Dan Hostetler's Food and Fasting Philosophy

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Table of Contents

Meat 4 Milk 7 Sugar 9 Highly Processed Foods 13

Evidence of Benefits 16 Water Fasting Versus Juice Fasting 16 General and Spiritual Uses 29 Christian Uses 30 Differences Between Diets and Eating Disorders (ED) 41 Chart of Religions 46 Footnotes 50

Organized and compiled by Dan Hostetler

MEAT 3

Eating animal meat is not good for you. That’s what you’re going to read about here. It will shorten your life, put weight on you that you cannot get rid of, and will make you miserable in all kinds of ways that disguise themselves as a bloated feeling, always tired, walking in increased gravity, headaches, upset stomach, acid reflux, bad toilet experiences, and a constant awful feeling of being in your body. To me, it degrades my experience of life.

The statistics, facts, and hard evidence that follows does not need to be memorized in order for you to break the meat habit and start healing the damage you’ve done to yourself. They’re here to establish the FACT that there are HARD FACTS to support what your body has been telling you all along. It’s not myth. It’s not opinion. It’s not a bunch of left-over, aging hippies making stuff up. It’s not fake news. It’s true and the brainwashing that you’ve been subject to for your entire life has been wrong . . . DEAD wrong!

Read on.

World renown organizations such as the IARC Working Group (which conducts its studies in conjunction with the WHO (World Health Organization)) issued urgent warnings in 2014 that their lengthy, scientific analyses synchronize with the Global Burden of Disease Project which provide evidence that processed meat (ham, hot dogs, sausages, corned beef, beef jerky, canned meat, and meat-based sauces and preparations) are now classified as Group 1A (the same group as tobacco smoking and asbestos), "carcinogenic to humans", and that red meat (all mammalian muscle meat including beef, veal, pork, lamb, mutton, horse, and goat) is now classified as Group 2A, "probably carcinogenic to humans". Amongst the strongly worded conclusive statements in their report were such clear comments as, "eating processed meat causes colorectal cancer" and "association with stomach cancer was also seen, but was not the focus of the study".

Their work also cited an analysis of data from 10 other scientific studies which concluded that every 50 gram portion of processed meat eaten daily increases the risk of colorectal cancer by about 18%. and by 17% for every 100 gram portion of red meat eaten daily. They also note that their study was based on the carcinogenic effect of cancer alone but cited many credible national health recommendations which link consumption of red and processed meat to increased risks of death from heart disease, diabetes, and other illnesses.

These results are available the World Health Organization's website at who.int 4

and all curious parties are encouraged to do their own fact checking before continuing their march towards premature and unnecessary death for these reasons.

Next, the American Heart Association has published the conclusive results of a metaanalysis of 329,495 participants with the statement that eating red meat -including beef, pork, lamb, ham, hot dogs, sausage, and bacon -- increases the risk of stroke. Each one-servingper-day increase in fresh, processed, and total red meat intake was associated with an 11% to 13% relative increase in the risk of all strokes, driven by an increase in the risk of ischemic stroke, according to Joanna Kaluza, PhD, of the Warsaw University of Life Sciences in Poland, and colleagues who conducted the study.

Chowing down on red meat has been associated with greater risks of many common cancers, coronary heart disease, and diabetes, as well as all-cause mortality and death from cardiovascular disease and cancer but due to the fact that red meat contains heme iron, they go on to say "high doses of iron may lead to oxidative stress, a state with increased peroxidation of lipids, protein modification, and DNA damage. Consumption over a long time means oxidative stress induced by iron can lead to the development of many diseases, such as cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, atherosclerosis, neurological disorders, and chronic inflammation."

Couple these findings with statements from the Mayo Clinic Staff on their website, "A plant-based diet, which emphasizes fruits, vegetables, grains, beans, legumes and nuts, is rich in fiber, vitamins and other nutrients. And people who eat only plant-based foods - aka vegetarians - generally eat fewer calories and less fat, weigh less, and have a lower risk of heart disease than 5

nonvegetarians do."

"Just eating less meat has a protective effect. A National Cancer Institute study of 500,000 people found that those who ate the most red meat daily were 30 percent more likely to die of any cause during a 10-year period than were those who ate the least amount of red meat. Sausage, luncheon meats and other processed meats also increased the risk. The fact is that most Americans get enough protein in their diets. Adults generally need 10 to 35 percent of their total daily calories to come from protein. Based on a 2,000calorie-aday diet, this amounts to about 50 to 175 grams a day. Of course, you can get protein from sources other than meat" and there are plenty of protein-rich plant substitutes that contain fiber, something that meat does not.

Has this made you curious? Visit "The Protein Myth" at www.pcrm.org (The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine which was founded by Dr. Neal Barnard who has visited Chicago twice at the invitation of Charlotte Cressey. I was honored to attend both meetings and meet this great physician who has changed the mentality of the American government regarding diet) which publishes conclusive evidence that the SAD (Standard American Diet) is too rich in meat and dairy protein which results in: "Kidney Disease, Cancer, Osteoporosis and Kidney Stones." Meat has no purpose in our diet. We've been brainwashed and betrayed, he concludes, by our government, our leaning institutions, and by the medical community.

As a physician himself, he speaks of his research into medical universities and colleges, noting that there is only an average of one hour of instruction provided regarding diet during the many years of medical school that aspiring doctors and clinicians must attend to become licensed. They ignore the basic fuel that we intake to make our bodies function, and concentrate on remedying the symptoms of what our poor diets have caused. Noting how little sense this makes, his organization has influenced the medical establishment in the United States to the point that they are beginning to take note and teach doctors and clinicians a little bit more than they were before. But that’s all they are doing . . . teaching a little bit more about it.

Make sure that you ask your doctor or medical advisor how much research they have done on diet and do not be afraid to ask them about authors and particular research they are familiar with. If they have not studied it, how can they advise for or against it? Answer: they cannot. Simple. Leave their pres6

ence and find a doctor or medical advisor that has paid attention to the huge, undeniable quantum research projects that have changed everyone’s minds but theirs. Go find someone who will give you good advice, and not repeat wooden, disproven theories based on guesswork from the 1950’s.

Continuing this fact dissemination regarding meat, we all have been told how much fiber we need in our diets (fiber is the part of fruits, vegetables and grains not digested by your body - it works like a “scrubber” in the lengthy intestinal tract to wipe the walls of your insides to keep things moving along toward elimination). The reason we have been hearing this advice for all these years is because red meat, in addition to being very scarce on providing the body with any nutritional benefits besides an unnecessary level of protein, has no fiber. Repeat: meat has no fiber. As a result, the amount of undigested material which accumulates and clogs your large intestine grows over time and becomes plaqued, impacted and can cause painful rectal problems and colonic diseases (all this according to countless physicians, nutritional experts, but in this case the Mayo Clinic . . . it's from their website).

Do you see where this is going?

This brings up another advantage to going meatless which is rarely touted, and that’s the fact that vegetables are all fiber! Not only does our need for fiber decrease as we stop eating meat, but our fiber intake increases geometrically. The internal scrubbing that all this fiber provides is one of the reasons that vegetarians and vegans look so young and are usually so trim . . . they’re scrubbed clean of harmful toxins and carcinogenic intake from the inside out!

Check the alkalinity chart on pages 50 & 51 and you'll see how meat consumption is a major cause of acidity which means you are creating a comfortable spa environment for all kinds of diseases which thrive in an acidic environment (including cancer - ask any physician).

Milk Human breast milk is the perfect food for human babies, while cow's milk is the perfect food for baby cows. Cow's milk naturally contains the large amount of hormones and protein needed to turn a 80-pound calf into a 1,000 pound cow in one year. That amount of protein and hormones is not only unnecessary but unhealthy for humans.

The Harvard School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School are down7

right critical of the USDA's recommendation of dairy products at every meal.

Harvard states, "there is little evidence that high dairy intake protects against osteoporosis but substantial evidence that high intake can be harmful." Bovine Milk is acidifying to the human body and can not only do highly acidic diets leech calcium from bones to normalize alkalinity levels, but Milk Osteoporosis is a thing, it does exist, and all milk drinkers should educate themselves on what they are pouring into their bodies. Just try the internet.

The American Dietetic Association supports a dairy-free, vegan diet: "It is the position of the American Dietetic Association that appropriately planned vegetarian diets, including total vegetarian or vegan diets, are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases."

Besides containing saturated fats, cholesterol, hormones and too much protein, milk is also linked to testicular cancer, breast cancer, and prostate cancer. Milk protein has been linked coronary deaths and to hardened, narrowed arteries.

Contaminants in milk are another serious concern. American milk is banned in the European Union because of added recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH). When administered to cows, rBGH causes the cows to produce up to 20% more milk, but also causes the cows to produce more Insulin like Growth Factor 1 (IGF-1). According to the Organic Consumers Association, some of the rBGH given to cows ends up in the milk. The Cancer Prevention Coalition (CPC) states:

It is highly likely that IGF-1 promotes transformation of normal breast cells to breast cancers. In addition, IGF-1 maintains the malignancy of human breast cancer cells, including their invasiveness and ability to spread to distant organs.

Another contaminant found in cow's milk is pesticide residue due to the fact that most dairy herds are fed diets of GMO corn, which is soaked in Monsanto's famous Glysophate. Residues are fat soluble, which means they become concentrated in the milk and tissues of animals. The use of this pesticide is so rampant that it is now found in human breast milk.

RBGH also increases the risk of mastitis, which sometimes leads to pus, bacteria and blood getting into the milk. Federal law in the US allows up to 50 mil8

lion pus cells per cup of milk.

So you might ask, if rBGH is so dangerous and is banned in the EU, why is it legal in the US? The CPC and I believe that, Monsanto Co., the manufacturer of rBGH (and the inventor of Agent Orange and Roundup pesticide), has influenced U. S. product safety laws permitting the sale of unlabeled rBGH milk.

They have now been purchased by Bayer, and the name has been retired due to its global unpopularity, but their research and toxic sales continue.

