During the period of a normal fast you lose all interest in food. You almost forget that there is such a thing as eating; you can look at food without any more desire for it than you have to swallow marbles and carpet tacks. But then suddenly appetite returns, as I have explained, and you find that you can think of nothing but food. This is what students of the subject describe as a "complete fast," and while I do not want to go to extremes and say that the "complete fast" will cure every case of every disease, I can certainly say this: in the letters which have come to me from people who tried the fast at my suggestion, there are cases of every kind of common disease. In my book, "The Fasting Cure," I give the results in cases reported to me after the publication of my first magazine article. I quote two paragraphs:
"The total number of fasts taken was 277, and the average number of days was six. There were 90 of five days or over, 51 of ten days or over, and six of 30 days or over. Out of the 119 person who wrote to me, 100 reported benefit, and 17 no benefit. Of these 17 about half give wrong breaking of the fast as the reason for the failure. In cases where the cure had not proved permanent, about half mentioned that the recurrence of the trouble was caused by wrong eating, and about half of the rest made this quite evident by what they said. Also it is to be noted that in the cases of the 17 who got no benefit, nearly all were fasts of only three or four days.
"Following is the complete list of diseases benefited—45 of the cases having been diagnosed by physicians: indigestion (usually associated with nervousness), 27; rheumatism, 5; colds, 8; tuberculosis, 4; constipation, 14; poor circulation, 3; headaches, 5; anaemia, 3; scrofula, 1; bronchial trouble, 5; syphilis, 1; liver trouble, 5; general debility, 5; chills and fever, 1; blood poisoning, 1; ulcerated leg, 1; neurasthenia, 6; locomotor ataxia, 1; sciatica, 1; asthma, 2; excess of uric acid, 1; epilepsy, 1; pleurisy, 1; impaction of bowels, 1; eczema, 2; catarrh, 6; appendicitis, 3; valvular disease of heart, 1; insomnia, 1; gas poisoning, 1; grippe, 1; cancer, 1."
There are many diseases with many causes, and some yield more quickly than others to the fast. In the first group I put the diseases of the digestive and alimentary tract. Stomach and bowel troubles, and the nervous disorders occasioned by these, stop almost immediately when you fast. Next come disorders of the blood-stream, which are generally a second stage of digestive troubles. Everything immediately due to impurities of the blood, pimples, boils, and ulcers, inflammation, badly healing wounds, etc., respond to a few days of fasting as to the magic touch of the old-time legends. When it comes to diseases caused by germ infections, you have a double aspect of the problem, and must have a double method of attack. I would not like to say that fasting could cure such a disease as sleeping sickness, to the germs of which our systems are not accustomed, and against which they may well be helpless. On the other hand, in the case of common infections, such as colds and sore throats, the fast is again the touch of magic. Having been plagued a great deal by these ailments in past times, I am accustomed to say that I would not trade my knowledge of fasting for everything else that I know about health.
The first thing you must do if you want to take a fast is to read the literature on the subject and make up your mind that the experiment will do you no injury. You should also try to get your relatives to make up their minds, because you are nervous when you are fasting, and cannot withstand the attacks of the people around you, who will go into a panic and throw you into a panic. As I said before, it is quite possible for people to die of panic, but I do not believe that anybody ever died of a fast. I have known of two or three cases of people dying while they were fasting, but I feel quite certain that the fast did not cause their death; they would have died anyhow. You must bear in mind that among the people who try the fast, a great many are in a desperate condition; some have been given up by the doctors, and if now and then one of these should die, we may surely say that they died in spite of the fast, and not because of it. There is no physician who can save every patient, and it would be absurd to expect this. I have read scores of letters from people who were at the point of death from such "fatal" diseases as Bright's disease, sclerosis of the liver, and fatty degeneration of the heart, and were literally snatched out of the jaws of death by beginning a fast. I would not like to guess just what percentage of dying people in our hospitals might be saved if the doctors would withdraw all food from them, but I await with interest the time when medical science will have the intelligence to try that simple experiment and report the results.
Just the other day in the Los Angeles county jail, a chiropractor went on hunger strike, as a protest against imprisonment, and he fasted 41 days. Then he broke his fast, the reason being given that his pulse was down to 54, and he was afraid of dying. I smiled to myself. The normal pulse is 70. I have taken my pulse many times at the end of a ten-day fast, and it has been as low as 32, and I am not dead yet, and if I wait to die from the symptoms of a fast, I expect to live a long time indeed!
The first time I fasted, I felt very weak, and lay around and hardly cared to lift my head; if I walked from my bed to the lawn, I was tired in the legs. But since then I have grown used to fasting. I have fasted for a week probably twenty or thirty times, and on such occasions I have gone about my business as if nothing were happening. Of course I would not try to play tennis, or to climb a mountain, but it is a fact that on the seventh day of a fast in New York, I climbed the five or six flights of stairs to the top of the Metropolitan Opera House, and felt no ill effects from doing this. I climbed slowly, and was careful not to tire myself. The simple rule is not to have anything that you must do on the fast, and then do what you feel like doing. Lie down and rest, and read a book, and take as much exercise as you find you enjoy. Keep your mind quiet and free from worries, and lock out of the house everybody who tells you that your heart is going to stop beating in the next few minutes, and that you must have an injection of strychnine to start it, and some beefsteak and fried onions to "restore your strength." Give yourself up to the care of your wise old mother nature, who will attend to your heart just as securely and serenely as she attended to it in the days before you were born.
By fasting I mean that you take no food whatever. I know some nature cure teachers who practice what they call a "fruit fast." All I know is that if I eat nothing but fruit, I soon have my stomach boiling with fermentation, and also I suffer with hunger; whereas, if I take a complete fast, I promptly forget all about food. You must drink all the water you can on the fast. This helps nature with her house-cleaning; it is well to drink a glass of water every half hour at least. Do not try to go without water, and then write me that the fasting cure is a failure. Also please do not write and ask me if it will be fasting if you take just a little crackers and milk, or some soup, or something else that you think doesn't count!
I recommend a dose of laxative to clean out the system at the beginning of a fast, because the bowels are apt to become sluggish at once, and the quicker you get the system cleansed, the better. It does no good to take laxatives if you are going to pile in more food, but if you are going to fast, that is a different matter. You should take a full warm enema every day during the fast, so long as it brings any results. There are some people whose bowels are so frightfully clogged that I have known the enema to bring results even in the second and third weeks. On the other hand, if there is no solid matter to be removed, a small enema every day will suffice. Take a warm bath every day; and needless to say, you should get all the fresh air you can, and should sleep as much as you can. You may have difficulty in sleeping, because the fast is apt to make you nervous and wakeful. I have known people who could not fast because they could not sleep, and I have taught them a little trick, to put a hot water bottle at the feet, and another on the abdomen, to draw the blood away from the head. So they would quickly fall asleep, and they got great benefit from their fasts.
You should supply yourself with good music if you can, and with plenty of good reading matter. You will be amazed to find how active your mind becomes; perhaps you had never known before what a mind you had. Your blood has always been so clogged with food poisons that you didn't know you could think. My three act play, "The Nature Woman," was conceived and written in two days and a half on a fast; but I do not recommend this kind of thing—on the contrary, I strongly urge against it, because if you work your brain on a fast, you do not get the good from your fast, and do not recover so quickly. Put off all your problems until you have got your health back, and seek only to divert your mind while fasting.