Why Fast?

Due to popular demand, here are just a few of my personal reasons for fasting. Please read on to get a fuller understanding of what I am doing.

-Reach my goal weight/height ratio (I am 5'5" so that's about 110-120 lbs)

-Have the experience of a supervised fast so as to better help others when I hold my own fasting retreat.

-Regulate my menstrual cycle. I have been on hormonal birth control since age 13 to control my ovarian cysts. My plant-based diet has helped tremendously with the cysts, but my period is still out of whack.

-"Reset" my metabolism so as to assimilate the food I eat more effectively. After 5+ years of bulimia, my body doesn't know when to hold on or let go of whatever food it gets.

-Emotionally and physically rest my overworked body. Clear my head of all emotional baggage.

Fasting has been around for as long as life itself. Religious, humanitarian, and political leaders are possibly most famous for abstaining from food, usually to make a statement. Animals of all species frequently go for weeks or even months without food during times of winter, famine, or physical injury. It is no secret that simple rest and water is the fastest way to recover from any sort of flu. When we get out of our own way and trust our body to prioritize well being, and put the draining responsibility of digestion on hold, in a relaxing, supervised environment, fasting has the potential to be the answer to all dis-ease.

An important distinction to make is that fasting is not starving. From an outside perspective, it is easy to categorize "not eating" as equivalent to "starving." However, the truth is that the human body is perfectly equipped to not only survive, but thrive on its own reserves for a surprisingly lengthy amount of time, before it succumbs to digesting its vital organs, also known as starving.

Naturally, most people are in awe at anyone willing to go more than 24 hours without sustenance and are eager to ask, "...but aren't you hungry? Isn't it uncomfortable?" Until I embark on my own fasting journey come January 2013, I won't have any personal remark to make on this. I have read extensively and asked dozens of fasters, and they all answer the same: After the first 48 hours, signs associated with hunger go away and they are surprised at how pleasant they feel.
It is also important to keep in mind that the time between meals that we often confuse as hunger, is truly just the movement of our previous food-stuffs going from stomach to intestines to bladder. The "stomach growl" is easily confused with pangs, pain, and desperation for nourishment, when in reality, if you wait an extra day or so, this feeling goes away. You are then renewed with energy from your existing stores (fat).

Dr. Herbert Shelton, a renowned Natural Hygienist and fasting supervisor has written volumes on the subject and fasted literally tens of thousands of individuals. In his book, Fasting and Sunbathing he says, "In total fasting, the body's reserves are drawn upon in a balanced manner, or else, those elements that are most abundant are used most rapidly, so that balance is preserved, or is restored, as a consequence."

As I embark on my journey to health, I realize that it is an every day act. 365 days in a year add up more than 28+ days of fasting on water alone. I have taken steps, one day at a time, towards perfect health within the last 2 years as I have transitioned from vegetarian, to raw, to vegan. The perfect health that is inevitably caused by fasting and following up with a plant-based diet can be easily replaced by doing the things that caused my condition to need to fast in the first place.
 As a funny side note, Shelton also writes, "The effects of fasting must not be confused with the effects of a white-flour-lard-pie-pasteurized-milk-mashed-potato-diet." 

As Dr. Graham would say, "It takes work to swim upstream...even a dead fish can float downstream." I refuse to coast in my journey towards health, and I look forward to propelling myself above the current by undertaking an extended, supervised fast in the mountains of Costa Rica. Much, much more to come.