Her weight was still excessive but the solace of eating was even more important.  This woman needed intensive counseling not more fasting.  Unfortunately, at the end she choose to remain obese.  Fat was much less frightening to her than confronting her emotions and fears.  The positive side was that after the fast she was able to maintain her weight at 225 instead of 375 which was an enormous relief to her exhausted heart.

Another client I fasted for 90 days was a 6’ 1” tall, chronic schizophrenic man who weighed in at 400 pounds.  He was so big he could barely get through my front door, and mine was an extraordinarily wide door in what had been an upper-class mansion.  This man, now in his mid twenties, had spent his last seven years in a mental institution before his parents decided to give him one last chance by sending to Great Oaks School.  The state mental hospitals at that time provided the mentally ill with cigarettes, coffee, and lots of sugary treats, but none of these substances were part of my treatment program so he had a lot of immediate withdrawal to go through.  The quickest and easiest way to get him through it was to put him on a water fast after a few days of preparation on raw food.

This was not an easily managed case!  He was wildly psychotic, on heavy doses of chloropromazine, with many bizarre behaviors.  Besides talking to himself continuously in gibberish, he collected bugs, moss, sticks, piles or dirt, and switched to smoking oak leaves instead of cigarettes.  He was such a fire hazard that I had to move him to a downstairs room with concrete floor.  Even in the basement he was a fire hazard with his smoking and piles of sticks and other inflammables next to his bed, but all of this debris was his “precious.”  I knew that I was in for trouble if I disturbed his precious, but the insects and dirt piles seemed to be expanding exponentially.

One day the dirt exceeded my tolerance level.  To make a long story short he caught me in the act of cleaning up his precious.  Was he furious!  All 350 pounds of him! (By this time he had lost 50 pounds.) He barreled into me, fists flying, and knocked me into the pipes next to the furnace and seemed ready to really teach me what was what.  I prefer to avoid fights, but if they are inevitable, I can really get into the spirit of the thing.  I’d had lots of childhood practice defending myself because I was an incurable tomboy who loved to wrestle; I could usually pin big boys who considered themselves tough.  So I began using my fists and what little martial arts training I had to good use.  After I hurt him a bit he realized that I was not going to be easily intimidated, and that in fact he was in danger of getting seriously damaged.  So he called a truce before either of us were badly beaten up.  He had only a few bruises and welts, nothing serious.