THE FASTING CURE
(Deals with nature's own remedy for disease, and how to make use of
it.)
We have next to consider the various human ailments, what causes them,
and how they can be remedied. As it happens, I know of a cure that comes
pretty near being that impossible thing, a "cure-all." At any rate, it
is so far ahead of all other cures, that a discussion of it will cover
three-fourths of the subject.
When I was a boy living in New York, there was a man by the name of Dr.
Tanner, who took a forty-day fast. He was on public exhibition at the
time, and was supposed to be watched day and night; the newspapers gave
a great deal of attention to the story, and crowds used to come to gaze
at him. I remember very well the conversations I heard about the matter.
People were quite sure that it couldn't be true. The man must be getting
something to eat on the sly; he must have some nourishment in the water
he drank; no human being could fast more than five or six days without
starving to death.
In the year 1910 I published in the United States and England a magazine
article telling how on several occasions I had fasted ten or twelve
days, and what I had accomplished by it. I found that I had the same
difficulty to confront as old Dr. Tanner; I received scores of letters
from people who called me a "faker," and I read scores of newspaper
editorials to the same effect. The New York Times published a dispatch
about three young ladies on Long Island who were trying a three-day
fast, and the Times commented editorially to the effect that these young
ladies were "the victims of a shallow and unscrupulous sensationalist."
The notion that human beings can perish for lack of food in a few days
is deeply rooted in people's minds. Recently a group of eleven Irishmen
in jail set to work to starve themselves to death, as a protest against
British rule in their country. Day after day the newspapers reported the
news from Cork prison, and at about the twentieth day they began to
state that the prisoners were dying, that the priest had been sent for,
that their relatives were gathered on the prison steps. Day after day
such reports continued, through the thirties, and the forties, and the
fifties, and the sixties, and the seventies. One man died on the
eighty-eighth day, and MacSwiney died on the seventy-fourth. The other
nine gave up after ninety-four days and were all restored to health. I
watched carefully the newspaper and magazine comment on this incident,
yet I did not see a single remark on the medical aspects of it; I could
not discover that scientific men had learned anything whatever about the
ability of the body to go without food for long periods.
Get this clear at the outset: Nobody ever "starved to death" in less
than two months, and it is possible for a fat person to go without food
for as long as three or four months. People who "starve to death" in
shorter times do not die of starvation, but of fright. The first time I
fasted happened to be at the time of the Messina earthquake. I was
walking about, perfectly serene and happy, having been without food for
three days, and I read in my newspaper how the rescue ships had reached
Messina, and found the population ravenous, in the agonies of
starvation, some of the people having been without food for seventy-two
hours! (It sounds so much worse, you see, when you state it in hours.)
The second point to get clear is that the fast is a physiological
process; that is to say, it is something which nature understands and
carries through in her own serene and efficient way. When you take a
fast, you are not carrying out a freak notion of your own, or of mine;
you are discovering a lost instinct. Every cat and dog knows enough not
to take food when it is ill; it is only in hospitals conducted by modern
medical science that the custom prevails of serving elaborate "trays" to
invalids. I remember a story about a man who made himself a reputation
and a fortune by curing the pet dogs of the rich. These beautiful little
creatures, which sleep between silken covers, and have several servants
to wait upon them, and are fed from gold and silver dishes upon rich and
elaborately cooked foods, fall victim to as many diseases as their
mistresses, and they would be brought to this specialist, who conducted
his dog hospital in an old brickyard. In each one of the compartments of
the brick kiln he would shut up a dog with a supply of fresh water, a
crust of stale bread, a piece of bacon rind, and the sole of an old
shoe; and after a few days he would go back and find that the dog had
eaten the crust of bread, and then he would write to the owner that the
dog was on the high road to recovery. He would go back a few days later
and find that the dog had eaten the piece of bacon rind, and then he
would write that the dog was very nearly cured. He would wait until the
dog had eaten the piece of shoe leather, and then he would write that
the dog was completely cured, and the owner might come and take it away.
Just what is the process of the fast cure? I do not pretend to know
positively. I can only make guesses, and wait for science to
investigate. I believe that the main source of the diseases of civilized
man is improper nutrition, and the clogging of the system with food
poisons in various stages. And when you fast you do two things: first,
you stop entirely the fresh supply of those food poisons, and second,
you allow the whole of the body's digestive and assimilative tract to
rest--to go to sleep, as it were--so that all the body's energy may go
to other organs. The body carries with it at all times a surplus store
of nutriment, which can be taken up and used by the blood stream,
apparently with much less trouble than is required to convert fresh food
to the body's uses. In other words, the body can feed on its own tissues
more easily than it can feed from the stomach. In the fast you may lose
anywhere from half a pound to two pounds in weight per day, and this
will be taken, first from your store of fat, and then from your muscular
tissues. Every part of your muscular tissue will be taken, before
anything is taken from your vital organs, your nerves or your
blood-stream. So long as there is a particle of muscular material left,
so long as you can make even the slightest movement of one finger, you
are still fasting, and it is only when your muscular tissue is all gone
that you begin at last to starve. So far as I know, the cases of
MacSwiney and the other Irishman are the only cases on record where
fasters have died of starvation.
