I learned a lot about fasting last weekend at a lecture by Dr. Jason Fung, a Canadian Nephrologist who has come over to the dark side – alternative medicine. Over the next few days, I’m going to share as much as I can of what I learned.
As little as five years ago, when we talked about fasting, healers of all kinds said ‘yes, it makes sense, but no one is ever really going to DO it’. It was considered unethical to even consider a clinical trial that included fasting.
Well my job as a healer is not to tell people what they can or cannot do, but to tell people what they NEED to do in order to get healthier. Sometimes, you have to let the body heal itself, and just get out of the way. And that’s really what fasting is. You, using your body’s own natural healing abilities, dealing with metabolic issues.
The father of modern medicine [Hippocrates (460-370 BC)] said ‘Our food should be our medicine; our medicine should be our food. But to eat when you are sick is to feed your sickness.’ Throughout history, a lot of very smart people recommended fasting. Benjamin Franklin said ‘The best of all medicines are resting and fasting.’
Fasting is a natural instinct, not just in humans, but everywhere in the animal kingdom. When any animal is sick, its natural instinct is to refuse food. When you are acutely sick, you certainly don’t go to the buffet. Now that so many of our ‘sicknesses’ are chronic, why do we continue to feed them?
. . . More to come. Stay tuned!