Fasting

From The Hygienic Dictionary



Cure. [1] There is no "cure" for disease; fasting is not a cure.

Fasting facilitates natural healing processes. Foods do not cure.

Until we have discarded our faith in cures, there can be no

intelligent approach to the problems presented by suffering and no

proper use of foods by those who are ill. _Herbert Shelton, The

Hygienic System, v. 3, Fasting and Sunbathing._ [2] All c re starts

from within out and from the head down and in reverse order as the

symptoms have appeared._ Hering's Law of Cure._ [3] Life is made up

of crises. The individual establishes a standard of health

peculiarly his own, which must vary from all other standards as

greatly as his personality varies from others. The individual

standard may be such as to favor the development of indigestion,

catarrh, gout, rheumatic and glandular inflammations, tubercular

developments, congestions, sluggish secretions and excretions, or

inhibitions of various functions, both mental and physical, wherever

the environmental or habit strain is greater than usual. The

standard of resistance may be opposed so strenuously by habits and

unusual physical agencies--that the body breaks down under the

strain. This is a crisis. Appetite fails, discomfort or pain forces

rest, and, as a result of physiological rest (fasting) and physical

rest (rest from daily work and habits), a readjustment takes place,

and the patient is "cured." This is what the profession and the

people call a cure, and it is for the time being--until an unusual

enervation is brought on from accident or dissipation; then another

crisis. These crises are the ordinary sickness of all communities--

all catalogued diseases. When the cold is gone or the hay-fever

fully relieved, it does not mean the patient is cured. Indeed, he

is as much diseased as before he suffered the attack--the

crisis--and he never will be cured until the habits of life that keep

up toxin poisoning are corrected. To recover from a crisis is not a

cure; the tendency is back to the individual standard; hence all

crises are self-limited, unless nature by maltreatment is prevented

from reacting. All so-called healing systems ride to glory on the

backs of self-limited crises, and the self-deluded doctors and their

credulous clients, believe, when the crises are past, that a cure

has been wrought, whereas the real truth is that the treatment may

have delayed reaction. This is largely true of anything that has

been done except rest. A cure consists in changing the manner of

living to such a rational standard that full resistance and a

balanced metabolism is established. I suppose it is not quite human

to expect those of a standardized school of healing to give

utterance to discovered truth which, if accepted by the people,

would rob them of the glory of being curers of disease. Indeed,

nature, and nature only, cures; and as for crises, they come and go,

whether or not there is a doctor or healer within a thousand miles.

_Dr. John. H. Tilden, Impaired Health: Its Cause and Cure, 1921._



The accelerated healing process that occurs during fasting can

scarcely be believed by a person who has not fasted. No matter how

gifted the writer, the experiential reality of fasting cannot be

communicated. The great novelist Upton Sinclair wrote a book about

fasting and it failed to convince the multitudes. But once a person

has fasted long enough to be certain of what their own body can do

to fix itself, they acquire a degree of independence little known

today. Many of those experienced with fasting no longer dread being

without health insurance and feel far less need for a doctor or of

having a regular checkup. They know with certainty that if something

degenerates in their body, their own body can fix it by itself.



Like Upton Sinclair and many others who largely failed before me, I

am going to try to convince you of the virtues of fasting by urging

you to try fasting yourself. If you will but try you will be changed

for the better for the rest of your life. If you do not try, you

will never Know.



To prompt your first step on this health-freedom road, I ask you to

please carefully consider the importance of this fact: the body's

routine energy budget includes a very large allocation for the daily

digestion and assimilation of the food you eat. You may find my

estimate surprising, but about one-third of a fairly sedentary

person's entire energy consumption goes into food processing. Other

uses for the body's energy include the creation or rebuilding of

tissues, detoxification, moving (walking, running, etc.), talking,

producing hormones, etc. Digestion is one aspect of the body's

efforts that we can readily control, it is the key to having or

losing health.



The Effort Of Digestion



Digestion is a huge, unappreciated task, unappreciated because few

of us are aware of its happening in the same way we are aware of

making efforts to use our voluntary muscles when working or

exercising. Digestion begins in the mouth with thorough chewing. If

you don't think chewing is effort, try making coleslaw in your own

mouth. Chew up at least half a big head of cabbage and three big

carrots that have not been shredded. Grind each bit until it

liquefies and has been thoroughly mixed with saliva. I guarantee

that if you even finish the chore your jaw will be tired and you

will have lost all desire to eat anything else, especially if it

requires chewing.



Making the saliva you just used while chewing the cabbage is by

itself, a huge and unappreciated chemical effort.



Once in the stomach, chewed food has to be churned in order to mix

it with hydrochloric acid, pepsin, and other digestive enzymes.

Manufacturing these enzymes is also considerable work! Churning is

even harder work than chewing but normally, people are unaware of

its happening. While the stomach is churning (like a washing

machine) a large portion of the blood supply is redirected from the

muscles in the extremities to the stomach and intestines to aid in

this process. Anyone who has tried to go for a run, or take part in

any other strenuous physical activity immediately after a large meal

feels like a slug and wonders why they just can't make their legs

move the way they usually do. So, to assist the body while it is

digesting, it is wise to take a siesta as los Latinos do instead of

expecting the blood to be two places at once like los

norteamericanos.



After the stomach is through churning, the partially digested food

is moved into the small intestine where it is mixed with more

pancreatin secreted by the pancreas, and with bile from the gall

bladder. Pancreatin further solubilizes proteins. Bile aids in the

digestion of fatty foods. Manufacturing bile and pancreatic enzymes

is also a lot of effort. Only after the carbohydrates (starches and

sugars), proteins and fats have been broken down into simpler water

soluble food units such as simple sugars, amino acids and fatty

acids, can the body pass these nutrients into the blood thorough the

little projections in the small intestines called villi.



