Fasting: Water Fasting, Juice Fasting

True fasting is consuming only water - and air, of course. This provides a strong inner experience; I believe that it should be done only under certain circumstances and ideally with the guidance and supervision of a physician or experienced nutritionist.

However, a surprising number of people have done water fasting successfully for short periods of time on their own. It is undertaken basically as a detoxification-cleansing-purifying process. It is not really a diet, since it provides no nutrients. Juice fasting is more common, provides more nutrients, and can be undertaken for a much longer period than water fasting, but it is still deficient in total nutrition.

Drinking only fruit and vegetable juices can be done for several day's, a week or two, or even longer; the longer fasting is done, the more problems, or "cleansing reactions" by those experiencing them, and deficiencies may be experienced. I have known people who have fasted for longer than two months and have personally monitored some patients through thirty-day fasts, most often on the "Master Cleanser," or lemonade, diet.

This fast and others, as well as the how-to's of fasting, are discussed in many books including Staying Healthy With the Seasons.

The fasting process is best used as a means of transformation to enhance the potential for change in habits and lifestyle during the reevaluation, detoxification period. Weight is usually lost during the process, though I do not suggest fasting as a weight-loss diet.

The fasting process is one of the best natural therapeutic tools available to the healing arts, given the right situation. Resting from foods and letting the body process what is already stored is the perfect balance to our typical excessive and congesting way of eating.

(Body-organ-cell congestion comes from eating more fat and protein foods than we need.) I have called fasting, or the cleansing process, the "missing link in the American diet."