There’s an old saying about this:  “feed a cold, starve a fever.”  Most people think this saying means you should eat when you have a cold.  What the saying really means is if you feed a cold then you will soon have to starve a fever.  Protein foods especially are not digested by a diseased body, and as mentioned before, the waste products of protein indigestion are especially poisonous.  That is all the body needs when it is already down, another load of poison which it can’t eliminate due to weakness and enervation.

Weight loss is usually associated with illness, as it should be!  In times of acute illness an otherwise healthy body loses its appetite for food because it is prosurvival to stop eating.  It is very hard to coax a sick animal to eat.  Their bodies, not controlled by a mind full of complex learned responses and false ideas, automatically know that fasting is nature’s method of healing.  Contrary to popular understanding, digestion, assimilation, and elimination require the expenditure of considerable energy.  This fact may contradict the reader’s experience because everyone has become tired when they have worked a long time without eating, and then experienced the lift after eating.  But an ill body cannot digest efficiently so instead of providing energy extracted from foods, the body is further burdened by yet another load of toxic material produced by fermented and putrefied food.  This adds insult to injury in a sick body that is already drowning in its own garbage.

Worse, during illness most available vital force is already redirected into healing; it is not available for digestion.  It is important to allow a sick body to proceed with healing and not to obstruct the process with unnecessary digestion or suppress the symptoms (which actually are the healing efforts) with drugs.  If you have an acute illness, and you stop all food intake except for pure water and herb teas, and perhaps some vegetable broth, or dilute non-sweet juice, you have relieved your body of an immense effort.  Instead of digesting, the body goes to work on catching up on healing.  The body can and will almost inevitably heal itself if the sick person will have faith in it, cooperate with the body’s efforts by allowing the symptoms of healing to exist, reduce or eliminate the intake of food to allow the body to marshal its energies, maintain a positive mental attitude and otherwise stay out of the way.

Many people intensely dread missing even one meal.  These folks usually are and have been so toxic that their bodies had been stashing uneliminated toxins in their fat for years.  They are usually so addicted to caffeine, cigarettes, alcohol, and so forth, that when they had fasted, even briefly, their bodies were forced to dip into highly-polluted fat reserves while simultaneously the body begins withdrawal.  People like this who try to fast experience highly unpleasant symptoms including headache, irritability, inability