The leftovers, elements of the food that can't be solubilized plus

some remaining liquids, are passed into the large intestine. There,

water and the vital mineral salts dissolved in that water, are

extracted and absorbed into the blood stream through thin permeable

membranes. Mucous is also secreted in the large intestine to

facilitate passage of the dryish remains. This is an effort.

(Intestinal mucous can become a route of secondary elimination,

especially during fasting. While fasting, it is essential to take

steps to expel toxic mucous in the colon before the poisons are re

adsorbed.) The final residue, now called fecal matter, is squeezed

along the length of the large intestines and passes out the rectum.



If all the digestive processes have been efficient there now are an

abundance of soluble nutrients for the blood stream to distribute to

hungry cells throughout the body. It is important to understand the

process at least on the level of oversimplification just presented

in order to begin to understand better how health is lost or

regained through eating, digestion, and elimination. And most

importantly, through not eating.



How Fasting Heals



Its an old hygienic maxim that the doctor does not heal, the

medicines do not heal, only the body heals itself. If the body can't

heal then nothing can heal it. The body always knows best what it

needs and what to do.



But healing means repairing damaged organs and tissues and this

takes energy, while a sick body is already enervated, weakened and

not coping with its current stressors. If the sick person could but

somehow increase the body's energy resources sufficiently, then a

slowly healing body could heal faster while a worsening one, or one

that was failing or one that was not getting better might heal.



Fasting does just that. To whatever degree food intake is reduced

the body's digestive workload is proportionately reduced and it will

naturally, and far more intelligently than any physician could

order, redirect energy to wherever it decides that energy is most

needed. A fasting body begins accessing nutritional reserves

(vitamins and minerals) previously stored in the tissues and starts

converting body fat into sugar for energy fuel. During a time of

water fasting, sustaining the body's entire energy and nutritional

needs from reserves and fat does require a small effort, but far

less effort than eating. I would guess a fasting body used about

five percent of its normal daily energy budget on nutritional

concerns rather than the 33 percent it needs to process new food.

Thus, water fasting puts something like 28 percent more energy at

the body's disposal. This is true even though the water faster may

feel weak, energyless.



I would worry if sick or toxic fasters did not complain about their

weakness. They should expect to feel energyless. In fact, the more

internal healing and detoxification the body requires, the tireder

the faster feels because the body is very hard at work internally. A

great deal of the body's energy will go toward boosting the immune

system if the problem is an infection. Liberated energy can also be

used for healing damaged parts, rebuilding failing organs, for

breaking down and eliminating deposits of toxic materials. Only

after most of the healing has occurred does a faster begin to feel

energetic again. Don't expect to feel anything but tired and weak.



The only exception to this would be a person who has already

significantly detoxified and healed their body by previous fasting,

or the rare soul that has gone from birth through adulthood enjoying

extraordinarily good nutrition and without experiencing the

stressors of improper digestion. When one experienced faster I know

finds himself getting "run down" or catching a cold, he quits eating

until he feels really well. Instead of feeling weak as most fasters

do, as each of the first four or five days of water fasting pass, he

experiences a resurgence of more and more energy. On the first

fasting day he would usually feel rotten, which was why he started

fasting in the first place. On the second fasting day he'd feel more

alert and catch up on his paper work. By his third day on only water

he would be out doing hard physical chores like cutting the grass,

splitting wood or weeding his vegetable garden. Day four would also

be an energetic one, but if the fast extended beyond that, lowering

blood sugar would begin to make him tired and he'd feel forced to

begin laying down.



After a day of water fasting the average person's blood sugar level

naturally drops; making a faster feel somewhat tired and "spacey,"

so a typical faster usually begins to spend much more time resting,

further reducing the amount of energy being expended on moving the

body around, serendipitously redirecting even more of the body's

energy budget toward healing. By the end of five or six days on

water, I estimate that from 40 to 50 percent of the body's available

energy is being used for healing, repair and detoxification.



The amount of work that a fasting body's own healing energy can do

and what it feels like to be there when it is happening is

incredible. But you can't know it if you haven't felt it. So hardly

anyone in our present culture knows.



As I mentioned in the first chapter, at Great Oaks School I

apprenticed myself to the traveling masters of virtually every

system of natural healing that existed during the '70s. I observed

every one of them at work and tried most of them on my clients.

After all that I can say with experience that I am not aware of any

other healing tool that can be so effective as the fast.



Essentials of a Successful, Safe Fast



1. Fast in a bright airy room, with exceptionally good ventilation,

because fasters not only need a lot of fresh air; their bodies give

off powerfully offensive odors. 2. Sun bathe if possible in warm

climates for 10 to 20 minutes in the morning before the sun gets too

strong. 3. Scrub/massage the skin with a dry brush, stroking toward

the heart, followed by a warm water shower two to four times a day

to assist the skin in eliminating toxins. If you are too weak to do

this, have an assisted bed bath. 4. Have two enemas daily for the

first week of a fast and then once daily until the fast is

terminated. 5. Insure a harmonious environment with supportive

people or else fast alone if you are experienced. Avoid well-meaning

interference or anxious criticism at all cost. The faster becomes

hypersensitive to others' emotions. 6. Rest profoundly except for a

short walk of about 200 yards morning and night. 7. Drink water! At

least three quarts every day. Do not allow yourself to become

dehydrated! 8. Control yourself! Break a long fast on diluted

non-sweet fruit juice such as grapefruit juice, sipped a teaspoon at

a time, no more than eight ounces at a time no oftener than every 2

or 3 hours. The second day you eat, add small quantities of fresh

juicy fruit to the same amount of juice you took the day before no

oftener than every 3 hours. By small quantities I mean half an apple

or the equivalent. On the third day of eating, add small quantities

of vegetable juice and juicy vegetables such as tomatoes and

cucumbers. Control yourself! The second week after eating resumed

add complex vegetable salads plus more complex fruit salads. Do not

mix fruit and vegetables at meals. The third week add raw nuts and

seeds no more than 1/2 ounce three times daily. Add 1/4 avocado

daily. Fourth week increase to 3 ounces of raw soaked nuts and seeds

daily and 1/2 avocado daily. Cooked grains may also be added, along

with steamed vegetables and vegetable soups.



