DAVID, * A MAN WHO HAD WORKED FOR MANY YEARS AS AN ENVIronmental engineer, seemed frightened and agitated as he walked into my office. His skin was pallid and deathly gray. His eyes seemed lifeless, and his demeanor was halting and somewhat confused.
He sat down and crossed his arms in disgust after he threw some paperwork on my desk. Visibly shaken, he declared loudly, “My body is more polluted than a toxic waste dump!” He pointed to the shocking results of the hair analysis for heavy metals he had brought with him. “I guess I’m just a walking toxic waste dump. According to these numbers, if my body was a piece of earth, it would be too toxic for my neighbors to live next to!”
The figures didn’t lie. If a piece of land contained the toxins that this man’s body contained, the government would probably have declared it a toxic waste site. How frightening!
This polluted planet is having a devastating impact upon us. If, like David, we’ve gotten to the place where our good health and mental acuity are already compromised, then we’ve almost gone too far.
David’s eyes filled with fear as he pleaded, “I don’t know what to do. I feel awful. I’m tired all the time. I can hardly remember the normal daily details of my life. I expect I’ll die of cancer or something worse if this can’t be turned around. Can you help me, Doc?”
Although my heart really went out to him, I knew that what David needed was not sympathy. Pure and simple, David needed toxic relief.
What about you? Your body may not be as toxic as David’s, but it’s still probably a lot more toxic than you might imagine. The good news is that toxic relief is available!
What’s Your Body Trying to Tell You?
For starters, ask yourself this question: Are you listening to your body? Do you understand what it’s trying to tell you?
Sickness and degenerative disease are usually simply nature’s way of telling you that your body is toxic and needs to be cleansed. If you were driving your car and the red engine light came on indicating that it was time to check the engine, would you continue to drive the car without taking it to the shop to have it checked? This actually happened to a patient. She ended up having to replace her engine because she ignored the red engine light.
You may laugh, as her family members did when she told the story. However, this is exactly what many of us are doing. Our red engine light is flashing through the symptoms and signs of degenerative diseases that we are experiencing—diabetes, heart disease, arthritis, headaches, allergies, psoriasis, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, and other degenerative diseases.
Too often we simply ignore the signs and symptoms and continue eating the wrong foods. We also keep living our stressed-out, unhealthy lifestyles including cigarette smoking, drinking alcohol, and not exercising.
Our bodies simply weren’t designed to handle it all. Nevertheless, we continue to push and stress our bodies with these toxic burdens until they eventually develop diseases. At that point, we then run to the doctor and get medication, which further strains the liver’s ability to detoxify and does nothing to cleanse it.
If this sounds like you, chances are you are simply toxic and probably overfed. As I mentioned earlier, simply beefing up your intake of supplements usually won’t help. So what can you do?
Finding Relief Through Fasting
The answer is fasting. Fasting is a powerful, natural way to cleanse your body from the burden of excess toxins, such as toxic fats, and from many other chemicals and toxins that cause degenerative diseases.
Fasting is the safest and best way to heal the body from degenerative diseases caused by being overfed with the wrong nutrition.
The ancient father of medicine, Hippocrates, said, “Every thing in excess is opposed by nature.” Many years as a practicing medical doctor have convinced me that he was right. Our nation is suffering an epidemic of degenerative diseases and death that is caused by excess—plain and simple. We have eaten too much sugar, too much fat, too many empty calories, and far too much processed, devitalized food.
Finding toxic relief through fasting can turn your life and health around. It is a natural, biblical system of supporting and cleansing the body from built-up chemicals, fats, and other toxins. It also has amazing spiritual benefits, as we will see later on.
Periodic fasting, followed by a cleansing diet, will allow you to live free of the physical and neurological burden of toxins. Fasting gives your toxic, overtaxed body an opportunity to “catch up” with its overwhelming task of waste removal.
Fasting—a Natural Principle of Healing
Fasting allows your body to heal by giving it a rest. All living things need to rest, including you. Even the land must rest, which was a principle God gave to the ancient agrarian Jewish nation regarding their fields. Every seventh year they were not permitted to grow any crops at all. They had to let the land lie fallow so that it could reestablish its own mineral and nutrient content. (See Leviticus 25:1–7.)
