100 Pounds Ago...I Started Learning How to Love Myself More Than the Pleasure of Food by Charles A. Postma - HTML preview

Chapter 6

What Fasting Has Done for Me

Fasting has always been a health plan with a side effect of weight loss. Today, weight loss is what draws many people into a fasting lifestyle and that blurs the higher purpose of the superhuman healing power that we now call autophagy. Okay, so I lost one hundred pounds. What else did it do for me?

In January of 2017 I listed all my health issues so that I could check them off as they disappeared. I found myself adding to the list as time went on because I did not think fasting had that kind of power like reversing heart disease, completely healing old wounds, and chronic pain relief. I had some strange improvements as well, like in the 1970’s I was prescribed a medication for ear infections that destroyed the hair and wax glands in my auditory canals. At 2 ½ years in I suddenly had wax in my ears reducing the need for a cream I use to prevent ear infections. Our natural wax prevents infections. The hair glands have not come back yet, but that is okay, I’d rather they did not.

The pain relief has been wonderful. In 2008 while restoring an old home I fell from a ladder onto a concrete pad that was 6.5 feet below the step I was standing on. I was leaning against the building when the ladder shot out from under me letting me fall on my side on the pad. I think I tangled my foot into the ladder framework. I did not break anything, but I did have a bad sprain of my left ankle. For 30 years I have been laying out for an hour every sunny day in the sun all summer long hoping to keep strong bones as I age. Well, it worked. However, finding this out in such a painful way is something I would like to have avoided. That injury gave me chronic ankle pain that plagued me until my first 5 day extended fast and only returns at about 8 months since my last extended fast. It eliminated all pain from a hammer toe as well. I still no longer eat breakfast which is an 18 hour fast until lunch from supper the previous day.

Another surprise was relief from seasonal pollen allergies. I had suffered from oak pollen for over 40

years. Sneezing, watery eyes, runny nose, difficulty sleeping, breathing, living. I had done two 5 day fasts by spring of 2018 and suddenly realized oak was in bloom, but I had not had even a sniffle. Nothing! It has been that way every spring since. Sugar, enriched grains, and vegetable/seed oils confuse our immune system.

In May of 2018 just after my stroke I recorded my 30-day average resting heart rate at 76.2 beats per minute which is “high” for my age at that time. In March of 2021 I recorded a new record low resting 14

heart rate of 57 beats per minute. I averaged my readings for the previous 30 days and found a 14%

improvement at 65.3. This was considered “great” for a man half my age at that time. I think of all those people who succumbed to an early grave, if they had only known that fasting reverses heart disease.

Again, though, one cannot discount the fact that I no longer eat sugar, added sugar foods, nor sugar concentrated beverages like fruit juice. This improvement came without exercise except I walk behind a mower for 40 minutes a week in the summer and do some push-ups occasionally.

One of the excuses to refuse a fasting lifestyle is “I do not want to lose muscle mass”. I read that this myth was busted in the 1860’s by French researcher Charles Choosat. It was again busted by Professor Sergious Morgulis of Ohio State University in the 1880’s. Several times in the early 1900’s and again as recently as 2016 using modern physiological measurement technology. Consistently they found that the fat to muscle loss was 97% to 3%. As a formerly fat man, that’s a trade I will make all day long! However, reading about this was one thing, but I wanted to prove it to myself, so I purchased a hand strength dynamometer. The only strength exercise I ever do is pushups so I do not do anything that would strengthen my hands specifically. Below you will see a chart that came with the device that conclusively proves that I gained strength from my fasting lifestyle. When I started, I was normal for a man in his late 60’s, but today at 73 I am now “strong” for a man in his 50’s.

In January 2017 I had plaque psoriasis. After my first 5 day extended fast in September of that year it was gone and has not returned. In Facebook fasting groups I gather that women really care about how their skin looks and they are always raving about the improvements they experience. I am not big on having soft supple skin, but I am really glad I no longer have those big purple blotches.

Below is a list of diseases that can be improved by fasting. The items in red type were my issues. The chart has a very good reminder and that is that fasting does not “cure” anything. It gives the body the rest it needs to cure itself. That is why fasting addresses such a wide range of issues. We are too used to the one pill approach that requires a patented prescription drug for every health issue. Obviously, the one pill per disease approach is certainly more profitable.

15

www.allaboutfasting.com/benefit-of-fasting.html

Keep in mind that in our one-pill-for-this-and-one-pill-for-that-world that our bodies are capable of multi-tasking to keep us healthy. You cannot expect autophagy to fix what you want or expect it to fix. I see people begin a fasting lifestyle to reverse a specific disease or blemish on their body and are disappointed when it does not happen as fast as they wish. I think autophagy works on the greatest threat to your well-being first and that may not be anything to satisfy your vanity or that you are aware of.

16

Chapter 7

Random, but Important Considerations

Is It Really Worth It?

Fasting has a variety of side effects. Most common among them is backaches, headaches, insomnia, being cold all the time, being hot, diarrhea, constipation, dizziness, fatigue, anger or being “hangry”, awkward social experiences, evaporation of family support, giving up foods you crave and are clearly addicted to, and, of course, regular periods of hunger pain. Is it really worth all that added to your daily grind? It took me 2.5 years to reach goal weight losing 100 pounds. In the process I reversed 4 diseases. I could have and wish I had done it a lot faster. I’ve been at goal weight for over 4 years now.