What the body does during the fast is quite plain, and can be told by
many symptoms. It begins a thorough house-cleaning, throwing out
poisonous material by every channel. The perspiration and the breath
become offensive, the tongue becomes heavily coated, so that you can
scrape the material off with a knife. I have heard vegetarians explain
this by saying that when the body is living off its own tissues, it is
following a cannibal diet; but that is all nonsense, because you can
live on meat exclusively, and quickly satisfy yourself that none of
these symptoms occurs. It is evident that the body is taking advantage
of the opportunity to get rid of waste products; and this will go on for
ten days, for twenty days, in some cases for as long as forty or fifty
days; and then suddenly occurs a strange thing: in spite of the
"cannibal diet" the symptoms all come to a sudden end. The tongue
clears, the breath becomes sweet, the appetite suddenly awakens.
During the period of a normal fast you lose all interest in food. You
almost forget that there is such a thing as eating; you can look at food
without any more desire for it than you have to swallow marbles and
carpet tacks. But then suddenly appetite returns, as I have explained,
and you find that you can think of nothing but food. This is what
students of the subject describe as a "complete fast," and while I do
not want to go to extremes and say that the "complete fast" will cure
every case of every disease, I can certainly say this: in the letters
which have come to me from people who tried the fast at my suggestion,
there are cases of every kind of common disease. In my book, "The
Fasting Cure," I give the results in cases reported to me after the
publication of my first magazine article. I quote two paragraphs:
"The total number of fasts taken was 277, and the average number of days
was six. There were 90 of five days or over, 51 of ten days or over, and
six of 30 days or over. Out of the 119 person who wrote to me, 100
reported benefit, and 17 no benefit. Of these 17 about half give wrong
breaking of the fast as the reason for the failure. In cases where the
cure had not proved permanent, about half mentioned that the recurrence
of the trouble was caused by wrong eating, and about half of the rest
made this quite evident by what they said. Also it is to be noted that
in the cases of the 17 who got no benefit, nearly all were fasts of only
three or four days.
"Following is the complete list of diseases benefited--45 of the cases
having been diagnosed by physicians: indigestion (usually associated
with nervousness), 27; rheumatism, 5; colds, 8; tuberculosis, 4;
constipation, 14; poor circulation, 3; headaches, 5; anaemia, 3;
scrofula, 1; bronchial trouble, 5; syphilis, 1; liver trouble, 5;
general debility, 5; chills and fever, 1; blood poisoning, 1; ulcerated
leg, 1; neurasthenia, 6; locomotor ataxia, 1; sciatica, 1; asthma, 2;
excess of uric acid, 1; epilepsy, 1; pleurisy, 1; impaction of bowels,
1; eczema, 2; catarrh, 6; appendicitis, 3; valvular disease of heart, 1;
insomnia, 1; gas poisoning, 1; grippe, 1; cancer, 1."
There are many diseases with many causes, and some yield more quickly
than others to the fast. In the first group I put the diseases of the
digestive and alimentary tract. Stomach and bowel troubles, and the
nervous disorders occasioned by these, stop almost immediately when you
fast. Next come disorders of the blood-stream, which are generally a
second stage of digestive troubles. Everything immediately due to
impurities of the blood, pimples, boils, and ulcers, inflammation, badly
healing wounds, etc., respond to a few days of fasting as to the magic
touch of the old-time legends. When it comes to diseases caused by germ
infections, you have a double aspect of the problem, and must have a
double method of attack. I would not like to say that fasting could cure
such a disease as sleeping sickness, to the germs of which our systems
are not accustomed, and against which they may well be helpless. On the
other hand, in the case of common infections, such as colds and sore
throats, the fast is again the touch of magic. Having been plagued a
great deal by these ailments in past times, I am accustomed to say that
I would not trade my knowledge of fasting for everything else that I
know about health.
