Why Fast? by Christine Baumgarthuber

Author:Christine Baumgarthuber
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books

New Varieties of Fasts

The hoopla surrounding Tanner’s exploit brought fasting to public awareness as a viable alternative to conventional treatments, many of which were invasive, sickness-inducing in their own right or otherwise quite unpleasant. And so many followed his example. On the very same day that Tanner began his highly publicized fast, Agnes Dehart, a 21-year-old woman from Staten Island, New York, undertook her own in a bid to cure her stomach ulcers.60 Various ills likewise prompted a band of fasters in Whanganui, New Zealand, to spend thirty days of the year 1907 living solely on orange juice.61 And Horace Fletcher (1849–1919), originator of the thorough-chewing method known as ‘Fletcherizing’, claimed that a water fast of two or three weeks would cure rheumatism.62

As interest in fasting for health grew, so too did the varieties of fasts you could undertake. Some were clearly absurd and, worse, heedless of the age-old call to moderation. Others, however, in their restraint prefigured the fasts advocated by some medical practitioners today.

Arnold Ehret (1866–1922), a German émigré to the United States, developed one of the more offbeat approaches to fasting. His family had been plagued by illness (his father and brother had died of tuberculosis and his mother suffered from kidney disease), and Ehret decided that conventional cures were largely useless. He too suffered from kidney and heart disease and found little relief from various treatments and special diets. Finally, while on a trip to Algiers, he stopped eating altogether. He was surprised to find his health vastly improved, so much so that he followed his fast with a 1,600-kilometre (1,000 mi.) bicycling trip. When he returned, he devoted himself to studying the practice.

Ehret’s erudition would culminate in his Mucusless Diet Healing System, which he developed in the 1920s. The system rested on his theory of pus- and mucus-forming foods as the cause of various ills, constipation being the worst of them. The Mucusless Diet Healing System forbade the consumption of meat, dairy, eggs and most grains and legumes, because Ehret believed that they spurred the formation of white blood cells, which in turn produced mucus and pus.63 Only foods that did not promote the formation of these bodily fluids – fruits, nuts and leafy greens, to name a few – would restore a sufferer to health.

Ehret would also recommend regular fasts. In fact, he believed the body did not require food at all: it was akin to an air-gas engine, and food served only to jam its workings. (We hear in this echoes of Hufeland’s own notion that light, heat and air were a body’s ideal sustenance.) Ehret’s entire system merely elaborated a simple equation, ‘Vitality = Power – Obstruction’, which is perhaps why it later captivated a teenaged Steve Jobs. The Apple founder and CEO followed the system until his death, in 2011.

Those unconvinced of mucus and pus’s uniformly evil roles in poor health could seek other inventive fasts, such as the one devised by an American abroad, Norman Walker (1886–1985). The sight of

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