A 2009 study found that children who consumed the most protein from animal sources entered puberty about seven months earlier than those who consumed the least. "It doesn't matter so much if it's milk, cheese, or meat - all these animal proteins have a clear impact on [our] IGF system," says Thomas Remer, Ph.D., one of the authors of the study and a professor at the Research Institute of Child Nutrition, in Germany.

Sugar Researchers have found a link between sugar and unhealthy levels of blood fats. There's an association between added sugar intake and what we call dyslipidemia -- higher triglycerides and lower HDL ("good") cholesterol, says Rachel K. Johnson, RD, MPH, PhD, a professor of nutrition at the University of Vermont and a spokeswoman for the American Heart Association (AHA).

In a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), people who ate the largest amounts of refined sugar had the highest blood triglyceride levels and the lowest HDL (good) cholesterol levels. That study also showed that eating lots of sugar more than tripled the odds of having low HDL cholesterol levels, a strong risk factor for heart disease.

In contrast, people who ate the least sugar had the lowest triglyceride levels and highest HDL levels, a protective factor against heart disease.

However, sugar is hard to stop once you start. Do you recognize this? It turns you into a junkie! Sugar turns you into a junkie! Much like street drugs, sugar triggers the release of chemicals that set off the brain's pleasure center, in this case opioids and dopamine. And as they do with street drugs, people develop a tolerance for sugar, meaning they need more sugar for a feel-good "fix." And it also: Makes. You. Feel. Famished. Emerging research suggests regularly eating too much sugar scrambles your body's ability to tell your brain you're full. Carrying a few extra pounds and living with type 2 diabetes 9

can throw off your body's ability to properly put off leptin hormones; leptin's job is to say, "I'm full! Now stop eating!" Fructose also appears to play badly with leptin; eating a high-fructose diet means your body feels hungry, even when you're overeating.

While we might reach for sugar to feel better, but we're actually getting the opposite effect in the end. A study published in Public Health Journal followed nearly 9,000 people to study the link between depression and eating sugary sweets and fast food. After six years, those who ate the most junk faced a nearly 40% greater risk of developing depression, compared to those who shunned sugary junk food the most. In people with insulin resistance, it appears the brain releases lower levels of feel-good dopamine.

Sugar makes your organs fat. The fructose, a component of table sugar and high-fructose corn syrup, in added sugars triggers your liver to store fat more efficiently, and in weird places. Over time, a diet high in fructose leads to globules of fat building up around your liver, a precursor to nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, a common disease today but rarely seen before 1980.

Sugar hammers your heart. The American Diabetes Association explains that heart disease and diabetes are intricately related: Heart disease and stroke are the number one causes of death among people with type 2 diabetes, accounting for 65% of those deaths, and sugar primes the body for diabetes according to countless studies.

Sugar promotes cholesterol chaos. There is an unsettling connection between sugar and cholesterol. A study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that, after excluding people with high cholesterol and/or diabetes and people who were highly overweight, those who ate the highest levels of added sugars experienced the biggest spike in bad cholesterol levels and dangerous triglyceride blood fats, and the lowest good (HDL) cholesterol levels.

Sugar overload sparks your liver to churn out more bad cholesterol while also inhibiting your body's ability to clear it out.

Brown University neuropathologist Suzanne de la Monte, MD, coined the term "type 3 diabetes" after her team was the first to discover the links between insulin resistance, high-fat diets, and Alzheimer's disease. In fact, her work suggests Alzheimer's is a metabolic disease, one in which the brain's ability to use glucose and produce energy is damaged. To paraphrase, it's like 10

having diabetes in the brain.

For those of us who care about what we look like, sugar in our bloodstream attaches to proteins to form harmful new molecules called advanced glycation end products, or AGEs. These unwanted invaders attack nearby proteins, damaging them, including protein fibers in collagen and elastin, the components that keep your skin firm and elastic. The result of too much sugar? Dry, brittle protein fibers that lead to wrinkles and saggy skin. And there's more!

AGEs promote the growth of fragile collagen and deactivate our body's natural antioxidant enzymes. This opens the door to more sun damage, which, as we all know, also damages and ages our skin.

Large bodies of epidemiological research (pun intended) has shown an association between intake of sugar-sweetened beverages and diabetes. Celebrities and high-profile chefs have touted the benefits of replacing refined white sugar with purportedly more natural, healthier sugars, such as honey, maple syrup, or molasses but there's no truth to these common misconceptions. The bottom line: All are simple sugars. A calorie of sugar is a calorie of sugar, so whether you're getting it from white sugar or some other type of sweetener, you're still adding empty calories to your diet.

The American Heart Associations' Scientific Statement on added sugars and cardiovascular health pointed to sodas and other sugar-sweetened drinks as the main source of added sugars in Americans' diets noting that Americans consume way too much sugar: an average of 22 teaspoons a day, the equivalent of 355 calories. Eating too much sugar can create several enormous problems: It either adds calories to your diet or it displaces other nutritious foods and in doing so, can cause obesity, many versions of degraded health, diabetes, and dental problems. Most Americans would live longer, feel better, and have consistent energy by reducing the amount of added sugars in their diet.

Sugar as it occurs in whole foods is not an issue; in fact, it is necessary and should be embraced. It's a problem only when it is extracted from its natural package and used to excess.

Sweeteners such as Equal and Nutrasweet contain aspartame, which is is a multipotential carcinogenic agent, even at a daily dose of much less than the current acceptable daily intake, according to a 2006 lifespan study in Environmental Health Perspectives. Check on this if you’re curious, right?

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Sweet-n-low and similar sweeteners contain an ingredient called saccharin, which has been linked to bladder cancer by way of a flawed study back in the 80's but today generally considered safe. I wonder about this. It’s a chemical.

Splenda is another popular one, but because the body doesn't recognize, it won't digest it, and can actually make you GAIN weight.

Personally, I would recommend a change in your palate by just reducing your

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intake of sweetness, but if you are unable to do so, I strongly recommend stevia. it's a natural herb and has a very reduced glycemic effect on the body.

Next would be Xylitol. it's a natural sweetener that's actually produced in our bodies and it creates a very beneficial flora in your mouth, so many dentists recommend it.

Highly Processed Foods Obviously, most foods we eat are processed in some way. While apples are simply cut from trees and eaten, ground beef has been ground in a machine and butter is cream that has been separated from the milk and churned but I'm not talking about this kind of process. This is mechanical processing and there is a huge difference between this and chemical processing.

If it's a single ingredient food with no added chemicals, then it doesn't matter if it's been ground or put into a jar. It's still real food.

However... foods that have been chemically processed and made solely from refined ingredients and artificial substances, are what is generally known as "processed food" and it's this kind of processing that is making us sick and fat (largely due to sugar's evil twin, High Fructose Corn Syrup, which saturates processed food items and gets buried in places where most of us don't see it).

Truth be told, processed foods are the main reason why people all over the world are getting fat and sick and we know this because every time a population adopts a "Western" diet high in processed foods, they get sick. It happens quickly, within a few years. Their genes don't change, their food does.

Beware, you never really know what you're eating and the body struggles to digest what it does not recognize. C'mon, none of this stuff exists in nature and the complex games that are played with our nutrition really classify us as guinea pigs as we stuff ourselves with stuff that we don't know what it is.

Processed food companies are like drug addicts, promising "next time it'll be different, watch!" but their euphoria comes from market share and rising stock prices., not the gut bombs that they've launched into our stomachs. As soon as they're discovered playing God with our taste buds, they back down, with apologies and promises, but as soon as we turn back to our plates and greasy bags of take-out they're right back to their old habits: cheap hidden sugar, loud marketing, bogus health claims.

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Here’s one example: It would be fair to assume that there are three ingredients in McDonald's French fries: potatoes, oil, and salt. But if you assumed that you'd be far from correct. It turns out that there are 17 ingredients in MickeyD's French fries! They contain: -Potatoes—Mickey D's uses varieties like the Russet Burbank, which have a nice oval shape and just the right balance of starch and sugar. Excess sugar can cause a fry to have brown spots where it's over-caramelized, leaving a burnt taste and deviating from the uniform yellow-arches color. Just in case, the spuds are blanched after slicing, removing surplus sugar. All this processing takes place before the fries even get reshaped to look like potatoes.

-Canola oil-Most canola oil is now genetically-modified. Actually, Canola is actually a contraction for “Canadian Oil Low Acid” and exists because a bunch of Canadian scientists wanted to turn rapeseed oil into an edible oil, so they used selective breeding techniques to "create" seeds that contained less harmful, bitter substances. It's not actually a plant. It's just a name for rapeseeds that have been bred and modified to be low in undesirable compounds.

-Hydrogenated soybean oil-Like canola oil, most soybean oil is now extracted from genetically-modified soybeans. Plus the hydrogenation process makes the oil more saturated than it would be in its natural form, and unhealthy.

-Safflower oil-Believed to be a healthier cooking oil, most safflower is unfortunately heated to high temperatures long before it is ever used for cooking, causing it to be chemically-altered from the heat, and a source of inflammation in the body when that is the case.

-"Natural flavor"-McDonald's natural flavor is apparently obtained from a vegetable source, but the "natural" moniker means nothing since it can even potentially contain the nerve- and brain-toxin monosodium glutamate (MSG).

-Dextrose-a type of sugar.

-Sodium acid pyrophosphate-This ingredient is apparently used to maintain the color of the fries. On the chemical industry's own safety data sheets it is listed as hazardous for ingestion, which is exactly what you'll be doing if you eat those French fries.

-Citric acid-used as a preservative.

-Dimethylpolysiloxane-used as an anti-foaming agent, this industrial chemical 14

is typically used in caulking and sealants and comes with a list of safety concerns.

