Complete Recovery Of The Seriously

Its a virtual certainty that to fully recover, a seriously ill
person will have to significantly rebuild numerous organs. They have
a hard choice: to accept a life of misery, one that the medical
doctors with drugs and surgery may be able to prolong into an
interminable hell on earth, or, spend several years working on
really healing their body, rotating between water fasting, juice or
broth fasting, extended periods on a cleansing raw food diet, and
periods of no-cleansing on a more complete diet that includes
moderate amounts of cooked vegetables and small quantities of cooked
cereals. And even after recovery someone who was quite ill may have
to live the rest of their life on a rather restricted regimen.

It is unrealistic to expect one fast to fix everything. The body
will heal as much as it can in the allotted time, but if a dangerous
illness has not been fully remedied by the first intense fast, a raw
food diet must be followed for three to six months until weight has
been regained, nutritional reserves have been rebuilt and it is safe
to undertake another extended fast. More than two water or juice
fasts a year of thirty continuous days are not recommended nor
should they be necessary unless the life is in imminent danger and
there is no other option.

The story of Jake's catastrophic illness and almost-cure is a good
example of this type of program. Jake was from back East. He phoned
me because he had read a health magazine article I had written, his
weak voice faintly describing a desperate condition. He was in a
wheelchair unable to walk, unable to control his legs or arms very
well, was unable to control his bladder and required a catheter. He
had poor bowel control, had not the strength to talk much or loudly
and most frightening to him, he was steadily losing weight although
he was eating largë amounts of cooked vegetables and grains. Jake
had wasted away to 90 pounds at 5' 10" and looked pathetic when I
first saw him wheeled off an airplane at my local airport.

Jake had seen a lot of medical doctors and had variously been
diagnosed as having chronic fatigue syndrome, chronic (whatever that
is) meningitis, and multiple sclerosis. He had been treated by
virtually every medical expert and many famous alternative
practitioners, utilizing a host of old and new techniques, all to no
avail. He had even tried intravenous chelation therapy and colonics.
It had also been suggested that he enter a hospital for the
treatment of eating disorders and/or see a psychiatrist. He had
tried to gain admittance to a number of holistic fasting
institutions back east, but they all refused him because they
considered the risk was too high to fast a person at such a low body
weight. But I had previously fasted emaciated people like Jake, and
there was something I liked about his telephone presence. Perhaps
this is why I foolishly decided I knew better than the other
experts.

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Sadly, though I could help his body to heal it was next to
impossible to stem the tides of Jake's appetites or to pleasantly
withstand his tantrums when he was denied; he always wanted more in
terms of quantity, more in terms of variety, and at more frequent
intervals. Though his organs had healed significantly, his digestive
capacity was not nearly as largë as he remembered himself enjoying
before he got sick. And never would be. Jake was not happy about the
dietary restrictions necessary for him to retain his newly attained
health, and unwilling to stay within the limits of his digestive
system's ability to process foods. He had gained weight and was back
up to 120 pounds. It was time for him to go home before I lost my
good humor.

Jake left with a lot of "good lucks" and stern admonitions to stick
to his stringent diet and supplement program. It was a big moment
for Jake. He had arrived in a wheelchair three months before. Now he
walked unaided to the airplane, something he had not been able to do
for two years.

Back at home Jake had no one courageous enough to set limits for
him. His immediate family and every one of his brow beaten
associates were compelled to give him everything that he wanted. So
his appetite and lack of personal discipline got the better of him.
He started eating lots of dates and figs. These had been eliminated
from his diet because he was unable to process foods which such a
high sugar content. He also atë larger and larger quantities of
grains, nuts and avocados, although I had warned him of specific
quantity limits on rich foods. Most sadly, he returned to enjoying
spaghetti with lots of cheese grated on top. Within months of
leaving my care his paralysis and weakness returned, except that
unfortunately for him, he still retained the ability to assimilate
food and maintain his body weight. Ironically, the only ultimate
benefit of his fasting with me was to permit him to suffer a far
longer existence in a wheelchair without wasting away and escaping
into death.

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Cornaro soon regained his health and he continued to follow the diet
until the age of 78. His health was so outstanding during this
period that people who were much younger in terms of years were
unable to keep up with him. At 78 his friends, worried about how
thin he was (doesn't it always seem that it is your so-called
friends who always ruin a natural cure) persuaded him to increase
his daily ration by two ounces a day. His delicate and weak
digestive system, which had operated perfectly for many years, was
unable to deal with the additional two ounces, and he became very
ill after a very short period of over eating.

Worse, his recent indulgence had even further damaged the organs of
digestion and to survive Cornaro had to cut his daily ration to
eight ounces of solid food and eleven of liquids. On this reduced
dietary he again regained his health and lived to be 100. Cornaro
wrote four books on the value of abstinence or "sober living" as he
called it, writing the last and perhaps the most interesting at 96
years of age. Had my patient Jake been able to confine his food
intake to the level of his body's ability to digest, he might still
be walking and enjoying life. But try as I might I could not make
him understand. Perhaps he enjoys doing penance in his wheel chair
more than he would enjoy health and life.

