When he came to me his body had reached the point where it was incapable of digesting, and because of lack of liver function, it was incapable of healing while fasting, a condition in which death is a certainty.  He was a Buddhist, did not fear death and did not want to be kept alive in agony or in prolonged unconsciousness by any extraordinary means, nor did he want to die with tubes in every orifice.  I was honored to be a supportive participant in his passing.  He died fasting, in peace, and without pain, with a clear mind that allowed him to consciously prepare for the experience.  He was not in a state of denial or fear, and made no frantic attempts to escape the inevitable.  He went quietly into that still dark night with a tranquil demeanor and a slight smile.

Fortunately, in my many years of practice I had the pleasure of seeing the majority of the people totally regain their health or at least greatly improve it by means of the fasting and healing diets.  Many cancer patients watched with amazement as their tumors disappeared before their eyes, many arthritics regained their function, serious skin conditions such as psoriasis disappeared, mental conditions improved, addictions vanished, fatigue was replaced by energy, and fat dissolved revealing the hidden sculpture beneath.  I will talk more about procedures and the particular reasons bodies develop specific conditions in later chapters.

Social/Cultural/Psychological Obstacles To Fasting

Numerous attitudes make it difficult to fast or to provide moral support to friends or loved ones that are fasting.  Many people harbor fears of losing weight because they think that if times were really tough, if there was a famine or they became ill and lost a lot of weight they would have no reserves and would certainly perish.  These people have no idea how much fat can be concealed on an even skinny body, nor of how slowly a skinny body loses weight while fasting.  Substantial fat reserves are helpful as heat-retaining insulation in those rare accidents when someone is dropped into a cold ocean and must survive until the rescue boat arrives.  Being fat might keep a person alive longer who is lost in the wilderness awaiting rescue with no supplies, no means of procuring food, and no means of keeping warm.  On the other hand, fat people would have a far harder time walking out of the wilderness.  And extensive fat deposits are merely fuel and do not contain extensive nutritional reserves.  An obese person fasting without significant nutritional supplementation would begin starving long before they became really skinny.  On the balance, carrying excess weight is a far greater liability than any potential prosurvival aspects it might have.