The Prime Rules Of Fasting



Another truism of natural hygiene is that we dig our own graves with

our teeth. It is sad but true that almost all eat too much quantity

of too little quality. Dietary excesses are the main cause of death

in North America. Fasting balances these excesses. If people were to

eat a perfect diet and not overeat, fasting would rarely be

necessary.



There are two essential rules of fasting. If these rules are ignored

or broken, fasting itself can be life threatening. But if the rules

are followed, fasting presents far less risk than any other

important medical procedure with a far greater likelihood of a

positive outcome. And let me stress here, there is no medical

procedure without risk. Life itself is fraught with risk, it is a

one-way ticket from birth to death, with no certainty as to when the

end of the line will be reached. But in my opinion, when handling

degenerative illness and infections, natural hygiene and fasting

usually offer the best hope of healing with the least possible risk.



The first vital concern is the duration of the fast. Two eliminatory

processes go on simultaneously while fasting. One is the dissolving

and elimination of the excess, toxic or dysfunctional deposits in

the body, and second process, the gradual exhaustion of the body's

stored nutritional reserves. The fasting body first consumes those

parts of the body that are unhealthy; eventually these are all gone.

Simultaneously the body uses up stored fat and other reserve

nutritional elements. A well-fed reasonably healthy body usually has

enough stored nutrition to fast for quite a bit longer than it takes

to "clean house."



While house cleaning is going on the body uses its reserves to

rebuild organs and rejuvenate itself. Rebuilding starts out very

slowly but the repairs increase at an ever-accelerating rate. The

"overhaul" can last only until the body has no more reserves.

Because several weeks of fasting must pass by before the "overhaul"

gets going full speed, it is wise to continue fasting as long as

possible so as to benefit from as much rejuvenation as possible.



It is best not to end the fast before all toxic or dysfunctional

deposits are eliminated, or before the infection is overcome, or

before the cause for complaint has been healed. The fast must be

ended when most of the body's essential-to-life stored nutritional

reserves are exhausted. If the fast goes beyond this point,

starvation begins. Then, fasting-induced organic damage can occur,

and death can follow, usually several weeks later. Almost anyone not

immediately close to death has enough stored nutrition to water fast

for ten days to two weeks. Most reasonably healthy people have

sufficient reserves to water fast for a month. Later I will explain

how a faster can somewhat resupply their nutritional reserves while

continuing 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 are too strong, too concentrated or too

poisonous for the organs of elimination to handle safely, or to be

handled within the willingness of the faster to tolerate the

discomforts that toxic releases generate. The highly-toxic faster

may even experience life-threatening symptoms such as violent asthma

attacks. This kind of faster has almost certainly been dangerously

ill before the fast began. Others, though not dangerously sick prior

to fasting, may be nearly as toxic and though not in danger of

death, they may not be willing to tolerate the degree of discomfort

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 and clean up all addictions. This will give the body

a chance to detoxify significantly before the water fast is started,

and will make water fasting much more comfortable. Seriously,

dangerously ill people should only fast with experienced guidance,

so the rapidity of their detoxification process may be adjusted to a

lower 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 the results. Many people experience

rapid relief from acute headache pain or digestive distress such as

gas attacks, mild gallbladder pain, stomach aches, etc., after only

one day's abstention from food. In one week of fasting a person can

relieve more dangerous conditions such as arthritic pain,

rheumatism, kidney pain, and many symptoms associated with allergic

reactions. But even more fasting time is generally needed for the

body to completely heal serious diseases. That's because eliminating

life-threatening problems usually involve rebuilding organs that

aren't functioning too well. Major rebuilding begins only after

major detoxification has 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 is

attacked. Liver and kidney efficiency declines. The adrenals tire,

becoming incapable of dumping massive amounts of stress-handling

hormones or of repeating that effort time after time without

considerable rest in between. The consequences of these

inter-dependent deterioration's is a cascade of deterioration that

contributes to even more rapid deterioration's. The name for this

cascading process 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 if they are doing the right thing

for their bodies they should feel better immediately. I wish it

weren't so, but most people have to pay the piper for their dietary

indiscretions and other errors in living. There will be aches and

minor pains and uncomfortable sensations. More about that later. A

rare faster does feel immediately better, and continues to feel ever

better by the day, and even has incredible energy while eating

nothing, but the majority of us folks just have to tough it out,

keeping in mind that the way out is the way through. It is important

to remind yourself at times that even with some discomfort and

considering the inconvenience of fasting that you are getting off

easy--one month of self-denial pays 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 of thumb is to fast on water for one

complete day (24 hours) for each year that the person has lived. If

you are 30 years old, it will take 30 consecutive days of fasting 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 or 14 days of fasting accumulated sporadically, such

as one day a week. This is not to say that regular short fasts are

not useful medicine. Periodic day-long fasts have been incorporated

into many religious traditions, and for good reason; it gives the

body one day a week to rest, to be free of digestive obligations,

and to catch up on garbage disposal. I heartily recommend it. But it

takes many years of unfailingly 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 those who are not motivated by severe illness to

