Chapter 2 Some Notes on Fasting: The Fasting Cure by Upton Sinclair from archive.org

SOME NOTES ON FASTING 

In relation to the article, ** Perfect 
Health," I received some six or eight 
hundred letters from people who 
either had fasted, or desired to fast 
and sought for further information. 
The letters showed a general uni- 
formity which made clear to me that 1 
had not been sufficiently explicit upon 
several important points. 

The question most commonly asked 
was how long should one fast, and how 
one should judge of the time to stop. 
I personally have never taken a 
** complete fast," and so I hesitate in 
recommending this to any one. I have 
fasted twelve days on two occasions. In 
both cases I broke my fast because I 
found myself feeling weak and I 



SOME NOTRB ON FA8TINO 

wanted to be about a good deal. In 
neither case was I hungry, although 
hunger quickly returned. I was told 
by Bernarr Macf adden, and by some of 
his physicians, that they got their best 
results from fasts of this length. I 
would not advise a longer fast for any 
of the commoner ailments, such as 
stomach and intestinal trouble, head- 
aches, constipation, colds and sore 
throat. Longer fasts it seems to me, 
are for those who have really desperate 
ailments, such deeply-rooted chronic 
diseases as Bright's disease, cirrhosis 
of the liver, rheumatism and cancer. 

Of course if a person has started on 
a fast and it is giving him no trouble, 
there is no reason why it should not be 
continued; but I do not in the least 
believe in a man's setting before him- 
self the goal of a forty or fifty days' 
fast and making a ' * stunt ' ' out of it. 

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THE FA8TINQ CURB 

I do not think of the fast as a thing to 
be played with in that way. I do not 
believe in fasting for the fun of it, or 
out of curiosity. I do not advise peo- 
ple to fast who have nothing the 
matter with them, and I do not advise 
the fast as a periodical or habitual 
thing. A man who has to fast every 
now and then is like a person who 
should spend his time in sweeping rain 
water out of his house, instead of 
taking the trouble to repair his roof. 
If you have to fast every now and then, 
it is because the habits of your life 
are wrong, more especially because you 
are eating unwholesome foods. There 
were several people who wrote me 
asking about a fast, to whom my reply 
was that they should simply adopt a 
rational diet; that I believed their 
troubles would all disappear without 
the need of a fast. 

•8 



SOME NOTES ON FASTING 

Several people asked me if it woula 
not be better for them to eat very 
lightly instead of fasting, or to con- 
tent themselves with fasts of two or 
three days at frequent intervals. My 
reply to that is that I find it very much 
harder to do that, because all the 
trouble in the fast occurs during the 
first two or three days. It is during 
those days that you are hungry, and if 
you begin to eat just when your hunger 
is ceasing, you have wasted all your 
efforts. In the same way, perhaps, it 
might be a good thing to eat very 
lightly of fruit, instead of taking an 
absolute fast — the only trouble is that 
I cannot do it. Again and again I 
have tried, but always with the same 
result : the light meals are just enough 
to keep me ravenously hungry, and in- 
evitably I find myself eating more and 
more. And it does me no good to call 



THB PASTING CUKB 

myself names about this, I just do it, 
and keep on doing it; I have finally 
made up my mind that it is a fact of 
my nature. I used to try these * * fruit 
fasts " under Dr. Kellogg's advice. 
I could live on nothing but fruit for 
several days, but I would get so weak 
that I could not stand up — iar weaker 
than I have ever become on an out-and- 
out fast. 

One should drink all the water he 
possibly can while fasting, only not 
taking too much at a time. I take a 
glass full every hour, at least; some- 
times every half-hour. It is a good 
plan to drink a great deal of water at 
the outset, whenever meal time comes 
around, and one thinks of the other 
folks beginning to eat. I drink the 
water cold, because it is less trouble, 
but if there is any hot water about, I 
prefer that. Hot water between meals 

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SOME NOTES ON FASTING 

is an immensely valuable suggestion 
which I owe to Dr. Salisbury. 

One should take a bath every day 
while fasting. I prefer a warm^bath 
followed by a cold shower. Also one 
should take a small enema. I find a 
pint of cool water sufficient. I re- 
ceived several letters from people who 
were greatly disturbed because of con- 
stipation during the fast. People 
apparently do not realize that while 
fasting there is very little to be 
eliminated from the body. (Of course, 
there are cases, especially of people 
who have suffered from long continual 
intestinal trouble, in which even after 
three or four weeks the enema con- 
tinues to bring away quantities of 
dried and impacted faeces.) 

