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Fasting |
All animals except modern man fast instinctively when sick.
To this day, primitive tribes in the Amazon, central Africa and remote parts of Asia maintain 'sick houses' on the outskirts of their villages, where ailing tribesman retire for prolonged and total fasts until they recover their health and vitality.
Hindu yogis are famous fasters and colon cleansers.
Therapeutic fasting has always been an important part of Taoist training regimens. Masters made their students fast for prolonged periods to purify body and clarify mind before introducing them to the most advanced techniques.
The ancient Greeks fasted for health and longevity, and were known for their robust physical health. Galen, Paracelsus and Hippocrates, who are recognized as the founding fathers of Western medicine, prescribed and practiced fasting for all serious ailments.
Pythagoras required his students to fast for 40 days to purify body and mind prior to receiving his highest teachings.
Plato and Aristotle, whose thought forms the very warp and woof of Western philosophy, fasted regularly to enhance physical health and stimulate mental powers.
The Bible mentions fasting 74 times, and Jesus himself fasted frequently, sometimes up to 40 days at a time. So did Buddha. Fasting is a universal natural response to sickness and debility, not a cultural or religious 'trip'.
Fasting triggers a truly wondrous cleansing process that reaches right down to each and every cell and tissue in the body.
Within 24 hours of curtailing food intake, enzymes stop entering the stomach and travel instead into the intestines and into the bloodstream, where they circulate and gobble up all sorts of waste matter, including dead and damaged cells, unwelcome microbes, metabolic wastes, and pollutants.
All organs and glands get a much-needed and well-deserved rest, during which their tissues are purified and rejuvenated and their functions balanced and regulated. The entire alimentary canal (stomach, small intestines, large intestine/colon) is swept clean, and what comes out the lower end should astonish and disgust the first-time fasters sufficiently to make fasting and colon cleansing a life-long habit.
Perhaps the most important benefit of fasting is that it thoroughly cleans and purifies the bloodstream.
Blood is responsible for delivering nutrients and oxygen to every cell in the body, and it must also carry away metabolic wastes from the cells for excretion in the kidneys and lungs. Blood is also the body's immunological watchman, circulating white blood cells, enzymes and other immunity factors are on 24-hour-a-day 'search-and-destroy' missions against invaders.
Dirty blood simply cannot perform these functions properly. As a result, malnutrition sets in, resistance plummets, toxemia becomes a chronic condition, and germs have a field day invading your most valuable tissues.
Unless you live an ascetic life far from civilization and avoid all dietary folly, your blood and other tissues are bound to accumulate toxins and generally lose their functional vitality.
If you don't purge yourself of these toxins on a regular basis, toxemia gets worse and worse, until the body cannot stand it any longer and either purges itself spontaneously in form of diarrhea, acne, pimples, boils, 'liver spots', foul perspiration, body odor, bad breath, and so forth, or else it simply gives up the battle and succumbs to cancer, tuberculosis and other fatal conditions.
An Associated Press release dated 28 May 1986, reports the following results of forced fasting on laboratory rats in a recent study on aging in America:
When the diets of laboratory rats are severely restricted, they live far longer than do otherwise identical animals that are allowed to eat as much as they want. In fact, researchers say such food limits are the only way they know for significantly extending those rodents' normal lifespans.
Fasting also reestablishes proper pH balance in the blood.
As we have seen, the Yin and Yang of diet and digestion boil down to acid/alkaline balance in Western scientific terminology.
Blood acidosis has become a major bane of contemporary civilization and is responsible for all sorts of misery. When acid builds up to intolerable levels in the blood, the bloodstream deposits the acid as crystals in the various joints, where they form spurs that literally 'cement' your joints together and supplant the natural synovial fluids that lubricate joints.
The result is thus painful, debilitating arthritis. Fasting permits enzymes to enter the joints and dissolve these crystals, thereby restoring the synovial fluids and recovering joint mobility.
Fasting also eliminates acidosis from the bloodstream itself. In fact, the unpleasant side effects felt during the first three days of a fast are due entirely to these acid crystals and other toxins entering the bloodstream en masse for elimination.
Fasting is excellent therapy for mental illness. In Russia, where fasting is called 'hunger cure', spectacular results have been achieved. In 1972, Dr. Yuri Nikolayev of the Moscow Research Institute of Psychiatry reported successful treatment of over 7,000 patients suffering from various psychic disorders such as schizophrenia and neurosis.
Suffering from impotence or infertility? You might take a look for the culprit in your colon.....clogged toxic colons negatively influence both male and female sexuality by pressing against and thereby interfering with sexual organs and glands.
Many cases have been reported in which married couples who had been childless for 10 or 20 years owing to 'infertility' found themselves 'with child' after a few therapeutic fasts combined with colon cleansing
The tenth-century AD Sung Dynasty physician Chang Tsung-cheng wrote extensively on the therapeutic benefits of cleansing the colon of accumulated debris and poisons, and he recommended this therapy for all sorts of seemingly unrelated ailments, including indigestion and constipation, breathing problems, headaches and fever, stiff and painful joints, mental and emotional abnormalities, and so forth. He wrote:
All physicians know that the unobstructed circulation of fresh blood and vital energy are the most important factors in health. But, if the stomach and bowels are blocked, then blood and energy stagnate.
The traditional Taoist method of cleansing the colon involved therapeutic fasts combined with powerful herbal purgatives that dissolved mucus and dredged debris from the colon.
These methods are mentioned as far back as the third century BC, in the Yellow Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine.
Today, chemical laxatives and cathartics have become among the most popular drugs in the Western world, where constipation has become a chronic problem for young and old, male and female alike.
Unlike the natural herbs Chinese physicians used to purge the bowels in conjunction with the therapeutic fasts and nutritional therapy, these Western drugs are inorganic chemicals that are entirely incompatible with the human system. They work by irritating the lining of the colon so severely that is literally recoils like a wounded snake, expelling the offending drug along with whatever loose debris happens to be in the way.
They do nothing whatsoever to remove the deeply impacted encrustation's of putrefied protein wastes, toxic residues of fermentation, and layers of dried mucus.
With continued use, these drugs gradually weaken the bowels so much that they fail to function at all without the artificial stimulus of ever stronger chemicals. And when those no longer work, the hapless patients next step is into the surgery room for a colostomy.
Fortunately, there is a better 'Way' to purge the colon and restore normal bowel movements, fasting based entirely on nature's most abundant and life-giving element-- water.