withstand the discomfort and boredom. However, it is possible to

finish a healing process initiated by one long water fast by

repeating the fast later. My husband's healing is a good example of

this. 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 consecutive years 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. She was a Mormon; generally members of the LDS Church eat a

healthier diet than most Americans, but her's included far too much

of what I call "healthfood junkfood," in the form of whole grain

cakes and cookies, lots of granola made with lots of honey, oil, and

dried fruit, lots of honey heaped atop heavily buttered whole grain

bread. (I will explain more about the trap of healthfood junkfood

later on.) 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 serious heath 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 a

very strong family orientation and this lady was no exception, but

she was insecure and unhappy in her marriage and sought consolation

in food, eaten far in excess 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 was unrealistic to try to shrink this woman any closer

to normal body weight because to her, fat represented an invaluable

insulation or buffer that she was not prepared to give up. As the

weight melted away on the fast and she was able to actually feel the

outline of a hip bone her neurosis became more and more apparent,

and the ability to feel a part of her skeleton was so upsetting to

her that her choice was 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 less frightening to her than confronting her emotions and

fears. The positive side was that after the fast she was able to

maintain her weight at 225 instead of 375 which was 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 my front door, and mine was an

extraordinarily wide door in what had been an upper-class mansion.

This man, now in his mid twenties, had spent his last seven years in

a mental institution before his parents decided to give him one last

chance by sending to Great Oaks School. The state mental hospitals

at that time provided the mentally ill with cigarettes, coffee, and

lots of sugary treats, but none of these substances were part of my

treatment program so he had a lot of immediate withdrawal to go

through. The quickest and easiest way to get him through it was to

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 himself continuously in gibberish, he collected bugs,

moss, sticks, piles or dirt, and switched to smoking oak leaves

instead of cigarettes. He was such a fire hazard that 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 that I was in for trouble if I disturbed his

precious, but the insects and dirt piles seemed 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 pounds of him! (By this time he had lost 50

pounds.) He barreled into me, fists flying, and knocked me into the

pipes next to the furnace and seemed ready to really teach me what

was what. I prefer to avoid fights, but if they are inevitable, I

can really get into the spirit of the thing. I'd had lots of

childhood practice defending myself because I was an incurable

tomboy who loved to wrestle; I could usually pin big boys who

considered themselves tough. So I began using my fists and what

little martial arts training I had to good use. After I hurt him a

bit he realized that I was not going to be easily intimidated, and

that in fact he was in danger of getting seriously 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 allowed me to maintain the authority I needed to

bully him into co-operating with the program: taking his vitamins,

and sticking to his fast until he finally reached 200 pounds. After

90 days on water he actually looked quite handsome, he no longer

smoked, he was off psychotropic medication, and his behaviors were

within an acceptable range as long as your expectations were not too

high.



He was well enough to live outside a hospital and also clear-headed

enough to know that if he let too many people know how well he

really was, he might have to give up his mental disability pension

and actually become responsible for himself. No way, Jose! This

fellow knew a good thing when he saw it. So he continued to pull

bizarre stunts just often enough in front of the right audience to

keep 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 up his megavitamins and minerals.

This compromise was tolerable from his point of view, because there

were no side effects like he experienced from his tranquilizers.



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 "mental illness" 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 transitory conditions. Some can be quite

uncomfortable. But, I don't want to leave the reader with the

impression that fasting is inevitably painful. So I will now recount

my 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, my predominant sensation for the first three days

was a desire to eat that was mostly a mental condition, and a lot of

rumbling and growling from my stomach. This is not 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, all of a sudden, it gets nothing, so naturally the stomach

wants to know what is going on. Once it realizes it is on temporary

vacation, the stomach wisely decides to reduce itself to a size

suitable for a retired organ. And it shuts up. This process usually

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

frequently interpreted 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 make assorted

unpleasant symptoms such as headaches and inability to think

clearly. These symptoms can be instantly eliminated by the intake of

a bit of food, bringing the 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 state of great urgency where I productively

busied myself for about half an hour. As I mentioned earlier, I was

experimentally adhering to a rigid type of fast of the sort

recommended by Dr. Herbert Shelton, a famous advocate of the Natural

Hygiene school. Shelton was such a powerful writer and personality

that there still exists a Natural Hygiene Society that keeps his

books in print and maintains his library. The words "Natural

Hygiene" are almost owned by the society like a trademark and they

object when anyone describes themselves as a hygienist and then

advocates 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 strongly opposed 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 the bowel

said, enough is enough of this crap, and initiated a goods house

cleaning session. When I saw what was eliminated I was horrified to

think that I had left that stuff in there for two weeks. I then

started to wonder if the Sheltonites were mistaken about this aspect

of fasting. Nonetheless, I persevered on the same regimen because my

hunger had not returned, my tongue was still thickly coated with

foul-smelling, foul-tasting mucus and I still had some fat on my

feet that had not 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 not even 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 to

passersby, and my shoes would not stay on my feet. This was not all

that surprising because I went from 135 pounds down to 85 on a 5' 7"

frame with substantial 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 up and became pink, my mind was clear, and my

spiritual awareness and sensitivity was heightened. In other words,

I was no longer a walking hulk of stored-up toxemia. I also felt

quite weak and had to rest for ten minutes out every hour in

horizontal position. (I should have rested much more.) I also

required very little sleep, although it felt good to just lie

quietly and rest, being aware of what was going 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 the handlebars of my bicycle I had broken my shoulder