Many of the questions asked dealt 
with the manner of breaking the fast; 
I suppose because I had been particu- 

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THE FASTING CURE 

lar to warn my readers that this was 
the one danger point in the proceeding. 
I told of my experience with the milk 
diet, and I received many inquiries 
about this. My answer was to refer 
the writers to Bernarr Macfadden's 
pamphlet on the milk diet, as I took 
this diet under his direction and have 
nothing to add to his instructions. I 
might say, however, that I was never 
able to take the milk diet for any 
length of time but once, and that after 
my first twelve-day fast. After my 
second fast it seemed to go wrong with 
me, and I think the reason was that I 
did not begin it until a week after 
breaking the fast, having got along on 
orange juice and figs in the meantime. 
Also I tried on many occasions to take 
the milk diet after a short fast of three 
or four days, and always the milk has 
disagreed with me and poisoned me. 

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SOME NOTES ON FASTING 

I take this to mean that, in my own 
case, at any rate, so much milk can 
only be absorbed when the tissues are 
greatly reduced; and I have known 
others who have had the same experi- 
ence. 

While I was down in Alabama, I 

took a twelve-day fast, and at the end 

I was tempted by a delicious large 

Japanese persimmon, which had been 

eyeing me from the pantry shelf during 

the whole twelve days. I ate that 

persimmon — and I mention that it 

was thoroughly ripe ; in spite of which 

fact it doubled me up with the most 

alarming cramp — and in consequence 

I do not recommend persimmons for 

fasters. I know a friend who had a 

similar experience from the juice of one 

orange; but he was a man with whom 

acid fruit has always disagreed. I 

know another man who broke his fast 

73 F 



THE FASTING CURE 

on a Hamburg steak ; and this also is 
not to be recommended. 

It has been my experience that im- 
mediately after a fast the stomach is 
very weak, and can easily be upset; 
also the peristaltic muscles are prac- 
tically without power. It is, therefore, 
important to choose foods which are 
readily digested, and also to continue 
to take the enema daily until the 
muscles have been sufficiently built up 
to make a natural movement possible. 
The thing to do is to take orange juice 
or grape juice in small quantities for 
two or three days, and then go 
gradually upon the milk diet, begin- 
ning with half a glass of warm milk 
at a time. If the milk does not agree 
with you, you may begin carefully to 
add baked potatoes and rice and gruels 
and broths, if you must ; but don't for- 
get the enema. 

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SOME NOTES ON FASTING 

People ask me in what diseases I 
recommend fasting. I recommend it 
for all diseases of which I have ever 
heard, with the exception of one in 
which I have heard of bad results — 
tuberculosis. Dr. Hazzard, in her 
book, reports a case of the cure of this 
disease, but Mr. Macfadden tells me 
that he has known of several cases of 
people who have lost their weight and 
have not regained it. There is one 
cure quoted in the appendix to this 
volume. 

The diseases for which fasting is 
most obviously to be recommended are 
all those of the stomach and intestines, 
which any one can see are directly 
caused by the presence of fermenting 
and putrefying food in the system. 
Next come all those complaints which 
are caused by the poisons derived from 
these foods in the blood and the elimi- 

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THE FASTING CURE 

native organs ; such are headaches and 
rheumatism, liver and kidney troubles, 
and of course all skin diseases. Finally, 
there are the fevers and infectious 
diseases, which are caused by the in- 
vasion of the organism by foreign 
bacteria, which are enabled to secure a 
lodgment because of the weakened and 
impure condition of the blood-stream. 
Such are the ' * colds ' ' and fevers. In 
these latter cases nature tries to save 
us, for there is immediately experi- 
enced a disinclination on the part of 
the sick person to take any sort of 
food ; and there is no telling how many 
people have been hurried out of life in 
a few days or hours, because ignorant 
relatives, nurses and physicians have 
gathered at their bedside and implored 
them to eat. I can look back upon a 
time in my own experience when my 
wife was ii the hospital with a slow 

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SOME NOTES ON FASTING 

fever; they would bring her up three 
square meals a day, consisting of lamb 
chops, poached eggs on toast, cooked 
vegetables, preserves and desserts ; and 
the physician would stand by her bed- 
side and say, in sepulchral tones, " If 
you do not eat, you will die ! ' ' 

