"
Health is wealth." Plant-food is medicine. And when our food is our medicine, we don't need medicine.
We certainly are more harmed than helped by pharmaceuticals. Fasting can remove the toxic residues we take in from daily living in a toxic world.
The best cleanse? They come in many forms. The "best" for one person or one time may not be suitable for another person or even the same person on a different occasion.
H2O - Water fasting is fantastic and simple. Stop eating. Start drinking a gallon of distilled water (with a level teaspoon of Himalayan pink salt) throughout the day.
Even one day of resting the internal organs is helpful. But if one continues to three days, the body will begin to cleanse. This could lead to a confusing healing crisis -- such as a rash or fluctuations in vital signs even dizziness or bad breath or a coating on the tongue. Poisons are moving out.
JUICE - Another good type of fasting-cleanse is to begin with a purgative (herbs to cause the bowels to move so that the digestive system is empty from the start, which is like adding one or more days to a fast) is just to drink fresh juices.
FRUIT - Yet another is to take only fresh fruits, preferably in season and organic, for as long as one can keep it up. (Avoid overly sweet Frankenfoods like our modern supermarket bananas, strawberries, grapes, oranges, and apples. These may be America's favorites, but they are also the most boring, flavorless, hybridized and tampered with fruits). Try the unfamiliar instead.
SOUP - Taking only the broth of soups can also be called "fasting" -- never canned, salted, containing body parts, or MSG, which hides in many forms food corporations call "spices," "yeast extract," "extractives," and other deceptive terms for excitotoxic flavorants. Make your own soup from fresh green leaves, and colorful vegetables, sea salt or rock salt (aluminum-free). Flavor with miso paste, tamari, seaweeds, roots, leaves, or chiles.
RAW - Eating only raw fruits and vegetables, separate since they are digested very differently, is also a gentle way to cleanse and is a much better way to start. The longer it has been since one fasted, the more gunked up the system is likely to be. And it will take some doing on the part of the body, and rest and faith that the body knows what it is doing on the part of the mind and spirit (breath).
VEG - Finally, eating only pure vegetarian foods can also be stretched to mean "fasting." If one is normally eating animal byproducts (dairy, guts, gore, flesh, slime, and things with urine and blood residue generally called gravy or
au jus), this will certainly allow the body to cleanse very gently. Paradoxically the MORE whole, raw, in season, unprocessed foods one consumes, the more one will fast and cleanse. Eating this way all the time is the secret to youth and vitality so long as flax is avoided, which will be difficult because it is like eggs to raw foodists and vegans who use it to hold everything together when chia works so much better and is so much more nutritional avoiding the harm of fatty acid imbalance by a preponderance of Omega 6 which throws the body off. (Hint: avoid flax).
AIR - The best fast, which some say is the only true fasting, avoids everything but fresh air ("spirit,"
prana, chi, spiritus, which form the basis of "spirituality") and solar waves (
manna from space). This may work for breatharians and
bhumi-devas, but it is not recommended. (Yogis and monks taught St. Issa, Rabbi Jesus in India, to fast for a reason).
We need clean (non-tap) water, and we need more of it when cleansing to flush out the toxins. Dehydration is the enemy of health, and even junk food wouldn't be so harmful if we took in more water, at least a gallon a day spaced out in small amounts.
- See your doctor before starting any new diet, fast, exercise regimen, or lifestyle. Fasting and cleansing are times of rest not activity and exercise. Take a steam. Take a walk. Get lots of fresh air, go barefoot, be in nature. Meditate so the mind/heart can cleanse, too.
Why fast?
Even one day of abstaining from food makes us realize how we USE food, not for nutrition or sustenance, but for comfort, boredom, neuroses, socializing, and a myriad of other things that have nothing to do with being healthy or staying alive. We shorten our lives the way we eat.
Stay. Live and live well! Cleanse internally. Just as you would not go a week without cleansing externally, why do we not fast even one day a week? Meatless Mondays are a start. How about a cleaning Sunday? It seems religious observance must have included a fasting day in the West.
Weekly fasting days
It certainly did in the Buddhist East. One translation of the Lunar Observance Day (
Uposattha, on the full, new, and quarter moondays) is the "fasting day." Buddhist monastics fast after noon every day, and they live very long for doing so.
Modern Mahayana monks and nuns, perhaps due to living in a colder climate far from India, gave up this rule instituted by the historical Buddha. But it is still observed in all climates by Theravada monastics.
The Lunar Observance Day was around long before the historical Buddha. Vedic adherents, many following in the tradition of brahmin priests and seers (
rishis), fasted according to a calender that would seem inconvenient and complex to our food based culture in the US today.
But the Moon is useful in leaving off food. In Christian Ethiopia, Christians fast for 40 days every Lent. But "fasting" has been redefined as eating vegetarian food. Many Mahayana Buddhists are at least vegetarians, so they may be keeping the monastic precept after all if they steer away from contaminating themselves with meat.
Not as much could probably be said for Vajrayana. Ladakhi, Tibetan, Sikkimese, Nepalese, and Bhutanese practitioners are very influenced by Hinduism today and their own witchcraft-shamanism-black magic-tantra (Bon and other pre-Buddhist animistic wizardry traditions).
A spring cleanse is rejuvenating. And it should always be remembered that the word "vegetarian" has NOTHING to do with the word "VEGETABLE." The term stems from the Latin root
vegetus, "
vigorous," "growing," "vitality." A vegetarian is "one who aims at vigor."
This vitality and life force is found in fresh, living plant foods even the Bible once advocated, until someone came around and mistranslated the word "food" as "meat." When "meat" is met with in the Bible, the word is food.
As the proto-Judeo-Christian world grew more brutal, no doubt some titans (
asuras), cretins (
nagas, reptilians or simply large creatures), "demons," ogres, or giants encouraged slaughter and cruel consumption of other creatures.
And before long slaughter laws (kosher and
halal) were instituted. Christians today laugh at all the trouble observant Jews go through to follow the same God's injunctions. Yet, the legend lives on of a more peaceful paradise on Earth where vegetarianism was the norm just as it was in
a Buddhist version of Genesis (see the
Agganna Sutra, DN 27).
For then [the tribal] God said: We "
give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food (
Genesis 1:29, NIV). To see the word food mistranslated as "meat," see the King James Version because since when did seed-bearing plants and trees start yielding up dead animals?
