Weight Loss By Fasting

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

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.