My friend, Mr. Arthur Brisbane, 
wrote me a gravely disapproving letter 
when he read that I was fasting. I 
had Si long correspondence with him, 
at the end of which he acknowledged 
that there *' might be something in 
it." ** Even dogs fast when they are 
ill," he wrote; and I replied, " I look 
forward to the time when human 
beings may be as wise as dogs." I 
read the other day an amusing story of 
a man who made himself a reputation 
for curing the diseases of the pampered 
pets of our rich society ladies. They 
would bring him their overfed dogs, 

77 



THE FASTING CURE 

and he would shut them up in an old 
brick-kiln, with a tub of water, and 
leave them there to howl until they 
were hoarse. In addition to the water 
he would put in each cell a hunk of 
stale bread, a piece of bacon rind, and 
an old boot. He would go back at the 
end of a few days, and if the bread 
was eaten he would write to the fond 
owner that the dog's recovery was 
assured. He would go back in a few 
more days, and if the bacon rind was 
eaten would write that the dog was 
nearly well. And at the end of 
another week, he would go back, and if 
the old boot was eaten he would write 
to the owner that the dog was now com- 
pletely restored to health. 

Several people wrote me who were 
in the last stages of some desperate 
disease. Of course they had always 
been consulting with physicians, and 

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SOME NOTES ON FASTING 

the physicians had told them that my 
article was "pure nonsense"; and 
they would write me that they would 
like to try to fast, but that they were 
" too weak and too far gone to stand 
it." There is no greater delusion 
than that a person needs strength to 
fast. The weaker you are from 
disease, the more certain it is that you 
need to fast, the more certain it is that 
your body has not strength enough to 
digest the food you are taking into it. 
If you fast under those circumstances, 
you will grow not weaker, but stronger. 
In fact, my experience seems to indi- 
cate that the people who have the least 
trouble on the fast are the people who 
are most in need of it. The system 
which has been exhausted by the efforts 
to digest the foods that are piled into 
it, simply lies down with a sigh of 
relief and goes to sleep. 

79 



THE FASTING CURB 

The fast is Nature's remedy for all 
diseases, and there are few exceptions 
to the rule. When you feel sick, fast. 
Do not wait until the next day, when 
you will feel stronger, nor till the next 
week, when you are going away into 
the country, but stop eating at once. 
Many of the people who wrote to me 
were victims of our system of wage 
slavery, who wrote me that they were 
ill, but could not get even a few days' 
release in which to fast. They wanted 
to know if they could fast and at the 
same time continue their work. Many 
can do this, especially if the work is of 
a clerical or routine sort. On my first 
fast I could not have done any work, 
because I was too weak. But on my 
second fast I could have done anything 
except very severe physical labour. I 
have one friend who fasted eight days 
for the first time, and who did all her 

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80ME NOTES ON FASTING 

own housework and put up several gal- 
lons of preserves on the last day. I 
have received letters from a couple of 
women who have fasted ten or twelve 
days, and have done all their own 
work. I know of one case of a young 
girl who fasted thirty-three days and 
worked all the time at a sanatorium, 
and on the twenty-fourth day she 
walked twenty miles. 

Fasting and the Doctors. 

A most discouraging circumstance 
to me was the attitude of physicians, 
as revealed in the correspondence that 
came to me. Mostly I learned of this 
attitude from the letters of patients 
who quoted their physicians to me. 
From the physicians themselves I 
heard practically nothing. We have 
some one hundred and forty thousand 

81 



THE FASTING CURE 

regularly graduated ** medical men " 
in this country, and they are all of 
them presumably anxious to cure 
disease. It would seem that an ex- 
perience such as mine, narrated over 
my own signature, and backed by 
references to other cases, would have 
awakened the interest of a good many 
of these professional men. 

Out of the six or eight hundred 
letters that I have received, just two, 
80 far as I can remember, were from 
physicians; and out of the hundreds 
of newspaper clippings which I re- 
ceived, not a single one was from any 
sort of medical journal. There was 
one physician, in an out-of-the-way 
town in Arkansas, who was really in- 
terested, and who asked me to let him 
print several thousand copies of the 
article in the form of a pamphlet, to 
be distributed among his patients. 

