness of the faster to tolerate thediscomforts that toxic releases generate. The highly-toxic faster may evenexperience life-threatening symptoms such as violent asthma attacks. This kind offaster has almost certainly been dangerously ill before the fast began. Others,though not dangerously sick prior to fasting, may be nearly as toxic and thoughnot in danger of death, they may not be willing to tolerate the degree ofdiscomfort fasting can trigger. For this reason I recommend that if at all possible,before undertaking a fast the person eat mostly raw foods for two months andclean up all addictions. This will give the body a chance to detoxify significantlybefore the water fast is started, and will make water fasting much morecomfortable. Seriously or dangerously ill people should only fast with experiencedguidance, so the rapidity of their detoxification process may be adjusted to alower level if necessary. A fast of only one week can accomplish a significant amount of healing. Slight
healing does occur on shorter fasts, but it is much more difficult to see or feel theresults. Many people experience rapid relief from acute headache pain ordigestive distress such as gas attacks, mild gallbladder pain, stomach aches, etc.,after only one day of abstention from food. In one week of fasting a person canrelieve more dangerous conditions such as arthritic pain, rheumatism, kidney pain,and many symptoms associated with allergic reactions,. But even more fastingtime is generally needed for the body to completely heal serious diseases. That’sbecause eliminating life-threatening problems usually involve rebuilding organs thataren’t functioning too well. Major rebuilding begins only after major detoxificationhas been accomplished, and this takes time. Yes, even lost organ function can be partially or completely restored by fasting. Aging and age-related degeneration is progressive, diminishing organ functioning. Organs that make digestive enzymes secrete less enzymes. The degenerated
immune system loses the ability to mobilize as effectively when the body isattacked. Liver and kidney efficiency declines. The adrenals tire, becomingincapable of dumping massive amounts of stress-handling hormones or ofrepeating that effort time after time without considerable rest in between. Theconsequences of these interdependent deteriorations is a cascade of deteriorationthat contributes to even more rapid deteriorations. The name for this cascadingprocess is aging. Its inevitable result—death. Fasting can, to a degree, reverse aging. Because fasting improves organ
functioning, it can slow down aging. Fasters are often surprised that intensified healing can be uncomfortable. They
have been programmed by our culture and by allopathic doctors to think that ifthey are doing the right thing for their bodies they should feel better immediately. Iwish it weren’t so, but most people have to pay the piper for their dietaryindiscretions and other errors in living. There will be aches and minor pains anduncomfortable sensations. More about that later. A rare faster does feelimmediately better, and continues to feel ever better by the day, and even hasincredible energy while eating nothing, but the majority of us folks just have totough it out, keeping in mind that the way out is the way through. It is important toremind yourself at times that even with some discomfort and considering theinconvenience of fasting that you are getting off easy—one month of self-denialpays for those years of indulgence and buys a regenerated body. Length Of The Fast
How long should a person fast? In cases where there are serious complaints to
remedy but where there are no life threatening disease conditions, a good rule ofthumb is to fast on water for one complete day (24 hours) for each year that theperson has lived. If you are 30 years old, it will take 30 consecutive days offasting to restore complete health. However, thirty fasting days, done a few days
here and a few there won’t equal a month of steady fasting; the body
accomplishes enormously more in 7 or l4 days of consecutive fasting, than 7 or14 days of fasting accumulated sporadically, such as one day a week. This is notto say that regular short fasts are not useful medicine. Periodic day-long fasts havebeen incorporated into many religious traditions, and for good reason; it gives thebody one day a week to rest, to be free of digestive obligations, and to catch upon garbage disposal. I heartily recommend it. But it takes many years ofunfailingly regular brief fasting to equal the benefits of one, intensive experience. Fasting on water much longer than fifteen consecutive days may be dangerous
for the very sick, (unless under experienced supervision) or too intense for thosewho are not motivated by severe illness to withstand the discomfort andboredom. However, it is possible to finish a healing process initiated by one longwater fast by repeating the fast later. My husband’s healing is a good example ofthis. His health began to noticeably decline about age 38 and he started fasting.He fasted on water 14 to 18 days at a time, once a year, for five consecutiveyears before most of his complaints and problems entirely vanished. The longest fast I ever supervised was a 90 day water fast on an
extraordinarily obese woman, who at 5’ 2” weighed close to 400 pounds. Shewas a Mormon; generally members of the LDS Church eat a healthier diet thanmost Americans, but her’s included far too much of what I call “healthfoodjunkfood,” in the form of whole grain cakes and cookies, lots of granola madewith lots of honey, oil, and dried fruit, lots of honey heaped atop heavily butteredwhole grain bread. (I will explain more about the trap of healthfood junkfood lateron.) A whole foods relatively meatless diet is far superior to its refined white flour,white sugar and white grease (lard) counterpart, but it still produced a seriousheath problem in just 30 years of life. Like many women, she expressed love-for-family in the kitchen by serving too-much too-tasty food. The Mormons have avery strong family orientation and this lady was no exception, but she wasinsecure and unhappy in her marriage and sought consolation in food, eaten far inexcess of what her body needed. On her 90 day water fast she lost about 150 pounds, but was still grossly
overweight when the fast ended. Toward the end it became clear that it wasunrealistic to try to shrink this woman any closer to normal body weight becauseto her, fat represented an invaluable insulation or buffer that she was not preparedto give up. As the weight melted away on the fast and she was able to actuallyfeel the outline of a hip bone her neurosis became more and more apparent, andthe ability to feel a part of her skeleton was so upsetting to her that her choicewas between life threatening obesity and pervasive anxiety. Her weight was still excessive but the solace of eating was even more
important. This woman needed intensive counseling not more fasting.Unfortunately, at the end she choose to remain obese. Fat was much lessfrightening to her than confronting her emotions and fears. The positive side wasthat after the fast she was able to maintain her weight at 225 instead of 375 whichwas an enormous relief to her exhausted heart. Another client I fasted for 90 days was a 6’ 1” tall, chronic schizophrenic man
who weighed in at 400 pounds. He was so big he could barely get through myfront door, and mine was an extraordinarily wide door in what had been anupper-class mansion. This man, now in his mid twenties, had spent his last sevenyears in a mental institution before his parents decided to give him one last chanceby sending to Great Oaks School. The state mental hospitals at that time providedthe mentally ill with cigarettes, coffee, and lots of sugary treats, but none of thesesubstances were part of my treatment program so he had a lot of immediatewithdrawal to go through. The quickest and easiest way to get him through it wasto put him on a water fast after a few days of preparation on raw food. This was not an easily managed case! He was wildly psychotic, on heavy
doses of chloropromazine, with many bizarre behaviors. Besides talking to himselfcontinuously in gibberish, he collected bugs, moss, sticks, piles or dirt, andswitched to smoking oak leaves instead of cigarettes. He was such a fire hazardthat I had to move him to a downstairs room with concrete floor. Even in the
basement he was a fire hazard with his smoking and piles of sticks and other
inflammables next to his bed, but all of this debris was his “precious.” I knew thatI was in for trouble if I disturbed his precious, but the insects and dirt pilesseemed to be expanding exponentially. One day the dirt exceeded my tolerance level. To make a long story short he
caught me in the act of cleaning up his precious. Was he furious! All 350 poundsof him! (By this time he had lost 50 pounds.) He barreled into me, fists flying, andknocked me into the pipes next to the furnace and seemed ready to really teachme what was what. I prefer to avoid fights, but if they are inevitable, I can reallyget into the spirit of the thing. I’d had lots of childhood practice defending myselfbecause I was an incurable tomboy who loved to wrestle; I could usually pin bigboys who considered themselves tough. So I began using my fists and what littlemartial arts training I had to good use. After I hurt him a bit he realized that I wasnot going to be easily intimidated, and that in fact he was in danger of gettingseriously damaged. So he called a truce before either of us were badly beaten up.He had only a few bruises and welts, nothing serious. After that he refrained from collecting things inside the building (he continued
to collect outside). This compromise was fine with me, and the incident allowedme to maintain the authority I needed to bully him into cooperating with theprogram: taking his vitamins, and sticking to his fast until he finally reached 200pounds. After 90 days on water he actually looked quite handsome, he no longersmoked, he was off psychotropic medication, and his behaviors were within anacceptable range as long as your expectations were not too high. He was well enough to live outside a hospital and also clearheaded enough to
know that if he let too many people know how well he really was, he might haveto give up his mental disability pension and actually become responsible forhimself. No way, José! This fellow knew a good thing when he saw it. So hecontinued to pull bizarre stunts just often enough in front of the right audience tokeep his disability checks coming in, while managing to act sane enough to be
allowed to live comfortably at home instead of in the hospital. By keeping to my
program he could stay off mind-numbing psychotropic medication if he kept uphis megavitamins and minerals. This compromise was tolerable from his point ofview, because there were no side effects like he experienced from histranquilizers. It is very rare for a mentally ill person who has spent more than a few months
in a mental hospital to ever usefully return to society because they find “mentalillness” too rewarding. My Own 56 Day Long Fast
Fasters go through a lot of different emotional states, these can get intense and
do change quite rapidly. The physical body, too, will manifest transitoryconditions. Some can be quite uncomfortable. But, I don’t want to leave thereader with the impression that fasting is inevitably painful. So I will now recountmy own longest fast in detail. When I did my own 42 day water fast followed by two weeks on carrot juice
diluted 50/50 with water, which really amounted to 56 consecutive days, mypredominant sensation for the first three days was a desire to eat that was mostlya mental condition, and a lot of rumbling and growling from my stomach. This isnot real hunger, just the sounds the stomach likes to make when it is shrinking.After all, this organ is accustomed to being filled at regular intervals, and then, allof a sudden, it gets nothing, so naturally the stomach wants to know what is goingon. Once it realizes it is on temporary vacation, the stomach wisely decides toreduce itself to a size suitable for a retired organ. And it shuts up. This processusually takes three to five days and for most people, no further “hunger pangs”are felt until the fast is over. Real hunger comes only when the body is actually starving. The intense
discomforts many people experience upon missing a meal are frequentlyinterpreted as hunger but they aren’t. What is actually happening is that their
highly toxic bodies are taking the opportunity presented by having missed a meal
