The Fasting Cure

by Upton Sinclair

The fast is to me the key to eternal youth, the secret of perfect and permanent health. I would not take anything in all the world for my knowledge of it. It is Nature's safety-valve, an automatic protection against disease. I do not venture to assert that I am proof against virulent diseases, such as smallpox or typhoid. I know one ardent physical culturist, a physician, who takes typhoid germs at intervals in order to prove his immunity, but I should not care to go that far; it is enough for me to know that I am proof against all the common infections which plague us, and against all the "chronic" troubles. And I shall continue so just as long as I stand by my present resolve, which is to fast at the slightest hint of any symptom of ill-being—a cold or a headache, a feeling of depression, or a coated tongue, or a scratch on the finger which does not heal quickly.

Those who have made a study of the fast explain its miracles in the following way: Superfluous nutriment is taken into the system and ferments, and the body is filled with a greater quantity of poisonous matter than the organs of elimination can handle. The result is the clogging of these organs and of the blood-vessels—such is the meaning of headaches and rheumatism, arteriosclerosis, paralysis, apoplexy, Bright's disease, cirrhosis, etc. And by impairing the blood and lowering the vitality, this same condition prepares the system for infection—for "colds," or pneumonia, or tuberculosis, or any of the fevers. As soon as the fast begins, and the first hunger has been withstood, the secretions cease, and the whole assimilative system, which takes so much of the energies of the body, goes out of business. The body then begins a sort of house-cleaning, which must be helped by an enema and a bath daily, and, above all, by copious water-drinking. The tongue becomes coated, the breath and the perspiration offensive; and this continues until the diseased matter has been entirely cast out, when the tongue clears and hunger reasserts itself in unmistakable form.

The loss of weight during the fast is generally about a pound a day. The fat is used first, and after that the muscular tissue; true starvation begins only when the body has been reduced to the skeleton and the viscera. Fasts of forty and fifty days are now quite common—I have met several who have taken them.

Strange as it may seem, the fast is a cure for both emaciation and obesity. After a complete fast the body will come to its ideal weight. People who are very stout will not regain their weight; while people who are under weight may gain a pound or more a day for a month. There are two dangers to be feared in fasting. The first is that of fear. I do not say this as a jest. No one should begin to fast until he has read up on the subject and convinced himself that it is the thing to do; if possible he should have with him someone who has already had the experience. He should not have about him terrified aunts and cousins who will tell him that he looks like a corpse, that his pulse is below forty, and that his heart may stop beating in the night. I took a fast of three days out in California; on the third day I walked about fifteen miles, off and on, and, except that I was restless, I never felt better. And then in the evening I came home and read about the Messina earthquake, and how the relief ships arrived, and the wretched survivors crowded down to the water's edge and tore each other like wild beasts in their rage of hunger. The paper set forth, in horrified language, that some of them had been seventy-two hours without food. I, as I read, had also been seventy-two hours without food; and the difference was simply that they thought they were starving. And if at some crisis during a long fast, when you feel nervous and weak and doubting, some people with stronger wills than your own are able to arouse in you the terrors of the earthquake survivors, they can cause their most direful anticipations to be realized.

The other danger is in breaking the fast. A person breaking a long fast should regard himself as if he were liable to seizures of violent insanity. I know a man who fasted fifty days, and then ate half a dozen figs, and caused intestinal abrasions from which he lost a great deal of blood. I would dwell more upon this topic were it not for my discovery of the "milk diet." When you drink a glass of milk every half-hour you have no chance to get really hungry, and so you glide, as if by magic, from a condition of extreme emaciation to one of blooming rotundity. But very frequently the milk diet disagrees with people; and these have to break the fast with very small quantities of the simplest foods—fruit juices and meat broths for the first two or three days at least.

I will conclude this chapter by narrating the experiences of some other persons with the fasting cure. With the exception of one, the second case, they are all people whom I know personally, and who have told me their stories with their own lips.

First, I give the case of my wife. She has always been frail, and subject to sore throats since girlhood. In the past five years she has undergone three major surgical operations and had several serious illnesses besides. Two years ago she had a severe attack of appendicitis. The physician made a wrong diagnosis, and kept her alive for about ten days with morphine. She was then too low to risk an operation, and was not expected to live. It was several months before she was able to walk again, and she had never fully recovered from the experience. When she began the fast she was suffering from serious stomach trouble, loss of weight, and neurasthenia.

I did not think that she would be able to stand a fast. She had more trouble than I—some nervousness, headache and nausea. But she stood it for ten days, when her tongue cleared suddenly. She had lost twelve pounds, and she then gained twenty-two pounds in seventeen days. She then took another fast of six days with me, and with no more trouble than I experienced the second time—walking four miles every morning with me. She is now a picture of health, and is engaged in accumulating muscle with enthusiasm.

Second, a man well on in life, who had always abused his health. He suffered from asthma and dropsy, and was saturated with drugs. He had not been able to lie down for several years. He weighed over 220 pounds, and his legs were "like sacks of water, leaking continually." His kidneys had refused to act, and after his doctors had tried all the drugs they knew, he was told that he was dying. His brother, who narrated the circumstances to me, persuaded him not to eat the supper that was brought in to him, and so he lived through the night. He fasted seven days, and went for four weeks longer on a very light diet, and is now chopping wood and pitching hay upon his farm in Kentucky.