Liza May writes:
>   Today (Thursday) I am on my fourth day of a water fast.  I'm frustrated
>with persistent health problems, despite many fasts of  7 - 15 days over
>the past 10 years, and a great diet (10% meat and fish, no dairy, no
>gluten) - so I am determined to fast these problems away. Hope it works.
>    On your 42-day fast, did you work?  This is the first time that I have
>actually laid in  bed while fasting - but I can't do this for very long,
>so I think I'll try to be up and carrying on life while continuing to fast
>(through the Holiday season - oh God!!). What do you think of this plan??
>   Thanks again for the vast amount of research you have done, and all the
>references provided.

Hi Liza May, thanks. It's definitely been a lot of work. Hopefully worth
it, though.

I don't give medical or health advice for obvious reasons (legal). Also, my
hope is that people will evaluate information and come to terms with making
their own decisions. However, regarding my own experiences with fasting,
working while doing them was bad news. On the 42-day fast I worked about
1/2 the days. (Although begrudgingly, and at as slow a pace as I possibly
could--I am a freelancer in communications, and having no vacation plan or
outside support was financially unable to quit work entirely without going
into serious debt). The other days I rested as completely as possible. The
working was a bad news: frazzled me out, exhausted my nervous system,
etc.--learned that one the hard way by experience. I got better results on
shorter fasts of, say, 2 weeks or a little longer when resting as
completely as possible.

For me, though, there was a point of diminishing returns with fasting. I
personally feel that as many problems for alternative health enthusiasts
like us are due to deficiencies because of the restrictive nature of some
of our diets, as are due to "toxicity," etc. Fasting is not going to help
those problems much except perhaps rebalancing the metabolism to some
degree or improving assimilation. In retrospect, there was little
additional benefit after the first couple of long fasts (there was some, of
course). The biggest improvements for me after that came from making my
diet as nutritionally rich as I could.

--Ward Nicholson <[log in to unmask]>