or two to begin to cleanse. The toxins being released and processed makeassorted unpleasant symptoms such as headaches and inability to think clearly.These symptoms can be instantly eliminated by the intake of a bit of food, bringingthe detox to a screeching halt. Two weeks into the fast I experienced sharp abdominal pains that felt like I
imagine appendicitis feels, which compelled me toward the nearest toilet in a stateof great urgency where I productively busied myself for about half an hour. As Imentioned earlier, I was experimentally adhering to a rigid type of fast of the sortrecommended by Dr. Herbert Shelton, a famous advocate of the Natural Hygieneschool. Shelton was such a powerful writer and personality that there still exists aNatural Hygiene Society that keeps his books in print and maintains his library.The words “Natural Hygiene” are almost owned by the society like a trademarkand they object when anyone describes themselves as a hygienist and thenadvocates any practice that Dr. Shelton did not approve of. Per Dr. Shelton, I was going to fast from the time hunger left until the time it
returned and I was not going to use any form of colon cleansing. Shelton stronglyopposed bowel cleansing so I did no enemas nor colonics, nor herbs, nor clays,nor psyllium seed designed to clean the bowel, etc. Obviously at day 14 thebowel said, enough is enough of this crap, and initiated a goods house cleaningsession. When I saw what was eliminated I was horrified to think that I had leftthat stuff in there for two weeks. I then started to wonder if the Sheltonites weremistaken about this aspect of fasting. Nonetheless, I persevered on the sameregimen because my hunger had not returned, my tongue was still thickly coatedwith foul-smelling, foul-tasting mucus and I still had some fat on my feet that hadnot been metabolized. Shelton said that cleansing is not complete until a skeletal condition is
reached—that is, absolutely no fat reserves are left. Up until that time I did noteven know that I had fat on my feet, but much to my surprise, as the weeks went
on, not only did my breasts disappear except for a couple of land marks well-
known to my babies, but my ribs and hip bones became positively dangerous topassersby, and my shoes would not stay on my feet. This was not all thatsurprising because I went from 135 pounds down to 85 on a 5’ 7” frame withsubstantial bone structure. Toward the end of the fast my eyes became brighter and clearer blue, my skin
took on a good texture, my breath finally became sweet, my tongue cleared upand became pink, my mind was clear, and my spiritual awareness and sensitivitywas heightened. In other words, I was no longer a walking hulk of stored-uptoxemia. I also felt quite weak and had to rest for ten minutes out every hour inhorizontal position. (I should have rested much more.) I also required very littlesleep, although it felt good to just lie quietly and rest, being aware of what wasgoing on in various parts of my body. During the last few weeks on water I became very attentive to my right
shoulder. Two separate times in the past, while flying head first over thehandlebars of my bicycle I had broken my shoulder with considerable tearing ofligaments and tendons. At night when I was totally still I felt a whole crew ofpixies and brownies with picks and shovels at work in the joint doing major repairwork. This activity was not entirely comfortable, but I knew it was constructivework, not destructive, so I joined the work crew with my mind’s eye and helpedthe work along. It seemed my visualizations actually did help. Ever since, I’ve had the fasters I
supervised use creative imagery or write affirmations to help their bodies heal.There are lots of books on this subject. I’ve found that the techniques work farbetter on a faster than when a person is eating normally. After breaking the fast it took me six weeks to regain enough strength that I
could run my usual distance in my regular time; it took me six months to regain myfull 135 pound weight because I was very careful to break the fast slowly andcorrectly. Coming off water with two weeks on dilute carrot juice I then added
small portions of raw food such as apples, raw vegetables, sprouts, vegetable
juices, and finally in the fourth week after I began drinking dilute carrot juice, Iadded seven daily well-chewed almonds to my rebuilding diet. Much later Iincreased to 14 almonds, but that was the maximum amount of such highlyconcentrated fare my body wanted digest at one time for over one year. I found Igot a lot more miles to the gallon out of the food that I did eat, and did not craverecreational foods. Overall I was very pleased with my educational fast, it hadtaught me a great deal. If I had undertaken such a lengthy fast at a time when I was actually ill, and
therefore had felt forced into it, my experience could have been different. Apositive mental attitude is an essential part of the healing process so fasting shouldnot be undertaken in a negative, protesting mental state. The mind is so powerfulthat fear or the resistance fear generates can override the healing capacity of thebody. For that reason I always recommend that people who consider themselvesto be healthy, who have no serious complaints, but who are interested in waterfasting, should limit themselves to ten consecutive days or so, certainly never morethan 14. Few healthy people, even those with a deep interest in the process, canfind enough personal motivation to overcome the extreme boredom of waterfasting for longer than that. Healthy people usually begin protesting severely afterabout two weeks. If there is any one vital rule of fasting, one never should fastover strong, personal protest. Anytime you’re fasting and you really desire to quit,you probably should. Unless, of course, you are critically ill. Then you may haveno choice—its fast or die. 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, andweakness in the first few days plus what they think is intense hunger. The dizzinessand weakness are really 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 newequilibrium in the second and third week of the fast and then, the dizziness maycease, 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 heart beat, so bloodpressure probably has dropped as well. If you stand up very quickly you mayfaint. I repetitively instruct all of my clients to stand up very slowly, moving from alying to a sitting position, pausing there for ten or twenty seconds, and then risingslowly from a sitting to a standing position. They are told that at the first sign ofdizziness they must immediately put their head between their knees so that thehead is lower than the heart, or squat/sit down on the floor, I once had a fasterwho forgot to obey my frequent warnings. About two weeks into a long fast, shegot up rapidly from the toilet and felt dizzy. The obvious thing to do was to sitback down on the toilet or lie down on the bath rug on the floor, but no, shedecided that because she was dizzy she should rush back to her bed in theadjoining room. She made it as far as the bathroom door and fainted, out cold,putting a deep grove into the drywall with her pretty nose on the way down. Wethen 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. Thiswas not much fun for either of us; it is well worthwhile preventing suchcomplications. 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 tolessened physical activity. People also dislike inactivity which seems excruciatinglyboring, and some are upset by weight loss itself. Coldness is best handled withlots of clothes, bedding, hot water bottles or hot pads, and warm baths. GreatOaks School of Health was in Oregon, where the endlessly rainy winters arechilly 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 overworked kidneys. This passes. Hot bathsor 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 itmore 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 bettersurvive one more deadly dull day in a state of relative unconsciousness. They findout much to their displeasure that very little sleep is required on a fast because thebody is at rest already. Many fasters sleep only two to four hours but dozefrequently and require a great deal of rest. Being mentally prepared for thischange of habit is the best handling. Generalized low-grade aches and pains in thearea of the diseased organs or body parts are common and can often bealleviated with hot water bottles, warm but not hot bath water and massage. If thistype of discomfort exists, it usually lessens with each passing day until itdisappears 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’tread or even pay close attention to videotaped movies, and if they can’t divertthemselves some fasters think they will go stir crazy. They are so addicted to ahectic schedule of doingness, and/or being entertained that they just can’t standjust being with themselves, forced to confront and deal with the sensations of theirown 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. Usuallythe 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 can not keep growing hair, and theexisting hair dies. However, the follicles themselves do not die and once the fasthas ended and sufficient nutrition is forthcoming, hair will regrow as well or betterthan 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. Thesemay take the form of desires for sweet, sour, salt, or a specific food dreamed ofwhile fasting, like chocolate fudge sundays or just plain toast. Food cravings mustbe controlled at all costs because if acted upon, each indulgence chips away thehealth gains of the previous weeks. A single indulgence can be remedied by a dayof restricting the diet to juice or raw food. After the repair, the person feels asgood as they did when the fast ended. Repeated indulgences will require anotherextended 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, arealmost inevitable. A well-educated faster should welcome these discomforts whenthey 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 ahealing crisis, 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 hasobtained 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 perhapsproduces a flu-like experience with fever chills, sweat, aches and pains, etc.Though unpleasant, this experience is to be encouraged; the body has merelyaccelerated its elimination process. Do not attempt to suppress any of thesesymptoms, don’t even try to moderate fever, which is the body’s effective way toburn out a virus or bacteria infection, unless it is a dangerously high fever (over102° Fahrenheit). Fever can be lowered without drugs by putting the person intoa cool/cold bath, or using cold towel wraps and cold water sponge baths. Thegood news is that healing crises usually do not last long, and when they are pastyou 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 havestayed awake all night for three nights continuously coughing and choking on thematerial that was being eliminated. After that clearing-out process they were ableto breath much more freely. Likewise I have had people who have had sinusitishave nothing but nonstop pussy discharge from their sinuses for three weeks.Some of this would run down the throat and cause nausea. All I could say toencourage the sufferer was that it needed to come out and to please stand asideand let the body work its magic. These fasters were not grateful until the sinusproblem that had plagued them since childhood disappeared. The interesting thing about healing crises are that the symptoms produced