Today, we live in a time in which farmers have completely forgotten this age-old principle. This is one of the factors involved in our being overfed and undernourished. It’s because much of our soil is depleted that our food sources have also become partially depleted of the minerals, vitamins, and other nutrients that our bodies crave. When we eat and don’t get the nutrition we need from our food, we will usually eat more, trying to fill the body’s craving for nourishment. Before long, we have become obese, overfed, and undernourished.
Every winter many animals will hibernate or rest for a season. Every night when you sleep, you give rest to your body and mind. Blessed rest is as much a law of the universe as gravity. It’s also a powerful principle of healing.
Think about it: When an animal is injured or sick, what does it do? It finds a resting place where it can lap up water, and it quits eating while it heals. This is natural, instinctual wisdom that God placed within the animal kingdom.
But when our bodies get sick, what do we do?
When we get sick with an injury or illness, such as pneumonia, a sinus infection, or strep throat, instead of resting and fasting by drinking water or juices only, we eat ice cream, puddings, creamy soups, and other rich, high-caloric foods that do nothing to cleanse and detoxify the body.
We also prolong our illnesses by taking Tylenol to suppress the fever so that we can go back to work far sooner than our bodies are ready. We push ourselves by taking antibiotics, decongestants, and antihistamines to dry up the mucus. This also impedes the natural process of detoxification. Instead of healing, our bodies may store even more toxic material.
Now I do recommend antibiotics for infectious diseases when they are warranted. Such times include for bacterial infections such as pneumonia, acute bronchitis, urinary tract infections, strep tonsillitis, and many other bacterial infections. However, too many doctors prescribe antibiotics for viral infections, allergic symptoms, or when a patient requests them. Sometimes they are given because a doctor is unable to figure out what is going on or what is causing the fever.
Hippocrates’ saying “Let your medicine be your food and let your food be your medicine” applies here as well. In other words, let what you take into your body provide healing. Rest the body. Drink plenty of fluids. Drink fresh juices that allow the body to heal. Don’t you think humans should have as much sense as the animals?
Hippocrates practiced around 400 b.c. and commonly used medicinal foods such as apples, barley, and dates to treat his patients. Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Galen, and Paracelsus all believed in fasting and practiced this therapy. They used fasting, juices, soups, nutrition, and rest to bring their patients back to health. Hippocrates treated the patient and not the disease.
Fasting gives a rest to the digestive tract. Your body uses a significant amount of your energy every day in digesting, absorbing, and assimilating your food. Since fresh juices are very easy for the body to assimilate, they give your digestive tract a chance to rest and repair. This, in turn, gives your overburdened liver a chance to catch up on its work of detoxification.
Juice fasting, as we will see later, also creates an alkaline environment for your body’s cells and tissues so that they can start releasing waste products through your body’s various channels of elimination. The primary elimination channels of the body include the kidneys and urinary tract, the colon, the lungs, and the skin. Fasting allows your liver to catch up on its internal cleansing and detoxification. At the same time, the digestive organs, including the stomach, pancreas, intestines, and gallbladder, get a much-deserved rest.
Even the blood and the lymphatic system can be effectively cleansed of toxic buildup through fasting. During fasting, our cells, tissues, and organs can begin to dump out accumulated waste products of cellular metabolism as well as chemicals and other toxins. This helps your cells to heal, repair, and be strengthened.
You have about sixty trillion to one hundred trillion cells in your body, and each one takes in nutrients and produces waste products. Fasting allows each cell to dump its waste products and thus be able to function at peak efficiency.
Fatty tissues release chemicals and toxins during fasting. These, in turn, are broken down by the liver and excreted by the kidneys. Your body will excrete toxins in many different ways during a fast. Some people actually develop boils, rashes, or body odor during fasting since toxins are being released through the body’s largest excretory organ, the skin.
Fasting is also an energy booster. The toxic buildup in the cells and oxidative stress compromise the mitochondria (the energy factories in each cell) so they cannot effectively produce energy. This leads to fatigue, irritability, and lethargy. Let me explain. Mitochondria are similar to tiny energy factories within each of your cells where energy is produced. Metabolic waste, chemicals, other toxins, and oxidative free radicals affect the function of the mitochondria of the cell, making them less efficient in producing energy.
Rejuvenate Physically, Mentally, and Spiritually
Periodic, short-term fasting will also strengthen your immune system and help you live longer.
Deep cleansing of every cell in your body through fasting has the wonderful added benefit of improving your appearance. As your body detoxifies, your skin will eventually become clearer and glow with a radiance that you probably haven’t seen for quite a few years. The whites of your eyes usually become clearer and whiter and may even sparkle.
