Fasting Quotes

Historical and modern day quotes on the value of fasting

Below are some of the best fasting quotes from both modern medical and health professionals as well as famous historical figures. History shows us that fasting was considered a natural therapy for so many of the ails of the past.

Modern professionals are telling us the same is still true; that fasting will alleviate a host of ailments that plague us in our modern world.

The fasting quotes are divided into four categories: Historical, Modern M.D.s, Other Health Professionals, and Religious Writers and Figures.

Historical

Modern M.D.s

"I believe that fasting is the "missing link" in the Western diet."

"From a medical point of view, I believe that fasing is not utilized often enough."

".... fasting is one of the best overall healing methods because it can be applied to so many conditions and people."

"Fasting is the single greatest natural healing therapy. It is nature's ancient, universal 'remedy' for many problems. Animals instictively fast when ill."

all from Elson Haas, M.D.,
  Staying Healthy with Nutrition

"Due to [the] effects of fasting, a fast can help you heal with greater speed; cleanse your liver, kidneys, and colon; purify your blood; help you lose excess weight and water; flush out toxins; clear the eyes and tongue; and cleanse the breath."

James F. Balch, M.D.,
Prescription for Nutritional Healing

"Therapeutic [water] fasting accelerates the healing process and allows the body to recover from serious disease in a dramatically short period of time."

"Fasting, combined with nutritional competence, removes the most significant causes of disease."

"Therapeutic fasting is not a mystical or magical cure. It works because the body has within it the capacity to heal when the obstacles to healing are removed. Health is the normal state. Most chronic disease is the inevitable consequence of living a life-style that places disease-causing stressors on the human organism. Fasting gives the body an interlude without those stressors so that it can speedily repair or accomplish healing that could not otherwise occur in the feeding state."

"The job of fasting is to supply the body with the ideal environment to accomplish its work of healing."

"The body's wondrous ability to autolyze (or self-digest) and destroy needless tissue such as fat, tumors, blood vessel plaque, and other nonessential and diseased tissues, while conserving essential tissues, gives the fast the ability to restore physiologic youth to the system. By removing or lessening the burden of diseased tissue, including the fatty tissue narrowing the blood vessels, fasting increases the blood flow and subsequent oxygenation and nutrient delivery to vital organs throughout the body."

all from Joel Fuhrman, M.D.,
  Fasting and Eating for Health

"Man is the only 'animal' who persists in eating when he is sick, even though he may have no appetite and food makes him nauseous."

"Fasting is a calming experience. It is restful. It relieves anxiety and tension. It is rarely depressing and it is often downright exhilarating."

Alan Cott, M.D.,
Fasting: The Ultimate Diet

"Fasting is the strongest appeal to the human being's natural powers of healing and self-rejuvenation, on both a spiritual and corporeal level."

Heinz Fahrner, M.D.

"I often observe in the fasting participants that by four days of fasting, concentration seems to improve, creative thinking expands, depression lifts, insomnia stops, anxieties fade, the mind becomes more tranquil and a natural joy begins to appear. It is my hypothesis that when the physical toxins are cleared from the brain cells, mind-brain function automatically and significantly improves and spiritual capacities expands."

Gabriel Cousins, M.D. (psychiatry)

"Although beginning my practice in fog-covered medical superstition, I came to the conclusion that only nature can practice medicine."

"I contend that during illness feeding becomes a burden to the sick. It uses energy that otherwise would be used to fight the illness."

both from Dr. Edward Dewey

"I must say in all seriousness that fasting when combined with a properly selected diet is the nearest approach to a 'cure-all' that is possible to conceive-- profoundly simple and simply profound!"

John Tilden, M.D.

"Religious ascetics, who led their lives abstaining from food, came to the conclusion that fasting improved not only their spiritual state, but also their physical condition, and through fasting many diseases could be cured."

Dr. Inamura Motoo

"I assert that fasting is the most efficient means for correcting any disease."