-Vegetable oil for frying. In the good old days, McDonald's fries were cooked in beef tallow. But customer demand for less saturated fat prompted a switch to vegetable oil in the early '90s. Here, that means oils of varying saturations combined into something reminiscent of beef tallow. There's canola (about 8 percent saturated fat), soybean oil (16 percent), and hydrogenated soybean oil (94 percent). And to replace the essence of beef tallow? "Natural beef flavor," which contains hydrolyzed wheat and milk proteins that could be a source of meaty-tasting amino acids.

-More Vegetable Oil - That's right, the fries get two batches of vegetable oilone for par-frying at the factory and another for the frying bath on location.

The second one adds corn oil and an additive called TBHQ, or tertbutylhydroquinone, which at high doses can cause nasty side effects in rats (mmmm ... stomach tumors). McDonald's uses this oil for all its frying, so the stuff usually sits around in big vats, which means it can go rancid as oxygen plucks hydrogens from lipids. TBHQ acts as an antioxidant, replacing those pilfered hydrogens with its own supply and is a petroleum-based, butane-like (yes, that's lighter fluid!) ingredient used as a preservative. It has been linked to asthma, skin conditions, hormone disruption, and in long-term animal studies to cancer and damage to DNA. Contrary to what McDonald's may claim in its slogan, I'm NOT lovin' it and everytime you get a fries at one of the many fast-food chains that mimick MickyD’s, you are eating fake food that plays havoc with your body.

To make matters worse, in the USA about one quarter of the vegetables consumed are French Fries. That's not one quarter of potatoes, that's one quarter of all vegetables in total! Americans now eat an average of four servings of french fries every week for every man, woman and child.

So we’ve established that french fries are a serious contender for the most unhealthy foods that people eat regularly, but this is only one example! Aren’t you curious about what’s in some of the other fast food you’ve been mowing down all these years? If not, you should be. And if you become disgusted and angry when your curiosity turns to fascination, most of this information can be found on their websites. Nobody reads it, but it’s there.

Kick it out of your life. Get rid of it fast and get back to your best self.

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What Does This Have To Do With Fasting?

With the indigestible fake food that we eat over many years, toxins build up in our body that hobble us, and cause us to prematurely age and die. Fasting is a healing antidote that can reverse the ravages that these years of abuse cause us.

It is the quickest, most holistic method for returning to an alkaline state where we experience consistent energy, self-esteem, sound sleep, and a long life, free of disease and unwanted physical trauma. Read on and you'll see.

For those of us with an urgent need to build an alkaline body, there is no substitute for eating more raw fruits and vegetables, and eating less sugar, refined foods, and animal protein while drinking less bovine dairy and dark liquids (and not smoking). There is also a quicker method to produce alkalinity, fasting, which is effective and cheap.

You can easily test how alkaline or acid your body is. Sickness thrives in an acid pH. So if you are prone to yearly colds and flu, or if you feel badly or headachy a lot of the time, or if you have a serious health challenge, you are most likely acidic.

If you want to know for certain, you can get pH paper from your local pharmacy. It's very inexpensive. I like the range from 5.5 to 8.0. You can use it to test your urine and saliva every morning. If you are below 7, you are acid. If you are above 7 you are alkaline. It's that simple..

If you are already eating your share of fruits and vegetables and are eating less sugar and animal protein, but still you are on the acidic side, fasting can help you to build an alkaline body very quickly and there are some other benefits to your immune system that come along for free, read on: Catharine Paddock PhD has made public the results of an interesting recent study on mice and a phase 1 trial of humans that provides evidence that prolonged cycles of fasting - for 2-4 days at a time - triggers stem cell regeneration of new immune cells and the clearing out of old, damaged cells to the extent that it can effectively protect against the well-known toxic effects of chemotherapy.

Conducted by researchers from the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles, and published in the journal Cell Stem Cell, their findings could 16

benefit people with immune system damage as well as elderly whose immune systems are weakened through aging, making them more susceptible to disease.

The scientists say prolonged fasting appears to shift stem cells of the immune system from a dormant state to an active state of self-renewal. It flipped a switch that changed the signaling pathways of hematopoietic stem cells - a group of stem cells that generate blood and immune systems.

"We could not predict that prolonged fasting would have such a remarkable effect in promoting stem Juice cell-based regeneration Water Juice plus of the hematopoietic system," says Valter LonKetosis Yes No No go, a professor of Gerontology and the BiologModerate Autolysis Yes Mild ical Sciences at the USC Davis School of GeronCleansing Toxins Yes Yes Yes tology, and director of the USC Longevity Insti- Cleansing ReacModerate Yes Mild tute. tion He says that when you stop eating, the body uses up stored glucose, fat and ketones, and also recycles worn out and damaged immune cells.

Resting the organs of the digestive system

Yes

Yes

Yes

Losing Weight

So So

So So

Yes

Electrolyte imbalance

Yes

No

No

"What we started noticing in both our human work and animal work is that the white blood cell count goes down with prolonged fasting," he explains. "Then when you re-feed, the blood cells come back. So we

Glucose imbalance

Yes

So So

No

Fatigue

Yes

So So

No

Loss of muscle mass

Yes

Yes

Moderate

Alkaline pH

No

Yes

Yes

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started thinking, well, where does it come from?"

Prolonged fasting replenished worn out immune cells with new ones and the researchers found that fasting for 2-4 days reduced PKA, an enzyme that is involved in extending lifespan in simple organisms.

In simple terms, prolonged periods of fasting - repeated cycles of 2-4 days with no food - over the course of 6 months, killed older and damaged immune cells and generated new ones.

Other studies have also linked PKA to the control of stem cell self-renewal and pluripotency - the extent to which they can become different cell-types.

Prolonged fasting also led to a drop in IGF-1, a growth factor hormone linked to aging, cancer and tumor progression.

Switching off the gene for PKA is the key step that triggers the stem cells to shift to regeneration, Prof. Longo says. "It gives the OK for stem cells to go ahead and begin proliferating and rebuild the entire system."

And the good news, he adds, is that the body also rids itself "of the parts of the system that might be damaged or old, the inefficient parts, during the fasting. Now, if you start with a system heavily damaged by chemotherapy or aging, fasting cycles can generate, literally, a new immune system."

Three-day fast protected cancer patients from toxic chemo effects in a clinical trial involving a small group of cancer patients, the team also found that fasting for 3 days before receiving chemotherapy protected them from its toxic effects.

While chemotherapy saves lives, it also causes significant damage to the immune system, and the team hopes their findings show that fasting may help to minimize some of that harm.

Prof. Longo says they are now investigating whether these same regeneration effects work with other systems and organs as well as the immune system. His lab is already planning further animal studies and clinical trials.

Funds from the National Institute of Aging of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the V Foundation and the National Cancer Institute of the NIH helped finance the study.

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A Handful of Other Studies and Commentary Heart disease, Cholesterol, Diabetes, and HGH In 2011, research cardiologists at the Intermountain Medical Center Heart Institute reported that fasting not only lowers one's risk of coronary artery disease and diabetes, but also produces significant beneficial changes in a person's blood cholesterol levels.23 According to the researchers, "Fasting causes hunger or stress. In response, the body releases more cholesterol, allowing it to utilize fat as a source of fuel, instead of glucose. This decreases the number of fat cells in the body.

This is important because the fewer fat cells a body has, the less likely it will experience insulin resistance, or diabetes." In addition, the study effectively confirmed earlier findings about the effects of fasting on human growth hormone (HGH). HGH works to protect lean muscle and metabolic balance, a response triggered and accelerated by fasting. During 24-hour fasting periods, HGH increased an average of 1,300 percent in women, and nearly 2,000 percent in men. And yet another study found that simply disrupting normal eating cycles through intermittent fasting improved the ability of the body to process, sense, and recognize the nutrients it was consuming, thereby helping to prevent obesity, diabetes, and liver diseases in mice on a high-fat diet.24 In addition, intermittent fasting raised bile acid production, which is essential for properly digesting fats, and energy expenditure and reduced inflammation.

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Brain aging A 2006 study found that both caloric restriction (CR) and intermittent fasting (IF) can prolong the health-span of the nervous system by affecting fundamental metabolic and cellular signaling pathways that regulate life-span.25 CR and IF affect energy, free radical production, and cellular stress response systems in ways that protect neurons against genetic and environmental factors to which they would otherwise succumb during aging.

Specifically, the researchers found that both IF and CR induce a mild stress response in brain cells, which results in the activation of compensating mechanisms. According to the researchers, IF regimens have previously been demonstrated to lessen and even stop damage to neurons and improve outcomes in animal models of both neurological trauma such as stroke26 and also age-related neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson's disease27 and Huntington's disease.28 Cancer Building on previous work that had found that fasting for as little as two days protects healthy cells against chemotherapy,29 another published study has established that fasting may actually retard tumors, while at the same time protecting against the harmful side effects of chemotherapy (as previously mentioned in this booklet regarding a different study).30 Researchers found that subjects given a high dose of chemotherapy after fasting continued to thrive, while half of the normally fed subjects died and half experienced lasting weight loss. In addition, laboratory studies of normal human brain cells and cancerous brain cell lines that underwent a short period of starvation (low glucose) revealed that normal cells also became resistant to chemotherapy (a good thing), while cancerous brain cell lines remained susceptible. In fact, the 2012 study found that five out of eight cancer types responded to fasting alone. Just as with chemotherapy, fasting slowed the growth and spread of tumors. And without exception, "the combination of fasting cycles plus chemotherapy" was either more or "much more" effective than chemo alone.

An additional study, on the other hand, actually found that cycles of starvation were as effective as chemotherapy drugs in delaying the progression of different tumors and increased the effectiveness of these drugs against melanoma, glioma, and breast cancer cells. In a variety of models of neuroblastoma, fasting cycles plus chemotherapy drugs--but not either treatment alone-resulted in long-term cancer-free survival. According to the researchers, these studies suggest that multiple cycles of fasting promote differential stress sen20

sitization in a wide range of tumors and could potentially replace or augment the efficacy of certain chemotherapy drugs in the treatment of various cancers.

That's not insignificant.

