Hope is immediately ahead! For those of you suffering from some long-term stubborn healing challenges, here are leads to reports of others who have found dramatic breakthroughs through fasting. Therapeutic fasting allows your body to clean out years of metabolic nitrogenic waste that could not otherwise be removed because of the constant demand for digestion. During the fast your body lives on a secondary energy source; this is called ketosis. Ketosis kicks in and is produced by the liver when the body reaches the fasted state. This happens only through a water fast; it does not occur during a juice fast. Not only does the body heal—the liver itself completely rejuvenates itself because of the change in chemistry.
According to these reports, heavier people lose stubborn pounds and thin people quickly regain their weight after the fast and delightfully find that they add more weight because now their nutrients can reach their destinations. Their thinness was an indication of an absorption problem that was resolved through the fast. Here are some amazing highlights from four books on fasting. If you can only read one, go for the first one:
Fasting and Eating Your Way to Health/ by Joel Fuhrman, M.D. (ISBN 0-312-18719-X)
Fasting Can Save Your Life/ by Herbert M. Shelton, N.D. (ISBN 0-914532-23-5)
Fast Your Way to Health/ by Lee Bueno (ISBN 0-88368-219-2)
The Miracle of Fasting/ by Paul C. Bragg and Patricia Bragg (both, N.D. and Ph.D.) (ISBN 0-87790-035-3)
Healing through diet:
Healing can be accomplished through major dietary changes alone, as per thousands of testimonials gathered by Halleluiah Acres and both the Gerson and Hippocrates institutes, but it just takes far longer. Each of the authors of the above cited books on fasting emphasizes that major dietary changes must be established AFTERWARDS, if not before, as a lifestyle change for the rest of one's life, to keep the dramatic gains made through fasting. Their combined seasoned brilliant counsel? Build your food intake around at least one pound of fruits and one pound of veggies per day via juicing once or twice a day and eating one or two major salads per day and remove the junk. That'll do it. One woman in her sixties who was wheelchair-bound with Multiple Sclerosis now runs and horseback rides; she literally measured out three cups of greens, meal after meal.
It is mysterious little fruit and veggie warriors called phytochemicals and buster-boxer antioxidants that do the huge disease reversing battle. No other "food-feller" has these components: ONLY fruits and veggies. There are thousands of these little guys, and thousands more yet to be discovered in each thing called a "fruit" and each thing called a "veggie". The radically different healing pyramid put out by Dr. Joel Fuhrman and others puts veggies at the bottom—as the largest part of the pyramid—not grains. This way of eating is veggie based. Veggies are given the biggest section on your plate.
Healing through fasting:
The fasts described in these books were major therapeutic fasts—not just 24-hour fasts, but instead, lasting between 10 and 21 days. Most of them were 10-day fasts. Fasts longer than that must be supervised by a medical doctor. Shelton alone supervised over 40,000 of them in a Texas clinic in the last century and witnessed great successes over a variety of health conditions. According to these authors, the sensation of hunger passes away after the second or third day. It simply gets easier once that toxic hunger (recreational hunger, comfort hunger) barrier is crossed when the body shifts into big-time house-cleaning.
Fasting addresses the underlying CAUSE of illness, instead of masking the symptoms with drugs. The diet/disease connection is historically well-established in the scientific literature. Chronic debilitating diseases due to poor diet have catapulted well into epidemic levels in recent years in America. Sick people who growing sicker are now desperate for answers. The largest hopeful answer is that life-changing rejuvenation can be obtained by diet-reversal and/or fasting.
Toxic hunger and food cravings are done away with through the fast. The body re-boots and forgets them. Food addictions are just as addictive as cocaine. They are very, very nasty things to overcome. Toxic junk food has hijacked our real taste sense. The water fast makes this job easier. Powerful anti-inflammatory agents are released during a water fast that can reverse even auto-immune diseases. Fasting normalizes and enhances immune function—and eats up benign tumors, metabolic wastes, and stored toxic salt.
Paul Bragg passed 1/3 cup of mercury that had been repeatedly given to him accidentally as a child in his cough medicine. He also got over tuberculosis through fasting. And—just for grins—he fattened up his skinny sister through a fast, as well. She did anything he told her, having already tried everything else with no success. He coached her into exercising massively, too—beginning with short walks and short spurts of all the types of exercise—progressively taking her to the next level.
Dr. Joel Fuhrman recovered from a severe foot injury that had badgered him for a year; he had been on crutches with chronically swollen ankles and no solution in sight. His non-healing leg and foot wound from an ice-skating rip of his foot and ankle tormented him for over a year. The day before a second major surgery a year later, he left his hospital bed and fasted, instead. After a 46-day fast supervised by Shelton, he skated his way to a 2nd place win in the 1973 U.S, National Pairs Championship and 3rd at the World Professional Pairs Skating Championship in Spain. Nearly 40 years later, he now can jump from the floor onto the examination table in ONE JUMP.
If nothing else has worked for you, consider trying fasting. The books cited above would offer a recommendation to begin with a one-day fast, then wait several weeks and try a three-day fast, and then wait another month and try another one. Practice these three-day fasts once a month for awhile and then attempt the 10-day fast several months later. In the meantime and in between fasts, eat VEGGIES and fruit—more than you ever have in your entire life. Greens will make you lean and mean :) If you are super-addicted to the wrong foods, just add MORE veggies and fruit. Eat big plates full of these FIRST. Up your QUANTITIES. Don't eat veggies like a mouse. Move veggies from being a "suggestion" on your plate, to the "main story". Then eat the junk with your LEFT-OVER appetite and your hunger desires should gradually change. You'll go from an "eating bum" to a "dining sophisticate"—gaining EXTRAORDINARY health. Your desire for health has to outwit your tamper-tantrum old addictive flesh! Put yourself under new management; try it for one week. Your cells will say "Wahoo!!!' and your health enemies will tuck their tails between their legs and scamper away, out of you, whimpering as they go.
Note: This is simply a report of what others have written about fasting. Nothing in this blog post is intended to constitute medical treatment or advice of any nature. Furthermore, as every person responds differently to fasting, it is heartily recommended that anyone desiring to fast, even for a short duration, should consult his or her doctor, and should remain under the doctor’s close medical supervision and advice throughout the fast and during the entire period of adjustment thereafter.
For basic nutritional tips by us, read Turbo-Charged Nutrition for Peak Performance Kids.