My answer to this question comes every time I look at myself in the mirror, or watch people I care about as they visit their doctors over and over and over again expecting different results. Then there are the more sudden rushes to the ER for conflicting reactions to the drugs they take and almost brag about when lined up like ducks in a row and placed into a daily dispenser. Complaining about their health and poor quality of life worms it way into the conversation at every social gathering. Our natural fear of death is conflicted with wishing for an early grave to end the misery. Yes, my answer is yes! At 73 years-old I thank God every day for giving us fasting and diet advice in Genesis that has brought me to my pain-free life in perfect health. It was indeed worth it to finally learn how to love myself more than the pleasure of food!

How Do I Begin A Fasting Lifestyle?

Some points below are repeated in the book, but this item is meant to be a condensed version of the manuscript.

How do you begin a fasting lifestyle? The short answer is just by skipping a meal. The long answer is first by educating yourself. I did both. I started skipping breakfast every day and a few weeks later started to skip lunch two non-consecutive days a week. I still do this today to maintain my weight loss and keep myself free of the autoimmune diseases I had and the pain of inflammation. Fasting can be used just for weight loss or for healing, or for both.

As I read twelve books on therapeutic fasting, I experimented with longer and longer fasts until 8

months into my journey I did my first 5-day zero calorie fast. All my fasting is zero calorie. There are fat fasts if you are only interested in weight loss or reversing diabetes. That is right, fat fasts. It is nearly impossible to eat enough fat to gain weight and it reduces hunger pain. I fast for healing, and I do not allow hunger pain to annoy me so fat fasts are not my thing. You cannot gain weight eating too much fat, but it can prevent weight loss. The established order of the body is to use dietary fat first and if that is depleted it starts delving into your fat stores. Hunger is the only indication you will have that confirms your body is eating its own fat. I saw hunger pain as good news!

Fasting is simple. There is nothing to buy, nothing to do, nothing. Boredom during a fast is a nemesis for some so for them it is important to stay busy. There are over one hundred diets that you can choose from or simply eat whatever you like. Fasting is an overlay of whatever diet you choose. You are an adult and know what you should and should not eat. The most detrimental food to the human body is sugar.

The Great Saturated Fat Hoax has had its day and we can all forgive the now dead people who took the money and created the deception that put millions of people into an early grave thinking it was saturated fat that put them there. Millions more use palliative drugs that merely address symptoms but bring no mercy from the disease that causes them. Sugar and in general a high carbohydrate diet is the 17

root cause of autoimmune diseases. We know this because high-quality randomized, controlled trials prove that excluding sugar, enriched grains, and vegetable oils from the diet reverses those same autoimmune diseases in most people.

Fasting is absolute. There is no wiggle room. If you are not healing or losing weight fast enough, you are eating too much food. If you are considering fasting for weight loss you can blame the fake research, your doctor’s advice, decades of false advertising, and on and on for how you got here, but in fasting if the scale does not budge, accept personal responsibility, and reduce the amount of food you are eating.

I have always, and still do today, weigh myself every morning. After I drain my bladder, but before I eat or drink anything, I step on the scale. I do not have a scale phobia. If it does not say what I want it to say I need to act. I do not blame the scale, water weight, hormones, God, the weather, I blame myself, make better food selections, and adjust my portion sizes to make sure that tomorrow I will like the truth the scale gives me. In one hundred pounds lost I never had a “plateau” that lasted more than a few days.

The “move more, eat less” paradigm has not worked. Exercise is optional with fasting. In fact, for a healing fast exercise during fasting is not recommended. Exercise to just lose weight is optional. The new paradigm for the low carb/intermittent fasting lifestyle is if you aren’t getting the desired results for weight loss, you need to eat less or fast longer.

Hunger pain isn’t fatal, and your healing or weight loss journey is not going anywhere without it. The only threat that hunger pain poses is that if you do not eat something your body is going to start carving off some of your precious fat stores for sustenance. Hunger also tells you that the healing power of autophagy is ramping up. Once I realized that this was good news, hunger became my new best friend.

Okay, so if fasting is so simple why do I need to educate myself about it? Because fasting has side effects. When you experience one you do not want to run in terror to the refrigerator to end your fast because of some common normal side effect. Nor do you want to ignore a life-threatening situation requiring immediate medical intervention. As I encountered side effects, I went to a Facebook fasting group and asked how to mitigate it. My fasting side effects include being cold and insomnia every other night during an extended fast. For being cold I either bundle up or do longer fasts in the summer. I now use a low-EMF electric blanket that when I wake up shivering, usually at about 3 AM, I just push a button and a few minutes later I’m back to sleep. For my insomnia every other day I learned that if I get up and do something it ruins the next day. If I just lay there not moving and bored to tears, I am fine the next day and even if still fasting I will sleep like a baby the next night. New research suggests that during fasting orexin, a neuropeptide, production is increased. Low levels of orexin, also called hypocretin, is found in people plagued with narcolepsy. It also helps convert normal adipose tissue to “brown fat”

used to regulate body temperature. Insomnia and being cold are two very common fasting side effects and they could be related to orexin production.