with considerable tearing of ligaments and tendons. At night when I

was totally still I felt a whole crew of pixies and brownies with

picks and shovels at work in the joint doing major repair work. This

activity was not entirely comfortable, but I knew it was

constructive work, not destructive, so I joined the work crew with

my mind's eye and helped the 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 far better 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 my full 135 pound weight because I was

very careful to break the fast slowly and correctly. 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, I added seven daily well-chewed

almonds to my rebuilding diet. Much later I increased to 14 almonds,

but that was the maximum amount of such highly concentrated fare my

body wanted digest at one time for over one year. I found I got a

lot more miles to the gallon out of the food that I did eat, and did

not crave recreational foods. Overall I was very pleased with my

educational fast, it had taught 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. A positive mental attitude is an

essential part of the healing process so fasting should not be

undertaken in a negative, protesting mental state. The mind is so

powerful that fear or the resistance fear generates can override the

healing capacity of the body. For that reason I always recommend

that people who consider themselves to be healthy, who have no

serious complaints, but who are interested in water fasting, should

limit themselves to ten consecutive days or so, certainly never more

than 14. Few healthy people, even those with a deep interest in the

process, can find enough personal motivation to overcome the extreme

boredom of water fasting for longer than that. Healthy people

usually begin protesting severely after about two weeks. If there is

any one vital rule of fasting, one never should fast over 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 have no 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, and weakness in the first few days plus what they think

is intense hunger. The dizziness and 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 new

equilibrium in the second and third week of the fast and then, the

dizziness may cease, but still, it is important to expect dizziness

at the beginning.



It always takes more time for the blood to reach the head on a fast

because everything has slowed down, including the rate of the heart

beat, so blood pressure probably has dropped as well. If you stand

up very quickly you may faint. I repetitively instruct all of my

clients to stand up very slowly, moving from a lying to a sitting

position, pausing there for ten or twenty seconds, and then rising

slowly from a sitting to a standing position. They are told that at

the first sign of dizziness they must immediately put their head

between their knees so that the head is lower than the heart, or

squat/sit down on the floor, I once had a faster who forgot to obey

my frequent warnings. About two weeks into a long fast, she got up

rapidly from the toilet and felt dizzy. The obvious thing to do was

to sit back down on the toilet or lie down on the bath rug on the

floor, but no, she decided that because she was dizzy she should

rush back to her bed in the adjoining room. She made it as far as

the bathroom door and fainted, out cold, putting a deep grove into

the drywall with her pretty nose on the way down. We then had to

make an unscheduled visit to a nose specialist, who calmly put a

tape-wrapped spoon inside her bent-over nose and pried it back to

dead center. This was not much fun for either of us; it is well

worthwhile preventing such complications.



Other common complaints during the fast include coldness, due to low

blood sugar as well as a consequence of weight loss and slowed

circulation due to lessened physical activity. People also dislike

inactivity which seems excruciatingly boring, and some are upset by

weight loss itself. Coldness is best handled with lots of clothes,

bedding, hot water bottles or hot pads, and warm baths. Great Oaks

School of Health was in Oregon, where the endlessly rainy winters

are chilly and the concrete building never seemed to get really

warm. I used to dream of moving my fasters to a tropical climate

where I could also get the best, ripest fruits to wean them back on

to food.



If the fast goes on for more than a week or ten days, many people

complain of back discomfort, usually caused by over-worked kidneys.

This passes. Hot baths or hot water bottles provide some relief.

Drinking more fluids may also help a bit. Nausea is fairly common

too, due to toxic discharges from the gall bladder. Drinking lots of

water or herbal tea dilutes toxic bile in the stomach and makes it

more tolerable.



Very few fasters sleep well and for some reason they expect to,

certainly fasters hope to, because they think that if they sleep all

night they will better survive one more deadly dull day in a state

of relative unconsciousness. They find out much to their displeasure

that very little sleep is required on a fast because the body is at

rest already. Many fasters sleep only two to four hours but doze

frequently and require a great deal of rest. Being mentally prepared

for this change of habit is the best handling. Generalized low-grade

aches and pains in the area of the diseased organs or body parts are

common and can often be alleviated with hot water bottles, warm but

not hot bath water and massage. If this type of discomfort exists,

it usually lessens with each passing day until it disappears

altogether.



Many fasters complain that their vision is blurred, and that they

are unable to concentrate. These are really major inconveniences

because then fasters can't read or even pay close attention to

video-taped movies, and if they can't divert themselves some fasters

think they will go stir crazy. They are so addicted to a hectic

schedule of doingness, and/or being entertained that they just can't

stand just being with themselves, forced to confront and deal with

the sensations of their own body, forced to face their own thoughts,

to confront their own emotions, many of which are negative. People

who are fasting release a lot of mental/emotional garbage at the

same time as they let go of old physical garbage. Usually the

psychological stuff contributed greatly to their illness and just

like the physical garbage and degenerated organs, it all needs to be

processed.



One of the most distressing experiences that happen occasionally is

hair loss. Deprived of adequate nutrition, the follicles can not

keep growing hair, and the existing hair dies. However, the

follicles themselves do not die and once the fast has ended and

sufficient nutrition is forthcoming, hair will regrow as well or

better than before.



There are also complaints that occur after the fast has been broken.

Post-fast cravings, even after only two weeks of deprivation, are to

be expected. These may take the form of desires for sweet, sour,

salt, or a specific food dreamed of while fasting, like chocolate

fudge sundays or just plain toast. Food cravings must be controlled

at all costs because if acted upon, each indulgence chips away the

health gains of the previous weeks. A single indulgence can be

remedied by a day of restricting the diet to juice or raw food.

After the repair, the person feels as good as they did when the fast

ended. Repeated indulgences will require another extended bout of

fasting to repair. It is far better to learn self-control.



