How and When to Be Your Own Doctor Part 5

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 cure 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. Appet.i.te 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 mult.i.tudes. 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 a.s.similation 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 ch.o.r.e 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 a.s.sist 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.ses out the r.e.c.t.u.m.

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 pa.s.s, 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 ch.o.r.es like cutting the gra.s.s, 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 "s.p.a.cey,"

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/ma.s.sage the skin with a dry brush, stroking toward the heart, followed by a warm water shower two to four times a day to a.s.sist the skin in eliminating toxins. If you are too weak to do this, have an a.s.sisted 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 quant.i.ties of fresh juicy fruit to the same amount of juice you took the day before no oftener than every 3 hours. By small quant.i.ties I mean half an apple or the equivalent. On the third day of eating, add small quant.i.ties of vegetable juice and juicy vegetables such as tomatoes and cuc.u.mbers. 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 quant.i.ty 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 pa.s.s 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 a.s.sociated 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 ma.s.sive 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 acc.u.mulated 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 b.u.t.tered 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-cla.s.s mansion.

This man, now in his mid twenties, had spent his last seven years in a mental inst.i.tution 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.