Energy, a boost of vitality and a greater sense of lightness in body and soul – sound good?
Then maybe you’d want to consider a fasting course this summer. I know. For some of us, the mere mention of the word can trigger an instant sensation of hunger. The thing is, though, that you never need to feel hungry during a five-day fasting course.
The next, natural objection might be whether it isn’t a little extreme not to eat anything at all for five days. The interesting thing is what happens if we turn that notion on its head: Perhaps it’s a little extreme to eat three meals a day, seven days a week, since most of us weigh too much anyway and don’t exactly match the ideal weight recommendations?
Already at the end of that reflection, we can detect a tiny glimpse of what five days of fasting can do for us, which is to offer a natural way to help our mind address and make us aware of the unconscious assumptions and coping mechanisms most of us apply to food, eating habits and habits in general. For most of us, food is not strictly about getting the right amount of nutrition.
For most of us, what we put in our mouths on a daily basis has a lot more to do with compensating for the loss of someone we loved or for a strange inner feeling of not being okay or good enough, which we don’t really know the source of but which we unconsciously discovered that we can deal with by eating. Of course, the feeling returns, but we can fix that by dipping back into the little bag of sweets in our bag or by making a quick pit stop at the bakery.
Years can go by like that, as we try all sorts of diets, solutions and fixes. And in many ways, they might be good years. But just think of all the unnecessary energy that goes into keeping all these unconscious thoughts and feelings down, ‘reined in’ or out of sight. Imagine if there was a natural way that has been used by cultures all over the globe for centuries that can help you look yourself in the eye and discover what an amazing, unique and completely good-enough person you are, just the way you are. And which can help you discover how much support you can find in your own inner nature, if you allow yourself to look behind the mental layers that have built up in your psyche, over many years, and which are now shaping your convictions and thus your behaviour and self-perceptions, for better and worse.
And there is such a way. It is completely no-nonsense and straightforward. It is fasting, and it involves spending a week, maybe five days for starters, under expert guidance, to see what happens when the body and the mind get a well-deserved break from our normal diet to be enriched with alkaline-forming decoctions of organic vegetables and ditto freshly squeezed juice.
Clearly, we will experience increased lightness of body and spirit when the body is flooded with alkaline-forming elements every single day, five days in a row, because the excess alkaline enables the body to let go of the built-up acid stores that generate in our connective and muscle tissue. And from the third day of fasting, when the body’s sugar stores are spent, the body naturally begins to metabolize fatty tissue, where research shows that our physical body tends to store heavy metals. The fatty tissue also seems to control our behaviour by making us crave sugar and more fat, and not necessarily healthy fat.
And clearly it has to produce energy when a process enables us to let go of our limiting assumptions about ourselves and allows a new self-image to emerge, which is that you are exactly as you are supposed to be and have something unique to offer, exactly the way you are.
And if you think that five days of fasting does not sound like the right thing for you, then try a weekly fasting day at first, where you drink vegetable juice without any sugar content, and see how that makes you feel. That can be a great way to ease into the practice, and maybe you want to expand this one day to, say, five days, since just a single day will give you a taste of all the good things that await once you get past the three days of metabolizing sugar and move on to metabolizing fat and discover how much energy this gives you.
If you would like to know more about my fasting course for beginners, you can read about it here.
I have also written a blog about it, which you can read here.
If you have participated in my fasting courses before, perhaps this year you might be interested in my advanced fasting course, where the content is more physically demanding than in the beginner’s course – several long walks, a walk across the sea to Æbelø, ashtanga yoga sessions during the week and an early morning start every morning at 7 with mindfulness meditation.
Wishing you a wonderful spring.
All the best,
Helen