Diabetes and Brain Damage And finally, it has been known for many years that calorie restricted diets have been shown to have several health benefits including increased insulin sensitivity, stress resistance, reduced morbidity, and increased life span. The mechanism still remains unknown, but the need for a long-term reduction in caloric intake to achieve these benefits has always been assumed, at least until a 2002 study found that intermittent fasting by itself resulted in beneficial effects that met or exceeded those of caloric restriction. We're talking about benefits including reduced serum glucose and insulin levels and increased resistance of neurons in the brain to excitotoxic stress.31 In other words, intermittent fasting produces the same kinds of beneficial effects on glucose regulation in diabetics and neuronal resistance to injury as caloric restriction, but most likely exceeds them.

Water Fasting VS Juice Fasting VS Juice Fasting Plus Single Cell Protein Water fasting, juice fasting, and juice fasting supplemented with single cell proteins are not the same thing. They are closely related, but they are different. Although they share "some" of the same benefits, you use them for different purposes and in different ways. Unfortunately, most people are not aware of these differences and use the different forms incorrectly, at the wrong times, and in the wrong way. This leads to problems--and allows the medical community to pounce on the problems this creates and thus brand all fasting as ineffective, unnecessary, and generally harmful. We will return to this topic a little later when we explore those differences...and benefits.

But for now, despite what you have been led to believe, there are still elements of fasting--notably water fasting--that have been studied by the scientific community with consistently positive results.

Water fasting is certainly more extreme than juice fasting or juice fasting plus spirulina or chlorella, but is the extremity worth it? That depends on what you're after. As you will see in the chart, on the next page, water fasting provides some benefits that juice fasting does not--but they come at a cost. Let's take a look: 21

Ketosis Normally your body burns carbohydrates for fuel. Ultimately, carbs are the main source of fuel for your brain, heart, and most other organs. During a water fast, after your body has used up all the available carbohydrate calories from your last meal, it then turns to the glycogen stored in your liver to meet its energy needs. Once your glycogen stores are used up, your body finally turns to its fat reserves. At this point, your body is in a state of ketosis.

A person in ketosis is getting energy from ketones, little carbon fragments that are the fuel created by the breakdown of fat stores. Mild ketosis, at least short term, can be beneficial. The first benefit is that it accelerates the loss of fat in your body; the second is that it can actually help stabilize your body's glycemic response over time.32 And thirdly, it can actually reduce hunger.

When the body is in ketosis, you tend to feel less hungry.

But longer term, or at more extreme levels, ketosis is definitely more bad than good. High levels of ketones can cause gout, kidney stones, and even lead to organ failure--particularly kidney failure. Note: as little as 100 grams of carbohydrates a day (not counting fiber) can prevent ketosis in your body.

There are some new “Ketone� diets emerging which can be extremely misleading and problematic long-term. Ketosis is a natural phenomenon that does not need to be induced by Erythitrol, which is the active ingredient. Do your homework, and make yourself aware of being accosted by multi-level marketing, which is the business model of most of the new Ketone diets.

Autolysis The technical definition of autolysis is the destruction of the tissues or cells of an organism by substances that are produced within that organism.

When it comes to fasting, we can think of this as the body digesting parts of itself to compensate for insufficient calories being consumed. The breaking down of fat cells through ketosis is one example. The breaking down of muscle and organ tissue to extract protein for more immediate needs is another.

If we believe the process to be random and arbitrary, as the medical community supposes, then it should be avoided at all costs. But as any endurance athlete can tell you, your body does not break down arbitrarily under autolytic conditions. As it turns out, you body is fundamentally self-aware and intelligent; it "digests" diseased and weakened tissue before healthy tissue. For an endurance runner, that means her body will "use up" her upper body tissue before it even thinks of taking anything from her legs. Quite simply, your body has the ability to readily adjust to changing circumstances-breaking 22

down tissue in one part of the body and reassembling it in another, again as circumstances require. Autolysis is not arbitrary. During fasting, autolysis is self-aware.

Since you are consuming fewer calories in a water fast, autolysis is more pronounced than with a juice fast. This means that your body will be breaking down unneeded, damaged, and toxic tissue faster than with other forms of fasting. However, as long as you are not overdoing the calories while juice fasting, autolysis will still take place while on a juice fast just not as noticably.

Along the same lines, and just as important, is autophagy, which causes the body to turn its attention toward resetting the immune system (which purportedly can be accomplished in as few as three days) during a fast.

Mark Barna wrote a great article on this in the October 2018 issue of Discovery Magazine entitled “Not So Fast:� on how to eat for your best life.

Cellular Cleanup Crew

Fasting and caloric restriction both can ramp up autophagy, a kind of cellular housekeeping. When cells are in famine mode and don’t have to break down food, they pause their usual tasks and stop dividing. Instead, they work on repairing and recycling dam23 aged components, and cleaning out dead or harmful cell matter.

Cleansing Toxins and Cleansing Reaction Different health experts have different opinions on this, but I believe that the main purpose of fasting is intelligent autolysis, with the removal of toxins from the body an important but secondary benefit. And when it comes to intelligent autolysis, water fasting is indeed stronger. But being stronger isn't necessarily better. Juice fasting provides benefits that water fasting does not. The breakdown of tissue as a result of autolysis during fasting both creates and releases toxins into the bloodstream. The body's response to these toxins is to first oxidize them, then reduce them, and finally conjugate them (i.e., combine them with something else) to create a less toxic or inactive compound and safely escort those compounds out of the body. Most of this is accomplished in the liver, but-and here's the key point-the process requires nutritional cofactors to conjugate the toxins. When juice fasting, these cofactors are abundantly provided by the fresh juice. When water fasting, no such luck. Elimination of these toxins when water fasting is, therefore, much more uncomfortable.

And it is here that fasting with juices plus single cell proteins such as chlorella and/or spirulina stands out. Both chlorella and spirulina are chelating and purifying agents that bond with the toxins and usher them out of your body.

It's not a coincidence that algae such as chlorella are used in water treatment plants to remove toxins from drinking water.

Resting the Organs of the Digestive System All three forms of fasting are useful when it comes to resting the digestive system since they require no, or very little, work from the digestive system in terms of processing. Note: this is why protein supplementation for the juice has to be of the single cell variety-to minimize any effort made by your digestive system. Spirulina is so easy to digest because it is surrounded by a thin membrane of complex sugars which dissolve easily in the stomach. Chlorella, on the other hand, is easy to digest since virtually all varieties sold as food are "broken-celled," meaning that the cell wall has already been breached and requires no further digestion to access the nutrients inside.

Note: while fasting, you are not only resting the organs of digestion from their workload, you are also freeing up the energy in your body normally devoted to digestion. Most people think that food provides them with energy, and it does...long term. But short term, digestion is an energy intensive process. Just consider for a moment how exhausted you feel after eating a large meal.

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While fasting, you free up that energy that was previously employed in digestion for the purposes of rebuilding and repairing other tissues in the body. In his book, The Science and Fine Art of Fasting, Herbert Shelton calls this "physiological compensation.33" As he says, "Energy saved in one department may be expended in another."

Electrolyte and Glucose Imbalance and Fatigue Water fasting is the most likely form of fasting to cause problems in terms of electrolyte and glucose imbalances, as well as fatigue. Since you're not taking in any electrolytes or glucose, you are going to run short. If you're healthy and the fast is short term, that's not a problem. But if you're not healthy, or the fast goes on longer than three days, the problems and risks increase. Water fasts longer than three days can cause irregular heartbeats (especially if your potassium levels have dropped) and extreme swings of fatigue from the drop in glucose levels.

And in some cases, where the faster doesn't know what they're doing, water fasting even presents a risk of death from the lack of electrolytes. It's the reason, if you're new to fasting, I never recommend a pure water fast longer than three days unless someone knowledgeable is personally guiding you through the process. Experienced fasters who are in tune with their bodies, on the other hand, can navigate longer periods of water fasting safely. Juice fasting is much less problematic for newbies in this regard.

Interestingly, juice fasting can present an opposite problem. If you rely too much on sweet fruit juices for your fast, you can push glucose levels up much too high, which can lead to severe glycemic swings. It's the reason that I recommend juicing primarily with vegetable juices while fasting and diluting any fruit juices you drink with pure water. The sweeter the juice, the more you'll want to dilute it--two or three parts water to one part juice is not unwarranted for such juices.

By the way, this is why the Master Cleanse adds both lemon juice and maple syrup to its version of the water fast -- lemon for the electrolytes and maple syrup to prevent glucose dips.

Loss of Muscle Mass This is pretty automatic: unless you are consuming protein, you will lose some overall muscle mass. Yes, you can build muscle in particular areas even while fasting, but you accomplish this by cannibalizing protein from other muscle tissue that is not being stressed.

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Alkaline pH Ketones are both acidic and acid forming in the body; thus, pushing your body into ketosis while water fasting can be acidifying to the body.

However, drinking enough water will flush the ketones quickly from the body, thereby minimizing that effect. Nevertheless, there is nothing in a pure water fast to help promote alkalinity. Incidentally, that's one of the reasons the Master Cleanse fast includes lemon juice with the water. As I've explained in other newsletters, although citrus fruits are acidic, they actually promote alkalinity in the body. Another possibility is to water fast using a water ionizer, which will help promote alkalinity in the body. Be careful, though, not to set the alkalinity too high; otherwise, since you'll be drinking so much water during the fast, you can promote a state of too much alkalinity.

In any case, juice fasting-especially with vegetable juices-is helpful in promoting an alkaline state. And the single-celled algae are also alkalinizing.

Weight-loss Water fasting is the least effective form of fasting for weight loss since with no calories your body quickly goes into shut down mode to prevent starvation. In other words, water fasting slows your metabolism so that you "survive" on fewer calories. This means that you progressively lose less weight as the fast goes on, but even more important, you have a high rebound effect once you start eating again...since your metabolism is now slower and it takes even fewer calories to put weight back on.

