“Fasting is sometimes glorious, sometimes healthy and sometimes sobering. However, if you have fasted for fun, you probably will not be lured into any activity that promises just fun in the future”.

It is worth noting that many people, including doctors, confuse a calorie-restricted diet with fasting.

“It should be understood that the fast itself is an important diagnostic tool in determining duration”.

“We have the innate capacity for prolonged water-only fasting. This capacity, which requires complex body machinery, did not “just happen” any more than our eyes and ears “just happen” to be part of our design. Such complex design is irrefutable evidence that our ancestors slowly evolved sophisticated, reliable machinery for managing caloric deprivation.”

“Our food should be our medicine. Our medicine should be our food. But to eat when you are sick, is to feed your sickness”.

“From a medical point of view, fasting is not utilized often enough. We take vacations from work to relax, recharge, and gain new perspectives on our life—why not take occasional breaks from food?”

“Therapeutic fasting accelerates the healing process and allows the body to recover from serious disease in a dramatically short period of time”.

In Ayurveda, fasting is a means of detoxification and is classified as “the first and most important of all medicine” .
 
Traditional Chinese Medicine and Taoism hold the belief that fasting is the key to attaining superior health and longevity.

In ancient Greece, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle fasted regularly to stimulate mental powers (Johnson, 1973). Pythagoras required his students to fast for 40 days in preparation of receiving his highest teachings.

So practices such as solitude and fasting enhance access to the inner world and its images, visions, dreams, and spirits. The range of these inner experiences is vast, but commonalities emerge across cultures.

“As deep fasts progress, as the veil between us and the spiritual world thins, the heart begins to perceive the hidden face of the sacred within everyday things”.

fasting is “an effective non-drug technique useful for inducing an altered state of multidimensional consciousness”.