Fasting

Have been doing some research on fasting, seem like a good thing.. anyone have any experience with this, was it good or bad? did it benefit you? were you hungry ? Would be most interested to hear your experience..

Bellow is some interesting info I plagiarized of another site, well worth the read..


Why fasting?
"Humans live on one-quarter of what they eat; on the other three-quarters lives their doctor." - Egyptian pyramid inscription, 3800 B.C.

"Very few people know what real health is, because most are occupied with killing themselves slowly." - Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, Ph.D., Hungarian-born American biochemist; Nobel Prize in physiology and medical science

Before we look at how to fast, let's examine the question: "Why fasting?" Although hundreds of fasting centers and clinics have existed in most European countries throughout the 20th century, Americans are still very far behind the learning curve regarding scientific, therapeutic fasting, as well as in adopting natural and organic food diets.

Likewise, despite all 3 Fathers of Western Medicine having fasted and having prescribed fasting (Hippocrates, Galen and Paracelsus, who declared fasting "the greatest remedy, the physician within"), the fact remains that symptoms-oriented trained U.S. physicians are also equally in the dark.

In the U.S., many in the medical orthodoxy continue to take a negative view of fasting, particularly as a therapeutic tool. But when the medical profession shifts gears from treating illness to PREVENTING illness, fasting will be increasingly prescribed.

Harvard-trained M.D., Andrew Weil, in his 1995 bestselling book "Spontaneous Healing", clearly summarizes what Allopathic Medicine can and cannot do for you, on pages 225-226: "CAN: "Manage trauma better than any other system of medicine; diagnose and treat many medical and surgical emergencies; treat acute bacterial infections with modern antibiotics; treat some parasitic and fungal infections; prevent many infectious diseases by immunization; diagnose complex medical problems; replace damaged hips and knees; get good results with cosmetic and reconstructive surgery, and it can diagnose and correct hormonal deficiencies. Allopaths CANNOT: Treat viral infections; cure most chronic degenerative diseases; effectively manage most kinds of mental illness; cure most forms of allergy or autoimmune disease; effectively manage psychosomatic illnesses, or cure most forms of cancer."

Doctor Weil also holds this opinion: "Do not seek help from a conventional doctor for a condition that conventional medicine cannot treat, and do not rely on an alternative provider for a condition that conventional medicine can manage well."

Too often, scientific studies prove nothing. Frequently, the source of the money dictates the conclusions. Yet, these experiments are all we have to go by, and are crucially important when we are testing these potentially-dangerous drugs that may have various hazardous effects. Fasting and adopting a healing diet designed to help one's condition, on the other hand, are health-supporting. They will make a healthy person even healthier.

Fasting - an "operation without surgery"
"Fasting is, without any doubt, the most effective biological method of treatment... it is the 'operation without surgery'... it is a cure involving exudation, reattunement, redirection, loosening up and purified relaxation. While fasting, the patient improves her or his physical health and gains much. But he or she will have neglected the most important thing if the hunger for spiritual nourishment that manifests itself during fasting is not satisfied." said Otto Buchinger, Sr., M.D., Germany's great, self-described "fasting therapist," who founded the most famous of several renowned, European Buchinger Kliniks in 1952.

Prolonged, scientific fasting has proven itself, over several thousand years, as humanity's oldest, fastest and most effective weight-loss, detoxification, healing and longevity-enhancing modality known to mankind - both curative, as well as preventive - and here are the reasons why:


Just as hibernating bears and migrating whales, as well as much smaller beings, including caterpillars, salmon,hedgehogs, snakes, salamanders, spiders, turtles, tadpoles and woodchucks, do live for many months each year without eating, your body is brilliantly designed to live on its own stored substances. Similarly, during skillful, therapeutic and prolonged juice-fasts (and every reputable fasting book today begins with a warning that noone should ever undertake a prolonged fast without professional supervision, initially), your body will brilliantly live on its own stored substance via "autolysis", or autodigestion. Marvelously, the body decomposes and burns all the cells and tissue which are aged, damaged, diseased, weakened or dead.