For that reason, juice fasting is better for losing weight and juice fasting with one-celled protein even better. They both offer less slowing of your metabolism--and, therefore, less rebound. That said, if you decide to use either water fasting or juice fasting for weight-loss, I recommend alternate day fasting.

Eating every other day prevents the body from shutting down. Note: just make sure you don't overeat on your alternate eating days in an unconscious attempt to "compensate" for what you didn't eat the day before. Overindulging in calories on eating days pretty much nullifies the gains you make on fasting days.

Conclusion Fasting is an essential component for preventing and even reversing catastrophic illness. I personally have done all different kinds of fasting over the years--including longer water fasts, Master Cleanses, and juice fasts.

In the end, after years of trial error, I've settled on the vegetable juice fast (with a small amount of fruit juice), supplemented with chlorella or spirulina, as the best form of fasting for the vast majority of people. And it's the form of 26

fasting I personally use most often. It's effective; reasonably pleasant, as fasts go; has the smallest chance of a detox reaction; is the easiest for most people to do, and is far and away the safest form of fasting.

I had a blog at: foodandfasting.blogspot.com which I stopped maintaining a few years ago but it has some of the more ignorant phases that I went through during the beginnings of my fasting journey. Even more recently I was able to conduct a 64 day juice fast from January 1, 2016 and another 43 day fast which culminated on October 31st of the same year. Both were spectacularly successful and have cemented my belief in the process.

Type of Juice In general, you want to use low sugar vegetable juices over high sugar fruit juices. Be sure and dilute any fruit juices that you do use. As I mentioned earlier, diluting two or three parts water for each part juice is advisable when drinking fruit juices.

No bottled juices! They are essentially sugar water, or just plain dead. Get a juicer. My favorite juicers now are the Breville 800JEXL - Juice Fountain Elite Extractor for when I want something quick and easy to clean up after and the Tribest Green Star Green Power Gold when I am juicing throughout the day for more than a couple of days. The Green Power does a superior job but is more of a pain to use and clean. However, if you are juicing throughout the day, you only need to clean it at the end of the day. Note: I love my Blendtec blender (prior page). I wouldn't own anything else, but it's a blender and not a juicer. It liquefies fruits and vegetables; it doesn't juice them.

It's great for pure fruit and vegetable smoothies, but not for juice fasting (It’s more powerful that Vitamix and has a blunt blade).

Chlorella, Spirulina, or Blue Green Algae It's six of one, half dozen of the other. My personal preference is for chlorella because I believe it does a better job as a detoxing agent. It's certainly superior in its ability to chelate heavy metals.

But spirulina and blue green algae offer a better protein source. Also, look out for allergies. People who are allergic to seafood may have a problem with one or the other of these foods. Note: blue green algae is likely to be 27

the least problematic in this regard.

In any case, buy organic from a trusted manufacturer that grows their algae in a very clean environment. Don't buy bargain brands that don't state how they are grown.

Juicing schedule As a basic schedule, I like the following: One day of juice fasting with chlorella a week. (I like Mondays because it cleans things up after the weekend and breaks the flow after any indulgences I may have allowed myself. And if I'm trying to lose any weight, I'll do both Mondays and Fridays for a couple of weeks.) Once a month, I like to extend that one day juice fast three days. There's an old saying in the world of fasting. One day gives your body a rest; three days is good for minor repair; and five to seven days works as a complete overhaul for your body.

With that in mind, twice a year, I do a five-day juice and chlorella fast in combination with my bi-annual kidney/liver/gallbladder/blood detox. I do one of those the first week in January to cleanse my body of all the bad stuff I ate over the holidays-and to break any bad eating habits I acquired during that period. I do the other one mid-summer, but am flexible as to exact dates.

Warnings Diabetics need to exercise special care when fasting--even shortterm. Diabetics should not start with water fasting as this can play havoc with your blood sugar levels. And absolutely, do not base your fast on undiluted fruit juices as this can send your blood sugar levels through the roof. Vegetable juices are preferable, and the use of supplemental single-celled proteins can smooth the edges out even further. In any case, work with your physician and monitor your blood sugar regularly. Also fasting is not recommended for women who are pregnant or breastfeeding as it can stir up toxins that can impact the child. And anyone who has a chronic illness, is using prescription medications, or is under a doctor's care should check with their doctor or naturopathic physician before embarking on a fasting program.

Final Word Despite what the medical community may feel about the practice, fasting is one of the cornerstones of many alternative health programs. As I have repeatedly stated over the years, a good juicer is one of the single best investments you can make in your health. And let me be absolutely clear, I do not sell juicers, and I do not make any money if you buy one. I just recommend their use.

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General Spiritual and Religious Uses of Fasting There are multiple reasons for a person to fast. The first is purification. Contamination comes from exposure to toxic influences. Spiritually speaking, such things certainly do not need to be medically poisonous. Purification involves stripping away the outer layers of the self until you get to a more simple and pure state. Abstaining from food or certain types of food is one way of doing this.

The second reason is a focus on spirituality. Many cultures see obsession with the physical world as a detriment to spirituality. By removing some of the draws of the physical world, one can return to a more focused, spiritual life.

Such fasting is generally coupled with increased prayer.

The third is a show of humility. Humans need a certain amount of sustenance to survive, but many of us eat well beyond that basic level.

Fasting helps remind the faster of the hardships faced by the less fortunate and can encourage them to better appreciate what they have, including regular access to food. For this reason, fasts are also sometimes paired with almsgiving.

Fasts can easily address combinations of the above reasons.

Practices Different cultures approach fasting in different manners as well.

Some prohibit certain foods. For Jews and Muslims, pork is always forbidden, for example. In this case it is because it is seen as unclean. For Catholics, traditionally meat could not be eaten on Friday or various other specified days (although that is no longer required by the church). This is not because meat is unclean but because it is a luxury: fasting forces believers to eat a little more modestly.

Other people for either medical or spiritual reasons abstain from eating many foods over several days to cleanse the body. These fasts generally allow a variety of drinks, but heavily limit foods in order to flush the body out.

Political activists often sometimes go on hunger strikes, which generally involves refusing food but not water. The body can live for an extended period of time without food. Refusing water, however, quickly becomes deadly.

Some groups abstain from both food and water during part of the day but are allowed to replenish at other times of the day. This includes the Baha'i during 29

Ala and Muslims during Ramadan, both of whom fast during the day but are allowed to eat and drink at night.

Timing The timing of fasts varies greatly between groups and sometimes according to purpose.

For the Baha'i and Muslims, fasting is associated with a particular span of time in the year. In eastern religions, the time of the full moon is often a time of fasting. For others, fasting is tied to specific holidays. Catholics and some other Christians fast during Lent, the forty days before Easter, for example. Jews fast on various holidays, most prominently Yom Kippur.

Some fast before embarking on particular actions. Purification rites are a part of many ordination rituals, and fasting might be included in it. Someone going on a spiritual quest might prepare with fasting, as might one petitioning God (or other spiritual being) for particular favor.

Fasting helps remind the faster of the hardships faced by the less fortunate and can encourage them to better appreciate what they have, including regular access to food. For this reason, fasts are also sometimes paired with almsgiving, volunteerism, and selfless acts of an infinite variety.

Fasts can easily address combinations of the above reasons but no matter what psychological, spiritual, physical, or combination of these motives inspires the fast, as long as it is not exaggerated and done according to rational and evidence-based guidelines, the results will be very positive.

I will encourage those of you who follow this path to be careful about who you inform of your fasting journey because society as a whole does not accept the practice and it could be problematic from a variety of familial and social aspects. It is better to embrace humility and discard the idea of proclamations and building-up spectator expectations needlessly. There is no benefit to letting anyone know except those that you have affirmed support from.

Other than that, do it as privately as you are able.

CHRISTIAN IMPLICATIONS

"We waited, and at last our expectations were fulfilled," writes the Serbian Bishop Nikolai of Ochrid, describing the Easter service at Jerusalem. "When the Patriarch sang 'Christ is risen,' a heavy burden fell from our souls. We felt as if we also had been raised from the dead. All at once, from all around, the 30

same cry resounded like the noise of many waters. 'Christ is risen' sang the Greeks, the Russians, the Arabs, the Serbs, the Copts, the Armenians, the Ethiopians-one after another, each in his own tongue, in his own melody. . . . Coming out from the service at dawn, we began to regard everything in the light of the glory of Christ's Resurrection, and all appeared different from what it had yesterday; everything seemed better, more expressive, more glorious. Only in the light of the Resurrection does life receive meaning." 1 This sense of resurrection joy, so vividly described by Bishop Nikolai, forms the foundation of all the worship of the Orthodox Church; it is the one and only basis for our Christian life and hope. Yet, in order for us to experience the full power of this Paschal rejoicing, each of us needs to pass through a time of preparation. "We waited," says Bishop Nikolai, "and at last our expectations were fulfilled." Without this waiting, without this expectant preparation, the deeper meaning of the Easter celebration will be lost.

So it is that before the festival of Easter there has developed a long preparatory season of repentance and fasting, extending in present Orthodox usage over ten weeks. First come twenty-two days (four successive Sundays) of preliminary observance; then the six weeks or forty days of the Great Fast of Lent; and finally Holy Week. Balancing the seven weeks of Lent and Holy Week, there follows after Easter a corresponding season of fifty days of thanksgiving, concluding with Pentecost.

Just as the children of Israel ate the "bread of affliction" (Deuteronomy 16:3) in preparation for the Passover, so Christians prepare themselves for the celebration of the New Passover by observing a fast. But what is meant by this word "fast" (nisteia)? Here the utmost care is needed, so as to preserve a proper balance between the outward and the inward. On the outward level fasting involves physical abstinence from food and drink, and without such exterior abstinence a full and true fast cannot be kept; yet the rules about eating and drinking must never be treated as an end in themselves, for ascetic fasting has always an inward and unseen purpose. Man is a unity of body and soul, "a living creature fashioned from natures visible and invisible," 2 and our ascetic fasting should therefore involve both these natures at once. The tendency to overemphasize external rules about food in a legalistic way, and the opposite tendency to scorn these rules as outdated and unnecessary, are both alike to be deplored as a betrayal of true Orthodoxy. In both cases the 31

proper balance between the outward and the inward has been impaired.

