How and When to Be Your Own Doctor by Moser and Solomon (best classic books to read .TXT) 📖

>Weight loss is usually associated with illness, as it should be! In times of acute illness an otherwise healthy body loses its appetite for food because it is prosurvival to stop eating. It is very hard to coax a sick animal to eat. Their bodies, not controlled by a mind full of complex learned responses and false ideas, automatically know that fasting is nature’s method of healing. Contrary to popular understanding, digestion, assimilation, and elimination require the expenditure of considerable energy. This fact may contradict the reader’s experience because everyone has become tired when they have worked a long time without eating, and then experienced the lift after eating. But an ill body cannot digest efficiently so instead of providing energy extracted from foods, the body is further burdened by yet another load of toxic material produced by fermented and putrefied food. This adds insult to injury in a sick body that is already drowning in its own garbage.

Worse, during illness most available vital force is already redirected into healing; it is not available for digestion. It is important to allow a sick body to proceed with healing and not to obstruct the process with unnecessary digestion or suppress the symptoms (which actually are the healing efforts) with drugs. If you have an acute illness, and you stop all food intake except for pure water and herb teas, and perhaps some vegetable broth, or dilute non-sweet juice, you have relieved your body of an immense effort.

Instead of digesting, the body goes to work on catching up on healing. The body can and will almost inevitably heal itself if the sick person will have faith in it, cooperate with the body’s efforts by allowing the symptoms of healing to exist, reduce or eliminate the intake of food to allow the body to marshal its energies, maintain a positive mental attitude and otherwise stay out of the way.

Many people intensely dread missing even one meal. These folks usually are and have been so toxic that their bodies had been stashing uneliminated toxins in their fat for years. They are usually so addicted to caffeine, cigarettes, alcohol, and so forth, that when they had fasted, even briefly, their bodies were forced to dip into highly-polluted fat reserves while simultaneously the body begins withdrawal. People like this who try to fast experience highly unpleasant symptoms including headache, irritability, inability to think or concentrate, blurred vision, profound fatigue, aches, etc. Most of these symptoms come from low blood sugar, but combined with the toxins being released from fat and combined with going through multiple addictive withdrawals, the discomforts are more than most people are willing to tolerate. Fasting on juice is much more realistic for cases like this. It is little wonder that when a hygienist suggests a fast to improve health, this type of case asserts positively that fasting is quite impossible, they have tried it, it is absolutely terrible and know that they can’t do it.

This rejection is partly due to a cultural expectation (one reinforced by western medicine) that all unpleasant symptoms should be avoided or suppressed. To voluntarily experience unpleasant sensations such as those mentioned above is more than the ordinary timid person will subject themselves to, even in order to regain health. They will allow surgery, drugs with violent and dangerous side effects, painful and invasive testing procedures and radiation—all unpleasant and sometimes extremely uncomfortable.

These therapies are accepted because someone else with authority is doing it to them. And, they have been told that it they don’t submit they will not ever feel better and probably will die in the near future. Also people think that they have no alternative, that the expert in front of them knows what is best, so they feel relieved to have been relieved of the responsibility for their own condition and its treatment.

Preventative Fasting

During the years it takes for a body to degenerate enough to prompt a fast, the body has been storing up large quantities of unprocessed toxins in the cells, tissues, fat deposits, and organs. The body in its wisdom will always choose to temporarily deposit overwhelming amounts of toxins somewhere harmless rather than permit the blood supply to become polluted or to use secondary elimination routes. A body will use times when the liver is less burdened to eliminate these stored toxic debris. The hygienists’ paradigm asserts that the manifestation of symptoms or illness are all by themselves, absolute, unassailable proof that further storage of toxic wastes in the cells, tissues, fat deposits, and organs is not possible and that an effort toward elimination is absolutely necessary. Thus the first time a person fasts a great quantity of toxins will normally be released. Being the resident of a body when this is happening can be quite uncomfortable. For this reason alone, preventative fasting is a very wise idea.

Before the body becomes critically ill, clean up your reserve fuel supply (fat deposits) by burning off some accumulated fat that is rich in toxic deposits and then replace it with clean, non-toxic fat that you will make while eating sensibly. If you had but fasted prophylactically as a preventative or health-creating measure before you became seriously ill, the initial detoxification of your body could have been accomplished far more comfortably, while you were healthy, while your vital force was high and while your body otherwise more able to deal with detoxification.

Each time you fast, even if it is only one day, you allow your body to go through a partial detox, and each time it becomes easier and more comfortable than the last time. The body learns how to fast.

Each time you fast it, your body slips into a cleansing mode more quickly, and each time you fast you lighten the load of stored toxins. Perhaps you have already eliminated the caffeine your body had stored, which frequently causes severe headaches on withdrawal, not to mention fatigue. It certainly helps to have this behind you before you go on to the elimination of other irritating substances.

Many people have gone through alcohol or tobacco withdrawal, and understand that it is very unpleasant, and also that it must be done in the pursuit of health. Why not withdraw from the rest of the irritating and debilitating substances we take into our system on an ongoing basis, and why not grit your way through the eliminative process, withdraw, from food addictions such as sugar or salt, and from foods that you may be allergic to like wheat, dairy products or eggs.

It is very wise to invest in your own insurance plan by systematically detoxifying while you are still healthy. Plan it into your life, when it is convenient, such as once a week on Sunday, or even once a month on a quiet day. Take a few days of vacation, go to a warm, beautiful place and devote part or all of it to cleansing.

Treat yourself by taking an annual trip to Hawaii, fasting at a hotel on the beach—do whatever it takes to motivate yourself. And consider this: vacations are enormously cheaper when you stay out of restaurants.

If you have accustomed your body to 24 hour fasts, then you can work on 48 hour fasts, and over time work up to 72 hour fasts, all on a continuum. You may find it becoming increasingly comfortable, perhaps even pleasant, something you look forward to. Fasting a relatively detoxified body feels good, and people eventually really get into the clean, light, clear headed, perhaps spiritually aware state that goes along with it.

By contrast, fasting when you are sick is much more difficult because your vitality or vital force is very low, you already have no energy, and probably have unpleasant symptoms that must be dealt with at the same time. There may be the added stress of being forced into a cleanse because you are too nauseous to eat. Most people let their health go until they are forced into dealing with it; they are too busy living, so why bother.

The truth is that our body does age, and over time becomes less able to deal with insults; the accumulated effect of insults and aging eventually leads most of us to some serious degenerative illness.

Normally this begins happening around age 50 if not sooner. Some of us that were gifted with good genes or what I call “a good start”

may have reached the age of 60 or 75 or even 90 without serious illness, but those people are few and far between. Why not tip the scales in your favor by preventing or staving off health problems with systematic detoxification at your own convenience.

Climb into the drivers seat and start to take control and gain confidence in your own ability to deal with your body, your own health, and your own life. When it gets right down to the bottom line, there is really only one thing in the world that is really yours, and that is your life. Take control and start managing it.

The reward will be a more qualitative life.