What I learned After 50 Days Without Eating Food
Yes, you read that right. As of this moment, I haven’t eaten for 53 days. There are many reasons why I chose to do this, which I will get into below, but the one thing I can say for sure is, the experience has not even come close to what I expected.
To be totally honest, I’ve always wanted to embark on a “serious” fast. I had tried a 3-day and 7-day juice fast in the past, and although they were challenging, I felt I needed to go a little deeper. I’m also working on a CE documentary called Psyched Out that is about how everything we’re told about psychedelics may be wrong. (If you’re interested in learning more, click here to sign up to be notified when it’s released).
In the process of making this film I started exploring other ways to reach altered states of consciousness and fasting kept popping up, so I started interviewing people about fasting and the experiences they’d had, and found myself increasingly fascinated by the topic, not to mention all the religious references to fasting and experiences those seekers encountered while out in isolation on long fasting expeditions. Many people use these types of fasts as a healing mechanism but for me it was out of sheer curiosity.
“Everyone has a doctor in him or her; we just have to help it in its work. The natural healing force within each one of us is the greatest force in getting well. Our food should be our medicine. Our medicine should be our food. But to eat when you are sick, is to feed your sickness.“
-Hippocrates, M.D., 460-377 B.C., Father of Western Medicine
At around the same time, my wife told me about this group on Facebook of people withering away, taking pictures of their poop (and many other nasty things coming out of them), and some even having their eyes change colour. At first I thought nothing of it, but a few days later she added me to it, and I was hooked. Intuitively I knew right away that this was for me, but the icing on the cake was when I found out that the creator of the fast, Gino DiSerio, lived in the same town I grew up in. I knew the universe was sending me a message so I got in contact with Gino, and within two weeks, I would be embarking on the Master Fast System.
The Master Fast System
Basically, the Master Fast is an extended fast that combines intermittent dry fasting (having a 6-8 hour window that you can drink juice in) with weekly and monthly extended dry fasts (24-48 hours of no food or water), drinking 1-3L of concord grape juice mixed with lemon juice daily within that window, taking a few tablespoons a day of a psyllium husk mixture with bentonite clay and activated charcoal (which they call psyllium pudding) to draw toxins from the intestine and keep the bowels moving, and some herbal tinctures taken with a kidney tea to filter the kidneys and support organs and glands through the detox. Enemas and colonics are also part of the system and are HIGHLY recommended to assist removal of toxins on the cleanse. All of this information can be found on the Master Fast website.
They recommend doing the fast for 108 days, which is very extreme and not appropriate for most people. I told myself I would aim for 40 days, which Gino says is the minimum required to get a good cleansing of the GI tract — the ultimate goal of the cleanse and the best way to reset the body. We have been clogging our system for years with foods and toxins that do not belong there, so we need a good clean to reset. Gino also believes we are meant to be mainly fruitarian, which he dives into a bit on the podcast (linked below).
In the Master Fast Facebook group, there are many incredible stories of transformation and healing on the physical, emotional, and mental levels. For example, there is a testimonial of a guy who healed his paralysis through extended fasting and is seen swimming in the ocean on a YouTube video.
My Experience
So I was ready to start, not knowing what to expect but open to any and all possibilities. I expected to feel lethargic and irritable (as I did on my 7-day juice fast a few years back), but it was quite the opposite. In the first week I felt amazing, and as the days went by I just felt better and better.
In the second or third week I started feeling aches and pains in my body, but I had read somewhere in the group that people claimed that old injuries would start to heal, and when I focused on where the pain was coming from (my middle toe and right hip flexor), I quickly realized these were old sports injuries, and within a few days the pain had subsided.
I think the theory goes something like this: when you start saving all the energy used to digest food it starts getting diverted to other places like brain function and healing. I’m not sure how to verify this scientifically but I can say that I felt it for sure!
“Instead of using medicine, rather, fast a day.”
– Plutarch
“The best of all medicines are rest and fasting”
– Benjamin Franklin
I still thought about food A LOT in the first three weeks. I was really contemplating how I would eat and what I would eat when I was done, and this would go on almost all day every day. I started to see what an addiction food was and slowly began to realize we don’t need to eat as much food as we do. We are responding more to cravings than a true need for food.
