If you’ve read this book and are still trying to decide if, when or how to give fasting a try, stop! Don’t intellectualize or rationalize it. You’ll only ever truly “get it” by trying for yourself.
It is a leap of faith to believe that something as simple as drinking juice can do what pills and potions cannot. So, you just need to make the leap and see what happens.
You need to remember that healing from the inside is something your body is designed to do. If you create the right conditions, the body will respond. Fasting can create the right internal environment for healing and positive change to occur.
The same process happens emotionally, too. There is nothing quite like the perspective or creative leap that occurs in the mind when you take time out from your norm. Just imagine what life could be like if you followed your dreams.
I know because that is exactly what happened to me. Before I end this book I want to tell you the story of the TV series that first spread the word of the power of fasting. It’s something I am asked about all the time, all over the world, and it’s a story I’ve never told fully before now.
I admitted at the beginning of the book that I kind of stumbled upon fasting. I had already studied Nutritional Medicine so I had a good grounding in the science of sound eating. However, when I started using juice fasting, first on my own and then with clients, the results were so astonishing that it was the push I needed to give up a six-figure salary, sell a house and drive to Spain with nothing more than the notion of following my dream to set up my first juice-fasting retreat.
One year later I had learned the local lingo, made lifelong friends and was enjoying a wonderful lifestyle of yoga on the beach, tapas and siestas. Alas, my dwindling bank balance told a different story. I had hired a rustic villa in the mountains to run juice retreats for a few people at a time, working from dawn till dusk and doing everything myself – not exactly a sustainable business model.
A random email from an old TV contact was the reality check I needed to put the retreats – and fasting – on the map. I worked up a pitch document and decided to knock on the doors of any media person I knew to get the format made into a TV series. Thirteen knock-backs later and I finally got a “yes”.
My retreats ended up becoming the subject of more than seven TV series, shown in over 22 countries around the world, which continue to be shown today.
I believe that the reason the series became such a phenomenon is that it showed, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that even dramatic health conditions are curable.
Almost a decade on, I still have people from all over the world getting in touch or attending my retreats who say that watching the series gave them hope and a new direction. Many times over I’ve been told that seeing health transformed using something as simple as a fast was the nudge they needed to take action in their own lives.