Autodigestion during fasting
During fasting, your body will "autolyze", or self-digest, its most inferior and impure materials and metabolic wastes, including: fat deposits, abcesses, dead and dying cells, bumps and protuberances, damaged tissue, calluses, furuncles (small skin abscesses, or boils), morbid accumulations, growths, and amazingly, various kinds of neoplasms (abnormal growths of tissue, or tumors). In "Fasting and eating for health", Joel Fuhrman, M.D., notes, p. 10: "The fast does not merely detoxify; it also breaks down superfluous tissue - fat, abnormal cells, atheromatous plaque, and tumors--and releases diseased tissues and their cellular products into the circulation for elimination. Toxic or unwanted materials circulate in our bloodstream and lymphatic tissues, and are deposited in and released from our fat stores and other tissues. An important element of fasting detoxification is mobilizing the toxins from their storage areas."
New cell growth during fasting is stimulated and accelerated as the required proteins are re-synthesized from decomposed cells (during autolysis). Thus, your serum albumin reading - blood-protein level - remains constant and normal throughout your fast, as your body very smartly uses protein and other stored nutrients where needed. Again, Germany's late Otto Buchinger, M.D., after supervising over 100,000 juice-fasts, eventually concluded what is clearly stated in the book, "Fasting: the Buchinger Method", page 22: "The need for protein diminishes during the fast, until in the second week, it has been reduced from 100 grams to from 15-20 grams a day, and this amount is, in fact, quite sufficient while fasting."

Unfortunately, today's most Western diets are heavily loaded with artificial flavors and chemically-created coloring agents, toxic pesticides, herbicides and fungicides, and insecticides, and other toxic chemicals which overburden our bodies.

As this toxic overload accumulates decade after decade, augmented also by environmental pollution, drugs and medications, it eventually interferes with normal functioning and our body's elimination becomes impaired. During fasting, large amounts of these accumulated metabolic wastes and poisons are, during autolysis, very quickly eliminated through the greatly enhanced cleansing capability of all the organs of elimination - liver, kidneys, skin and lungs. Several common symptoms of detoxification seen during this process could be darker urine, the possibility of catarrhal elimination of excess mucus ("rhinorrhea" - a mucous discharge from the nose), continuous discharge through the colon, etc.

Fasting gives your digestive system a rest
For perhaps the first time in your entire life, fasting affords a physiological rest to the digestive, assimilative and protective organs of your body. Fresh fruit and vegetable juices require little digestion, and are quickly assimilated from the upper digestive tract. Therefore, most of the 10% of bodily energy normally involved in your mastication, assimilation, digestion, and elimination is freed up. This is another reason you'll feel more - not less - energy throughout properly-done juice-fasting - unlike the physically debilitating weakness water-fasters experience.

Additionally, these many fruit and vegetable juices all supply excellent energy, minerals, vitamins, live enzymes, and other nutrients necessary to enhance health during the fast. By providing much of the body's daily caloric needs with easily-digested juices, the release of toxins from the fat cells is much more gentle and gradual.

Scientific fasting enhances longevity, as Doctor Fuhrman notes in "Fasting and eating for health", p. 27: "If we restrict the calories an animal can eat, by underfeeding it or periodically fasting it, we can significantly prolong its life. In fact, periodically fasting animals can double their natural life span.(1,2)

What about water-fasting?
In his 1999 instant classic, "Radical Healing: Integrating the World's Great Therapeutic Traditions to Create a New Transformative Medicine," Rudolph Ballentine, M.D., Founder and Director of the Center for Holistic Medicine in New York City, does not recommend "water-fasting," which he says "is more correctly termed starvation," adding the following words of warning: "The destruction of starvation, and the cleansing and repair that happen in a well-managed fast, are polar opposites. Unfortunately today, when the average person is overburdened with wastes and environmental toxins, and when reserves of essential nutrients are low because of the ubiquity of 'empty-calorie' foods, what is intended as a fast may well end up as starvation. Your best insurance against such a catastrophe is to do a juice-fast. Juices can eliminate much of the trauma of fasting."

Freshly-squeezed and extracted vegetable and fruit juices contain a wealth of vitamins and organically-complexed minerals. They will also supply the 400 calories or so that is your minimal fuel requirement. Without that minimum caloric intake, your body begins to break-down protein structures to get it. What's more, fresh juices have a cleansing effect of their own. During fasting, a balanced regime of juices should be made from a broad spectrum of fruits and vegetables.

Dr. Ballentine, who does not recommend juice-fasting for a duration of more than 3 days without expert supervision, is supported by the fact that none of the world's best fasting centers and clinics - the majority of which have been based in Europe, historically - have done debilitating water-fasting over the past 75 years. Like the world-renowned, self-described "fasting therapist," Otto Buchinger, Sr., M.D., who supervised over 100,000 fasts, they've all done the wiser, more efficient juice-fasting.