The second tendency is doubtless the more prevalent in our own day, especially in the West. Until the fourteenth century, most Western Christians, in common with their brethren in the Orthodox East, abstained during Lent not only from meat but from animal products, such as eggs, milk, butter, and cheese. In East and West alike, the Lenten fast involved a severe physical effort. But in Western Christendom over the past five hundred years, the physical requirements of fasting have been steadily reduced, until by now they are little more than symbolic. How many, one wonders, of those who eat pancakes on Shrove Tuesday are aware of the original reason for this custom to use up any remaining eggs and butter before the Lenten fast begins? Exposed as it is to Western secularism, the Orthodox world in our own time is also beginning to follow the same path of laxity.

One reason for this decline in fasting is surely a heretical attitude towards human nature, a false "spiritualism" which rejects or ignores the body, viewing man solely in terms of his reasoning brain. As a result, many contemporary Christians have lost a true vision of man as an integral unity of the visible and the invisible; they neglect the positive role played by the body in the spiritual life, forgetting Saint Paul's affirmation: "Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit. . . . Glorify God with your body" (1 Corinthians 6:19, 20). Another reason for the decline in fasting among Orthodox is the argument, commonly advanced in our times, that the traditional rules are no longer possible today.

These rules presuppose, so it is urged, a closely organized, non-pluralistic Christian society, following an agricultural way of life that is now increasingly a thing of the past. There is a measure of truth in this. But it needs also to be said that fasting, as traditionally practiced in the Church, has always been difficult and has always involved hardship. Many of our contemporaries are willing to fast for reasons of health or beauty, in order to lose weight; cannot we Christians do as much for the sake of the heavenly Kingdom? Why should the self-denial gladly accepted by previous generations of Orthodox prove such an intolerable burden to their successors today? Once Saint Seraphim of Sarov was asked why the miracles of grace, so abundantly manifest in the past, were no longer apparent in his own day, and to this he replied: "Only one thing is lacking - a firm resolve."3 The primary aim of fasting is to make us conscious of our dependence upon 32

God. If practiced seriously, the Lenten abstinence from food-particularly in the opening days-involves a considerable measure of real hunger, and also a feeling of tiredness and physical exhaustion. The purpose of this is to lead us in turn to a sense of inward brokenness and contrition; to bring us, that is, to the point where we appreciate the full force of Christ's statement, "Without Me you can do nothing" (John 15:5). If we always take our fill of food and drink, we easily grow overconfident in our own abilities, acquiring a false sense of autonomy and self-sufficiency.

The observance of a physical fast undermines this sinful complacency. Stripping from us the specious assurance of the Pharisee-who fasted, it is true, but not in the right spirit-Lenten abstinence gives us the saving self-dissatisfaction of the Publican (Luke 18:10-13). Such is the function of the hunger and the tiredness: to make us "poor in spirit," aware of our helplessness and of our dependence on God's aid.

Yet it would be misleading to speak only of this element of weariness and hunger. Abstinence leads, not merely to this, but also to a sense of lightness, wakefulness, freedom, and joy. Even if the fast proves debilitating at first, afterwards we find that it enables us to sleep less, to think more clearly, and to work more decisively. As many doctors acknowledge, periodical fasts contribute to bodily hygiene. While involving genuine self-denial, fasting does not seek to do violence to our body but rather to restore it to health and equilibrium. Most of us in the Western world habitually eat more than we need.

Fasting liberates our body from the burden of excessive weight and makes it a willing partner in the task of prayer, alert and responsive to the voice of the Spirit.

It will be noted that in common Orthodox usage the words "fasting" and "abstinence" are employed interchangeably. Prior to the Second Vatican Council, the Roman Catholic Church made a clear distinction between the two terms: abstinence concerned the types of food eaten, irrespective of quantity, whereas fasting signified a limitation on the number of meals or on the amount of food that could be taken. Thus on certain days both abstinence and fasting were required; alternatively, the one might be prescribed but not the other. In the Orthodox Church a clear-cut distinction is not made between the two words. During Lent there is frequently a limitation on the number of meals eaten each day, but when a meal is permitted there is no restriction on 33

the amount of food allowed. The Fathers simply state, as a guiding principle, that we should never eat to satiety but always rise from the table feeling that we could have taken more and that we are now ready for prayer.

If it is important not to overlook the physical requirements of fasting, it is even more important not to overlook its inward significance. Fasting is not a mere matter of diet. It is moral as well as physical. True fasting is to be converted in heart and will; it is to return to God, to come home like the Prodigal to our Father's house. In the words of Saint John Chrysostom it means "abstinence not only from food but from sins." "The fast," he insists, "should be kept not by the mouth alone but also by the eye, the ear, the feet, the hands, and all the members of the body": the eye must abstain from impure sights, the ear from malicious gossip, the hands from acts of injustice. 4 It is useless to fast from food, protests Saint Basil, and yet to indulge in cruel criticism and slander: "You do not eat meat, but you devour your brother." 5 The same point is made in the Triodion, especially during the first week of Lent: As we fast from food, let us abstain also from every passion. . . .

Let us observe a fast acceptable and pleasing to the Lord.

True fasting is to put away all evil, To control the tongue, to forbear from anger, To abstain from lust, slander, falsehood, and perjury.

If we renounce these things, then is our fasting true and acceptable to God. Let us keep the Fast not only by refraining from food, But by becoming strangers to all the bodily pas sions.6 The inner significance of fasting is best summed up in the triad: prayer, fasting, almsgiving. Divorced from prayer and from the reception of the holy sacraments, unaccompanied by acts of compassion, our fasting becomes pharisaical or even demonic. It leads, not to contrition and joyfulness, but to pride, inward tension, and irritability. The link between prayer and fasting is rightly indicated by Father Alexander Elchaninov. A critic of fasting says to him: "Our work suffers and we become irritable. . . I have never seen servants [in prerevolutionary Russia] so bad tempered as 34

during the last days of Holy Week. Clearly, fasting has a very bad effect on the nerves." To this Father Alexander replies: "You are quite right. . . . If it is not accompanied by prayer and an increased spiritual life, it merely leads to a heightened state of irritability. It is natural that servants who took their fasting seriously and who were forced to work hard during Lent, while not being allowed to go to church, were angry and irritable." 7 Fasting then is valueless or even harmful when not combined with prayer; In the Gospels the devil is cast out, not by fasting alone, but by "prayer and fasting" (Matthew 17:21; Mark 9:29); and of the early Christians it is said, not simply that they fasted, but that they "fasted and prayed" (Acts 13:3; compare 14:23). In both the Old and the New Testament fasting is seen, not as an end in itself, but as an aid to more intense and living prayer, as a preparation for decisive action or for direct encounter with God. Thus our Lord's forty-day fast in the wilderness was the immediate preparation for His public ministry (Matthew 4:1-11). When Moses fasted on Mount Sinai (Exodus 34:28) and Elijah on Mount Horeb (1 Kings 19:8-12), the fast was in both cases linked with a theophany. The same connection between fasting and the vision of God is evident in the case of Saint Peter (Acts 10:9-17). He "went up on the housetop to pray about the sixth hour, and he became very hungry and wanted to eat"; and it was in this state that he fell into a trance and heard the divine voice. Such is always the purpose of ascetic fasting-to enable us, as the Triodion puts it, to "draw near to the mountain of prayer."8 Prayer and fasting should in their turn be accompanied by almsgiving-by love for others expressed in practical form, by works of compassion and forgiveness. Eight days before the opening of the Lenten fast, on the Sunday of the Last Judgment, the appointed Gospel is the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats (Matthew 25:31-46), reminding us that the criterion in the coming judgment will not be the strictness of our fasting but the amount of help that we have given to those in need. In the words of the Triodion: Knowing the commandments of the Lord, let this be our way of life: Let us feed the hungry, let us give the thirsty drink, Let us clothe the naked, let us welcome strangers, Let us visit those in prison and the sick. Then the Judge of all the earth will say even to us: 35

"Come, ye blessed of My Father, inherit the Kingdom prepared for you."9 The second-century Shepherd of Hermas insists that the money saved through fasting is to be given to the widow, the orphan, and the poor. 10 But almsgiving means more than this. It is to give not only our money but our time, not only what we have but what we are; it is to give a part of ourselves.

When we hear the Triodion speak of almsgiving, the word should almost always be taken in this deeper sense. For the mere giving of money can often be a substitute and an evasion, a way of protecting ourselves from closer personal involvement with those in distress. On the other hand, to do nothing more than offer reassuring words of advice to someone crushed by urgent material anxieties is equally an evasion of our responsibilities (see James 2:16). Bearing in mind the unity already emphasized between man's body and his soul, we seek to offer help on both the material and the spiritual levels at once.

"When thou seest the naked, cover him; and hide not thyself from thine own flesh." The Eastern liturgical tradition, in common with that of the West, treats Isaiah 58:3-8 as a basic Lenten text. So we read in the Triodion: While fasting with the body, brethren, let us also fast in spirit.

Let us loose every bond of iniquity; Let us undo the knots of every contract made by violence; Let us tear up all unjust agreements; Let us give bread to the hungry And welcome to our house the poor who have no roof to cover them, That we may receive great mercy from Christ our God.11 Always in our acts of abstinence we should keep in mind Saint Paul's admonition not to condemn others who fast less strictly: "Let not him who abstains pass judgment on him who eats" (Romans 14:3). Equally, we remember Christ's condemnation of outward display in prayer, fasting, or almsgiving (Matthew 6:1-18). Both these Scriptural passages are often recalled in the Triodion:

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Consider well, my soul: dost thou fast?

Then despise not thy neighbor.

Dost thou abstain from food? Condemn not thy brother.