Shouldn’t I consult a doctor before jumping into a fasting lifestyle? Yes, you should. However, it should be someone qualified to answer the question. There is one thing that your doctor and the McDonald’s restaurant drive-up window attendant have in common. They both have no training of any kind in therapeutic fasting. No training means that a medical professional is not qualified to speak on the topic in a professional capacity. So, a fasting lifestyle is a path of self-discovery. That path can prove to be quite frightening for someone who has always relied on “experts” for matters concerning their health. I have been permanently injured three times by incompetent medical professionals. They have no skin in 18

my health game other than my body being a conduit to Medicare money, so I consider them to be advisors and nothing more. I never ask an important health question of a medical professional unless I already know the state-of-the-art answer. That way I will immediately know if I am talking to someone who is too afraid to step outside the medical dogma guidelines to speak the truth. The “Standard of Care” in most countries means that their treatment of your issue is limited by what the government will pay for. State of the Art care is reserved for cash paying customers.

Fear of Fasting

Fasting anxiety is a very real experience for most. It can be very frightening to start skipping meals or going days without sustenance. You will very quickly adopt a heightened sense of awareness with every ache, pain, and muscle twitch in your body. Issues that you have always had suddenly may seem to become greater than before. Cortisol production increases during a fast and some see a modest rise in blood pressure. Education and experience are the only things that gave me relief from fear. Part of your education should include the epic zero calorie fast by Angus Barbieri of 382 days in 1965-66.

Support from Others

Do not expect support from others. This new fad diet intervention that has only been around for thousands of years just cannot be good for you. The concern comes from a place of love, but the lack of support from a lack of knowledge of the health benefits fasting brings. Unfortunately, this lack of knowledge is something they share with most medical professionals. The benefits you get from fasting will soon have you bursting to tell others so that they can have the same hope that you have discovered.

You will be disappointed with the reaction. Go ahead and try, but I think you will soon understand why a fasting lifestyle is something better kept to yourself.

Food addiction is what brought most of us to consider fasting for weight reduction. Sugar in all its insidious forms can have a powerful grip on our minds. Extended fasting is what truly broke that grip for me. My wife buys and eats sugary snacks every day. Our pantry and freezer are full of delicious things she bakes or buys, and I never touch it. Extended fasting is what took me from a place of envy to a place of apathy toward the unhealthy foods other people are eating around me.

Pity Party

Fasting is not for everyone. To be brutally honest, some people have such a low threshold for discomfort that they are already driving their loved ones crazy with complaining about things they can’t change, like the weather, to things they could change, but refuse to do so. Listening to someone whine about being hungry during a fast gets absolutely no sympathy from me because hunger pain is good news and weight loss will not happen without it.

Of No Benefit to Anyone, Except…

If fasting is so wonderful why does everyone discourage it? Fasting is of benefit to no one except the person doing it. Once you learn what fasting can do for you, you will understand the threat it poses to the financial interests surrounding obesity and autoimmune disease. Over 80% of hospital beds are filled by people with autoimmune diseases that can be improved, reversed, or prevented with fasting. There is only one drug category (antibiotics) that actually cures disease. The rest are palliative, meaning they only mask the symptoms of autoimmune disease, but cure nothing. Doctors have bills to pay, a six-digit student loan, a clinic rent payment, a staff payroll, a mortgage payment, and kids to put through college.

There just is not much incentive to recommend a therapy that is free to the patient. That is probably 19

why therapeutic fasting has not been taught in medical schools since about the 18th century. The food industry is terrified of what might happen to them once people learn that the body actually needs only about ¼ of what we consume to thrive. The weight loss industry fears that the old paradigm of “move more, eat less” will change to “fast longer or eat less” because exercise to get healthy might help, but is optional to the faster.

Past Diets Failed Me

Fact: The FAILURE rate for keeping lost weight lost using manmade diets is: 98.3%.

Manmade diets fail because they are, well, manmade. Fasting does not have this fatal flaw. I’ve lost 60 pounds twice. First with the low-fat diet and a couple decades later with the low-carb diet and both times gained it all back. I feared a three-peat with fasting. Any weight loss diet will work as long as you follow it for the rest of your life. Other diets proved too difficult to follow forever, but more importantly did nothing to correct the grip food had on my mind. How many recovering alcoholics do you think there would be if they all had to drink just a little booze three times a day? Abstinence works for the alcoholic and for brief periods of time will work for the faster as well to break food’s grip on your mind. As far as the difficulty of following a fasting lifestyle, at its core fasting is to do nothing. Nothing is easier to do than nothing. How hard has maintenance been for me? How hard is it to do nothing?

The Smartest Things I Did When I started A Fasting Lifestyle (mentioned elsewhere, but summarized here)

100 pounds ago when I started a fasting lifestyle the smartest things I did were as follows: 1. I read several books on therapeutic fasting so that I knew what to expect during a fast. This prevented me from running in terror to the refrigerator to end my fast over some common normal fasting side effect nor from ignoring a life-threatening event that required immediate medical intervention. Most people, me included, when a fasting side effect is noticed and gets a little scary, they just eat something, and it goes away.

2. I selected a simple weekly protocol that I knew I could live with for the rest of my life and then learned how to lose weight on it without extended fasting. This was huge for my successful maintenance of the weight loss and health benefits I received. Five years in and I have difficulty fasting for more than 24 hours.

