After I resumed eating solid food it took six weeks to regain enough strength to be able to run the same distance in the same time I had before fasting, and it took me about six months to regain my previous weight.  My eyes and skin had become exceptionally clear, and some damaged areas of my body such as my twice-broken shoulder had undergone considerable healing.  I ate far smaller meals after the fast, but food was so much more efficiently absorbed that I got a lot more miles to the gallon from what I did eat.  I also became more aware when my body did not want me to eat something.  After the fast, if I ignored my body’s protest and persisted, it would immediately create some unpleasant sensation that quickly persuaded me to curb my appetite.

I later experimented with other approaches to fasting, with juice fasts, with colon cleansing, and began to establish my own eclectic approach to fasting and detoxification, using different types of programs for different conditions and adjusting for psychological tolerances.  I’ll have a lot more to say about fasting.

After my own rigorous fasting experience I felt capable of supervising extended fasts on very ill or very overweight people.  Great Oaks was gradually shifting from being a place that mentally ill people came to regain their sanity to being a spa where anyone who wanted to improve their health could come for a few days, some weeks or even a few months.  It had been my observation from the beginning that the mentally ill people in my program also improved remarkably in physical health; it was obvious that my method was good for anyone.  Even people with good health could feel better.

By this time I’d also had enough of psychotic people anyway, and longed for sane, responsible company.

So people started to come to Great Oaks School of Health to rest up from a demanding job, to drop some excess weight, and generally to eliminate the adverse effects of destructive living and eating habits.  I also began to get cancer patients, ranging from those who had just been diagnosed and did not wish to go the Ama-approved medical route of surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation, to those with well-advanced cancer who had been sent home to die after receiving all of the above treatments and were now ready to give alternative therapies a try since they expected to die anyway.  I also had a few people who were beyond help because their vital organs had been so badly damaged that they knew they were dying, and they wanted to die in peace without medical intervention, in a supportive hospice cared for by people who could confront death.