Come, let us cleanse ourselves by almsgiving and acts of mercy to the poor, Not sounding a trumpet or making a show of our charity.

Let not our left hand know what our right hand is doing; Let not vainglory scatter the fruit of our almsgiving; But in secret let us call on Him that knows all secrets: Father, forgive us our trespasses, for Thou lovest mankind. 12 If we are to understand correctly the text of the Triodion and the spirituality that underlies it, there are five misconceptions about the Lenten fast against which we should guard. In the first place, the Lenten fast is not intended only for monks and nuns, but is enjoined on the whole Christian people.

Nowhere do the Canons of the Ecumenical or Local Councils suggest that fasting is only for monks and not for the laity. By virtue of their Baptism, all Christians-whether married or under monastic vows-are Cross-bearers, following the same spiritual path. The exterior conditions in which they live out their Christianity display a wide variety, but in its inward essence the life is one. Just as the monk by his voluntary self-denial is seeking to affirm the intrinsic goodness and beauty of God's creation, so also is each married Christian required to be in some measure an ascetic. The way of negation and the way of affirmation are interdependent, and every Christian is called to follow both ways at once.

In the second place, the Lenten fast should not be misconstrued in a Pelagian sense. If the Lenten texts are continually urging us to greater personal efforts, this should not be taken as implying that our progress depends solely upon the exertion of our own will. On the contrary, whatever we achieve in the Lenten fast is to be regarded as a free gift of grace from God. The Great Canon of Saint Andrew of Crete leaves no doubt at all on this point: I have no tears, no repentance, no compunction; 37

But as God do Thou Thyself, 0 Savior, bestow them on me.13 In the third place, our fasting should not be self-willed but obedient. When we fast, we should not try to invent special rules for ourselves, but we should follow as faithfully as possible the accepted pattern set before us by Holy Tradition. This accepted pattern, expressing as it does the collective conscience of the People of God, possesses a hidden wisdom and balance not to be found in ingenious austerities devised by our own fantasy. Where it seems that the traditional regulations are not applicable to our personal situation, we should seek the counsel of our spiritual father-not in order legalistically to secure a "dispensation" from him, but in order humbly with his help to discover what is the will of God for us. Above all, if we desire for ourselves not some relaxation but some piece of additional strictness, we should not embark upon it without our spiritual father's blessing. Such has been the practice since the early centuries of the Church's life: Abba Antony said: "I know of monks who fell after much labor and lapsed into madness, because they trusted in their own work and neglected the commandment that says: `Ask your father, and he will tell you'“(Deuteronomy 32:7)."

Again he said: "So far as possible, for every step that a monk takes, for every drop of water that he drinks in his cell, he should consult the gerontes, in case he makes some mistake in this."14 These words apply not only to monks but also to lay people living in the "world," even though the latter may be bound by a less strict obedience to their spiritual father. If proud and willful, our fasting assumes a diabolical character, bringing us closer not to God but to Satan. Because fasting renders us sensitive to the realities of the spiritual world, it can be dangerously ambivalent: for there are evil spirits as well as good.

In the fourth place, paradoxical though it may seem, the period of Lent is a time not of gloom but of joyfulness. It is true that fasting brings us to repentance and to grief for sin, but this penitent grief, in the vivid phrase of Saint John Climacus, is a "joy-creating sorrow."15 The Triodion deliberately mentions both tears and gladness in a single sentence: Grant me tears falling as the rain from heaven, 0 Christ, As I keep this joyful day of the Fast.16 38

It is remarkable how frequently the themes of joy and light recur in the texts for the first day of Lent: With joy let us enter upon the beginning of the Fast.

Let us not be of sad countenance. . . .

Let us joyfully begin the all-hallowed season of abstinence; And let us shine with the bright radiance of the holy commandments. . . .

All mortal life is but one day, so it is said, To those who labor with love. There are forty days in the Fast: Let us keep them all with joy.17 The season of Lent, it should be noted, falls not in midwinter when the countryside is frozen and dead, but in spring when all things are returning to life.

The English word "Lent" originally had the meaning "springtime"; and in a text of fundamental importance the Triodion likewise describes the Great Fast as "springtime": The springtime of the Fast has dawned, The flower of repentance has begun to open. 0 brethren, let us cleanse ourselves from all impurity And sing to the Giver of Light: Glory be to Thee, who alone lovest mankind.18 Lent signifies not winter but spring, not darkness but light, not death but renewed vitality. Certainly it has its somber aspect, with the repeated prostrations at the weekday services, with the dark vestments of the priest, with the hymns sung to a subdued chant, full of compunction. In the Christian Empire of Byzantium theatres were closed and public spectacles forbidden during Lent;19 and even today weddings are forbidden in the seven weeks of the fast.20 Yet these elements of austerity should not blind us to the fact that the fast is not a burden, not a punishment, but a gift of God's grace: Come, 0 ye people, and today let us accept The grace of the Fast as a gift from God.21 Fifthly and finally, our Lenten abstinence does does not imply a rejection of God's creation. As Saint Paul insists, "Nothing is unclean in itself" (Romans 39

14:14). All that God has made is "very good" (Genesis 1:31): to fast is not to deny this intrinsic goodness but to reaffirm it. "To the pure all things are pure" (Titus 1:15), and so at the Messianic banquet in the Kingdom of heaven there will be no need for fasting and ascetic self-denial. But, living as we do in a fallen world, and suffering as we do from the consequences of sin, both original and personal, we are not pure; and so we have need of fasting. Evil resides not in created things as such but in our attitude towards them, that is, in our will. The purpose of fasting, then, is not to repudiate the divine creation but to cleanse our will. During the fast we deny our bodily impulses-for example, our spontaneous appetite for food and drink-not because these impulses are in themselves evil, but because they have been disordered by sin and require to be purified through self-discipline. In this way, asceticism is a fight not against but for the body; the aim of fasting is to purge the body from alien defilement and to render it spiritual. By rejecting what is sinful in our will, we do not destroy the God-created body but restore it to its true balance and freedom. In Father Sergei Bulgakov's phrase, we kill the flesh in order to acquire a body.

But in rendering the body spiritual, we do not thereby dematerialize it, depriving it of its character as a physical entity. The "spiritual" is not to be equated with the non-material, neither is the "fleshly" or carnal to be equated with the bodily. In Saint Paul's usage, "flesh" denotes the totality of man, soul and body together, in so far as he is fallen and separated from God; and in the same way "spirit" denotes the totality of man, soul and body together, in so far as he is redeemed and divinized by grace.22 Thus the soul as well as the body can become carnal and fleshly, and the body as well as the soul can become spiritual. When Saint Paul enumerates the "works of the flesh" (Galatians 5:19-21), he includes such things as sedition, heresy, and envy, which involve the soul much more than the body. In making our body spiritual, then, the Lenten fast does not suppress the physical aspect of our human nature, but makes our materiality once more as God intended it to be.

Such is the way in which we interpret our abstinence from food. Bread and wine and the other fruits of the earth are gifts from God, of which we partake with reverence and thanksgiving. If Orthodox Christians abstain from eating meat at certain times, or in some cases continually, this does not mean that the Orthodox Church is on principle vegetarian and considers meateating to be a sin; and if we abstain sometimes from wine, this does not mean that we 40

uphold teetotalism. When we fast, this is not because we regard the act of eating as shameful, but in order to make all our eating spiritual, sacramental, and eucharistic-no longer a concession to greed but a means of communion with God the giver. So far from making us look on food as a defilement, fasting has exactly the opposite effect. Only those who have learnt to control their appetites through abstinence can appreciate the full glory and beauty of what God has given to us. To one who has eaten nothing for twenty -four hours, an olive can seem full of nourishment. A slice of plain cheese or a hardboiled egg never tastes so good as on Easter morning, after seven weeks of fasting.

Those who fast, so far from repudiating material things, are on the contrary assisting in their redemption. They are fulfilling the vocation assigned to the "sons of God" by Saint Paul: "The created universe waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. . . . The creation will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail until now" (Romans 8.19-22). By means of our Lenten abstinence, we seek with God's help to exercise this calling as priests of the creation, restoring all things to their primal splendor. Ascetic self-discipline, then, signifies a rejection of the world, only in so far as it is corrupted by the fall; of the body, only in so far as it is dominated by sinful passions. Lust excludes love: so long as we lust after other persons or other things, we cannot truly love them. By delivering us from lust, the fast renders us capable of genuine love. No longer ruled by the selfish desire to grasp and to exploit, we begin to see the world with the eyes of Adam in Paradise. Our self-denial is the path that leads to our selfaffirmation; it is our means of entry into the cosmic liturgy whereby all things visible and invisible ascribe glory to their Creator.

Differences Between Diets and Eating Disorders (ED) If you have a healthy attitude toward eating (meaning that you respond appropriately with rational flexibility toward your hunger, social environments, compulsions, and so on) and you are eating enough to fuel your day while fasting, then fasting is not an eating disorder. Moreover, many people don't eat 3 times a day. I myself eat 4-5 times a day, just in smaller portions; my wife eats only 2 meals a day.

However, the restrictive nature of fasting can be quite dangerous for some41

one with an eating disorder (ED). Absolutely do not suggest someone with an ED to take up fasting or intermittent fasting, as it could trigger ED thoughts and behaviors.

Eating disorders are not diets, they're dangerous, addictive, compulsive behaviors categorized by a loss of self-control and an inability to think and behave rationally. They're mental illnesses that need diagnosis and treatment.

Diets are voluntary, planned behaviors that meet the body's nutritional requirements but when you consider that even the National Eating Disorder Association makes a distinction between the 50% of girls who use unhealthy weight control behaviors (such as skipping meals, fasting, smoking, vomiting, and using laxatives) and the 25% of those pathological dieters that will progress to developing full-blown eating disorders, it's no wonder people are unsure of how to recognize the difference.

So here's a look at five subtle differences between dieting and eating disorders (ED) in hopes of shedding light on this complicated issue.