Adolph Mayer, M.D.,
Fast Cures - Wondercures

"Fasting creates a condition of low concentration of toxic wastes in the circulatory system. This is sensed by the plasma membrane of each cell and each cell will then let go of its load of toxic wastes."

Ron Kennedy, M.D.

Other Health Professionals

"The practice of fasting tacitly acknowledges the fact that ours is a self-healing organism. Healing occurs naturally if it is allowed; improper or excessive food simply thwarts the natural ongoing healing processes. Forcing a sick person to eat 'to keep up his strength' overlooks the fact that digestion uses up strength too: more often than not, the available strength is better used for healing the problem at hand than for digestion."

Annemarie Colbin,
Food and Healing

"Fasting is like being a gifted sculptor who knows how to take areas of fatness and thinness and give them proper form."

Otto Buchinger, Jr.,
director of a fasting clinic

"I do not think it is possible to over-emphasize the fact that the physical sensations of fasting are, for the most part, far more pleasurable than the real or illusory delights of feasting."

Herbert Shelton,
Fasting Can Save Your Life

"We must restore fasting to the place it occupied in an ancient hierarchy of values 'above medicine'. We must rediscover it and restore it to honor because it is a necessity."

Buchinger Clinics

"The skin becomes more youthful [during fasting]. The eyes clear up and become brighter. One looks younger. The visible rejuvenation in the skin is matched by manifest evidences of similar but invisible rejuvenescence throughout the body."

Herbert Shelton,
water fasting overseer

"When we fast, energy is freed for a thorough housecleaning of the system. The body becomes lighter, more flexible; the mind becomes clearer and more creative. Greater intuitive powers may develop and deep spiritual insights may be experienced after a period of time. A feeling of well-being arises when the energy is freed in this way -- problems suddenly become solutions and ideas flow from nowhere."

Kripalu Center for Holistic Health,
  The Self-Health Guide

Religious Writers and Figures

"Fasting is a natural method of healing. When animals or savages are sick, they fast."

Paramahansa Yogananda

"The purpose of fasting is to loosen to some degree the ties which bind us to the world of material things and our surroundings as a whole, in order that we may concentrate all our spiritual powers upon the unseen and eternal things."

Ole Kristian O. Hallesby,
Brief Biography

"Fast because it is good for you...[it can be an] exercise to get the body in shape to be alive to itself. This process frees the self to be more sensitive to the Creation, to ourselves, and to our histories."

Christian Century magazine

"Prayer brings us halfway to God, fasting takes us to the gateway of heaven."

Muhammad

"Fasting is the soul's nourishment, it reins in language and seals one's lips, it tames desire and calms the choleric temperament. It awakens consciousness, renders the body docile, dispels nightly dreams, cures headaches and strengthens the eyes."

John Chrysostom, one of the early
founders of the Christian Church

"Seek the angel of fresh air, the angel of water, the angel of sunlight, and the angel of the earth, and invite them to stay with you throughout the fast!"

from the writings of the Essenes

"When you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrits." "Be honest, be sincere. Fast for honest and truthful purposes."

Book of Matthew

Poetry

On Fasting, by Rumi

There's a hidden sweetness in the stomach's emptiness.
We are lutes. No more, no less.

If the soundbox is stuffed full, there is no room for music.
If the brain and the belly are burning clean with fasting,
every moment a new song comes out of the fire.
The fog clears, and new energy makes you run
up the steps before you.
Be emptier and cry like reed instruments cry.

Emptier—write secrets with the reed pen.
When you're full of food and drink,
an ugly metal statue sits where your spirit should.
When you fast, good habits gather like
friends who wish to help.

Fasting is Solomon's ring.
Don't give it to some illusion and lose your power.
But even if you have, if you've lost all will and control,
they come back when you fast,
like soldiers appearing out of the ground,
pennants flying above them.

A table descends to your tents, Jesus' table.
Expect to see, when you fast,
this table spread with other food,
better than the broth of cabbages.

 

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