3. I weighed myself every morning (and still do) and made my food selections and adjusted my portion sizes based on what the scale told me. I never counted calories or carbs, nor did I weigh my food. I had to keep it simple! I never had a “plateau” that lasted more than a day or two during my initial weight loss. I was never disappointed by what the scale told me. After a while I knew what it was going to say based on my indulgences of the previous day. I provide support to some Facebook fasting groups and am dismayed when I see people give power over themselves to an inanimate object, the scale. It is just a measurement tool, nothing more. Just use it, do not hate it for something that you are responsible for, like what it tells you. If it does not tell you what you want to see, it is not the scale’s fault.

4. I kept a daily record of my blood pressure, weight, date, time, and resting heart rate. I was able to accurately determine benefits to my circulatory system from my lifestyle. I purchased a hand strength dynamometer to prove to myself from what I had read that fasting does not diminish muscle mass. My strength increased by 14% during the time between starting my fasting lifestyle to the time I reached my goal weight.

5. I set my goal weight to ten pounds below the weight I wanted to stay at for the rest of my life.

Blowing past that weight brought me back to my 1967 high school weight and dimensions and gave me the confidence that I will never be obese again! The uniform in the image was fit to me in 1969.

20

6. I made a list of every disease, ache, skin blemish, and health issue I had so that I could check them off as they vanished.

Food Addiction and Obsession

People with weight issues are addicted to sugar. People laugh at that and say to themselves, “not me”. I challenge obese people to go one day from the time they get up in the morning until they go to bed at night to not eat anything sweet or with added sugar. Without exception (so far) they can’t do it. One woman I know admitted that after supper she was in such a bad state that she tipped a spray can of whipped cream into her mouth to satisfy her intense craving for something sweet. The thing that really broke food’s grip on my mind and body was several 7-day zero-calorie fasts. Today I eat nothing with added sugar and do not feel deprived or the need to whine about it.

The Importance of Flexibility

I have read so many posts about the dreaded plateau and how someone has been in one for months and months. If your routine or protocol isn’t working, you must be flexible! Change your diet, reduce your portion sizes, don’t just keep doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. As you lose weight it is going to get harder and harder to keep losing weight. It takes less energy to move my 160-pound body than it did my 260 pound body. It’s just physics. Getting my health back was just like peeling an onion including the tears of giving up things I loved.

The Most Difficult Thing About a Fasting Lifestyle

They say that “Knowledge is power to the person who has it”. So, I know that heart disease, strokes, diabetes, and cancers are caused by the over consumption of sugar, enriched grains, and vegetable oils.

I have reversed my heart disease and have substantially reduced my chances of having a heart attack or a second stroke by avoiding these foods and living a fasting lifestyle. The most difficult thing for me is watching people I care about slowly committing suicide as they continue to consume those foods, especially children when the average 12-year-old child has as much as a 15% blockage of their blood vessels by that young age. I know two people who are proud of making huge quantities (over one hundred pounds) of super sugar dense fudge for children during the holidays. Being critical of these behaviors at every opportunity is detrimental to relationships and not well received. All I can do is lead by example and answer questions, if asked, how I stay so fit at my age. However, having knowledge gained from quality research, and applied experience providing overwhelming support, withholding it from people I care about is an abuse of the power of knowledge, is it not?

Support from Friends and Family

When you tell friends and family that you are determined to lose weight and embrace a healthier lifestyle you likely will get swamped with support and encouragement until you tell them that you are going to include fasting. The support will evaporate faster than ice in a furnace. You will hear the words starve and starvation tossed about and at you. Words of caution and horror stories and links to fasting disasters sent in emails. People are killed every day in automobile accidents so you should never drive comes from similar logic. The best way to deal with this is to tell no one that you do not have to tell.

When people ask how you have achieved such remarkable results tell them the truth and let it sink in.

What I know is that their concerns come from a place of love, but the lack of support from a lack of knowledge of the benefits.

I wrote this as a Facebook post, but it is an example of encouraging others to embrace this way of life: Yesterday my wife again chastised me for talking too much about health issues. She says I am obsessed with it. She is probably right. Four years ago, I had a stroke. It was the most frightening experience I’ve 21

ever had. For weeks I struggled to eat food and manage bodily functions without assistance. Thanks to embracing a healthier lifestyle I have fully recovered. At least when I have a senior moment or physical issue these days I cannot tell if it is a lingering stroke symptom or just from being 73 years old. One of the things the rehabilitation people told me was that my pre-stroke stamina would never return. I am blessed to report I do anything and everything I wish to do with no lingering fatigue.

I am not the kind of person to accept ignorance is bliss when it comes to my health, and I am too much of a control freak to just wait around for my next health shoe to drop and instantly downgrade my quality of life. I do not eat sugar added foods, commercial enriched grain products, or anything with seed oils in them. I do not snack between meals. Diet wise, if my food whether animal, vegetable, or fruit, if it doesn’t look like it might have just come from the Garden of Eden I won’t eat it. I don’t count calories or carbs and I never eat until I’m “stuffed”. These lifestyle changes have allowed me to lose 100

pounds, arrest 4 autoimmune diseases, manage chronic pain from and old injury, and keep it all lost for over 4 years at this writing.

Please forgive me if I can’t hold my tongue when I see people I care about feeding their food and sugar addictions or adding my $0.02 every time a health conversation comes up, and with the older crowd I hang out with, that’s quite often. Committing suicide with food is a delicious way to dig an early grave for yourself. And I think the devil takes great delight from every mouthful that destroys your temple of the Holy Spirit or brings you closer to cursing God when a health shoe drops and you find yourself in a health crisis. Honestly, fasting is easy, there is literally nothing to do. The hard part is the mental transition to love yourself more than food. Once you stop eating sugar and bread the intense cravings and hunger pain become no big deal.

