From The Hygienic Dictionary

Categories: Fasting
Sources: How And When To Be Your Own Doctor

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 rom 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.