Since fasting has never been taught in any of America's 127 medical schools, allopath doctors - schooled exclusively to deal only with symptoms, versus the causes which prolonged, juice-fasting more wisely addresses - hold a dim view of fasting. In fact, most allopath doctors appear never to have known, or seem to have forgotten, that all 3 Fathers of Western Medicine practiced and prescribed prolonged fasting - Hippocrates, Galen and Paracelsus, who declared fasting "the greatest remedy, the physician within.

 

Personally I think deliberately starving yourself so your body eats its hard earned muscle and all that malarky is plain stupid. Everyone I know who have fasted are absoloutly begging for food and actually time it to the second for the official night so they can eat. Personally I don't think its worth it

 

I take it you did not read my whole post..

Basically, it mentions two types of fasting.. one where the person drinks only water.. and the other which is based on drinking juices because:

"Freshly-squeezed and extracted vegetable and fruit juices contain a wealth of vitamins and organically-complexed minerals. They will also supply the 400 calories or so that is your minimal fuel requirement. Without that minimum caloric intake, your body begins to break-down protein structures to get it. What's more, fresh juices have a cleansing effect of their own. During fasting, a balanced regime of juices should be made from a broad spectrum of fruits and vegetables."

So, thanks for the insight, but I would have much preferred it if you read my full post before replying with obsolete info.

 

excellent way to test the will !

i have some experience with fasting... have done it twice for three days each time.

i found it to be an absolutely wonderful experience and an excellent way to test the will. i have participated in a variety of will testing exercises, but i found fasting to be the most beneficial... a real experience in separating the mind from the body.

i recommend doing it over a long weekend, for no more than three days. I think it is best to have no food, but drink plenty of water (only water, no fruit juice). Keep your activities to a minimum and be careful of TV… suddenly every cooking show seems to be on. You will find the process your body goes through to be amazing, even loosing it a little bit by your third day. But that is why it is great. Three days with only water is not a big deal (assuming you are already healthy), but for some reason we think it is.

Go ahead and test your will! True martial arts is about breaking through your limitations.

good luck,

stu

 

3 days of that would be hell! Painfull enough trying to keep under 4,000 calories

Whats the benefit of this over spending the sam eamount of time on a healthy diet that comes in at the normal 2,500 calories a day?

 

Well, I think the answer to this is in my first post.. but lets recap..

It seems the benefits of fasting are:

1) A rest for the digestive system

2) Exudation, reattunement, redirection, loosening up and purified relaxation

3) Weight-loss, detoxification, healing and longevity-enhancing.

4) Curative and preventative bnefits for health

5) During fasting, your body will "autolyze", or self-digest, its most inferior and impure materials and metabolic wastes, including: fat deposits, abcesses, dead and dying cells, bumps and protuberances, damaged tissue, calluses, furuncles (small skin abscesses, or boils), morbid accumulations, growths, and amazingly, various kinds of neoplasms (abnormal growths of tissue, or tumors).

6) New cell growth during fasting is stimulated and accelerated as the required proteins are re-synthesized from decomposed cells (during autolysis).

7) Testing the will, maybe realization of the bodies dependence on food, and the minds dependence on the body.

Hmm... obviously none of this is from my own experience so don’t know if it really works, but that’s what the info points to..

 

Thanks for the summary, does sound a worthwhile thing to do, strange that something that would be so effective isn't more widely done?

Is the 400 cals a day enough to stop muscle wastage? Even with someone that has more than the average amount of muscle, as an extra pound of muscle gained will cause you to burn off an extra 50 cals a day even when not training.

 

the benefit

the benefit of fasting is testing your will and breaking through your limitations.

three days will not kill you or casue you to lose muscle. it will only strengthen you!

stu

 

I haven't actually read completely into fasting and the wide effects it will obviously have. I have mulled over the idea before but I would like to read more science about it, not stuff like "it's a good d3t0x!". As far as I have seen, detoxing is mostly for addicts and people who think having a mudbath will somehow do wonders for you. It's called relaxation! In theory it could have benefits, but whether these benefits actually occur or not and what really does happen is another matter.

It doesn't matter whether he's won a Nobel Prize, he still sounds stupid when he states the complete obvious - everyone is dying slowly... genius!