The Healing Crisis And Retracing



Certain unpleasant somatics that occur while fasting (or while on a

healing diet) may not be dangerous or "bad." Two types, the healing

crisis, and retracing, are almost inevitable. A well-educated faster

should welcome these discomforts when they happen. The healing

crisis (but not retracing) also occurs on a healing diet.



The healing crisis can seem a big surprise to a faster who has been

progressing wonderfully. Suddenly, usually after a few days of

noticeably increased well-being, they suddenly experience a set of

severe symptoms and feel just awful. This is not a setback, not

something to be upset or disappointed about, but a healing crisis,

actually a positive sign



Healing crises always occur after a period of marked improvement. As

the vital force builds up during the healing process, the body

decides it now has obtained enough energy to throw off some

accumulated toxins, and forcefully pushes them out through a typical

and usually previously used route of secondary elimination, such as

the nose, lungs, stomach, intestines, skin, or perhaps produces a

flu-like experience with fever chills, sweat, aches and pains, etc.

Though unpleasant, this experience is to be encouraged; the body has

merely accelerated its elimination process. Do not attempt to

suppress any of these symptoms, don't even try to moderate fever,

which is the body's effective way to burn out a virus or bacteria

infection, unless it is a dangerously high fever (over 102 degree

Fahrenheit). Fever can be lowered without drugs by putting the

person into a cool/cold bath, or using cold towel wraps and cold

water sponge baths. The good news is that healing crises usually do

not last long, and when they are past you feel better than you did

before the crisis.



Asthmatics seem to have the worst crises. I have had asthmatics

bring up a quart of obnoxious mucous from their lungs every night

for weeks. They have stayed awake all night for three nights

continuously coughing and choking on the material that was being

eliminated. After that clearing-out process they were able to breath

much more freely. Likewise I have had people who have had sinusitis

have nothing but non-stop pussy discharge from their sinuses for

three weeks. Some of this would run down the throat and cause

nausea. All I could say to encourage the sufferer was that it needed

to come out and to please stand aside and let the body work its

magic. These fasters were not grateful until the sinus problem that

had plagued them since childhood disappeared.



The interesting thing about healing crises are that the symptoms

produced retrace earlier complaints; they are almost never something

entirely unknown to the patient. Usually they are old, familiar

somatics, often complaints that haven't bothered the faster for many

years. The reason the symptom is familiar but is not currently a

problem is because as the body degenerates it loses vital force;

with less vital force it loses the ability to create such acute

detoxification episodes in non-life-threatening secondary

elimination routes. The degenerated body makes less violent efforts

to cleanse, efforts that aren't as uncomfortable. The negative side

of this is that instead of creating acute discomfort in peripheral

systems, the toxemia goes to more vital organs where it hastens the

formation of life-threatening conditions.



There is a very normal and typical progress for each person's fatal

illness. Their ultimate disease starts out in childhood or

adolescence as acute inflammations of skin-like organs, viral or

bacterial infections of the same. Then, as vital force weakens,

secondary eliminations are shifted to more vital organs. Allergies

or colds stop happening so frequently; the person becomes rheumatic,

arthritic or experience weakness in joints, tendons, ligaments, or

to have back pains, or to have digestive upsets. These new symptoms

are more constant but usually less acute. Ultimately, vital organs

begin to malfunction, and serious disease develop. But a hygienist

sees the beginning of fatal diseases such as cancer in adolescent

infections and allergies.



Retracing is generally seen only on water fasts, not on extended

cleansing diets. The body begins to repair itself by healing

conditions in the reverse order to that which they occurred

originally. This means that the body would first direct healing

toward the lungs if the most recently serious illness was an attack

of pneumonia six months previously. In this case you would expect to

quickly and intensely experience a mini-case of pneumonia while the

body eliminates residues in the lungs that were not completely

discharged at the time. Next the body might take you through a

period of depression that you had experienced five years in the

past. The faster may be profoundly depressed for a few days and come

out of it feeling much better. You could then reexperience

sensation-states like those caused by recreational drugs you had

playfully experimented with ten years previously along with the

"trippiness" if it were a hallucinogen, speediness if it was "speed"

or the dopiness if it was heroin. Retracing further, the faster

might then experience something similar to a raging attack of

tonsillitis which you vaguely remember having when you were five

years old, but fortunately this time it passes in three days (or

maybe six hours), instead of three weeks. This is retracing.



Please do not be surprised or alarmed if it happens to you on a

fast, and immediately throw out the baby with the bath water

thinking that you are doing the wrong thing because all those old

illnesses are coming back to haunt you. It is the body's magnificent

healing effort working on your behalf, and for doing it your body

deserves lots of "well done", "good body" thoughts rather than

gnashing of teeth and thinking what did I do to deserve this. The

body won't tell you what you did to deserve this, but it knows and

is trying its darndest to undo it.



The Unrelenting Boredom Of Fasting



Then there's the unrelenting boredom of fasting. Most people have

been media junkies since they were kids; the only way they believe

they can survive another day of fasting is by diverting their minds

with TV. This is far from ideal because often the emotions of a

faster are like an open wound and when they resonate with the

emotions portrayed on most TV shows, the faster gets into some very

unpleasant states that interfere with healing. And the emotions many

movies prompt people to sympathetically generate are powerful ones,

often highly negative, and contrary to healing. Especially unhelpful

are the adrenaline rushes in action movies. But if TV is the best a

faster can do, it is far better that someone fast with television

programming filling their minds than to not fast at all. I keep a

library of positive VHS tapes for these addicts--comedies, stories of

heroic over-comings, depiction's of humans at their best.



Boredom is probably the most limiting factor to fasting a long time.

