A little about cleansing: Water and Juice Fasting

Today I’m doing a one-day water fast, so I thought it would be nice to share about it.

It's not something most people typically walk around thinking about, but our bodies are ecosystems. Not only do each of our own cells have an existence and a form of consciousness in their own right, but we actually host (I'm not sure of the order of magnitude... billions? trillions?) vast populations of independent organisms throughout our bodies, many of which we simply couldn't live without. Especially the ones in our digestive tract.

Toxins are everywhere in our modern biosphere. Even people living in the cleanest environment with the purest of diets can’t avoid them. For those of us living in an average community, our systems are processing them constantly. Even some of the byproducts of our own system are toxic. Stress is toxic.

So it is helpful and loving to the body to occasionally cleanse. It’s especially important for our livers and kidneys, which are among other things biological filters required to process toxins and metabolic wastes. Demanding too much of these organ systems can eventually damage them. (Ever known anyone with a damaged liver or kidneys? It’s a rough, rough life).

As a young person, when the body is still growing, it can absorb endless abuse. The cells are simply turning over at such a high rate. But as time goes on, it's less and less true. The ecosystem that we are gets out of balance. Communities of harmful organisms can overgrow and decimate the populations of helpful organisms that we need to survive. Toxins accumulate, inflammation sets in, and organs begin to slowly fail. Systems crash. For me, at age 44, it's really all downhill unless I do some focused work.

Water fasting allows the system to reboot. The primary mechanism is that you simply flush. Large quantities of accumulated toxins get a chance to wash out. From your organs, joints, brain, everything. That’s what I’m doing today, just a quick little system flush.

The secondary mechanism is that all tissues that are getting inflamed and cruddy get a chance to normalize and heal. (Current medical info on inflammation and cardiovascular disease research :
Scholarly: http://circ.ahajournals.org/cgi/content/full/107/3/499
General Public: http://www.americanheart.org/presenter.jhtml?identifier=4648 )
That's if you fast long enough, usually for most people at least 3-4 days.

The tertiary mechanism is that the body begins to devour all the poison. It starts with the weakest, most un-needed stuff first. It's smart that way. Stored fats go, and diseased tissues. Think pre-cancerous tissue. I met a woman in Tucson who beat down advanced cancer through fasting (months of carefully guided juice fasting in her case). This effect will generally start to kick in after about 3-4 days.

It's really not true for most people that you lose much muscle mass unless you're going for several weeks. If you go to the point where you start devouring your own organs, you are now at the point of total system failure, aka death. That takes months, generally.

However, in this vastly complicated ecosystem that we are, nothing's so simple. You can only give guidelines and rules of thumb. If you go down this path you may very well run up against things that violate the laws of nature as we currently understand them.

I used to go out with a quite buffed woman who lived on nothing but water and not too much of that for 2 months while working as a construction laborer... that's sometimes referred to as a 'Breatharian.' Stranger things exist. There was this guy who collapsed in a storm near the summit of Everest, lay in the snow for 36 hours in temperatures comparable to a summer day on Mars, was unable to move until he started to think of his family, at which point he got up and walked back to camp. http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_kamler_medical_miracle_on_everest.html
Mind has limitless potential, and the body can do things that really can’t be explained.

I know people who have done 21 day water fasts. Some in the Christian community take the biblical prescription of 40 days and 40 nights. I've personally done an 80 day juice fast, and a 7 day water fast. It's not easy for me, since I have a pretty fast metabolism, and I do suffer, at least initially. After you get over the hump, it can be anywhere from a completely normal, functional comfortableness, to a sort of super-state of high energy and intense mental clarity, to a genuinely altered state that's deeply spiritual and very hard to describe. I got that once at the end of a 4 day water fast.

Water fasting specifically is used in many religious and yogic traditions for spiritual purification. Be careful with this. Trust your heart, but advice and support are strongly recommended. Water fasting can be dangerous. (I EMPHASISE: YES, YOU REALLY CAN HURT YOURSELF DOING THIS. KNOW YOUR LIMITATIONS) For health purposes, juice fasting really works just as well, or nearly, and is very safe. It’s just a little slower.

My personal, subjective experience from the 80 day juice fast was that it rolled back my biological clock by at least 5 years. If you've never even considered something like that, it may seem wacky-extreme (my coworkers certainly thought so) but who would say no to 5 more years of youthful, healthy life?

I have a really funny story about my last water fast... to put it in context, though, at the time I'm working in a school system in a pretty isolated oil-drilling community. The general health and lifestyle of the adults in this community is unbelievably horrible. So anyway right after the seven day fast, here I am, fresh and chipper (It's incredible for your hair and skin, but also just your overall energy field), and I am working with a new first grade student, who has a few handwriting issues. Smart kid. And he starts asking me some questions. "Do you have a sister?" "A mom and dad?" "Pets?" yes, yes, and no. Then there's this long pause. "So... are you just a kid who works?" Compared to the other adults he'd seen in his life, he couldn’t even fit me into that category.

If your interested in exploring water fasting specifically, probably the best way is to go to a fasting clinic, like True North, run by actual medical people, but that is a money issue. Listen to your own heart, know your limitations, and be careful. Juice fasting on the other hand is pretty safe.

http://www.healthpromoting.com/
http://www.freedomyou.com/fasting_book/water%20fasting.htm
http://www.juicefeasting.com/