Man’s wisdom is always opposite of God’s wisdom. Fasting is the only dietary intervention that is designed, recommended, encouraged, and expected by God. That’s probably why man’s flawed and feeble wisdom is against it. Isaiah 58:6 tells us to use fasting to “untie the cords of the yoke…and to break every yoke.” I do not know about your yokes, but thanks to this lifestyle of loving myself more than food I am no longer yoked with one hundred pounds of fat and a host of palliative drugs that merely make me comfortable while I continue to kill myself with what I put in my mouth. I do not want to control what you eat. I want you to love yourself more than food by shunning man’s dietary wisdom and embracing God’s. (End of my Facebook Post)

Medical Community Support

It is very rare to find a medical professional, or anyone connected with nutrition that will have a favorable opinion about fasting. I am amused when people say, “I will have to ask my doctor before I try it.” The first thing to ask your medical professional is, “Do you have any training in using therapeutic fasting or diet for disease prevention?” If they say no, they are not qualified to answer the question nor even speak on the subject in a professional capacity.

The Studies We Live and Die By

I demonize sugar, enriched grains, and seed oils (soybean, canola, corn, sunflower, all “vegetable” oils) at every opportunity. The science is in if you care enough to look for it. Products made with those ingredients will kill you slowly. Randomized, controlled trails with human cohorts are the “gold standard” of health studies, even better if “blind” or “double-blind, and are far superior to relational or comparison studies that can never prove causation. Relational studies are not worth the time to review them and especially not worthy of making health decisions based on them. If I made a shark repellant and wanted to market it to everyone, I would hire a research company to do a relational/comparison 22

study that would try to convince you that if you did not put my product into your toilet after every flush, there was a very real possibility that you could be bitten by a shark while sitting on it.

Another example of a relational study is that the divorce rate in Germany is rising at the exact same rate as soybean production in the United States. Therefore, if we wish to curb the German divorce rate, we need to curb soybean production in the US. Most relational studies are far more plausible than my silly examples, but no matter how plausible they are they will never prove causation. Relational studies are influenced by cherry-picking results as Ancel Keys did with his Seven Countries Study that started the Great Saturated Fat Hoax. When an honest analysis of his research results were finally done they actually suggested that a diet high in saturated fat protected the circulatory system from heart disease.

Randomized, controlled trials have now proven this protection. Think of the millions of people who have gone to an early grave thinking it was saturated fat that put them there when it was in fact, sugar, enriched grains, and vegetable oils. Relational and comparison studies are open to fraud, researcher bias and mostly used to promote products or to “prove” the theory of an arrogant, egocentric expert that can’t admit to being wrong like Ancel Keys. Relational and comparison studies are used to support theories to ask for more funding for a randomized, controlled trial. These controlled trials can give a research team years of income to support their families. Survival is a strong incentive to push the data a bit in a favorable direction. There is also funding and publication bias. Governments that provide grants to research teams will fork out money more willingly for research that supports their personal agenda.

The publishing bias means that if your research proves something that is not popular or thought to be newsworthy you cannot get the results published. The best contemporary example of this is anything that challenges the Global Warming/Climate Change narrative.

For health-related studies do your own research starting at Pub Med. I have found that the links provided with videos on Youtube to support what the vlogger is talking about will help to discern real useable information from that of a talking head with an agenda. The vloggers who are enduring personal and professional persecution are the ones I find to be the most genuine. There is not much money to be had in telling people to fast and eat fresh produce and pastured meat. If the studies are not randomized controlled trials, they should be ignored. Never in history has therapeutic fasting posed a greater threat to the industries that make their livelihoods from our illness and suffering.

In the southern United States, they have a saying, “You need to be able to pick the pepper from the fly poop”. The meaning of this is that you need to know what good information is and what is bad information. Most of the books I have read had chapters that explained how we came to be able to fast from a paleo perspective. I filter anything I read through the reality of how we got here in the first place.

When I read that a so-called expert says that we should be doing this or that when fasting I compare that advice to prehistoric times and if our ancestors did not have it then, it probably isn’t a necessity today.

Industry Support

The food, pharmaceutical, and weight loss industries will spare no expense to capitalize on our natural fear of not eating to keep you from trying it. Food sales, especially sugary grain-based food products, which are the most profitable, will suffer if a fasting lifestyle becomes a world trend. About 80% of hospital beds are filled with patients who have autoimmune diseases that fasting, and diet will improve, reverse, or prevent. These patients are being pumped full of palliative drugs to relieve the symptoms, but that offer no mercy from the diseases that cause them. These drugs also cause a myriad of side effects that include permanent disability and death. This industry, Big Pharma, stands to lose the most if fasting becomes widespread. Just look at one drug alone, statins. Cholesterol does not cause heart 23

disease, a high-carb diet does. And yet your doctor will encourage you to take them because it is “the standard of care protocol”. Dogma jeopardizes the health of millions of people worldwide.

They Have Their Place

You might think that I am a little harsh toward the medical profession. If I have a gunshot wound, been stabbed, in a car or industrial accident I surely do not want the ambulance driver to take me to a fasting clinic. That said, they should recognize that without even 60 seconds of therapeutic fasting training they should not speak on the subject let alone denigrate it at every opportunity. I can appreciate the temptation to speak ill of it because it is free to the patient.