retrace earlier complaints; they are almost never something entirely unknown tothe patient. Usually they are old, familiar somatics, often complaints that haven’tbothered the faster for many years. The reason the symptom is familiar but is notcurrently a problem is because as the body degenerates it loses vital force; withless vital force it loses the ability to create such acute detoxification episodes innon-life-threatening secondary elimination routes. The degenerated body makesless 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 acuteinflammations 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 backpains, or to have digestive upsets. These new symptoms are more constant butusually less acute. Ultimately, vital organs begin to malfunction, and seriousdisease develop. But a hygienist sees the beginning of fatal diseases such ascancer 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 tothat which they occurred originally. This means that the body would first directhealing toward the lungs if the most recently serious illness was an attack ofpneumonia six months previously. In this case you would expect to quickly andintensely experience a mini-case of pneumonia while the body eliminates residuesin the lungs that were not completely discharged at the time. Next the body mighttake you through a period of depression that you had experienced five years inthe past. The faster may be profoundly depressed for a few days and come out ofit feeling much better. You could then reexperience sensation-states like thosecaused by recreational drugs you had playfully experimented with ten yearspreviously 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 thenexperience something similar to a raging attack of tonsillitis which you vaguelyremember having when you were five years old, but fortunately this time it passesin 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 doingthe wrong thing because all those old illnesses are coming back to haunt you. It isthe body’s magnificent healing effort working on your behalf, and for doing it yourbody deserves lots of “well done”, “good body” thoughts rather than gnashing ofteeth and thinking what did I do to deserve this. The body won’t tell you whatyou 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 anotherday of fasting is by diverting their minds with TV . This is far from ideal becauseoften the emotions of a faster are like an open wound and when they resonatewith the emotions portrayed on most TV shows, the faster gets into some veryunpleasant states that interfere with healing. And the emotions many moviesprompt people to sympathetically generate are powerful ones, often highlynegative, and contrary to healing. Especially unhelpful are the adrenaline rushes inaction movies. But if TV is the best a faster can do, it is far better that someonefast with television programming filling their minds than to not fast at all. I keep alibrary of positive VHS tapes for these addicts—comedies, stories of heroicover-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. Butconcurrently, the rate of healing is accelerating with each slowly-passing day.Every day the faster gets through does them considerably more good than theprevious day. However, fasters rarely are motivated enough to overcomeboredom for more than two weeks or so, unless they started the fast to solve avery serious or life-threatening condition. For this reason, basically well peopleshould not expect to be able to fast for more than a couple of weeks every sixmonths 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 musthave complete bed rest, with no books, no TV , no visitors, no enemas, noexercise, no music, and of course no food, not even a cup of herb tea. In mymany years of conducting people through fasts, I have yet to meet an individualthat could mentally tolerate this degree of nothingness. It is too drastic awithdrawal from all the stimulation people are used to in the twentieth century. Istill don’t know how Shelton managed to make his patients do it, but my guess isthat he must have been a very intimidating guy. Shelton was a body builder ofsome renown in his day. I bet Shelton’s patients kept a few books and magazinesunder their mattress and only took them out when he wasn’t looking. If I had triedto enforced this type of sensory deprivation, I know my patients would havegrabbed their clothes and run, vowing never to fast again. I think it is mostimportant that people fast, and that they feel so good about the experience thatthey 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 everyday, without stopping. I would like to have been there to see how they managedto enforce that. I suspect some patients cheated. I lived with schizophrenicsenough years to know that it is very difficult to get them to do anything that theydon’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. Ihave had clients who walked six miles a day during an extended water fast, butthey were not feeling very sick when they started the fast, and they were alsophysically fit. In contrast I have had people on extended fasts who were unable towalk 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 distributedthroughout 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 thecenter of the body where they can be eliminated. The blood is circulated throughthe arteries and veins in the body by the contractions of the heart, but thelymphatic system does not have a pump. Lymphatic fluid is moved by thecontractions of the muscles, primarily those of the arms and legs. If the faster istoo 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 withwaste products the ducts and nodes swell, and until the source of the localirritation is removed, are incapable of handling further debris. If left in thiscondition 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 acancer. Fasting, massage, and poultices will often soften overloaded lymph nodesand 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 prepare theirbody for the fast. Two weeks would be a minimum amount of time, and if theprospective faster wants an easier time of it, they should allow a month or eventwo 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 morepleasant, and is strongly recommended. However, eliminating all these harmfulsubstances 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. Psychologicalhunger usually begins with the first missed meal. If the faster seems to be losingtheir resolve, I have them drink unlimited quantities of good-tasting herb teas,(sweetened—only if absolutely necessary—with nutrisweet). Salt-free brothsmade from meatless instant powder (obtainable at the health food store) can alsofend 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 wasteproducts. Most people starting a fast begin with an overly acid blood pH from thetypical American diet that contains a predominance of acid-forming foods.Switching over to burning fat for fuel triggers the release of even more acidicsubstances. Acidosis is usually accompanied by fatigue, blurred vision, andpossibly 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 gooddeal 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 detoxifyfrom yesterday’s abuses. So people routinely awaken in a state of acidosis. Theirtongue is coated, their breath foul and they feel poorly. They end their briefovernight fast with breakfast, bringing the detoxification process to a screechinghalt and feel much better. Many people think they awaken hungry and don’t feelwell until they eat. They confuse acidosis with hunger when most have neverexperienced 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 beyondthe 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 isgradually corrected. This sets the stage for serious healing of body tissues andorgans. Normalization may take one or two more weeks depending on how badlythe body was out of balance. As the blood chemistry steadily approachesperfection, the faster usually feels an increasing sense of well-being, broken byshort spells of discomfort that are usually healing crises or retracings. The next stage, accelerated healing, can take one or many weeks more, again
depending on how badly the body has been damaged. Healing proceeds rapidlyafter the blood chemistry has been stabilized, the person is usually in a state ofprofound rest and the maximum amount of vital force can be directed towardrepair and regeneration of tissues. This is a miraculous time when tumors aremetabolized as food for the body, when arthritic deposits dissolve, when scartissues 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 ittakes 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 toreject food when you try to make it eat, even if you introduce foods verygradually. The faster, the spiritual being running the body, may have becomebored and want some action, but the faster’s body hasn’t finished. The bodywants 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 yourselfdigesting it easily. Then and only then, reintroduce a little solid raw food like agreen 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 buildingup to solid raw fruit, small amounts of raw vegetable foods should be added. If ithas been a long fast, say over three weeks, this reintroduction should be donegingerly over a few weeks. If this stage is poorly managed or ignored you maybecome acutely ill, and for someone who started fasting while dangerously ill, lossof self control and impulsive eating could prove fatal. Even for those fasting tocure non-life-threatening illnesses it is pointless to go through the effort anddiscipline of a long fast without carefully establishing a correct diet after the fastends, or the effort will have largely been wasted. Foods For Monodiet, Juice or Broth Fasting
zucchini, garlic, onion, green beans, kale, celery, beet greens and root,
cabbage, carrot, wheat grass juice, alfalfa juice, barley green juice, parsley
juice, lemon/lime juice, grapefruit juice, apples (not juice, too sweet),
diluted orange juice, diluted grape juice
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 havebeen created by grasping the underlying truth of fasting, namely whenever thedigestive effort can be reduced, by whatever degree, whenever the formation ofthe 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 eatsonly grapes for a month or so, or the lemon cure, where the juice of one or morelemons is added to water and nothing else is consumed for weeks on end. Here Ishould also mention the “lemon juice/cayenne pepper/maple syrup cure,” thevarious green drink cures using spirulina, chlorella, barley green or wheat grass,and the famous Bieler broths—vegetable soups made of overcooked green beansor 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 beextremely useful, especially for those individuals who can not or will not tolerate awater fast. The best foods for monodiet fasting are the easiest ones digest: juices of raw
fruits and non-starchy vegetables with all solids strained out. Strained mineralbroths made of long-simmered non-starchy vegetables (the best of them made ofleafy green vegetables) fall in the same category. So if you are highly partial to theflavor of grapes or lemons or cayenne and (highly diluted) maple syrup, a long faston one of these would do you a world of good, just not quite as much good asthe 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 notovereat. Dr. Bieler gave his fasting patients only one pint of zucchini soup three orfour times a day. The way to evaluate how much to eat is by how much weightyou 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 keyconcept here is nutritional reserves. Body fat is stored, surplus energy fuel. Butenergy alone cannot keep a body going. It needs much more than fuel to rebuildand repair and maintain its systems. So the body in its wisdom also stores upvitamins 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. Andit is almost a truism that a sick person has, for quite some time, been a poorlynourished one. With low nutritional reserves. This fact alone can make it difficultfor a sick person to water fast for enough time to completely heal their damagedorgans and other systems. Obese people have fat reserves sufficient to provide energy for long periods,
but rarely can any body, no matter how complete its nutrition had been overprevious years, contains sufficient nutritional reserves to support a water fast ofover six weeks. To water fast the very obese down to normal weight can takemonths but to make this possible, rather diverse and concentrated nutritioncontaining few calories must be given. It is possible to fast even a very slim aperson for quite a bit longer than a month when their body is receiving easilyassimilable vitamins and minerals and small amounts of sugars or other simplecarbohydrates. 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 ofnutrition taken and the amount the juices or broths are diluted. But juice fastingcan permit healing to go on several times longer than water might. Fasting on dilute juice and broth can save the life of someone whose organs of
elimination are insufficiently strong to withstand the work load created by waterfasting. In this sense, juices can be regarded as similar to the moderators in anuclear reactor, slowing the process down so it won’t destroy the container. On afast of undiluted juice, the healing power drops considerably, but a person on thisregimen, 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, andthis could happen as quickly as one week or take as long as 60 days if the personis 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, theirdigestive system never shuts down and consequently, it is much easier for them toresume eating. The thing to keep in mind is that if the symptoms return, the fastwas not long enough or the diet was not properly reformed after the fast. During a long fast on water or dilute juice, once the body has used up all of it’s