The first thing you must do if you want to take a fast is to read the
literature on the subject and make up your mind that the experiment will
do you no injury. You should also try to get your relatives to make up
their minds, because you are nervous when you are fasting, and cannot
withstand the attacks of the people around you, who will go into a panic
and throw you into a panic. As I said before, it is quite possible for
people to die of panic, but I do not believe that anybody ever died of a
fast. I have known of two or three cases of people dying while they were
fasting, but I feel quite certain that the fast did not cause their
death; they would have died anyhow. You must bear in mind that among the
people who try the fast, a great many are in a desperate condition; some
have been given up by the doctors, and if now and then one of these
should die, we may surely say that they died in spite of the fast, and
not because of it. There is no physician who can save every patient, and
it would be absurd to expect this. I have read scores of letters from
people who were at the point of death from such "fatal" diseases as
Bright's disease, sclerosis of the liver, and fatty degeneration of the
heart, and were literally snatched out of the jaws of death by beginning
a fast. I would not like to guess just what percentage of dying people
in our hospitals might be saved if the doctors would withdraw all food
from them, but I await with interest the time when medical science will
have the intelligence to try that simple experiment and report the
results.
Just the other day in the Los Angeles county jail, a chiropractor went
on hunger strike, as a protest against imprisonment, and he fasted 41
days. Then he broke his fast, the reason being given that his pulse was
down to 54, and he was afraid of dying. I smiled to myself. The normal
pulse is 70. I have taken my pulse many times at the end of a ten-day
fast, and it has been as low as 32, and I am not dead yet, and if I wait
to die from the symptoms of a fast, I expect to live a long time indeed!
The first time I fasted, I felt very weak, and lay around and hardly
cared to lift my head; if I walked from my bed to the lawn, I was tired
in the legs. But since then I have grown used to fasting. I have fasted
for a week probably twenty or thirty times, and on such occasions I have
gone about my business as if nothing were happening. Of course I would
not try to play tennis, or to climb a mountain, but it is a fact that on
the seventh day of a fast in New York, I climbed the five or six flights
of stairs to the top of the Metropolitan Opera House, and felt no ill
effects from doing this. I climbed slowly, and was careful not to tire
myself. The simple rule is not to have anything that you must do on the
fast, and then do what you feel like doing. Lie down and rest, and read
a book, and take as much exercise as you find you enjoy. Keep your mind
quiet and free from worries, and lock out of the house everybody who
tells you that your heart is going to stop beating in the next few
minutes, and that you must have an injection of strychnine to start it,
and some beefsteak and fried onions to "restore your strength." Give
yourself up to the care of your wise old mother nature, who will attend
to your heart just as securely and serenely as she attended to it in the
days before you were born.
By fasting I mean that you take no food whatever. I know some nature
cure teachers who practice what they call a "fruit fast." All I know is
that if I eat nothing but fruit, I soon have my stomach boiling with
fermentation, and also I suffer with hunger; whereas, if I take a
complete fast, I promptly forget all about food. You must drink all the
water you can on the fast. This helps nature with her house-cleaning; it
is well to drink a glass of water every half hour at least. Do not try
to go without water, and then write me that the fasting cure is a
failure. Also please do not write and ask me if it will be fasting if
you take just a little crackers and milk, or some soup, or something
else that you think doesn't count!
I recommend a dose of laxative to clean out the system at the beginning
of a fast, because the bowels are apt to become sluggish at once, and
the quicker you get the system cleansed, the better. It does no good to
take laxatives if you are going to pile in more food, but if you are
going to fast, that is a different matter. You should take a full warm
enema every day during the fast, so long as it brings any results. There
are some people whose bowels are so frightfully clogged that I have
known the enema to bring results even in the second and third weeks. On
the other hand, if there is no solid matter to be removed, a small enema
every day will suffice. Take a warm bath every day; and needless to say,
you should get all the fresh air you can, and should sleep as much as
you can. You may have difficulty in sleeping, because the fast is apt to
make you nervous and wakeful. I have known people who could not fast
because they could not sleep, and I have taught them a little trick, to
put a hot water bottle at the feet, and another on the abdomen, to draw
the blood away from the head. So they would quickly fall asleep, and
they got great benefit from their fasts.
You should supply yourself with good music if you can, and with plenty
of good reading matter. You will be amazed to find how active your mind
becomes; perhaps you had never known before what a mind you had. Your
blood has always been so clogged with food poisons that you didn't know
you could think. My three act play, "The Nature Woman," was conceived
and written in two days and a half on a fast; but I do not recommend
this kind of thing--on the contrary, I strongly urge against it, because
if you work your brain on a fast, you do not get the good from your
fast, and do not recover so quickly. Put off all your problems until you
have got your health back, and seek only to divert your mind while
fasting.