“Standard of Care” protocols in America are limited to what the government will pay for and provide a very narrow corridor of acceptable medical procedures, and if they are circumvented, the rogue practitioner can expect harsh retribution. The “state of the art care” is reserved for cash-paying customers.

Who Profits from Fasting?

At some point you should realize that fasting is of no benefit for anyone except the person doing it.

Selling information about it as I am, or fasting practitioners who charge patients for taking their daily vitals, filling a bed, and drinking all the water that they want is about it. Patients who use fasting to reverse diabetes, heart disease, arthritis, etc. are gone as customers unless they go back to the unhealthy habits that gave them their autoimmune issues in the first place. Therefore, the only people

“shouting it from the rooftops” are people whose lives have been saved by it as mine has.

“Slide Into Your Coffin”

We have all heard people who reject a healthy lifestyle saying that they refuse to lie there in their coffin with a pristine well cared for body. They would rather enjoy life and slide into their coffin with a well-used up body. The fact is, if you do not take better care of your body, your health decline will begin a decade or so before you perish and you will not “slide” into your coffin, you’ll crawl into it and be glad to be out of your misery.

Fasting Zealots

Water-only!!!! Every topic has its zealots that know exactly how something should be done and fasting is no different. Fasting is the most flexible health plan you could ever embrace. The list of things you do not have to do is endless. The list of things you do have to do is very short. The first thing you must do is stop eating. The second thing is drinking water when you get thirsty. The third thing is when you start eating again eat what sounds good, but do not eat too much too fast. To start a fasting lifestyle, just skip a meal. It all can really be that simple. I tried water-only until I got cramps in my hands two times on day five of two consecutive fasts. I went to Facebook groups, youtube, etc. and learned that electrolytes can prevent cramping. I found and tried a homemade recipe called “snake juice” and during my next fast had no cramps making it to seven days. I could have gone longer, much longer, but my wife gets more anxious with each passing day. To keep the peace 7 days is my limit. Fat fasting is something that diabetics do to reduce insulin resistance and reverse the disease. They put butter or coconut oil in their coffee to make Bullet-Proof coffee (very tasty I might add), drink bone broth, and use fat bombs to stave off hunger and avoid any chance of ketoacidosis when using drugs to treat the disease.

There are people who swear by the advice of this doctor or that fasting guru just like followers of any other influencer. The biggest name in fasting to reverse diabetes is unquestionably Dr. Jason Fung. For managing cancer, Dr. Thomas Seyfried, and for cognitive decline, which is what I originally investigated 24

fasting for, Dr. Mark Mattson. Dr. Joseph Mercola is an excellent source for time restricted eating and selecting a diet that will support a healthy lifestyle.

Selecting the “Right” Diet

Spoiler alert! There is no such thing as a diet that is right for everyone. I repeat, there is no such thing as a diet that is right for everyone! Anyone who tells you that you should do this diet or that diet is an idiot and can be regarded as an uneducated diet zealot. There are diets that will kill you. I tried the Vegan diet once. It was the worst 4 hours of my life.

After I realized that all my gastrointestinal issues were caused by eating whole grains, any of them, I sent in some saliva to 23andme for a DNA analysis to see where my ancestors came from. Northwestern Europe was the general area. I have a Dutch last name, but that was surprisingly not where my ancestors came from. I am predominately German and French with some Irish and Danish. Well, no wonder tropical fruit, except for mangoes, does not agree with me. You see, there is natural selection at play here. My ancestors who could not tolerate the foods available in the region they were relocated to, or born and lived in simply died young. I looked up the foods that have been eaten in those regions for the past several hundred years and developed a personal diet that is both nutritious and gets along well with my body. Except for sugar and sugar added foods, foods that you have always liked, and that agree with your digestive track are probably from the regions your people came from. Grains were not something that my ancestors had much of in their diets which is why whole grain foods do not agree with me today. And when I think of all the grief I endured because I listened to the “experts” I can get very angry. Today I eat fruits, vegetables, meats, seafood, and dairy that were plentiful to my ancestors, and I have been issue-free ever since.

Fasting with Supervision

Gone are the large clinics in most major cities that would supervise people who wanted to reverse disease by fasting. Fasting practitioners were plentiful in the early 20th century. The government and pharmaceutical industry were very effective in using fear to bully practitioners and scare people away from fasting to the new pills they continue to roll out on the population. There are about 250,000

different prescription drugs with only antibiotics actually able to cure anything. Dr Linda Hazzard, early in the last century, spent time in prison for “killing people with starvation”. The truth is that she made the mistake of taking in people who had been told to go home and die by their medical doctors. As a result, if you are given the same cast off by an MD you have no hope of getting advice from a fasting practitioner today. If you die in a fasting practitioners care, the medical establishment lays in wait to pounce on anyone who bucks the system with this autophagy and fasting “nonsense.”

Older people or people with a compromising health condition who choose to fast need to be careful and almost always should consider putting electrolytes in their drinking water. To see if there is a fasting practitioner in your area visit www.iahp.net. I’ve also learned that naturopathic doctors are more common and have been trained to use fasting as a healing tool, but they rarely use it.