 

I'm wondering if you guys are overstating the results of fasting.

If you eat nothing but crap food for 3 days, you might gain a pound or two, same thing with fasting (in the sense that change is going to minimal). I just can't see widesweeping changes in the body only after 3 days.

I've talked to a guy who regularly fasts for a week (!) every few months and he says he feels incredibly better every time. Maybe it's a psychological thing. I'm definitely gonna give it a try eventually.

 

i agree trae... i'm not saying your life will be changed forever, but i does alter your perspective a bit and is an excellent test of the will, not to mention it's fun in a sick way. kind of like trying to sit absolutely motionless for an hour.. ugh!

stu

 

That's a good point. Can't expect much change over a weekend. ^ ^

But this fasting thing looks kind of appealing, I must saw. If there's a healthy way to do it, then it sounds like a good idea.

 

Can you exercise during fasting? I didnt read the initial post but im guessing its a list of reasons fasting is good so ill just take his word for it.

 

Um, you should have read it, but that's OK. It was pretty long. ^ ^;;

Anyway, it said that you should probably not be too active during any kind of fasting, whether juice or water fasting. That would be kind of dangerous.

 

I tried to do some research on fasting before I posted anything, and all I could find were sites that were trying to sell me stuff and I tend to get more then a bit leary when that is the only sources of information you can find.
I have read some of Weil's things, and generally find his information is correct. But I just don't buy fasting.
1.) Any serious buildups that you might have in your body are not going to go away just because you eat organically (which seems to be required for the notion of getting out impurities) for three days. Many heavy metals can never be gotten rid of once they are in the system.
2.) The body, when it autometabolizes, does not seem to recognize the difference between "good" bits and "bad" bits. When it starts consuming muscle, for instance, it does not differentiate between, say, cardiac muscle and skeletal muscle.
3.) Humans do not and have not ever hibernated. Its not in our evolutionary makeup. While there has been experimentation in hibernation as a technique to deal with serious injury, it has nothing to do with lack of food, but everything to do with lack of oxygen. By deoxygenating cells, you can induce a state of hybernation or statis, so unless you are talking about attempting to deprive yourself with oxygen, you aren't coming close to hibernation in any way or form.
4. Most of your artificial colors and flavors are perfectly safe. People who tell you that they aren't are also selling you "natural" substnaces, which have not been tested, regulated or controled.

That's the main points of my veiw. Fasting isn't a cure-all for anything that I am aware of and most of the arguements for fasting are proposed by a group of people who have no training in science or health who are interested in only gaining your money, and frankly, ought to have a good kick in the knee for every dollar they scam someone out of.

 

^^^ A bunch of stuff that I pretty much couldn't be bothered to say They're basically my major feelings on it all. I would love to experiment with it sometime, but not for the reasons that most "health gurus" say.

 

1. Why does a digestive system need a physiological rest? Does the acid get tired? The little villi and muccous get fatigued of just chilling out in your intestines? What is it that needs a break?

It has a job to do and it does it. You don't shut off your brain, heart or respiratory muscles, nor any of your major organs.

2. Reattunement of what and to what? And purified relaxation? :bang:

3. Weightloss can be done in many other ways without starving oneself. As for detox, why not just got for a good ol' colon cleansing: "A step beyond a simple enema, this procedure is performed by a trained therapist who introduces from 5-25 gal (19-941 l) of water, or other cleansing agents, directly into the rectum using a tube and nozzle." Um... no thanks. I'll skip on the detox stuff.

4. Curative and preventative benefits? Such as...?

5. So fasting will eat tumours? Cancer research has seriously missed this one!

I think the test of will is the only benefit you've proven in your posts. I'm with Adam on this one - I'd like to find more scientific research on it, less new-age product sales pushing and hype.

 

simple

i would not focus on any of the disputed health benefits you have discussed regarding fasting. as it pertains to matial arts, the benefit of fasting are simple:

1) testing your will.

2) breaking through your limitations.

stu

 

I agree on those, but with health benefits vs possible negative side-effects still in question, there are other ways to test one's will and other limitations to break.

I'm open to the idea though, and not disputing that some people who fast perceive great benefit. I'd just like to know how, or maybe still to other tests of will.

 

I've only previously heard of fasting as a religious thing before, and maybe various religious leaders are trying to push the benefits both religious and otherwise, for their own agenda?

The claims made sound too good to be true, and why would something so good not be more widely used...