Starvation

It is true that ethical medical doctors use the least-risky
procedure they are allowed to use. But this does not mean there are
no risks to allopathic treatment. The medical doctor justifies
taking the risks by saying that the risk/reward ratio is the best
possible. Any sick person is already at risk. Life comes with only
one guarantee: that none of us gets out of it alive.

Compared to the risks of allopathic medicine, fasting is a far safer
method of treating disease. The oft-repeated scare stories medical
doctors and their allies circulate about fasting are not true, and
it is important to remember that none of these people portraying
fasting as evil and dangerous have ever fasted themselves--I'll put
money on that one. Or, on the slim possibility that someone telling
fasting horror stories did actually not eat for 24 hours (probably
because some accident or acute illness prevented them), they had a
terrible experience because they didn't understand the process, were
highly toxic, and were scared to death the whole time.

Or worse yet they fasted for a short period with an "open mind"--a
very dangerous state in which to approach anything new. I have found
through considerable experience with people professing to have open
minds that the expression "I'm open minded" usually means that
someone has already made up their mind and new data just passes
straight through their open mind--in one ear and out the other. Or
sometimes, the phrase "open mind" means a person that does not
believe any information has reality and is entirely unable to make
up their mind.

The most commonly leveled criticism of fasting is that in its
efforts to survive self-imposed starvation the body metabolizes
vital tissue, not just fat, and therefore, fasting is damaging,
potentially fatally damaging. People who tell you this will also
tell you that fasters have destroyed their heart muscle or ruined
their nervous system permanently. But this kind of damage happen
only when a person starves to death or starves to a point very close
to death, not when someone fasts.

There is a huge difference between fasting and starvation. Someone
starving is usually eating, but eating poorly and inadequately,
eating scraps of whatever is available such as sugar, white flour,
rancid grease, shoe leather, or even dirt. Frequently a starving
person is forced to exercise a great deal as they struggle to
survive and additionally is highly apprehensive. Or someone starving
to death is confined to a small space, may become severely
dehydrated too and is in terror. Fear is very damaging to the
digestive process, and to the body in general; fear speeds up the
destruction of vital tissue. People starve when trekking vast
distances through wastelands without food to eat, they starved in
concentration camps, buried in mind disasters, they starve during
famines and starve while being tortured in prisons.

Weight Loss By Fasting

Loss of weight indicates, almost guarantees, that detoxification and
healing is occurring. I can't stress this too much. Of all the
things I find my patients seem to misunderstand or forget after
being told, it is that they can't heal in a rapid manner without
getting smaller. This reality is especially hard for the family and
friends of someone who is fasting, who will say, "you're looking
terrible dear, so thin. Your skin is hanging on your bones. You're
not eating enough protein or nutrient food to be healthy and you
must eat more or you're going to develop serious deficiencies. You
don't have any energy, you must be getting sicker. You're doing the
wrong thing, obviously. You have less energy and look worse every
day. Go and see a doctor before it is too late." To succeed with
friends like this, a faster has to be a mighty self-determined
person with a powerful ability to disagree with others.

Medical personnel claim that rapid weight loss often causes
dangerous deficiencies; these deficiencies force the person to
overeat and regain even more weight afterward. This is largely
untrue, though there is one true aspect to it: a fasted, detoxified
body becomes a much more efficient digester and assimilator,
extracting a lot more nutrition from the same amount food is used to
eat. If, after extended fasting a person returns to eating the same
number of calories as they did before; they will gain weight even
more rapidly than before they stated fasting. When fasting for
weight loss, the only way to keep the weight off is to greatly
reform the diet; to go on, and stay on, a diet made up largely of
non-starchy, watery fruits and vegetables, limited quantities of
cooked food, and very limited amounts of highly concentrated food
sources like cereals and cooked legumes. Unless, of course, after
fasting, one's lifestyle involves much very hard physical labor or
exercise. I've had a few obese fasters become quite angry with me
for this reason; they hoped to get thin through fasting and after
the fast, to resume overeating with complete irresponsibility as
before, without weight gain.

People also fear weight loss during fasting because they fear
becoming anorexic or bulimic. They won't! A person who abstains from
eating for the purpose of improving their health, in order to
prevent or treat illness, or even one who fasts for weight loss will
not develop an eating disorder. Eating disorders mean eating
compulsively because of a distorted body image. Anorexics and
bulimics have obsessions with the thinner-is-better school of
thought. The anorexic looks at their emaciated frame in the mirror
and thinks they are fat! This is the distorted perception of a very
insecure person badly in need of therapy. A bulimic, on the other
hand stuffs themselves, usually with bad food, and then purges it by
vomiting, or with laxatives. Anorexics and bulimics are not
accelerating the healing potential of their bodies; these are life
threatening conditions. Fasters are genuinely trying to enhance
their survival potential.

Occasionally a neurotic individual with a pre-existing eating
disorder will become obsessed with fasting and colon cleansing as a
justification to legitimize their compulsion. During my career while
monitoring hundreds of fasters, I've known two of these. I
discourage them from fasting or colon cleansing, and refuse to
assist them, because they carry the practices to absurd extremes,
and contribute to bad press about natural medicine by ending up in
the emergency ward of a hospital with an intravenous feeding tube in
their arm.