reserves and/or the body has reached skeletal condition, but the condition orsymptoms being addressed still persists, the fast must still be ended. Perhaps theperson should go on a raw food healing diet. If three to six months on raw fooddon’t solve the complaint then another spell of water or dilute juice fasting shouldbe attempted. Most fasters are incapable of persisting until the body reserveshave 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 truehunger is the critical indicator that must not be ignored. True hunger is not whatmost people think of when they think they are hungry. Few Americans have everexperienced true hunger. It is not a rumbling in the stomach or a set ofuncomfortable sensations (caused by the beginning of detoxification) you knowwill go away after eating. True hunger is an animal, instinctual feeling in the backof 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 pre-existing
mineral deficiencies. I say inevitably because they likely would not have become illhad they been properly nourished. Sick fasters may be wise to take in mineralsfrom thin vegetable broths or vitamin-like supplements in order to preventuncomfortable deficiency states. For example calcium or magnesium deficienciescan make water fasters experience unpleasant symptoms such as hand tremors,stiff muscles, cramps in the hands, feet, and legs, and difficulty relaxing. I want tostress 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 nonstarchyvegetables one juices or makes into vegetable broths, but eaten whole and raw.Heating food does two harmful things: it destroys many vitamins, enzymes andother nutritional elements and it makes many foods much harder to digest. So nocooked vegetables or fruits are allowed because to maintain health on this limitedregimen it is essential that every possible vitamin and enzyme present in the foodbe available for digestion. Even though still raw, no starchy or fatty vegetables orfruits are allowed that contain concentrated calories like potatoes, winter squash,avocados, sweet potatoes, fresh raw corn, dates, figs, raisins, or bananas. Andnaturally, no salad dressings containing vegetable oils or (raw) ground seeds areallowed. 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 muchsugar do these fruits have, and well-chewed watermelon seeds are verynourishing). Eating even large quantities of only raw fruit and raw non-starchyvegetables results in a slow but steady healing process about 10 to 20 percent asrapid 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, evena year or more without experiencing massive weight loss and, more important tosome people, without suffering the extremes of low blood sugar, weakness andloss of ability to concentrate that happen when water fasting. Someone on a rawfood 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 orless normal (though slower paced) life activities. However, almost no one on thisdiet is able to sustain an extremely active life-style involving hard physical labor orcompetitive sports. And from the very beginning someone on a raw food cleansemust be willing and able to lie down and rest any time they feel tired or unable toface their responsibilities. Otherwise they will inevitably succumb to the mentalcertainty that their feelings of exhaustion or overwhelm can be immediately solvedby eating some concentrated food to “give them energy.” Such low-energy stateswill, 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 digestionand assimilation; a body that is kept on a raw food cleansing diet will initially loseweight rapidly, but eventually weight loss slows to virtually nothing and thenstabilizes. 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 andhealing 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 areeaten. Though this diet has ceased to be cleansing, few if any toxins frommisdigestion will be produced and health is easy to maintain. “Raw fooders” are usually people who have healed themselves of a serious
diseases and ever after continue to maintain themselves on unfired food, almost asa 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. Whenraw fooders wish to perform hard physical work or strenuous exercise, they’llconsume raw nuts and some raw grains such as finely-ground oats soakedovernight 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 bepurchased in some health food stores. However, little or no healing ordetoxification can happen once concentrated energy sources are added to thediet, 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 ateabout half my diet raw and the rest fired. I have listed some books by rawfooders 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 ofmisery, one that the medical doctors with drugs and surgery may be able toprolong into an interminable hell on earth, or, spend several years working onreally 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 amore complete diet that includes moderate amounts of cooked vegetables andsmall quantities of cooked cereals. And even after recovery someone who wasquite 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 remediedby the first intense fast, a raw food diet must be followed for three to six monthsuntil weight has been regained, nutritional reserves have been rebuilt and it is safeto undertake another extended fast. More than two water or juice fasts a year ofthirty continuous days are not recommended nor should they be necessary unlessthe 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 adesperate condition. He was in a wheelchair unable to walk, unable to control hislegs 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 mostfrightening to him, he was steadily losing weight although he was eating largeamounts of cooked vegetables and grains. Jake had wasted away to 90 poundsat 5’10” and looked pathetic when I first saw him wheeled off an airplane at mylocal airport. Jake had seen a lot of medical doctors and had variously been diagnosed as
having chronic fatigue syndrome, chronic (whatever that is) meningitis, andmultiple sclerosis. He had been treated by virtually every medical expert andmany famous alternative practitioners, utilizing a host of old and new techniques,all to no avail. He had even tried intravenous chelation therapy and colonics. Ithad also been suggested that he enter a hospital for the treatment of eatingdisorders and/or see a psychiatrist. He had tried to gain admittance to a numberof holistic fasting institutions back east, but they all refused him because theyconsidered the risk was too high to fast a person at such a low body weight. But Ihad previously fasted emaciated people like Jake, and there was something Iliked about his telephone presence. Perhaps this is why I foolishly decided I knewbetter 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 bewasting. Eating further increases their toxic burden from undigested meals, furtherworsening their already failing organs. The real solution is to stop feeding themaltogether so that their digestive functions can heal. In Jake’s case, his body’snutritional reserves had already become sadly depleted due to poor absorptionover such an extended period, so I could not fast him on water. I immediately putJake 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 fortifiedwith sea weed. It did not matter too much what vegetables I used as long as therewere lots of leafy greens containing lots of chlorophyll (where the mostconcentrated 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 colonicspreviously had not accomplished much for I must say that Jake had the most foulsmelling discharges that I had ever encountered in administering over 6,000colonics over many years. It was as if his body was literally rotting from the insideout. 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 weightstarts fasting, to conserve vital tissue the body goes rapidly into a state ofprofound 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 earlier. After onemonth on mineral broth Jake began to show signs of mineral deficiencies in theform of a fine tremor of the hands, and cramps in the feet, so I put him on mineralsupplements 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 addedfrom sources such as algae (spirulina), wheat grass juice, alfalfa, etc.. This wasfollowed by two more weeks on small quantities of raw fruits and vegetables, andthen followed by two weeks with added steamed vegetables, and finally, heachieved a diet which included small amounts of grain, cooked legumes and rawnuts, plus the fruits and vegetables previously mentioned. Jake’s health steadilyimproved. He gained control of his bladder, bowels, speech, hands, and legs. Hebegan to exercise in the living room on a stationary bike, and walked slowly upand 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 wasdenied; he always wanted more in terms of quantity, more in terms of variety, andat more frequent intervals. Though his organs had healed significantly, his digestivecapacity was not nearly as large as he remembered himself enjoying before he gotsick. And never would be. Jake was not happy about the dietary restrictionsnecessary for him to retain his newly attained health, and unwilling to stay withinthe limits of his digestive system’s ability to process foods. He had gained weightand was back up to 120 pounds. It was time for him to go home before I lost mygood 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 hadarrived in a wheelchair three months before. Now he walked unaided to theairplane, 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 togive him everything that he wanted. So his appetite and lack of personal disciplinegot the better of him. He started eating lots of dates and figs. These had beeneliminated from his diet because he was unable to process foods which such ahigh sugar content. He also ate larger and larger quantities of grains, nuts andavocados, 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 thatunfortunately for him, he still retained the ability to assimilate food and maintain hisbody weight. Ironically, the only ultimate benefit of his fasting with me was topermit him to suffer a far longer existence in a wheelchair without wasting awayand 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 goodItalian family with lots of other kinds of rich food. Jake had a reputation for beingable to outeat everybody in terms of quantity and in the amount of time spenteating. In childhood, this ability had made his Italian mother very happy because itshowed 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 otherpeople whether they needed a helping of his angry emotions or not. A lot ofpeople in his employ and in his extended family tiptoed around Jake, alwayscareful of triggering his wrath. At my place as Jake began to get well he began touse his increased energy and much stronger voice to demonstrate his poorcharacter. At meal times Jake would bang the table with a fork hard enough toleave dents in the wood table top while yelling for more, complaining loudly aboutthe lack of rich sauces and other culinary delights he craved. This was a characterproblem that Jake could not seem to overcome, even with a lot of interventionfrom the local minister on his behalf and my counseling. Jake was a Catholic whowent 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 notchange his habitual responses. His negative thoughts and actions interfered withhis digestive capacity to the extent that his gluttonous eating habits producedillness, a vegetative paralyzing illness, but not death. To me this seems almost aform 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 anythingto have a second chance at doing life right. Some succeed with their secondchance and some don’t. If they don’t succeed in changing their life andrelationships, 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 thevalue of abstentousness. Had Jake taken this story to heart he would have totallyrecovered. Cornaro was a sixteenth century Venetian nobleman. He, like Jake thespaghetti baron, was near death at the young age of forty. (Jake was also in hisearly 40s when he broke down.) Cornaro’s many doctors were unable to curehim. Finally he saw a doctor who understood the principles of natural healing.This wise physician determined that this illness was caused by a mismatchbetween Cornaro’s limited digestive capacity and the excessive amount of foodhe was eating. So Cornaro was put on a diet of only 12 ounces of solid food andfourteen ounces of liquid a day. Any twelve ounces of any solids he wanted andany 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 weremuch younger in terms of years were unable to keep up with him.
