Fasting for Health
Pitfalls and Success Tips
PREAMBLE
I’m not a doctor, so I’m supposed to tell you to go to a doctor despite that they’re the leading cause of death, professionally and have never appropriately diagnosed or treated any illness I’ve ever had. I’m also not a fasting expert, so if you want the real experts advice, those who I’ve learned the most from are Dr. Mindy Pelz and Cole Robinson. Otherwise, I’ll summarize for you everything that was important for my own journey, including the things that stopped me from successfully fasting long term and how I overcame them.
Jump down to the bullet points to skip the intro and persuasion, friends.
I suffer from late-stage, advanced, auto-immune disease that was diagnosed as Hashimoto’s but presents more like Lyme and the like. It is a multi-systemic series of failures in the body that reinforce one another in a downward spiral. If you don’t understand the way that auto-immune disease is actually a host of interrelated poisonings and infections, you may not understand how the various symptoms experienced can look like almost every other disease you’ve ever heard of, but all together at once and running in cycles, making it exceptionally difficult to heal from.
In addition to the multitude of life-changing and life-saving efforts I’ve made, which you can read about here and here, fasting is the ultimate end-all and be-all curative for literally any disorder or disease that I have ever come across. What’s even better is that it is FREE or exceptionally CHEAP and saves a ton of money on food, too. So to those of you who have complained that many of my own choices for healing are too expensive, here’s your golden ticket.
When I’ve researched auto-immune, parasites, bacterial dysbiosis, removing poisons from the body, overcoming viral illness, cancers, biofilms, diabetes and more, fasting positively affects the body despite ALL those varied ills and seems to be a key in removing ALL of them from the body.
There are endless studies proving the positive benefits of fasting including the improvement of the immune system, the removal of toxins and infectious agents, the shrinking of cancerous indicators, the reduction of “bad fat” storage, and perhaps most interestingly and best of all: life extension.
The easiest fast to implement and the one I’ve been doing off and on for over a decade is a simple shortened eating window every day. For me, it works best to not eat until afternoon and stop eating before it is dark, leaving about a six hour eating window, four hours if I’m really killing it.
Longer fasting, however, is when autophagy really kicks in. Ideally, fasting between 18 and 36 hours seems to be the sweet spot for really hitting a deep autophagy.
Autophagy is the process by which your body breaks down and removes dysfunctional or outright harmful cells and materials from your body. This is how your body removes cancers, poisons, toxins and more. It is the natural system of true healing that your body does naturally.
Many have pointed out the wisdom of animals who we all know and have noticed will STOP EATING WHEN THEY ARE ILL OR INJURED. This is because they’re still in touch with their instincts and understand that the body needs all its reserve energy and to not be DISTRACTED BY DIGESTION in order to truly heal.
Yes, digestion takes an immense amount of energy from the body and essentially stops all other processes that are not necessary to remain alive. This is why fasting is so good for us and why it takes a bit of time to really get into the autophagy, because digestion takes a LONG time.
This is also why it is crucial to understand that fasting means fasting — sneaking a bite of something or a caloric drink during the fast absolutely ruins all your progress and renders it pointless. Stop cheating and give yourself a moment of healing.
Religious and spiritual traditions from around the world and throughout history emphasize fasting as one of the ways in which we reach spiritual alignment and deeper spiritual connection. I’ll attest all day every day to the strange mental clarity and bliss that takes over once you’re well into a fast, usually after 24 hours or more. Try it, you’ll love it.
PITFALLS
My own specific pitfalls came from two main aspects of my specific diseases which you may or may not also experience. One is that I have a tendency toward sugar dysregulation or hypoglycemia. I can get dizzy, flooded by intense heat, profusely and suddenly drenched in sweat, shaky, full of tremors, and can even suddenly pass out if my sugars are dysregulated. For me, that meant that fasting could be not only very uncomfortable, but somewhat dangerous.
To overcome this specific aspect, I had to:
Remove caffeine or at least only have only a small amount of green tea or matcha
Work toward smaller and smaller eating windows each day, fasting every day for longer and longer periods until I reached the ability to easily maintain a four hour window
Be sure to eat far less or no carbs (except for green vegetables) the day or days leading up to a longer fast
My other specific pitfall was that I was and am chronically constipated, like the vast majority of Americans. You may think you are not constipated, but if you aren’t having EASY and FULL bowel evacuations multiple times a day, you are likely much, much more constipated than you believe. Fasting, for me, made me even more constipated, as my digestive system was so sluggish that, while other people take about 72 hours for their digestive system to “turn off”, mine was “turning off” within about 30 hours or even less. So, longer fasts became a nightmare.
To overcome this specific aspect, I had to:
First implement weekly colonic treatments
Greatly increase my lymphatic movement through daily ACV, lemon, and cayenne tonics first thing in the morning on an empty stomach (this does not break a fast!)
Increase lymphatic movement through light massage via hands or a dry brush
Eventually I switched from colonics to daily coffee enemas and my bowels and lymphatic flow has never been better — you may even simply start at this step if you also have slow lymphatic movement and overall digestion. This is also a sort of cure-all for various diseases, seemingly, and may simply be something you want to do to support your own healing.
SUCCESS VIA FASTING
Otherwise, fasting is EASY if you follow this basic protocol:
Daily window — fast every day by reducing your eating window and not eating ANY calories outside that window
24-48 Hour Fasts — Once you’re going for the longer, full autophagy fasts like these with multi-day spans, it is essential you drink what Cole Robinson calls “Snake Juice”, but is simply a way to keep your minerals good while fasting. You’re not actually hungry, you’re thirsty and wanting minerals. Drink a lot and drink every time you feel “hungry”. I do this in a gallon of water, but whatever you think will satisfy you during each 24 hour window, do that. Note that drinking this in 32 oz of water or less and quickly may give you SUDDEN DIARRHEA. Don’t do that.
Per 2 Liter H20:
Potassium Chloride Powder = 1 tsp
Himalayan Pink Salt = 1/2 tsp
Baking Soda = 1 tsp
Magnesium Sulphate (Optional)= 1/2 tsp
72 Hour Fast — This is known as the immune system reset and is allegedly good for overcoming any regular illness, like cold or flu. Anecdotally, my love and I were both sick with whatever it is we colloquially refer to as Covid. He fasted for 72 hours and was done with it. I didn’t and it lasted many weeks. This is a powerful fast and should not be done until you have done the above fasts with success and seen the improvements. This fast is done by many people at least once a month, to keep the immune system in perfect order and running at top efficacy.
Extended Fasts — I have never gone more than 72 hours, though I’ve seen many people in Cole Robinson’s Snake Diet Facebook Group do so to great success and do believe if you are obese and ill — which is most people — it may be the ideal to work toward doing longer fasts, though again, I defer to the experts on this and to you, who should follow your gut. Either way, that group is a great group to be in if you are looking for a badass community that supports you the whole way and is very, very excited for you to heal.
CLOSING
Just love yourself enough to do it. You’ll never, ever regret healing all of yourself, at every level, and you’ll never find a better approach to healing ANYTHING you suffer from than this. The gut and body can heal ANYTHING, trust your body’s inbuilt, FREE methods that are scientifically proven to WORK.
***Super duper bonus: in times of planned famine and intentional poisoning, fasting can become a health BENEFIT instead of a sad, horrifying torture, if you know what you’re doing and have experience at it…. be prepared for anything and everything while reaching levels of wellness you never thought possible. I believe in you.