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When no food at all enters the system, the blood keeps right on
passing through the liver/filter just as it does when we are eating.
When the liver does not have to take care of toxins generated by the
current food intake, each passage through the liver results in a
cleaner blood stream, with the debris decreasing in quantity,
viscosity, and toxicity, until the blood becomes normalized. During
fasting, debris from the gall bladder still pass through the small
intestine and into the largë intestine. However, if the bowels do
not move the toxins in the bile are readsorbed into the blood stream
and get recirculated in an endless loop. This toxic recycling makes
a faster feel just terrible, like they had a flu or worse!

The bowels rarely move while fasting. During fasting only enemas or
colonics permit elimination from the largë intestine. If done
effectively and frequently, enemas will greatly add to the well
being and comfort of the faster. Many times when a faster seems to
be retracing or experiencing a sudden onset of acute discomfort or
symptoms, these can be almost immediately relieved by an enema or
colonic.

A person with major liver degeneration inevitably dies, with or
without fasting, with or without traditional medicine. Significantly
impaired kidney function can also bring about this same result.
Mercifully, death while fasting is usually accomplished relatively
free of pain, clear of mind and with dignity. That often can not be
said of death in a hospital. There are much worse experiences than
death.

Fasting is not a cure-all. There are some conditions that are beyond
the ability of the body to heal. Ultimately, old age gets us all.

Dr. Linda Hazzard, one of the greats of natural hygiene, who
practiced Osteopathic medicine in the 1920s, had a useful way of
categorizing conditions that respond well to fasting. These she
labeled "acute conditions," and "chronic degenerative conditions." A
third classification, "chronic conditions with organic damage," does
not respond to fasting. Acute conditions, are usually inflammations
or infections with irritated tissue, with swelling, redness, and
often copious secretions of mucous and pus, such as colds, flu, a
first time case of pneumonia, inflamed joints as in the early stages
of arthritis, etc. These acute conditions usually remedy in one to
three weeks of fasting. Acute conditions are excellent candidates
for self-doctoring. Chronic degenerative conditions are more serious
and the patient usually requires supervision. These include
conditions such as cancer, aids, chronic arthritis, chronic
pneumonia, emphysema and asthma. Chronic degenerative conditions
usually respond within a month to three months of fasting. The
fasting should be broken up into two or three sessions if the
condition has not been relieved in one stint of supervised fasting.
Each successive fast will produce some improvement and if a light,
largely raw-food diet is adhered to between fasts the patient should
not worsen and should be fairly comfortable between fastings.

Social/Cultural/Psychological Obstacles To Fasting

Numerous attitudes make it difficult to fast or to provide moral
support to friends or loved ones that are fasting. Many people
harbor fears of losing weight because they think that if times were
really tough, if there was a famine or they became ill and lost a
lot of weight they would have no reserves and would certainly
perish. These people have no idea how much fat can be concealed on
an even skinny body, nor of how slowly a skinny body loses weight
while fasting. Substantial fat reserves are helpful as
heat-retaining insulation in those rare accidents when someone is
dropped into a cold ocean and must survive until the rescue boat
arrives. Being fat might keep a person alive longer who is lost in
the wilderness awaiting rescue with no supplies, no means of
procuring food, and no means of keeping warm. On the other hand, fat
people would have a far harder time walking out of the wilderness.
And extensive fat deposits are merely fuel and do not contain
extensive nutritional reserves. An obese person fasting without
significant nutritional supplementation would begin starving long
before they became really skinny. On the balance, carrying excess
weight is a far greater liability than any potential prosurvival
aspects it might have.

There are other attitudes associated with weight loss that make it
difficult for people to fast. People hold rather stereotypical
notions about what constitutes an attractive person; usually it
involves having some meat on ones bones. Hollywood and Hugh Hefner
have both influenced the masses to think that women should have
hourglass figures with largë, upthrust, firm breasts. Since breasts
are almost all useless fatty tissue supporting some milk-producing
glands that do not give a breast much volume except when engorged,
most women fasters loose a good percentage of their breast mass. If
the fast is extensive, there should also develop an impressive
showing of ribs and hip bones; these are not soft and cuddly.
Husbands, lovers, parents, and friends frequently point out that you
don't look good this way and exhort you to put on weight. Most
people think pleasantly plump is healthy.

Skinny men, especially those who had lost a lot of weight during an
illness, are pressured by associates to put on weight to provë that
they are healthy. I had a client who was formerly a college varsity
football player. Before his illness he had lifted weights and looked
like a hunk. His family and friends liked to see him that way and
justifiably so. Then he got seriously ill. On a long extended
healing diet he lost a significant amount of weight and seemed down
right skinny, causing all who knew him well and cared about him to
tempt him with all kinds of scrumptious delicacies from the best of
kitchens. But this case was like Luigi Cornaro, a man who never
again could look like a hunk. His "friends" made an absolutely
necessary change in life style and appearance far more difficult
than it was already. My client was torn between a desire to please
others, and a desire to regain and retain his health. This problem a
sick person doesn't need.