Those Who Should Not Fast

In the books I’ve read and several other sources they list people who should not engage in fasting without supervision. Note that the books never said, “should not fast”. They said, “should not fast without supervision”. It is a short list, but children under the age of 18 should not fast. Once parents discover the benefits of fasting, they want their children to enjoy these benefits as well. Whenever I see people discussing it on social media, I warn them that unless they want to be visited by their local child protective services office they had better shut-up about fasting their kids. If the kid takes no interest in 25

breakfast that’s another thing and a very good thing for their future health. The phrase “breakfast is the most important meal of the day” is the most successful advertising slogan in the history of marketing when it appeared in a 1917 issue of Good Health Magazine. The article’s editor was Dr. John Kellogg, yes, of the Kellogg cereal family.

Mothers who are pregnant, and lactating mothers should not fast. I occasionally see women on social media wanting to fast to lose weight so badly that they would actually risk the baby’s health to do so. If something was wrong with the baby imagine the guilt the mother would carry for the rest of her life.

People who have a Body Mass Index (BMI) lower than 18.5. 18.5 is really thin. I am glad they have the 18.5 limit because people who have a distorted self-image have an objective value that they can come up with using their own calculator that says they are too thin. Maybe that can jar them into some sense of reality regarding their weight.

It is recommended that people with diabetes should not fast unless supervised by a qualified fasting practitioner. Unfortunately, most people live hundreds of miles from a “qualified” fasting professional.

Dr. Jason Fung and Megan Ramos run one of the largest Facebook fasting groups. They have a free side and a paid side for one-on-one support for diabetics who wish to reverse their disease. Fung also has a clinic in Toronto, Canada. If you have diabetes, you will find The Fasting Method Facebook group to be very helpful. Diabetes being a permanent disease is nonsense. Even the American Diabetes Association website now says that a low-carb diet can reverse the disease.

The Return of Natural Hunger

The Return of Natural Hunger was a descriptive phrase coined in the late 1800’s by fasting practitioners who took their patients to the threshold of fasting where to go beyond this point meant you were passing into starvation. Not to be confused with “starvation mode”. That is something else. I am not even sure “starvation mode” is a real thing. The Return of Natural hunger is real and was even mentioned in the Bible when after the famous 40 day fast of Jesus the Bible says, “He was hungry”. After the fourth day of a water-only fast hunger pain for most people stops and does not return until the Return of Natural Hunger. The only book I’ve read that elaborates on The Return of Natural Hunger is Fasting and Sunbathing by Dr. Herbert Shelton. Every patient Shelton had was fasted to the point of the Return of Natural Hunger allowing the body “to finish its work” is the way he put it. He fasted over 30,000 people to this point, so I suppose that would make him the authority on this. He describes the sensation as unlike normal hunger pain. It is more in the chest and throat and does not go away until you eat something. It took Jesus 40 days to reach this point. For people who start at normal body weight the days to get there is between 30 and 50 days based on Shelton’s writings.

Loose Skin

I lost 100 pounds and had some loose skin and so will you for a while if you lose that much weight. At 73

and in maintenance for 3.5 years I still have some, but it is better. At 73 I am supposed to have loose skin anyway. The younger you are the faster it will disappear. Some say that taking collagen supplements help, some say the key is to exercise. There are lots of theories, but not much research.

People hoping to make a dollar from fasting are hoping to cash in on this niche market opportunity.

Fasting until the Return of Natural Hunger and then eating what is healthy for you back up to a normal weight seems to be the best way to rid yourself quickly of it. Otherwise, be patient and content with the fact that with clothes on you look great and some loose skin is way better than what used to fill it.

Prehistoric Fasting

26

When the spear or arrow missed its mark, or the bear beat you to the berries you fasted. Your skills of hunting and finding food had to be sharp or you perished. Every time I see the rules people pile onto the simple art of fasting, I reflect back on how it all got started and use it as a baseline to see if the proposed addition has value or if I should just ignore it. As I’ve already said, some people really like to clutter a beautiful thing with manmade rules, regulations, and limitations. It is disappointing when they use our natural fear of going without food to push their point of view. Prehistoric man always, always, always located his home near a water source. For this reason, I think dry fasting is for zealots who love to do foolish things to test the limits of crazy. They probably like skydiving and swimming with sharks too. I have a penchant for risky behavior too, but not with my health.

A Scale Is Just a Scale

I’ve already mentioned my amusement with people who give scales power over their mind, giving it all manner of demonic attributes. A scale is just a tool and as such needs to fill that role properly. I make sure my scale is accurate by stepping on and off three times letting the unit settle between each step-on. A good scale should give you the same weight each time. The second way I calibrate my scale is to compare it to a second scale. When I’m weighed at the doctor’s office I come straight home without a trip to the restroom or removing any clothing and step on my home scale to make sure my weight is the same. If different, then I seek out another scale and do the same thing. If the difference is the same, then I make the adjustment at each weigh-in on my home scale for my records. If the difference between the two scales is 2 pounds, then I add or deduct that amount each day to ensure consistent accuracy. If you think about it, giving an inanimate mechanical device power over how you think is much like the power we give food over our well-being.

My Mistake

Between the 2nd and third anniversary of my 100-pound loss I started snacking between meals. My eating window for two meals a day was 11:30 am through 6:00 pm and for one meal a day 4:00 pm through 6:00 pm. Between lunch and dinner I started snacking on low-carb high fat foods and when I ate supper only (one meal a day) I started snacking at 4:00 pm. I gave myself insulin resistance again. Any time you put something in your mouth your pancreas gives you a little shot of insulin thereby stopping any weight loss for which you were hoping. I have discussed this with people on Facebook who did not experience a halt in weight loss, but they were all still quite heavy. When you are hovering around your ideal weight it is a whole new ball game. Just a small wrong move can make a significant difference. So especially when you are closing in on goal weight be mindful that snacking between meals will spell disaster of your efforts just as it did for me.