As toxic fat melts away through fasting, you’ll feel and look better than you have in years. Your energy will be supercharged. And your mental functioning usually improves as your body cleanses, repairs, and rejuvenates.
Fasting cleanses and rejuvenates the body physically, mentally, and spiritually. It is also one of the best ways of preventing and treating sickness and disease, as we will see later.
Have you ever driven by a garbage dump in the middle of the summer? It isn’t a pleasant experience. So, don’t let your body become a cellular garbage dump filled with toxins that eventually lead to degenerative diseases. Instead, cleanse your body periodically with fasting to both prevent or to treat degenerative diseases.
You may be thinking, “Fasting is something that I just cannot do! Fasting is for far more disciplined people than me. It’s impossible for me to fast.”
If you’ve responded this way, you probably see fasting as a feat of unflinching self-denial and otherworldly determination for which only a few are cut out. Certainly not yourself! However, that’s simply not true. Although some fasting is little more than a rigorous test of self-endurance, that’s not at all the kind of fasting I’m suggesting here.
The detox fast that I will be outlining in the following chapters is not a grueling feat of self-denial. If you carefully follow the steps that I will outline, you will not find fasting difficult at all.
So, let’s take a look at the first step, which is the preparation.
Fasting in general is very controversial. Many methods of fasting exist, as well as many attitudes about fasting. As a doctor, I’ve been able to look closely at the various popular methods of fasting. Some of them are good, while others can be downright dangerous. So, before you decide to begin fasting, let’s investigate fasting and look carefully at the method of fasting that I’m convinced will put you on a path to healthier living.
Despite the fact that many believe that the only true method of fasting is the total fast—not eating or drinking anything—I consider this method to be unsafe. Let’s look.
Fasting is often thought of as taking nothing by mouth. Technically speaking, this is true fasting. But it’s not the type of fasting I’m suggesting here for detoxification.
I never recommend total fasting. Your body must always have at least two quarts of water a day to sustain your life, for you can only live for a few days without water.
The kind of fasting that most of us are familiar with is avoiding all solid food and consuming liquids only.
The strictest, most severe fast is a water-only fast. In general, I usually don’t recommend this type of fasting. But for certain autoimmune diseases such as lupus and rheumatoid arthritis or for severe atherosclerosis such as severe coronary artery disease, the benefits of water-only fasting are powerful. Nevertheless, you can also experience similar benefits for these diseases with juice fasting—it just takes longer.
If you are considering water-only fasting, be prepared to completely devote several days to doing little more than fasting. For most individuals, water-only fasting so weakens the body that working a full-time job while fasting is not possible.
If you do not have one of these diseases, I believe that the best fasting method for cleansing and detoxification is juice fasting. Juice fasting provides most of the benefits of water-only fasting without the unpleasant weakness and hunger that often accompany a water-only fast.
The fasting method I recommend for complete detoxification is juice fasting. For this type of fast, you will need lots of fresh fruits, vegetables, and a juicer.
Some feel that juice fasting is not really fasting in the truest sense of the word. Others doubt that it has the same benefits of water fasting. And while water-only fasting does have some truly restorative healthful effects, juice fasting can be even more beneficial, and it is far less strenuous, since it supports detoxification, alkalinizes the body, and supports the liver. One usually doesn’t experience the weakness or hunger of water fasting and usually experiences tremendous energy during the fast.
As I mentioned, water-only fasting can reduce inflammation in the body. In addition, it may actually cause the hardened arterial plaque of severe coronary disease to regress. Juice fasting can produce a similar effect, but over an extended period of time.
In addition, raw, freshly squeezed juices supply generous amounts of vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, enzymes, and phytonutrients that help your body to restore itself and heal.
Let’s take a look at some of the special benefits of juice fasting.
Restoring Nature’s Delicate Balance
Few people ever consider that the health of their bodies is based partially upon a delicate natural acid and alkaline balance. Nevertheless, this balance is essential to your body’s ability to detoxify successfully. When all your body gets is the standard American diet, your tissues become more acidic than nature intended—upsetting this delicate balance.
If you’d like to know how acidic your body is, you can find out very easily by simply purchasing some pH strips at the drugstore. Collect the first morning urine and dip a pH paper into it. It will indicate your urine’s pH level with a change of color. The urinary pH usually indicates the pH of the tissues. The change of color can then be matched to a numerical reading. A card is included in the pH paper that correlates a color to a pH number.