That is because boredom is progressive, it gets worse with each

slowly-passing day. But concurrently, the rate of healing is

accelerating with each slowly-passing day. Every day the faster gets

through does them considerably more good than the previous day.

However, fasters rarely are motivated enough to overcome boredom for

more than two weeks or so, unless they started the fast to solve a

very serious or life-threatening condition. For this reason,

basically well people should not expect to be able to fast for more

than a couple of weeks every six months or year, no matter how much

good a longer fast might do.



Exercise While Fasting



The issue of how much activity is called for on a fast is

controversial. Natural Hygienists in the Herbert Shelton tradition

insist that all fasters absolutely must have complete bed rest, with

no books, no TV, no visitors, no enemas, no exercise, no music, and

of course no food, not even a cup of herb tea. In my many years of

conducting people through fasts, I have yet to meet an individual

that could mentally tolerate this degree of nothingness. It is too

drastic a withdrawal from all the stimulation people are used to in

the twentieth century. I still don't know how Shelton managed to

make his patients do it, but my guess is that he must have been a

very intimidating guy. Shelton was a body builder of some renown in

his day. I bet Shelton's patients kept a few books and magazines

under their mattress and only took them out when he wasn't looking.

If I had tried to enforced this type of sensory deprivation, I know

my patients would have grabbed their clothes and run, vowing never

to fast again. I think it is most important that people fast, and

that they feel so good about the experience that they want to do it

again, and talk all their sick friends into doing the same thing.



In contrast to enforced inactivity, Russian researchers who

supervised schizophrenics on 30 day water fasts insisted that they

walk for three hours every day, without stopping. I would like to

have been there to see how they managed to enforce that. I suspect

some patients cheated. I lived with schizophrenics enough years to

know that it is very difficult to get them to do anything that they

don't want to do, and very few of them are into exercise, especially

when fasting.



In my experience both of these approaches to activity during the

fast are extremes. The correct activity level should be arrived at

on an individual basis. I have had clients who walked six miles a

day during an extended water fast, but they were not feeling very

sick when they started the fast, and they were also physically fit.

In contrast I have had people on extended fasts who were unable to

walk for exercise, or so weak they were unable to even walk to the

bathroom, but these people were critically ill when they started

fasting, and desperately needed to conserve what little vital force

they had for healing.



Most people who are not critically ill need to walk at least 200

yards twice a day, with assistance if necessary, if only to move the

lymph through the system. The lymphatic system is a network of ducts

and nodes which are distributed throughout the body, with high

concentrations of nodes in the neck, chest, arm pits, and groin. Its

job is to carry waste products from the extremities to the center of

the body where they can be eliminated. The blood is circulated

through the arteries and veins in the body by the contractions of

the heart, but the lymphatic system does not have a pump. Lymphatic

fluid is moved by the contractions of the muscles, primarily those

of the arms and legs. If the faster is too weak to move, massage and

assisted movements are essential.



Lymph nodes are also a part of our immune system and produce white

blood cells to help control invading organisms. When the lymph is

overloaded with waste products the ducts and nodes swell, and until

the source of the local irritation is removed, are incapable of

handling further debris. If left in this condition for years they

become so hard they feel like rocks under the skin. Lumps in the

armpits or the groin are prime sites for the future development of a

cancer. Fasting, massage, and poultices will often soften overloaded

lymph nodes and coax them back into operation.



The Stages Of Fasting



The best way to understand what happens when we fast is to break up

the process into six stages: preparation for the fast, loss of

hunger, acidosis, normalization, healing, and breaking the fast.



A person that has consumed the typical American diet most of their

life and whose life is not in immediate danger would be very wise to

gently prepare their body for the fast. Two weeks would be a minimum

amount of time, and if the prospective faster wants an easier time

of it, they should allow a month or even two for preliminary

housecleaning. During this time, eliminate all meat, fish, dairy

products, eggs, coffee, black tea, salt, sugar, alcohol, drugs,

cigarettes, and greasy foods. This de-addiction will make the

process of fasting much more pleasant, and is strongly recommended.

However, eliminating all these harmful substances is withdrawal from

addictive substances and will not be easy for most. I have more to

say about this later when I talk about allergies and addictions.



The second stage, psychological hunger, usually is felt as an

intense desire for food. This passes within three or four days of

not eating anything. Psychological hunger usually begins with the

first missed meal. If the faster seems to be losing their resolve, I

have them drink unlimited quantities of good-tasting herb teas,

(sweetened--only if absolutely necessary--with nutrisweet). Salt-free

broths made from meatless instant powder (obtainable at the health

food store) can also fend off the desire to eat until the stage of

hunger has passed.



Acidosis, the third stage, usually begins a couple of days after the

last meal and lasts about one week. During acidosis the body

vigorously throws off acid waste products. Most people starting a

fast begin with an overly acid blood pH from the typical American

diet that contains a predominance of acid-forming foods. Switching

over to burning fat for fuel triggers the release of even more

acidic substances. Acidosis is usually accompanied by fatigue,

blurred vision, and possibly dizziness. The breath smells very bad,

the tongue is coated with bad-tasting dryish mucus, and the urine

may be concentrated and foul unless a good deal of water is taken

daily. Two to three quarts a day is a reasonable amount.



Mild states of acidosis are a common occurrence. While sleeping

after the last meal of the day is digested bodies normally work very

hard trying to detoxify from yesterday's abuses. So people routinely

awaken in a state of acidosis. Their tongue is coated, their breath

foul and they feel poorly. They end their brief overnight fast with

breakfast, bringing the detoxification process to a screeching halt

and feel much better. Many people think they awaken hungry and don't

feel well until they eat. They confuse acidosis with hunger when

most have never experienced real hunger in their entire lives. If

you typically awaken in acidosis, you are being given a strong sign

by your body that it would like to continue fasting far beyond

breakfast. In fact, it probably would enjoy fasting long beyond the

end of acidosis.