What Does Loving Food and/or Convenience More Than Yourself or Your Loved Ones Look Like?

Looking back on my evolution to get to the point where I am today, I recall my addiction denial period being long and well supported with my creative excuses to ignore the obvious. What do you see when you look at your naked body in a mirror? I had a distorted view of what I observed supported, or maybe tainted is a better word, by people who told me that I “carried my weight well”. They were just lying, of course, to make me feel better. 100 extra pounds doesn’t carry well on anyone. I searched for information that shed negative light on the BMI (Body Mass Index) calculation that put me at 41 where 18.5 through 25 is the recommended healthy weight for someone of my stature. I hoped to find some science that supported my excuses, but there was none to be found. I tried living under a rock too, when it came to health information. I refused to read anything that even remotely suggested that I needed a lifestyle change.

27

I created all manner of excuses as to why my time was too valuable to sacrifice it to prepare proper nutrition for myself or my loved ones. Opening a can of Spaghetti-O’s, pouring it onto a plate, blasting it with microwaves, and setting it in front of someone you love isn’t very loving, is it? Fearing the wrath and confrontation of your children who love and are already addicted to convenience foods isn’t parenting either. Convenience foods are purposely made to be addictive, you know.

Addiction is powerful. That first touch of your brain by alcohol, cocaine, heroin, or sugar can be so warm and inviting, a faux friend in troubling times and anxious moments. A deep inhale of tobacco smoke by the smoker delivers a shot of nicotine and the thrill of engaging in risky behavior that twists your mind into believing that the cancer and emphysema threat will pass you by. To the problem gambler the thrill of the spinning tumblers or rolling dice until they stop to reveal your plight. The common theme to breaking free of any addiction is learning to love yourself more than whatever pleasure is destroying your life. It truly is that simple and yet incredibly hard. At least, now you know the goal, the end game.

Just love yourself more than food.

What does loving yourself more than food look and feel like?

The most astonishing attribute of loving yourself more than food is that you realize that refusing to eat foods that you know destroy your health has nothing to do with will-power.

You never get “hangry” because you are mad at yourself and others for denying yourself the foods that you crave.

You will never again be envious of people as you watch them stuff their faces with foods you used to be addicted to.

You have empathy for people who are trying to achieve the state of mind you now enjoy but failing and experiencing self-pity and a feeling of despair.

You have no fear of regaining lost weight realizing that it has nothing to do with will-power. It has everything to do with refusing to put poisonous substances into your mouth or stuff yourself at every meal.

You have no food cravings and even no desire for certain foods that you know will shorten your life.

You no longer have favorite restaurants.

After disappointing results from encouraging loved ones to embrace an intermittent fasting lifestyle and wholesome food choices, you accept their decision and patiently wait for them to want what you now have.

“Knowledge is power to the person who has it” has never resonated to you more than it does now.

Listening to medical professionals tell you that your lifestyle will yield disastrous results in the long run brings amusement and confidence that you have finally made the right choices for your wellbeing.

You hope and pray every day for people you care about to care enough about themselves to accept responsibility for their food and lifestyle choices and do something about it.

You no longer live in fear of when your next health crisis comes, and how much it will further denigrate your quality of life.

You will never get used to the joy of knowing that a pain-free life, in perfect health, to anyone at any age is available for the taking.

Giving thanks to God for telling us so specifically how to eat, live, and thrive in the Book of Genesis.

Give It Time

Are you allowing the pleasures of food to destroy your life?

It takes time for the message to resonate…to love yourself more than food. The first step in recognizing addiction is denial. Whether the addiction is alcohol, cocaine, heroin, tobacco, gambling, or foods that you know don’t support your health, you will deny that addiction. For most addicts “hitting rock 28

bottom” is the wake up call they need to amend their lifestyle to save themselves from certain early death. For the alcoholic this can be time in jail and a huge fine for driving under the influence. For a drug addict it might be a near-death overdose. For the tobacco user a diagnosis of cancer. For the food addicted person, obesity is your first clue. The inability to resist foods that you know compromise your health is another. You just can’t do without that sweet rush is another clue. Ongoing awareness alerts for the food addicted is increasing doctor visits and pills that address only symptoms but give no mercy from the diseases that cause them. You keep looking outwardly for salvation from your growing health crisis but find only a sympathetic medical industry thriving off your misery. Can anything be done for the truth that “we are what we eat” to not rest so heavily upon our weakening shoulders? Can we please continue to satisfy our food cravings without these wretched, debilitating penalties? We all wish we could be like someone we know who dines at the table of gluttony but suffers no ill effects. My wakeup call was a stroke in 2018 at 67 years-old that left me paralyzed, unable to walk without assistance, blurred vision, difficulty swallowing, and slurred speech. I immediately altered my lifestyle by not eating anything with added sugar and doing extended zero-calorie fasts of 5-7 days. I have fully recovered and today enjoy a pain-free life in perfect health never eating sugar-added foods, commercially made enriched grain products, and seed oils. I hope you survive your wakeup call as well as I have survived mine. Just learn to love yourself more than food.