Dick Gregory's Natural Diet for Folks Who Eat by Dick Gregory

Author:Dick Gregory
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Amistad
Published: 2021-04-20T00:00:00+00:00

The What of Fasting

What is fasting? It is simply the voluntary withdrawal of food for a period of time. Or, in other words, it is to choose to stop eating. People go on a mild fast, a very brief fast, every day of their lives and don’t even realize it. When you go to bed at night, you don’t eat until the next morning. Unless, of course, you get up in the middle of the night and have a midnight snack. But then you don’t eat again until you wake up. So there is always a period of say six to eight hours when you don’t eat.

When you get up and eat your first meal, what do you call it? Break-fast! When you have your breakfast you are “breaking the fast” of the night before. Your whole body has been resting, including the parts of the body machine which have to work out during the digestive period. Those glands and organs need a period of rest, which means a period when food is not being taken in for them to digest.

The fasting which occurs while you are asleep is only indirectly a voluntary abstaining from food. You don’t say, “It’s time to stop eating now,” but rather, “It’s time to go to bed.” But it is the result of your body saying to you, “For heaven’s sake, go to bed. I need a rest from the further ingestion of food so I can do something with what you’ve already thrown in here.” So your body is making the choice for you.

It is interesting to note that when you go on an extended fast the body requires less and less sleep. The body is not involved in the constant process of exerting energy to digest food, and as more and more waste matter and poisons are eliminated from the system, the body is in need of less rest. The opposite side of that observation is what happens after you eat a big meal, as at Thanksgiving or Christmas. First of all, the meal has probably contained the most impossible combinations of food for your body to handle. You’ve probably eaten a huge amount of turkey, maybe ham too, untold starches, etc., all of it cooked. So what happens? You go to sleep right after dinner! Your body is so busy trying to handle all that holiday mess you don’t even have energy left to walk around.

There is a difference between fasting, starvation and malnutrition. Malnutrition is closer to starvation than to fasting. Malnutrition means “bad nutrition” from the Latin word malus meaning “bad, ill.” Malnutrition is bad nutrition or “malassimilation,” the failure of the body to be able to assimilate and use the food which has been taken in. Malnutrition can be the result of very few scraps of food being eaten, or it can come from large amounts of food being eaten, none of it useful to the body. Well fed but undernourished, in other words. The Ellen H. Richards

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.