Be_your_own_doctor.txt
Summarize the following text section accurately and concisely. Maintain specific details and numerical information, and use anti-repetition mechanisms:

        Mostreasonably healthy people have sufficient reserves to water fast for a month. LaterI will explain how a faster can somewhat resupply their nutritional reserves whilecontinuing to fast, and thus safely extend the fasting period. The second essential concern has to do with adjusting the intensity of the fast. Some individuals are so toxic that the waste products released during a fast aretoo strong, too concentrated or too poisonous for the organs of elimination tohandle safely, or to be handled within the willingness of the faster to tolerate thediscomforts that toxic releases generate. The highly-toxic faster may evenexperience life-threatening symptoms such as violent asthma attacks. This kind offaster has almost certainly been dangerously ill before the fast began. Others,though not dangerously sick prior to fasting, may be nearly as toxic and thoughnot in danger of death, they may not be willing to tolerate the degree ofdiscomfort fasting can trigger. For this reason I recommend that if at all possible,before undertaking a fast the person eat mostly raw foods for two months andclean up all addictions. This will give the body a chance to detoxify significantlybefore the water fast is started, and will make water fasting much morecomfortable. Seriously or dangerously ill people should only fast with experiencedguidance, so the rapidity of their detoxification process may be adjusted to alower level if necessary. A fast of only one week can accomplish a significant amount of healing. Slight
healing does occur on shorter fasts, but it is much more difficult to see or feel theresults. Many people experience rapid relief from acute headache pain ordigestive distress such as gas attacks, mild gallbladder pain, stomach aches, etc. ,after only one day of abstention from food. In one week of fasting a person canrelieve more dangerous conditions such as arthritic pain, rheumatism, kidney pain,and many symptoms associated with allergic reactions,. But even more fastingtime is generally needed for the body to completely heal serious diseases. That’sbecause eliminating life-threatening problems usually involve rebuilding organs thataren’t functioning too well. Major rebuilding begins only after major detoxificationhas been accomplished, and this takes time. Yes, even lost organ function can be partially or completely restored by fasting. Aging and age-related degeneration is progressive, diminishing organ functioning. Organs that make digestive enzymes secrete less enzymes. The degenerated
immune system loses the ability to mobilize as effectively when the body isattacked. Liver and kidney efficiency declines. The adrenals tire, becomingincapable of dumping massive amounts of stress-handling hormones or ofrepeating that effort time after time without considerable rest in between. Theconsequences of these interdependent deteriorations is a cascade of deteriorationthat contributes to even more rapid deteriorations. The name for this cascadingprocess is aging. Its inevitable result—death. Fasting can, to a degree, reverse aging. Because fasting improves organ
functioning, it can slow down aging. Fasters are often surprised that intensified healing can be uncomfortable. They
have been programmed by our culture and by allopathic doctors to think that ifthey are doing the right thing for their bodies they should feel better immediately. Iwish it weren’t so, but most people have to pay the piper for their dietaryindiscretions and other errors in living. There will be aches and minor pains anduncomfortable sensations. More about that later. A rare faster does feelimmediately better, and continues to feel ever better by the day, and even hasincredible energy while eating nothing, but the majority of us folks just have totough it out, keeping in mind that the way out is the way through. It is important toremind yourself at times that even with some discomfort and considering theinconvenience of fasting that you are getting off easy—one month of self-denialpays for those years of indulgence and buys a regenerated body. Length Of The Fast
How long should a person fast. In cases where there are serious complaints to
remedy but where there are no life threatening disease conditions, a good rule ofthumb is to fast on water for one complete day (24 hours) for each year that theperson has lived. If you are 30 years old, it will take 30 consecutive days offasting to restore complete health. However, thirty fasting days, done a few days
here and a few there won’t equal a month of steady fasting; the body
accomplishes enormously more in 7 or l4 days of consecutive fasting, than 7 or14 days of fasting accumulated sporadically, such as one day a week. This is notto say that regular short fasts are not useful medicine. Periodic day-long fasts havebeen incorporated into many religious traditions, and for good reason; it gives thebody one day a week to rest, to be free of digestive obligations, and to catch upon garbage disposal. I heartily recommend it. But it takes many years ofunfailingly regular brief fasting to equal the benefits of one, intensive experience. Fasting on water much longer than fifteen consecutive days may be dangerous
for the very sick, (unless under experienced supervision) or too intense for thosewho are not motivated by severe illness to withstand the discomfort andboredom. However, it is possible to finish a healing process initiated by one longwater fast by repeating the fast later. My husband’s healing is a good example ofthis. His health began to noticeably decline about age 38 and he started fasting. He fasted on water 14 to 18 days at a time, once a year, for five consecutiveyears before most of his complaints and problems entirely vanished. The longest fast I ever supervised was a 90 day water fast on an
extraordinarily obese woman, who at 5’ 2” weighed close to 400 pounds. Shewas a Mormon; generally members of the LDS Church eat a healthier diet thanmost Americans, but her’s included far too much of what I call “healthfoodjunkfood,” in the form of whole grain cakes and cookies, lots of granola madewith lots of honey, oil, and dried fruit, lots of honey heaped atop heavily butteredwhole grain bread. (I will explain more about the trap of healthfood junkfood lateron. ) A whole foods relatively meatless diet is far superior to its refined white flour,white sugar and white grease (lard) counterpart, but it still produced a seriousheath problem in just 30 years of life. Like many women, she expressed love-for-family in the kitchen by serving too-much too-tasty food. The Mormons have avery strong family orientation and this lady was no exception, but she wasinsecure and unhappy in her marriage and sought consolation in food, eaten far inexcess of what her body needed. On her 90 day water fast she lost about 150 pounds, but was still grossly
overweight when the fast ended. Toward the end it became clear that it wasunrealistic to try to shrink this woman any closer to normal body weight becauseto her, fat represented an invaluable insulation or buffer that she was not preparedto give up. As the weight melted away on the fast and she was able to actuallyfeel the outline of a hip bone her neurosis became more and more apparent, andthe ability to feel a part of her skeleton was so upsetting to her that her choicewas between life threatening obesity and pervasive anxiety. Her weight was still excessive but the solace of eating was even more
important. This woman needed intensive counseling not more fasting. Unfortunately, at the end she choose to remain obese. Fat was much lessfrightening to her than confronting her emotions and fears. The positive side wasthat after the fast she was able to maintain her weight at 225 instead of 375 whichwas an enormous relief to her exhausted heart. Another client I fasted for 90 days was a 6’ 1” tall, chronic schizophrenic man
who weighed in at 400 pounds. He was so big he could barely get through myfront door, and mine was an extraordinarily wide door in what had been anupper-class mansion. This man, now in his mid twenties, had spent his last sevenyears in a mental institution before his parents decided to give him one last chanceby sending to Great Oaks School. The state mental hospitals at that time providedthe mentally ill with cigarettes, coffee, and lots of sugary treats, but none of thesesubstances were part of my treatment program so he had a lot of immediatewithdrawal to go through. The quickest and easiest way to get him through it wasto put him on a water fast after a few days of preparation on raw food. This was not an easily managed case. He was wildly psychotic, on heavy
doses of chloropromazine, with many bizarre behaviors. Besides talking to himselfcontinuously in gibberish, he collected bugs, moss, sticks, piles or dirt, andswitched to smoking oak leaves instead of cigarettes. He was such a fire hazardthat I had to move him to a downstairs room with concrete floor. Even in the
basement he was a fire hazard with his smoking and piles of sticks and other
inflammables next to his bed, but all of this debris was his “precious. ” I knew thatI was in for trouble if I disturbed his precious, but the insects and dirt pilesseemed to be expanding exponentially. One day the dirt exceeded my tolerance level. To make a long story short he
caught me in the act of cleaning up his precious. Was he furious. All 350 poundsof him. (By this time he had lost 50 pounds. ) He barreled into me, fists flying, andknocked me into the pipes next to the furnace and seemed ready to really teachme what was what. I prefer to avoid fights, but if they are inevitable, I can reallyget into the spirit of the thing. I’d had lots of childhood practice defending myselfbecause I was an incurable tomboy who loved to wrestle; I could usually pin bigboys who considered themselves tough. So I began using my fists and what littlemartial arts training I had to good use. After I hurt him a bit he realized that I wasnot going to be easily intimidated, and that in fact he was in danger of gettingseriously damaged. So he called a truce before either of us were badly beaten up. He had only a few bruises and welts, nothing serious. After that he refrained from collecting things inside the building (he continued
to collect outside). This compromise was fine with me, and the incident allowedme to maintain the authority I needed to bully him into cooperating with theprogram: taking his vitamins, and sticking to his fast until he finally reached 200pounds. After 90 days on water he actually looked quite handsome, he no longersmoked, he was off psychotropic medication, and his behaviors were within anacceptable range as long as your expectations were not too high. He was well enough to live outside a hospital and also clearheaded enough to
know that if he let too many people know how well he really was, he might haveto give up his mental disability pension and actually become responsible forhimself. No way, José. This fellow knew a good thing when he saw it. So hecontinued to pull bizarre stunts just often enough in front of the right audience tokeep his disability checks coming in, while managing to act sane enough to be
allowed to live comfortably at home instead of in the hospital. By keeping to my
program he could stay off mind-numbing psychotropic medication if he kept uphis megavitamins and minerals. This compromise was tolerable from his point ofview, because there were no side effects like he experienced from histranquilizers. It is very rare for a mentally ill person who has spent more than a few months
in a mental hospital to ever usefully return to society because they find “mentalillness” too rewarding. My Own 56 Day Long Fast
Fasters go through a lot of different emotional states, these can get intense and
do change quite rapidly. The physical body, too, will manifest transitoryconditions. Some can be quite uncomfortable. But, I don’t want to leave thereader with the impression that fasting is inevitably painful. So I will now recountmy own longest fast in detail. When I did my own 42 day water fast followed by two weeks on carrot juice
diluted 50/50 with water, which really amounted to 56 consecutive days, mypredominant sensation for the first three days was a desire to eat that was mostlya mental condition, and a lot of rumbling and growling from my stomach. This isnot real hunger, just the sounds the stomach likes to make when it is shrinking. After all, this organ is accustomed to being filled at regular intervals, and then, allof a sudden, it gets nothing, so naturally the stomach wants to know what is goingon. Once it realizes it is on temporary vacation, the stomach wisely decides toreduce itself to a size suitable for a retired organ. And it shuts up. This processusually takes three to five days and for most people, no further “hunger pangs”are felt until the fast is over. Real hunger comes only when the body is actually starving. The intense
discomforts many people experience upon missing a meal are frequentlyinterpreted as hunger but they aren’t. What is actually happening is that their
highly toxic bodies are taking the opportunity presented by having missed a meal
or two to begin to cleanse. The toxins being released and processed makeassorted unpleasant symptoms such as headaches and inability to think clearly. These symptoms can be instantly eliminated by the intake of a bit of food, bringingthe detox to a screeching halt. Two weeks into the fast I experienced sharp abdominal pains that felt like I