Most people will have a pH test reading of about 5.0 to 6.0, which means their bodies are very acidic. It should be between 7.0 and 7.5. Close enough doesn’t count. Even though five is only two points less than seven, a pH of 5.0 is actually a hundred times more acidic than a pH of 7.0.
What happens when your body is too acidic? Precious minerals including calcium, potassium, and magnesium are lost in the urine, and cells become less permeable, which means they are unable to excrete waste products effectively. In a sense, your cells become constipated, or each one of them may become full of waste that it cannot get rid of.
When this occurs, the mitochondria or energy-producing structures in the cell do not function properly, and you usually feel fatigued. Your cells become toxic. Now, free-radical activity increases, and the toxic overload continues to build until eventually your body begins to deteriorate and degenerative diseases occur.
Juice fasting brings back the natural balance. It alkalinizes the tissues and raises the pH. Now the cells can begin to excrete toxins again. Detoxification has begun.
An occasional juice fast—every one, three, or six months—gives your gastrointestinal system a much-needed rest.
Juices are easy on the digestive system. They are easily absorbed into the body without requiring much work from your stomach and intestines. Water fasts also give the digestive system a rest.
Juice Fasting vs. Water-Only Fasting
Fasting is not new. As a matter of fact, it’s been around since before Moses. Many people go on water-only fasts and believe that this is the only true way to fast. However, this program of juice fasting will usually provide you with more benefits than water fasting, but without many of the drawbacks. Let’s take a look.
The right kind of juice fast will continue to nourish your body. You won’t experience the kind of muscle loss that can happen during a wateronly fast. If you’re a fan of the television series Survivor, you’ve watched the participants wither away every week, losing large quantities of muscle mass. In essence, except for a few spoons of rice each day, they usually are on a water-only fast. Periodic juice fasting provides the body with so much nutrition that such muscle loss would be minimal.
In addition, prepared correctly, juice can provide the nutrients, amino acids, and fuel that your liver requires to detoxify. This is an extremely important aspect of detoxification that we will examine in-depth later on.
That’s not all! Juice fasting has even more cleansing benefits. Correctly prepared, juice can supply a vast array of antioxidants—which you will need to protect your liver from the enormous amounts of free radicals that are released during fasting. Water-only fasts decrease the stores of antioxidants, increasing your risk for oxidative damage from free radicals to tissues and organs throughout your body.
Water fasting, and even long-term juice fasting, depletes your body of glutathione. That may not seem that important, but it really is. Glutathione is the most important and the most abundant antioxidant in the body. It protects us from free-radical activity and regenerates itself as well as vitamins C, E, and other antioxidants. e overworked liver is a hotbed of free-radical activity, and adequate levels of glutathione are essential or the liver can not detoxify heavy metals, chemicals, pesticides and some medications and can be damaged by free radicals.
To cleanse your body effectively, I believe it is much healthier to go on a series of short juice fasts rather than one long fast. This allows your body time to recuperate and rebuild its stores of antioxidants as well as glutathione. I also recommend taking a glutathione-boosting supplement while fasting. (See Appendix D.)
Fasting with the right kinds of raw, fresh juices increases the healing benefits of fasting.
Specially prepared juices are packed full of nutrients, phytonutrients, and enzymes. These can supply the raw materials your body needs to repair your cells, heal your organs, and protect your tissues from free radicals.
This sensible, medically sound method of fasting can very quickly allow you to shed any extra toxic fat that your body may be carrying—even if you’re significantly overweight. In addition, you can avoid a water-only fasting trap of which many people are not even aware. What’s the trap? Water-only fasting usually suppresses the metabolic rate, significantly causing you to gain significant amounts of weight after the fast!
That’s one of the reasons that fasting with a program of specially prepared juices is so much more sensible. Not only that, but it’s also much easier to stay on a specially prepared juice fast because you’re less likely to have severe food cravings compared to a water-only fast.
No metabolically induced weight gain
The reason for this is because fasting with specially prepared juices usually does not throw your body into a state of muscle catabolism, which is excessive muscle breakdown.
During a water-only fast, the body goes into this state and eventually burns muscle tissue as fuel. After about two to three days of burning muscle, which is converted to glucose, as fuel, the body shifts to burning ketones from the breakdown of fat as fuel. Thus after a few days of water fasting, the body begins breaking down more fat and less muscle. Ketosis develops, and the body can become more acidic.