Most fasters feel much more comfortable by the end of the first

seven to ten days, when they enter the normalization phase; here the

acidic blood chemistry is gradually corrected. This sets the stage

for serious healing of body tissues and organs. Normalization may

take one or two more weeks depending on how badly the body was out

of balance. As the blood chemistry steadily approaches perfection,

the faster usually feels an increasing sense of well-being, broken

by short spells of discomfort that are usually healing crises or

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 rapidly after the blood chemistry has been

stabilized, the person is usually in a state of profound rest and

the maximum amount of vital force can be directed toward repair and

regeneration of tissues. This is a miraculous time when tumors are

metabolized as food for the body, when arthritic deposits dissolve,

when scar tissues tend to disappear, when damaged organs regain lost

function (if they can). Seriously ill people who never fast long

enough to get into this stage (usually it takes about ten days to

two weeks of water fasting to seriously begin healing) never find

out what fasting can really do for them.



Breaking the fast is equally or more important a stage than the fast

itself. It is the most dangerous time in the entire fast. If you

stop fasting prematurely, that is, before the body has completed

detoxification and healing, expect the body to reject food when you

try to make it eat, even if you introduce foods very gradually. The

faster, the spiritual being running the body, may have become bored

and want some action, but the faster's body hasn't finished. The

body wants to continue healing.



By rejection, I mean that food may not digest, may feel like a stone

in your stomach, make you feel terrible. If that happens and if,

despite that clear signal you refuse to return to fasting, you

should go on a juice diet, take as little as possible, sip it slowly

(almost chew it) and stay on juice until you find yourself digesting

it easily. Then and only then, reintroduce a little solid raw food

like a green salad.



Weaning yourself back on to food should last just as long as the

fast. Your first tentative meals should be dilute, raw juices. After

several days of slowly building up to solid raw fruit, small amounts

of raw vegetable foods should be added. If it has been a long fast,

say over three weeks, this reintroduction should be done gingerly

over a few weeks. If this stage is poorly managed or ignored you may

become acutely ill, and for someone who started fasting while

dangerously ill, loss of self control and impulsive eating could

prove fatal. Even for those fasting to cure non-life-threatening

illnesses it is pointless to go through the effort and discipline of

a long fast without carefully establishing a correct diet after the

fast ends, or the effort will have largely been wasted.



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 have been created by grasping the underlying

truth of fasting, namely whenever the digestive effort can be

reduced, by whatever degree, whenever the formation of the toxins of

misdigestion can be reduced or prevented, to that extent the body

can divert energy to the healing process. Thus comes about assorted

famous and sometimes notorious monodiet semi-fasts like the grape

cure where the faster eats only grapes for a month or so, or the

lemon cure, where the juice of one or more lemons is added to water

and nothing else is consumed for weeks on end. Here I should also

mention the "lemon juice/cayenne pepper/maple syrup cure," the

various green drink cures using spirulina, chlorella, barley green

or wheat grass, and the famous Bieler broths--vegetable soups made of

overcooked green beans or zucchini.



I do not believe that monodiets work because of some magical

property of a particular food used. They work because they are

semi-fasts and may be extremely useful, especially for those

individuals who can not or will not tolerate a water fast.



The best foods for monodiet fasting are the easiest ones digest:

juices of raw fruits and nonstarchy vegetables with all solids

strained out. Strained mineral broths made of long-simmered

non-starchy vegetables (the best of them made of leafy green

vegetables) fall in the same category. So if you are highly partial

to the flavor of grapes or lemons or cayenne and (highly diluted)

maple syrup, a long fast on one of these would do you a world of

good, just not quite as much good as the same amount of time spent

on water alone. If you select something more "solid" for a long

monodiet fast, like pureed zucchini, it is essential that you not

overeat. Dr. Bieler gave his fasting patients only one pint of

zucchini soup three or four times a day. The way to evaluate how

much to eat is by how much weight you are losing. When fasting, you

must lose weight! And the faster the better.



Pure absolute water fasting while not taking any vitamins or other

nutritional supplementation has a very limited maximum duration,

perhaps 45 days. The key concept here is nutritional reserves. Body

fat is stored, surplus energy fuel. But energy alone cannot keep a

body going. It needs much more than fuel to rebuild and repair and

maintain its systems. So the body in its wisdom also stores up

vitamins and minerals and other essential substances in and

in-between all its cells. Bodies that have been very well nourished

for a long time have very large reserves; poorly nourished ones may

have very little set aside for a rainy day. And it is almost a

truism that a sick person has, for quite some time, been a poorly

nourished one. With low nutritional reserves. This fact alone can

make it difficult for a sick person to water fast for enough time to

completely heal their damaged organs and other systems.



Obese people have fat reserves sufficient to provide energy for long

periods, but rarely can any body, no matter how complete its

nutrition was for years previously, contain sufficient nutritional

reserves to support a water fast of over six weeks. To water fast

the very obese down to normal weight can take months but to make

this possible, rather diverse and concentrated nutrition containing

few calories must be given. It is possible to fast even a very slim

a person for quite a bit longer than a month when their body is

receiving easily assimilable vitamins and minerals and small amounts

of sugars or other simple carbohydrates.



I estimate that fasting on raw juices and mineral broths will result

in healing at 25 to 75 percent of the efficiency of water fasting,

depending on the amount of nutrition taken and the amount the juices

or broths are diluted. But juice fasting can permit healing to go on

several times longer than water might.



Fasting on dilute juice and broth c