(This is Part 2 of a 2-part article. Go back to Part 1.)
In my opinion, the beginning phase, the first 3 or 4 days, is often the hardest part. That's when we're still hungry and it's often when we'll feel the worst. Often the faster will come down with a severe headache or "cold" or "allergy," etc. during the first week or so. The fast is not causing this; rather, the fast is simply revealing the true state of the body, which is basically polluted and poisoned.
After the first few days, the body turns off the appetite, because now it wants to do deep work and doesn't want to be disturbed. Beyond the first few days, the faster does not walk around hungry. There can be pyschological hunger, but there's uaually no physical hunger. However, the tongue usually becomes coated and the breath turns foul. This is not a bad sign at all; it's a sign that the body has seriously begun its detoxifying process.
If we let the fast of just water or fruit juices take its natural course, usually around 30 days or so will mark a dramatic change. This point in time can vary widely, of course, depending on the individual and the specific conditions of each body.
But somewhere around a month, give or take a lot, several signs will be noticed: The tongue will taste fresh and clean, the breath will become sweet and suddenly the body will turn the appetite back on with a vengeance. It's now signaling that it wants to eat!
If we go beyond this point, where the body signals that it wants to eat again, then we enter the period of starvation (and ordinarily will die somewhere around the 90th to 100th day). Up to that dividing line the process is "fasting" and purely beneficial; after that point it becomes a process of starvation and harmful.
Along with a fast or series of them, the person who is following Natural Hygienic principles will want to adopt a diet of mostly fresh living fruit and juices, raw nuts and and salad greens. This superbly allows the body to continue to detoxify while supplying all its needs. In fact, this is simply a return to our natural diet when we lived in the trees for 50 million years or so—the diet that the body had by far the longest evolutionary time to adapt to, and its natural diet.
During this time and afterwards, it's important to get extra amounts of rest and sleep and relaxation while reducing stress, allowing the body to work at the deepest levels possible. It's also extremely advisable to get professional supervision by a wholistic doctor experienced in fasting and familiar with your personal situation. There are also fasting and cleansing centers which can greatly facilitate this whole process
4) As the raw fruitarian diet interspersed with periodic fasts continues, you'll begin to gradually notice some interesting signs: Your skin will begin to look younger. A certain sparkle will come back into your eyes, and if you had dark eye circles they'll go away.
Though the energy on the surface can vary a lot, especially near the beginning, deep down you'll begin to feel a growing sense of vitality and energy, like a seed growing. This indefinable but unmistakable sense is the sign that the body is successfully cleansing and detoxifying itself, including cleansing itself of cancerous cells.
From that point on, the idea is to continue a mostly raw or fruitarian diet as a lifestyle rather than just a therapy. Adopted as a lifestyle, the body can continue the process of continually cleansing, detoxifying and re-balancing itself, which you will notice as a continuing sense of lightness, freshness and vitality for an extended lifespan.
And if the process of cachexia is too far advanced, and you must pass on, then the adoption of a cleasing diet and periodic fasting will normally allow the person to be pain-free during the decline and often conversing with friends up to the last minute. And as a final benefit, often years of life are unexpectedly added.
Even sometimes in the most extreme of circumstances, it is amazing what this beautiful self-maintaining, self-repairing natural bodily network can do. It carries within itself a stupendous network of self-organized wisdom that can only be considered one of the greatest and most miraculous beauties of existence.
—jim sloman, 1.12.03 for 3.17.03
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