The metabolic rate also slows down. This metabolic slowdown can actually cause you to gain weight after the water fast when you begin to eat again.
Let me explain. When you go on a water-only fast, mechanisms in your brain signal your body that you are starving even if you are not. Therefore, your body goes into a survival state to try and hold on to all of the calories it gets. In this state, you can actually eat nothing and lose only a small amount of weight.
However, your body doesn’t immediately move back out of that state when you start eating again. It may take months for the metabolic rate to recover. Thus when you go back to eating a normal diet, you will usually gain weight rapidly and will often gain more weight. When you do another fast, the metabolic rate may have never fully recovered, and therefore you may continue to gain more weight after the fast is broken.
This should not happen to you on my specially prepared juice fast. Fasting with the juice program that I have provided in this book will provide your body with enough calories and nutrition so that you should be able to bypass this experience altogether.
The final effect for you will be—weight loss! Not only will this special fasting method free your body of disease-causing chemicals, but it will also free it of toxic fat. If you are overweight, and even significantly obese, one of the truly wonderful and healthful benefits of this fasting method is that it can help bring your body back to the normal, healthy size that God intended. A regular, sensible fasting program can slim you down very quickly, and you will also experience the more important benefit of eliminating the fatty areas in your body, especially toxic belly fat where dangerous toxins and chemicals are usually stored. As these toxic fat depots are mobilized, toxins in the fat will be released and toxins will be detoxified and flushed more readily from your body.
Not only will you live longer through this juice detoxification plan, but you will feel better and look better also!
Many fasting programs are so physically challenging that you can be left feeling completely wiped out with little or no energy to function. This juice-fasting program is designed to keep you energized enough to work, play, and enjoy your daily activities.
As a matter of fact, since juice fasting will increase both the detoxification capabilities of the body and increase the elimination of toxins, you may actually experience more energy during this fast, not less.
Water-only fasting can place considerable additional strain upon an already overworked liver. And since your liver is the primary detoxification organ, you need to do all that you can to support its vital function in your body.
Juice fasting does this, while on the other hand, water fasting usually places more strain on the liver and usually further depletes the liver of glutathione, the most important detoxifier and the most important antioxidant. That’s one of the reasons for the overwhelming sense of fatigue you can experience during a water-only fast.
During a water-only fast, a flood of toxins is released from fat and other cells and tissues so quickly that the liver can become overwhelmed trying to keep up the process of detoxification. Such a burden is placed upon the liver at this point that it usually requires more glutathione, vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and antioxidants. Juice fasting supplies the vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and antioxidants, but water fasting does not. In addition, a shower of free radicals is created in this flood of released toxins, creating a hotbed of free-radical activity in the liver and possibly injuring the liver.
One of my main concerns about water-only fasting is that it knocks out a major player in the detoxification game—the colon. When you fast with water only, your colon usually shuts down. In a less toxic world, this probably wouldn’t matter so much. But with the toxic load with which our bodies are dealing, we don’t want this vital detox player sitting on the bench.
One extremely important reason for keeping this vital player in the detox game is DDT, as well as other pesticides.
As mentioned earlier, most of us have DDT or DDE (the toxic metabolite of DDT) in our fatty tissues. During a water-only fast in which the colon rests, DDT as well as other pesticides and solvents are released from the fatty tissues into the bloodstream at an extremely rapid rate. This, in turn, can overwhelm the liver so that it cannot detoxify the chemical effectively. If this happens, DDT and other pesticides and solvents can end up in other fatty tissue in the body, including the brain, spinal cord, and peripheral nerves.
That’s why it’s absolutely essential to keep this powerful detox player in the game. Even while you’re on this program of juice fasting, consider drinking herbal teas to keep the colon functioning. If you become constipated, be prepared to use an herbal tea or a mild enema. I recommend a Vitamix blender, which maintains the fiber in the juice. The soluble fiber binds toxins and hormones and aids in excreting them out of the body, whereas water-only fasting includes no fiber. We’ll discuss more about this later.
Controversy will always remain between water-fasting and juice-fasting methods. That’s why it’s important to consider carefully both methods and determine which one will be most effective for you.
Now let’s look at juice fasting and the promise it holds for your renewed health and vitality.
* Fictionalized character created from a composite of accounts