imagine appendicitis feels, which compelled me toward the nearest toilet in a stateof great urgency where I productively busied myself for about half an hour. As Imentioned earlier, I was experimentally adhering to a rigid type of fast of the sortrecommended by Dr. Herbert Shelton, a famous advocate of the Natural Hygieneschool. Shelton was such a powerful writer and personality that there still exists aNatural Hygiene Society that keeps his books in print and maintains his library. The words “Natural Hygiene” are almost owned by the society like a trademarkand they object when anyone describes themselves as a hygienist and thenadvocates any practice that Dr. Shelton did not approve of. Per Dr. Shelton, I was going to fast from the time hunger left until the time it
returned and I was not going to use any form of colon cleansing. Shelton stronglyopposed bowel cleansing so I did no enemas nor colonics, nor herbs, nor clays,nor psyllium seed designed to clean the bowel, etc. Obviously at day 14 thebowel said, enough is enough of this crap, and initiated a goods house cleaningsession. When I saw what was eliminated I was horrified to think that I had leftthat stuff in there for two weeks. I then started to wonder if the Sheltonites weremistaken about this aspect of fasting. Nonetheless, I persevered on the sameregimen because my hunger had not returned, my tongue was still thickly coatedwith foul-smelling, foul-tasting mucus and I still had some fat on my feet that hadnot been metabolized. Shelton said that cleansing is not complete until a skeletal condition is
reached—that is, absolutely no fat reserves are left. Up until that time I did noteven know that I had fat on my feet, but much to my surprise, as the weeks went
on, not only did my breasts disappear except for a couple of land marks well-
known to my babies, but my ribs and hip bones became positively dangerous topassersby, and my shoes would not stay on my feet. This was not all thatsurprising because I went from 135 pounds down to 85 on a 5’ 7” frame withsubstantial bone structure. Toward the end of the fast my eyes became brighter and clearer blue, my skin
took on a good texture, my breath finally became sweet, my tongue cleared upand became pink, my mind was clear, and my spiritual awareness and sensitivitywas heightened. In other words, I was no longer a walking hulk of stored-uptoxemia. I also felt quite weak and had to rest for ten minutes out every hour inhorizontal position. (I should have rested much more. ) I also required very littlesleep, although it felt good to just lie quietly and rest, being aware of what wasgoing on in various parts of my body. During the last few weeks on water I became very attentive to my right
shoulder. Two separate times in the past, while flying head first over thehandlebars of my bicycle I had broken my shoulder with considerable tearing ofligaments and tendons. At night when I was totally still I felt a whole crew ofpixies and brownies with picks and shovels at work in the joint doing major repairwork. This activity was not entirely comfortable, but I knew it was constructivework, not destructive, so I joined the work crew with my mind’s eye and helpedthe work along. It seemed my visualizations actually did help. Ever since, I’ve had the fasters I
supervised use creative imagery or write affirmations to help their bodies heal. There are lots of books on this subject. I’ve found that the techniques work farbetter on a faster than when a person is eating normally. After breaking the fast it took me six weeks to regain enough strength that I
could run my usual distance in my regular time; it took me six months to regain myfull 135 pound weight because I was very careful to break the fast slowly andcorrectly. Coming off water with two weeks on dilute carrot juice I then added
small portions of raw food such as apples, raw vegetables, sprouts, vegetable
juices, and finally in the fourth week after I began drinking dilute carrot juice, Iadded seven daily well-chewed almonds to my rebuilding diet. Much later Iincreased to 14 almonds, but that was the maximum amount of such highlyconcentrated fare my body wanted digest at one time for over one year. I found Igot a lot more miles to the gallon out of the food that I did eat, and did not craverecreational foods. Overall I was very pleased with my educational fast, it hadtaught me a great deal. If I had undertaken such a lengthy fast at a time when I was actually ill, and
therefore had felt forced into it, my experience could have been different. Apositive mental attitude is an essential part of the healing process so fasting shouldnot be undertaken in a negative, protesting mental state. The mind is so powerfulthat fear or the resistance fear generates can override the healing capacity of thebody. For that reason I always recommend that people who consider themselvesto be healthy, who have no serious complaints, but who are interested in waterfasting, should limit themselves to ten consecutive days or so, certainly never morethan 14. Few healthy people, even those with a deep interest in the process, canfind enough personal motivation to overcome the extreme boredom of waterfasting for longer than that. Healthy people usually begin protesting severely afterabout two weeks. If there is any one vital rule of fasting, one never should fastover strong, personal protest. Anytime you’re fasting and you really desire to quit,you probably should. Unless, of course, you are critically ill. Then you may haveno choice—its fast or die. 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, andweakness in the first few days plus what they think is intense hunger. The dizzinessand weakness are really 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 newequilibrium in the second and third week of the fast and then, the dizziness maycease, 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 heart beat, so bloodpressure probably has dropped as well. If you stand up very quickly you mayfaint. I repetitively instruct all of my clients to stand up very slowly, moving from alying to a sitting position, pausing there for ten or twenty seconds, and then risingslowly from a sitting to a standing position. They are told that at the first sign ofdizziness they must immediately put their head between their knees so that thehead is lower than the heart, or squat/sit down on the floor, I once had a fasterwho forgot to obey my frequent warnings. About two weeks into a long fast, shegot up rapidly from the toilet and felt dizzy. The obvious thing to do was to sitback down on the toilet or lie down on the bath rug on the floor, but no, shedecided that because she was dizzy she should rush back to her bed in theadjoining room. She made it as far as the bathroom door and fainted, out cold,putting a deep grove into the drywall with her pretty nose on the way down. Wethen 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. Thiswas not much fun for either of us; it is well worthwhile preventing suchcomplications. 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 tolessened physical activity. People also dislike inactivity which seems excruciatinglyboring, and some are upset by weight loss itself. Coldness is best handled withlots of clothes, bedding, hot water bottles or hot pads, and warm baths. GreatOaks School of Health was in Oregon, where the endlessly rainy winters arechilly 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 overworked kidneys. This passes. Hot bathsor 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 itmore 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 bettersurvive one more deadly dull day in a state of relative unconsciousness. They findout much to their displeasure that very little sleep is required on a fast because thebody is at rest already. Many fasters sleep only two to four hours but dozefrequently and require a great deal of rest. Being mentally prepared for thischange of habit is the best handling. Generalized low-grade aches and pains in thearea of the diseased organs or body parts are common and can often bealleviated with hot water bottles, warm but not hot bath water and massage. If thistype of discomfort exists, it usually lessens with each passing day until itdisappears 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’tread or even pay close attention to videotaped movies, and if they can’t divertthemselves some fasters think they will go stir crazy. They are so addicted to ahectic schedule of doingness, and/or being entertained that they just can’t standjust being with themselves, forced to confront and deal with the sensations of theirown 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. Usuallythe 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 can not keep growing hair, and theexisting hair dies. However, the follicles themselves do not die and once the fasthas ended and sufficient nutrition is forthcoming, hair will regrow as well or betterthan 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. Thesemay take the form of desires for sweet, sour, salt, or a specific food dreamed ofwhile fasting, like chocolate fudge sundays or just plain toast. Food cravings mustbe controlled at all costs because if acted upon, each indulgence chips away thehealth gains of the previous weeks. A single indulgence can be remedied by a dayof restricting the diet to juice or raw food. After the repair, the person feels asgood as they did when the fast ended. Repeated indulgences will require anotherextended 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, arealmost inevitable. A well-educated faster should welcome these discomforts whenthey 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 ahealing crisis, 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 hasobtained 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 perhapsproduces a flu-like experience with fever chills, sweat, aches and pains, etc. Though unpleasant, this experience is to be encouraged; the body has merelyaccelerated its elimination process. Do not attempt to suppress any of thesesymptoms, don’t even try to moderate fever, which is the body’s effective way toburn out a virus or bacteria infection, unless it is a dangerously high fever (over102° Fahrenheit). Fever can be lowered without drugs by putting the person intoa cool/cold bath, or using cold towel wraps and cold water sponge baths. Thegood news is that healing crises usually do not last long, and when they are pastyou 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 havestayed awake all night for three nights continuously coughing and choking on thematerial that was being eliminated. After that clearing-out process they were ableto breath much more freely. Likewise I have had people who have had sinusitishave nothing but nonstop pussy discharge from their sinuses for three weeks. Some of this would run down the throat and cause nausea. All I could say toencourage the sufferer was that it needed to come out and to please stand asideand let the body work its magic. These fasters were not grateful until the sinusproblem that had plagued them since childhood disappeared. The interesting thing about healing crises are that the symptoms produced
retrace earlier complaints; they are almost never something entirely unknown tothe patient. Usually they are old, familiar somatics, often complaints that haven’tbothered the faster for many years. The reason the symptom is familiar but is notcurrently a problem is because as the body degenerates it loses vital force; withless vital force it loses the ability to create such acute detoxification episodes innon-life-threatening secondary elimination routes. The degenerated body makesless 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 acuteinflammations 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 backpains, or to have digestive upsets. These new symptoms are more constant butusually less acute. Ultimately, vital organs begin to malfunction, and seriousdisease develop. But a hygienist sees the beginning of fatal diseases such ascancer 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 tothat which they occurred originally. This means that the body would first directhealing toward the lungs if the most recently serious illness was an attack ofpneumonia six months previously. In this case you would expect to quickly andintensely experience a mini-case of pneumonia while the body eliminates residuesin the lungs that were not completely discharged at the time. Next the body mighttake you through a period of depression that you had experienced five years inthe past. The faster may be profoundly depressed for a few days and come out ofit feeling much better. You could then reexperience sensation-states like thosecaused by recreational drugs you had playfully experimented with ten yearspreviously 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 thenexperience something similar to a raging attack of tonsillitis which you vaguelyremember having when you were five years old, but fortunately this time it passesin 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 doingthe wrong thing because all those old illnesses are coming back to haunt you. It isthe body’s magnificent healing effort working on your behalf, and for doing it yourbody deserves lots of “well done”, “good body” thoughts rather than gnashing ofteeth and thinking what did I do to deserve this. The body won’t tell you whatyou 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 anotherday of fasting is by diverting their minds with TV. This is far from ideal becauseoften the emotions of a faster are like an open wound and when they resonatewith the emotions portrayed on most TV shows, the faster gets into some veryunpleasant states that interfere with healing. And the emotions many moviesprompt people to sympathetically generate are powerful ones, often highlynegative, and contrary to healing. Especially unhelpful are the adrenaline rushes inaction movies. But if TV is the best a faster can do, it is far better that someonefast with television programming filling