Fasting – Effective Therapy For Health Concerns

Updated: January 27, 2017

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Dear Robert K.,

 

If there were a pill that effectively treated high blood pressure, overcame Type II diabetes, consistently produced dramatic improvements in autoimmune diseases such as lupus, rheumatoid arthritis and psoriasis, and provided effective relief for asthma attacks and migraine headaches it would be seen as a wonder drug of the highest order. Yet, such profound improvements in these medical conditions, and many others, are routinely seen during a water fast lasting more than a few days.

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I am on the clinical staff of TrueNorth Health Center in Santa Rosa, California (about one hour north of San Francisco), a nutritionally-based clinic specializing in reversing chronic diseases. The most powerful tool we have to improve our health is a whole foods, plant-based diet.

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After all, virtually all the debilitating chronic diseases that afflict people in Western societies are the result of their high-fat, overly-processed, salt-sugar-and-oil-laden, animal-based food stream that people pour through their tissues hour after hour, day after day, year after year, courtesy of the Standard American Diet (SAD). 

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When a truly health-promoting food stream based on whole, plant-based foods is run through the body, day after day, month after month, year after year, most disease processes stop in their tracks and true, deep healing begins.

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Although a water fast can be a very powerful way to initiate healing, and to bring rapid and dramatic improvement to common and life-threatening diseases, real healing power is found in a whole foods, plant-based diet, not in a water fast, per se.

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Most people’s experience tells them that going a day or two without solid food produces profound hunger and discomfort. The thought of going two or three weeks or longer without food leaves them incredulous, and certainly not eager to undertake such a trial. After supervising hundreds of fasts, many lasting 2-3 weeks, and some up to 30 or 40 days, I can report the happy news that reality is nothing like (much better than) the feared image people hold about fasting. 

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How can this be?

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For the first 24 to 48 hours after beginning a water fast, the body burns off circulating blood sugar and sugar stored in the muscles and liver in the form of glycogen. The “real” metabolic fast does not begin until one metabolizes their blood sugar, in approximately 2 to 3 days. At that time, the body begins to burn fat tissue for fuel. When that happens, molecules called ketones enter the blood circulation. These ketones have some very interesting properties.

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For the faster, the main welcome property of ketones is that they suppress hunger. By day four or five of a water fast, hunger is usually gone and is replaced by a feeling of great well-being. 

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Why more energy, and not less? 

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So much of the energy that the body uses all day goes to digesting our food including muscular contractions of the intestine, chemical energy used to synthesize stomach acid, bile, and digestive enzymes as well as the billions of immune cells in the intestinal lining that interrogate the chemical nature of the food going by in the digestive tract. When that function is no longer required on a fast, all that energy is freed up and people surprisingly – but predictably – feel very light and energetic for the first several weeks on the fast.

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It may be counterintuitive, but it is true nonetheless. The commonly-held image of a long water fast is of a person lying on their bed, weak, hungry and whimpering, trying not to think about food, when actually, the reality is quite the opposite.

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People at our TrueNorth Health Center who are on a water fast, frequently stop me in our courtyard to say “Doctor, I haven’t felt this good in years! I haven’t eaten for three weeks, but I feel wonderful!” It really is quite remarkable. 

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It is during this time that we observe a normalizing of blood pressure and blood sugar readings and a subsiding of most pains, swellings, and other signs of inflammation. (See corresponding references below.)

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During a fast, the body is in “Full Energy Conservation Mode” and it does not want to spend precious chemical energy on chaotic, heat-generating, activities, such as inflammatory reactions and growing tumor tissue. During a fast, hot angry joints in rheumatoid arthritis, gout and other inflammatory joint diseases (predictably) cool down, inflamed plaques of psoriasis in the skin are becalmed, and wounds in and on the body heal extremely well. If malignant breast cells are multiplying in tissues, the fasting body generates molecules called sirtuins which put the breaks on cancer growth.