1. Relationship with Food When a person on a healthy diet is weighing their options regarding food intake, a pang of guilt may creep up when working out how they might feel later on. This thought process isn't problematic because it's relatively the same way that we feel whenever we do anything that we feel is detrimental to our ultimate goals. A person with a healthy relationship with food isn't going to spend days worrying about the intake. Their emotional well-being isn't at stake. They feel guilt, process it, and move on.

Eating disorders, on the other hand, don't work like that. Instead of the possible guilt associated with goal-setting, eating disorders can cause chestconstricting feelings that accompany fear whenever food is around. Rather than feeling a desire for the food and dealing with what the consequences (positive or negative) will be if it's eaten, like a person on a diet thinks through, the feeling is of disgust and aversion, wanting to push it away.

2. Relationship with Weight When people decide to go on a diet, it's usually because they want to reach a certain goal weight, one that is within healthy range. They want to lose or gain enough weight to achieve a look that they believe will suit them. Five, ten, twenty, fifty pounds.

When people have eating disorders, there is no goal weight because 120 won't be low enough. If they reach 100, and they want 99. If they reach 95 42

and they want 85. "Just five more pounds, just five more pounds" becomes the mantra to an insatiable, unjustifiable need. When people suffer from anorexia, they want to be weightless.

It's the difference between wanting to look good in a swimming suit and wanting to walk in the snow without leaving a footprint.

3. Relationship with the Scale The difference between recognizing the scale as an inanimate object and personifying it as your best friend or worst enemy, depending on the number that it blinks back at you, is another distinction between dieting and anorexia.

People on healthy diets understand that a scale helps them record their progress.

People with eating disorders depend on scales for validation.

4. Relationship with Exercise Going to the gym should be fun. It should be part of a healthy routine. It should be to work on your body out of love for your body because healthy dieting and its associated exercise is about feeling good.

Using the gym to purge is about feeling horrible because there's a difference between going to the gym to burn a couple hundred calories and forcing midnight treadmill sessions to punish yourself. The question to ask is what's your motivation? Are you going to the gym for health? Or are you going for attempted redemption?

5. Relationship with Brain Some eating disordered people are so entirely fixated on food that some psychologists liken anorexia to a form of OCD, obsessively thinking about food and compulsively avoiding it.

Although food-centered thoughts also occur more frequently in people who are dieting, the difference is how much control those thoughts have over your life. It's the difference between paying attention to something that you haven't before (like, say, calories or food pyramids) and not being able to think about anything else because food - as well as fat and weight - is what an eating disordered person's illness revolves around, so too can their lives.

Every second of every day is spent trying to work out how, exactly, to avoid something that healthy people can do without a second thought. For an eating disordered person, food is less of an awareness and more of an obsession.

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Footnotes: 1.

Bishop Nikolai (Velimirovich), Missionary Letters: abbreviated from the translation in The Journal of the Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius, no. 24 (1934), pp. 26-27.

2.

Vespers for Saturday of the Dead.

3.

See V. Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (London, 1957), p. 216.

4.

Homilies on the Statues, iii, 3-4 (PG. [Patrologia Graeca] 1 xlix, 51-53).

5.

Homilies on Fasting, i, 10 (PG. xxxi, 181B).

6.

Vespers for Sunday evening (Sunday of Forgiveness); Vespers for Monday and Tuesday in the first week..

7.

The Diary of a Russian Priest (London, 1967), p. 128.

8.

Matins for Tuesday in the first week.

9.

Vespers for Saturday evening (Sunday of the Last Judgment).

10. Similitudes, V, iii, 7.

11. Vespers for Wednesday in the first week.

12. Matins for the Sunday of the Last Judgment; Vespers for Sunday evening (Sunday of Orthodoxy).

13. Canticle Two, troparion 25.

14. Apophthegmata Patrum, alphabetical collection (PG. lxv), Antony 37 and 38. The Greek term geron (in Russian, starets) means literally an old manold, not necessarily in years, but in spiritual experience and wisdom. He is one endowed by the Holy Spirit with the gift of seeing into men's hearts and offering them guidance.

15. The Ladder of Paradise, Step 7, title.

16. Vespers for Monday in the first week.

17. All these quotations are from Matins for the first Monday.

18. Vespers for Wednesday in the week before Lent.

19. Photius, Nomocanon, Tit. vii, c. I. Might not this rule be applied by con50

temporary Orthodox to television?

20. Council of Laodicea (c. A.D. 364), Canon 52. Dispensations from this rule require episcopal permission, which should not be granted except for grave reasons.

21. Matins for Monday in the first week.

22. The liturgical texts, however, do not always conform to this biblical usage, but sometimes employ the word "flesh" as a synonym for "body."

23. "Study finds routine periodic fasting is good for your health, and your heart." Intermountain Medical Center. 3 April 11. (Accessed 3 Mar 2012.) http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-04/imcsfr033111.php 24. Megumi Hatori, Christopher Vollmers, Amir Zarrinpar, et al.

"TimeRestricted Feeding without Reducing Caloric Intake Prevents Metabolic Diseases in Mice Fed a High-Fat Diet. 6 June 2012. Cell Metabolism 15(6) pp. 848 - 860. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/ S1550413112001891 25. Bronwen Martin, Mark P. Mattson, Stuart Maudsleya. "Caloric restriction and intermittent fasting: Two potential diets for successful brain aging."

Ageing Res Rev. 2006 August; 5(3): 332--353. http:// www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2622429 26. Yu ZF, Mattson MP. "Dietary restriction and 2-deoxyglucose administration reduce focal ischemic brain damage and improve behavioral outcome: evidence for a preconditioning mechanism." J. Neurosci. Res. 1999;57:830--839 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15247064 27. Duan W, Mattson MP. "Dietary restriction and 2-deoxyglucose administration improve behavioral outcome and reduce degeneration of dopaminergic neurons in models of Parkinson's disease." J. Neurosci. Res. 1999;57:195--206. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9354418 28. Duan W, Guo Z, Jiang H, Ware M, Li XJ, Mattson MP. "Dietary restriction normalizes glucose metabolism and BDNF levels, slows disease progression, and increases survival in huntingtin mutant mice." Proc. Natl. Acad.

Sci. U.S.A. 2003;100:2911--2916. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/ articles/PMC151440 51

29. Lizzia Raffaghello, Changhan Lee, Fernando M. Safdie, et al.

"Starvationdependent differential stress resistance protects normal but not cancer cells against high-dose chemotherapy." PNAS June 17, 2008 vol. 105 no. 24 http://www.pnas.org/content/105/24/8215.full 30. Lee C, Raffaghello L, Brandhorst S, Safdie FM, et al. "Fasting cycles retard growth of tumors and sensitize a range of cancer cell types to chemotherapy." Sci Transl Med. 2012 Mar 7;4(124):124ra27. http:// www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22323820 31. R. Michael Anson, Zhihong Guo, Mark P. Mattson, et al. "Intermittent fasting dissociates beneficial effects of dietary restriction on glucose metabolism and neuronal resistance to injury from calorie intake." PNAS 2003 100 (10) 6216-6220. http://www.pnas.org/ content/100/10/6216.full.pdf+html?sid=b96bbfde-06cd-4192848023a7792e907c 32. Eric C Westman1, William S Yancy, John C Mavropoulos, et al. "The Effect of a Low-Carbohydrate, Ketogenic Diet Versus a Low-Glycemic Index on Glycemic Control in Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus" Nutrition & Metabolism 2008, 5:36. http://www.nutritionandmetabolism.com/content/ pdf/1743 -7075-5-36.pdf 33. Herbert M. Shelton. "The Science and Fine Art of Fasting." Natural Hygiene Press; 5th edition (August 1978) Vegetarianism is the practice of abstaining from the consumption of meat (red meat, poultry, seafood, and the flesh of any other animal).

Veganism is the practice of abstaining from ingesting animal products. This means avoiding not only meat but also egg and dairy products and other animal-derived foodstuffs. This philosophy means opposing the use of animal products for any purpose.

Raw veganism is a diet that combines the concepts of veganism and raw foodism. It excludes all food and products of animal origin, as well as food cooked at a temperature above 48 °C (118 °F). A raw vegan diet includes raw vegetables and fruits, nuts and nut pastes, grain and legume sprouts, seeds, plant oils, sea vegetables, herbs, mushrooms, and fresh juices.

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FASTING? Fasting is not a new thing. In fact, it’s been around humans for thousands of years with the ancient Greeks marveling at its miraculous impact on the body and mind. A 16th-century German-Swiss physician, call it “the physician within.” Then humankind, doomed forever it seems to repeat its shortcomings, forgot about it. Other, more important things regarding “progress” became the shiny object that swiveled our attention away until we “discovered”, in 1946, that fasting caused longer, less diseased lives (Michelle Harvie published her research in The Journal of Nutrition). The reason I bring this, and all the stuff in this little booklet, up is because fasting is anything but a fad. It is as old as we are as a species. It exists for our well-being, longevity, and peaceful coexistence with ourselves.

Everything else that you’ll read is for your entertainment, for you to pick and choose what to become curious about and research, or for you to discard and never think about again. Like life, and our place in it, it’s all contingent and built on your choice . . . I just want you to have more of them.

The reason that I open this booklet’s discussion of red meat, dairy products, refined foods, sugar, and toxins is because it is as important, in my opinion, to know what you are opposed to as what you are fasting towards. That’s why I constructed the booklet beginning with the dark clouds that you will be running from (and why) and ending with the bright light that you will be running towards (spirituality). I hope it makes sense to you but in the end, if it doesn’t, just pass this booklet along to someone who is tired of being imprisoned in their body and is seeking liberation. No harm, no foul. Not everyone wants to be free of their addictions and there is no shame in whatever one chooses.

Fasting was an integral part of my walking away from my own addictions, and it became so central, so empowering, and so rewarding that I could not not pass what I found along to the brothers and sisters that I walk this earth with.

Bless you all. I love you.

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