their minds than to not fast at all. I keep alibrary of positive VHS tapes for these addicts—comedies, stories of heroicover-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. Butconcurrently, the rate of healing is accelerating with each slowly-passing day. Every day the faster gets through does them considerably more good than theprevious day. However, fasters rarely are motivated enough to overcomeboredom for more than two weeks or so, unless they started the fast to solve avery serious or life-threatening condition. For this reason, basically well peopleshould not expect to be able to fast for more than a couple of weeks every sixmonths 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 musthave complete bed rest, with no books, no TV, no visitors, no enemas, noexercise, no music, and of course no food, not even a cup of herb tea. In mymany years of conducting people through fasts, I have yet to meet an individualthat could mentally tolerate this degree of nothingness. It is too drastic awithdrawal from all the stimulation people are used to in the twentieth century. Istill don’t know how Shelton managed to make his patients do it, but my guess isthat he must have been a very intimidating guy. Shelton was a body builder ofsome renown in his day. I bet Shelton’s patients kept a few books and magazinesunder their mattress and only took them out when he wasn’t looking. If I had triedto enforced this type of sensory deprivation, I know my patients would havegrabbed their clothes and run, vowing never to fast again. I think it is mostimportant that people fast, and that they feel so good about the experience thatthey 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 everyday, without stopping. I would like to have been there to see how they managedto enforce that. I suspect some patients cheated. I lived with schizophrenicsenough years to know that it is very difficult to get them to do anything that theydon’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. Ihave had clients who walked six miles a day during an extended water fast, butthey were not feeling very sick when they started the fast, and they were alsophysically fit. In contrast I have had people on extended fasts who were unable towalk 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 distributedthroughout 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 thecenter of the body where they can be eliminated. The blood is circulated throughthe arteries and veins in the body by the contractions of the heart, but thelymphatic system does not have a pump. Lymphatic fluid is moved by thecontractions of the muscles, primarily those of the arms and legs. If the faster istoo 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 withwaste products the ducts and nodes swell, and until the source of the localirritation is removed, are incapable of handling further debris. If left in thiscondition 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 acancer. Fasting, massage, and poultices will often soften overloaded lymph nodesand 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 prepare theirbody for the fast. Two weeks would be a minimum amount of time, and if theprospective faster wants an easier time of it, they should allow a month or eventwo 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 morepleasant, and is strongly recommended. However, eliminating all these harmfulsubstances 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. Psychologicalhunger usually begins with the first missed meal. If the faster seems to be losingtheir resolve, I have them drink unlimited quantities of good-tasting herb teas,(sweetened—only if absolutely necessary—with nutrisweet). Salt-free brothsmade from meatless instant powder (obtainable at the health food store) can alsofend 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 wasteproducts. Most people starting a fast begin with an overly acid blood pH from thetypical American diet that contains a predominance of acid-forming foods. Switching over to burning fat for fuel triggers the release of even more acidicsubstances. Acidosis is usually accompanied by fatigue, blurred vision, andpossibly 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 gooddeal 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 detoxifyfrom yesterday’s abuses. So people routinely awaken in a state of acidosis. Theirtongue is coated, their breath foul and they feel poorly. They end their briefovernight fast with breakfast, bringing the detoxification process to a screechinghalt and feel much better. Many people think they awaken hungry and don’t feelwell until they eat. They confuse acidosis with hunger when most have neverexperienced 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 beyondthe 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 isgradually corrected. This sets the stage for serious healing of body tissues andorgans. Normalization may take one or two more weeks depending on how badlythe body was out of balance. As the blood chemistry steadily approachesperfection, the faster usually feels an increasing sense of well-being, broken byshort spells of discomfort that are usually healing crises or retracings. The next stage, accelerated healing, can take one or many weeks more, again
depending on how badly the body has been damaged. Healing proceeds rapidlyafter the blood chemistry has been stabilized, the person is usually in a state ofprofound rest and the maximum amount of vital force can be directed towardrepair and regeneration of tissues. This is a miraculous time when tumors aremetabolized as food for the body, when arthritic deposits dissolve, when scartissues 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 ittakes 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 toreject food when you try to make it eat, even if you introduce foods verygradually. The faster, the spiritual being running the body, may have becomebored and want some action, but the faster’s body hasn’t finished. The bodywants 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 yourselfdigesting it easily. Then and only then, reintroduce a little solid raw food like agreen 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 buildingup to solid raw fruit, small amounts of raw vegetable foods should be added. If ithas been a long fast, say over three weeks, this reintroduction should be donegingerly over a few weeks. If this stage is poorly managed or ignored you maybecome acutely ill, and for someone who started fasting while dangerously ill, lossof self control and impulsive eating could prove fatal. Even for those fasting tocure non-life-threatening illnesses it is pointless to go through the effort anddiscipline of a long fast without carefully establishing a correct diet after the fastends, or the effort will have largely been wasted. Foods For Monodiet, Juice or Broth Fasting
zucchini, garlic, onion, green beans, kale, celery, beet greens and root,
cabbage, carrot, wheat grass juice, alfalfa juice, barley green juice, parsley
juice, lemon/lime juice, grapefruit juice, apples (not juice, too sweet),
diluted orange juice, diluted grape juice
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 havebeen created by grasping the underlying truth of fasting, namely whenever thedigestive effort can be reduced, by whatever degree, whenever the formation ofthe 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 eatsonly grapes for a month or so, or the lemon cure, where the juice of one or morelemons is added to water and nothing else is consumed for weeks on end. Here Ishould also mention the “lemon juice/cayenne pepper/maple syrup cure,” thevarious green drink cures using spirulina, chlorella, barley green or wheat grass,and the famous Bieler broths—vegetable soups made of overcooked green beansor 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 beextremely useful, especially for those individuals who can not or will not tolerate awater fast. The best foods for monodiet fasting are the easiest ones digest: juices of raw
fruits and non-starchy vegetables with all solids strained out. Strained mineralbroths made of long-simmered non-starchy vegetables (the best of them made ofleafy green vegetables) fall in the same category. So if you are highly partial to theflavor of grapes or lemons or cayenne and (highly diluted) maple syrup, a long faston one of these would do you a world of good, just not quite as much good asthe 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 notovereat. Dr. Bieler gave his fasting patients only one pint of zucchini soup three orfour times a day. The way to evaluate how much to eat is by how much weightyou 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 keyconcept here is nutritional reserves. Body fat is stored, surplus energy fuel. Butenergy alone cannot keep a body going. It needs much more than fuel to rebuildand repair and maintain its systems. So the body in its wisdom also stores upvitamins 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. Andit is almost a truism that a sick person has, for quite some time, been a poorlynourished one. With low nutritional reserves. This fact alone can make it difficultfor a sick person to water fast for enough time to completely heal their damagedorgans and other systems. Obese people have fat reserves sufficient to provide energy for long periods,
but rarely can any body, no matter how complete its nutrition had been overprevious years, contains sufficient nutritional reserves to support a water fast ofover six weeks. To water fast the very obese down to normal weight can takemonths but to make this possible, rather diverse and concentrated nutritioncontaining few calories must be given. It is possible to fast even a very slim aperson for quite a bit longer than a month when their body is receiving easilyassimilable vitamins and minerals and small amounts of sugars or other simplecarbohydrates. 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 ofnutrition taken and the amount the juices or broths are diluted. But juice fastingcan permit healing to go on several times longer than water might. Fasting on dilute juice and broth can save the life of someone whose organs of
elimination are insufficiently strong to withstand the work load created by waterfasting. In this sense, juices can be regarded as similar to the moderators in anuclear reactor, slowing the process down so it won’t destroy the container. On afast of undiluted juice, the healing power drops considerably, but a person on thisregimen, 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, andthis could happen as quickly as one week or take as long as 60 days if the personis 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, theirdigestive system never shuts down and consequently, it is much easier for them toresume eating. The thing to keep in mind is that if the symptoms return, the fastwas not long enough or the diet was not properly reformed after the fast. During a long fast on water or dilute juice, once the body has used up all of it’s
reserves and/or the body has reached skeletal condition, but the condition orsymptoms being addressed still persists, the fast must still be ended. Perhaps theperson should go on a raw food healing diet. If three to six months on raw fooddon’t solve the complaint then another spell of water or dilute juice fasting shouldbe attempted. Most fasters are incapable of persisting until the body reserveshave 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 truehunger is the critical indicator that must not be ignored. True hunger is not whatmost people think of when they think they are hungry. Few Americans have everexperienced true hunger. It is not a rumbling in the stomach or a set ofuncomfortable sensations (caused by the beginning of detoxification) you knowwill go away after eating. True hunger is an animal, instinctual feeling in the backof 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 pre-existing
mineral deficiencies. I say inevitably because they likely would not have become illhad they been properly nourished. Sick fasters may be wise to take in mineralsfrom thin vegetable broths or vitamin-like supplements in order to preventuncomfortable deficiency states. For example calcium or magnesium deficienciescan make water fasters experience unpleasant symptoms such as hand tremors,stiff muscles, cramps in the hands, feet, and legs, and difficulty relaxing. I want tostress 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 nonstarchyvegetables one juices or makes into vegetable broths, but eaten whole and raw. Heating food does two harmful things: it destroys many vitamins, enzymes andother nutritional elements and it makes many foods much harder to digest. So nocooked vegetables or fruits are allowed because to maintain health on this limitedregimen it is essential that every possible vitamin and enzyme present in the foodbe available for digestion. Even though still raw, no starchy or fatty vegetables orfruits are allowed that contain concentrated calories like potatoes, winter squash,avocados, sweet potatoes, fresh raw corn, dates, figs, raisins, or bananas. Andnaturally, no salad dressings containing vegetable oils or (raw) ground seeds areallowed. 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 muchsugar do these fruits have, and well-chewed watermelon seeds are verynourishing). Eating even large quantities of only raw fruit and raw non-starchyvegetables results in a slow but steady healing process about 10 to 20 percent asrapid 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, evena year or more without experiencing massive weight loss and, more important tosome people, without suffering the extremes of low blood sugar, weakness andloss of ability to concentrate that happen when water fasting. Someone on a rawfood 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 orless normal (though slower paced) life activities. However, almost no one on thisdiet is able to sustain an extremely active life-style involving hard physical labor orcompetitive sports. And from the very beginning someone on a raw food cleansemust be willing and able to lie down and rest any time they feel tired or unable toface their responsibilities. Otherwise they will inevitably succumb to the mentalcertainty that their feelings of exhaustion or overwhelm can be immediately solvedby eating some concentrated food to “give them energy. ” Such low-energy stateswill, 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 digestionand assimilation; a body that is kept on a raw food cleansing diet will initially loseweight rapidly, but eventually weight loss slows to virtually nothing and thenstabilizes. 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 andhealing 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 areeaten. Though this diet has ceased to be cleansing, few if any toxins frommisdigestion will be produced and health is easy to maintain. “Raw fooders” are usually people who have healed themselves of a serious
