joel fuhrman fasting and eating for health pdf

I won't even bother trying to list them here, except to say they ranged the spectrum from incontinence to cancer. I started writing down the different diseases and conditions that Fuhrman claimed fasting could fix and had to stop myself after filling two entire notebook pages.

But I hesitate to believe any text that claims the entire cornucopia of health can be achieved by one simple (albeit arduous) practice. Finally! A doctor's view! A medical doctor's view! A cover that didn't feature some vague and blurry picture of the desert! I thought: 'This could be legitimate.'Īnd maybe it is. You can understand, then, my (scholarly) excitement when I stumbled across Joel Fuhrman's Fasting and Eating for Health: A Medical Doctor's Program for Conquering Disease. When does the body start to experience real hunger? What are the chemical and catalytic interactions at each stage of the fast? What's happening in the brain? What's happening in the blood? The bones? The belly? What are the short-term effects? The long-term effects? What experiments or studies have been conducted to test these effects? Depending, of course, on how you define 'starvation.'īut I want to know what happens to the body. See, I'm not just interested in learning about the spiritual and historical aspects of fasting, but the actual effects of what can only be termed periodic self-starvation. In my ambitious attempt to collate a list of books on fasting-the 'literature of fasting,' as I so pretentiously call it around my scholarly buddies-I have discovered a really disturbing thing: there are, proportionally speaking, very few books on the medical side of the process. Not because it helped my craft, you know, at all, but because it gave me an excuse to read up on a subject that has always bothered me and read some books not on the syllabus.

I might add that this 'spiritual discipline' element of my graduate nonfiction craft class (theme = 'The Interior Journey') has been its most redeeming feature.

That is, I've been fasting every Friday as a sort of experiment, partially prompted by a class that required me to develop and practice a 'spiritual discipline' for the duration of the semester, and partially prompted by my curmudgeonly attitude towards all things ascetic and a desire to figure out why people are willing to injure their bodies for the sake of their souls.

Joel fuhrman fasting and eating for health pdf