diseases and ever after continue to maintain themselves on unfired food, almost asa 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. Whenraw fooders wish to perform hard physical work or strenuous exercise, they’llconsume raw nuts and some raw grains such as finely-ground oats soakedovernight 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 bepurchased in some health food stores. However, little or no healing ordetoxification can happen once concentrated energy sources are added to thediet, 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 ateabout half my diet raw and the rest fired. I have listed some books by rawfooders 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 ofmisery, one that the medical doctors with drugs and surgery may be able toprolong into an interminable hell on earth, or, spend several years working onreally 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 amore complete diet that includes moderate amounts of cooked vegetables andsmall quantities of cooked cereals. And even after recovery someone who wasquite 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 remediedby the first intense fast, a raw food diet must be followed for three to six monthsuntil weight has been regained, nutritional reserves have been rebuilt and it is safeto undertake another extended fast. More than two water or juice fasts a year ofthirty continuous days are not recommended nor should they be necessary unlessthe 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 adesperate condition. He was in a wheelchair unable to walk, unable to control hislegs 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 mostfrightening to him, he was steadily losing weight although he was eating largeamounts of cooked vegetables and grains. Jake had wasted away to 90 poundsat 5’10” and looked pathetic when I first saw him wheeled off an airplane at mylocal airport. Jake had seen a lot of medical doctors and had variously been diagnosed as
having chronic fatigue syndrome, chronic (whatever that is) meningitis, andmultiple sclerosis. He had been treated by virtually every medical expert andmany famous alternative practitioners, utilizing a host of old and new techniques,all to no avail. He had even tried intravenous chelation therapy and colonics. Ithad also been suggested that he enter a hospital for the treatment of eatingdisorders and/or see a psychiatrist. He had tried to gain admittance to a numberof holistic fasting institutions back east, but they all refused him because theyconsidered the risk was too high to fast a person at such a low body weight. But Ihad previously fasted emaciated people like Jake, and there was something Iliked about his telephone presence. Perhaps this is why I foolishly decided I knewbetter 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 bewasting. Eating further increases their toxic burden from undigested meals, furtherworsening their already failing organs. The real solution is to stop feeding themaltogether so that their digestive functions can heal. In Jake’s case, his body’snutritional reserves had already become sadly depleted due to poor absorptionover such an extended period, so I could not fast him on water. I immediately putJake 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 fortifiedwith sea weed. It did not matter too much what vegetables I used as long as therewere lots of leafy greens containing lots of chlorophyll (where the mostconcentrated 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 colonicspreviously had not accomplished much for I must say that Jake had the most foulsmelling discharges that I had ever encountered in administering over 6,000colonics over many years. It was as if his body was literally rotting from the insideout. 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 weightstarts fasting, to conserve vital tissue the body goes rapidly into a state ofprofound 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 earlier. After onemonth on mineral broth Jake began to show signs of mineral deficiencies in theform of a fine tremor of the hands, and cramps in the feet, so I put him on mineralsupplements 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 addedfrom sources such as algae (spirulina), wheat grass juice, alfalfa, etc. This wasfollowed by two more weeks on small quantities of raw fruits and vegetables, andthen followed by two weeks with added steamed vegetables, and finally, heachieved a diet which included small amounts of grain, cooked legumes and rawnuts, plus the fruits and vegetables previously mentioned. Jake’s health steadilyimproved. He gained control of his bladder, bowels, speech, hands, and legs. Hebegan to exercise in the living room on a stationary bike, and walked slowly upand 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 wasdenied; he always wanted more in terms of quantity, more in terms of variety, andat more frequent intervals. Though his organs had healed significantly, his digestivecapacity was not nearly as large as he remembered himself enjoying before he gotsick. And never would be. Jake was not happy about the dietary restrictionsnecessary for him to retain his newly attained health, and unwilling to stay withinthe limits of his digestive system’s ability to process foods. He had gained weightand was back up to 120 pounds. It was time for him to go home before I lost mygood 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 hadarrived in a wheelchair three months before. Now he walked unaided to theairplane, 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 togive him everything that he wanted. So his appetite and lack of personal disciplinegot the better of him. He started eating lots of dates and figs. These had beeneliminated from his diet because he was unable to process foods which such ahigh sugar content. He also ate larger and larger quantities of grains, nuts andavocados, 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 thatunfortunately for him, he still retained the ability to assimilate food and maintain hisbody weight. Ironically, the only ultimate benefit of his fasting with me was topermit him to suffer a far longer existence in a wheelchair without wasting awayand 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 goodItalian family with lots of other kinds of rich food. Jake had a reputation for beingable to outeat everybody in terms of quantity and in the amount of time spenteating. In childhood, this ability had made his Italian mother very happy because itshowed 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 otherpeople whether they needed a helping of his angry emotions or not. A lot ofpeople in his employ and in his extended family tiptoed around Jake, alwayscareful of triggering his wrath. At my place as Jake began to get well he began touse his increased energy and much stronger voice to demonstrate his poorcharacter. At meal times Jake would bang the table with a fork hard enough toleave dents in the wood table top while yelling for more, complaining loudly aboutthe lack of rich sauces and other culinary delights he craved. This was a characterproblem that Jake could not seem to overcome, even with a lot of interventionfrom the local minister on his behalf and my counseling. Jake was a Catholic whowent 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 notchange his habitual responses. His negative thoughts and actions interfered withhis digestive capacity to the extent that his gluttonous eating habits producedillness, a vegetative paralyzing illness, but not death. To me this seems almost aform 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 anythingto have a second chance at doing life right. Some succeed with their secondchance and some don’t. If they don’t succeed in changing their life andrelationships, 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 thevalue of abstentousness. Had Jake taken this story to heart he would have totallyrecovered. Cornaro was a sixteenth century Venetian nobleman. He, like Jake thespaghetti baron, was near death at the young age of forty. (Jake was also in hisearly 40s when he broke down. ) Cornaro’s many doctors were unable to curehim. Finally he saw a doctor who understood the principles of natural healing. This wise physician determined that this illness was caused by a mismatchbetween Cornaro’s limited digestive capacity and the excessive amount of foodhe was eating. So Cornaro was put on a diet of only 12 ounces of solid food andfourteen ounces of liquid a day. Any twelve ounces of any solids he wanted andany 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 weremuch younger in terms of years were unable to keep up with him. Section summary: 

This passage discusses general guidelines related to prolonged fasting practices. It emphasizes caution regarding potential risks:
    -   * Only reasonably healthy persons undergo extensive fasting;
     * Avoid dehydration throughout the process;

Additionally mentions concerns surrounding adjustments based on toxicity issues

* High toxin levels indicate potentially unsafe durations >15-day span,

And highlights importance factors affecting compliance rates concerning overall wellness outcomes :

          **Emphasizing** the value of preparing oneself beforehand : Eat mainly RAW FOODS FOR TWO MONTHSBEFORE WATER FASTING TO CLEAN UP THE BODY AND MAKE IT POSSIBLETO EXTEND THIS PERIOD OF ABSTINENCE WITHOUT ENDANGER OR DISCOMFORTECHNICAL ISSUES WITH JUICE DIET IS PREFERABLE OVERWATER TASTINGS IN CASE THEY HAVE INSUFFICIENT RESERVES WHILEFASTED AS WELL ON NUTRITIONAL SUPPLEMENTS AT ALL TIMES IF YOU ARE NOTCRITICALLY III PLEASE BE WILLING TO WEAN YOURSELF BACK INTOFOOD GRADULLY BY DRINKING GOOD-TASTING HERB TEAS LIKE PEPPERMINT MISTLEOEATEN VERY CAREFULLY FIRST SMALL AMOUNTS ONLY WHEN HE WAS UNABLYWEIGHT BUT EVENTUALLY REGAINED HIS FULL WEIGHT AFTER BREAKAGE THEREBYMAKNG LIFE EASY AGAIN THROUGH PROPER REBUILDUNG FROMTHE CELLULAR LEVEL DOWNWARD TO DEGENERATION PROCESS THAT HAS ALREADYSTARTED BEFORE FINISHING THEIR PREVIOUS MEDICATION SEQUENCES. Please summarize correctly and briefly describe main points discussed above. Here's accurate summarizer report. Key Points:


• Generally speaking, otherwise sound individuals possess ample nutrient reservoirsto endure thirst fasting lasting approximately [month]. Future explanations shall clarifyhow extending the lengthier fast securely


• Important considerations encompass readjustments grounded in poisoning dilemmas. Summary: Main themes comprise addressing fundamental safety precautions relevant to prolonged abstinence strategies among ostensibly wholesome entities, emphasizing crucial aspects linked to purification processes amid unfavorable biological situations. Further topics touch base onto post-healing recuperation protocols alongside suggestions for overcoming monotony amidst therapeutic interventions. Among discussions lies detailed examination covering challenges connected with organic substance management via bodily rehabilitation routines. Jake and biographical illustrations illustrate practical examples illustrating pivotal lessons learnedduring experimentation studies conducted across decades. Present findings contribute substantial insights aidingindividual understanding towards optimized healthcare methodologies incorporating novel perspectives exploringbiochemical pathways connecting hydration procedures coupled together. Is your summarized version concise. No. Your response exceeds word count constraints imposed herein. Kind regards. Best regards. , Bobbie.
It's recommended to fast for 10-14 days, as this duration allows for some healing without causing extreme discomfort or risking the development of serious health complications.
What is the recommended duration of a water fast for a person who is not critically ill?
The author advises that people who are not critically ill should not fast for more than 14 days, as this can lead to serious health complications.
What is the author's recommendation for people who want to fast for an extended period?
The author does not recommend the use of enemas and colonics during a fast, as they can disrupt the healing process.
What is the author's stance on the use of enemas and colonics during a fast?
The author emphasizes the importance of self-discipline and self-control during a fast, as it is crucial for the body to continue the healing process.
What is the author's opinion on the importance of self-discipline during a fast?
The author believes that nutrition plays a crucial role in the healing process, as it is essential to provide the body with the necessary vitamins and minerals to support the healing process.
What is the author's view on the role of nutrition in the healing process?