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SOME NOTES ON FASTING 

One single mind, among all the hun- 
dred and forty thousand, open to a 
new truth 1 

In the English Review for Novem- 
ber, 1910, I find an article entitled 
" Bone-setting and the Profession, by 
Fairplay." It is a narrative of the 
experience of the writer and some of 
his friends with Osteopathy, being a 
defence of that method of treatment 
in cases of bruises and sprains. I 
quote the following paragraph : 

" Harvey's statement about the cir- 
culation of the blood was met with 
scorn by the doctors, who called him in 
derision the* Circulator.' Simpson's 
discovery of the use of chloroform was 
scouted by them as incredible, some 
even declared it to be ' impious,' and a 
* defiance of the will of God.' Elliot- 
son's use of the stethoscope called 
forth the rage of the protected society 

83 



THE FASTING CURK 

as a body : the Lancet described him as 
a * pariah of the profession.' The 
ignorant scorn and slander broke his 
heart ; but to-day the stethoscope is in 
constant use, and is recognized as one 
of the most important aids to a correct 
diagnosis." 

It might also be of interest to quote 
the note which one finds appended to 
this remarkable article : * * The Editor 
was amused to find that the Lancet re- 
fused the advertisement of the above 
article, thereby confirming what the 
writer alleges against the ring." 

Of course I realize what a difficult 
matter it is for a medical man to face 
these facts about the fast. Sometimes 
it seems to me that we have no right to 
expect their help at all, and that we 
never will receive it. For we are 
asking them to destroy themselves, 
economically speaking. We do not 

84 



SOME NOTES ON FASTING 

expect aid from eminent corporation 
lawyers when we set out to overthrow 
the rule of privilege in our country ; and 
it must be equally difficult for a hard- 
worked and not very highly paid phy- 
sician to contemplate the triumph of 
an idea, which would leave no place for 
him in civilization. In an article con- 
tributed to Physical Culture magazine 
for January, 1910, I stated that in the 
course of my search for health: I had 
paid to physicians, surgeons, drug- 
gists and sanatoriums not less than 
fifteen thousand dollars in the last six 
or eight years. In the last year, since 
I have learned about the fast, I have 
paid nothing at all; and the same 
thing is true, perhaps on a smaller 
scale, of every one who discovers the 
fasting cure. As one man, who wrote 
me a letter of enthusiastic gratitude, 
expresses it : "I have spent over five 

85 



THE FASTING CURE 

hundred dollars in the last ten years 
trying to get well on medicines. It 
cost me only thirty cents to use your 
method, and for that thirty cents I 
obtained relief a million-fold more 
beneficial than from five hundred 
dollars' worth of medicine." 

Not so very long ago I saw a report 
in some metropolitan newspaper to 
the effect that the medical profession 
was greatly alarmed over the decrease 
in its revenues — it being estimated 
that the income of the average physi- 
cian to-day was less than half of what 
it had been ten years ago. All this, I 
think, is directly attributable to the 
spread of knowledge concerning 
natural methods in the treatment of 
disease — and, more important yet, of 
natural methods in the preservation 
of health. Only the other day I was 
talking with a friend who was a 



SOME NOTES ON FASTING 

teacher in a small college in the Middle 
[West. There was a physician regu- 
larly employed to attend the girl- 
students, but several of the teachers 
became interested in the fasting cure, 
and whenever they learned of any ill- 
ness they would go to the girl and start 
her on a fast ; as a result, the physician 
lost considerably more than half his 
practice. In the same way, I myself 
recently started several people in a 
small town to fasting, and every time 
I saw the local physician driving by 
in his carriage I marvelled at the 
courtesy and cordiality he displayed; 
for before I had left that place I had 
cured half a dozen of his permanent 
customers — people to whom he had 
been dispensing pills and powders 
every few weeks for a dozen years. 



87 



THE HUMORS OF FASTING. 

At the time of writing these words, it 
has been just six months since I pub- 
lished my first paper upon fasting, 
and I am still getting letters about it 
at the rate of half a dozen a day. The 
tent which I inhabit is rapidly becom- 
ing uninhabitable because of paste- 
board boxes full of ** fasting-letters " ; 
and the store-keeper who is so good as 
to receive my telegrams over the 
'phone, is growing quite expert at 
taking down the symptoms of adven- 
turers who get started and want to 
know how to stop. I could make quite 
a postage-stamp collection from these 
letters — I had one from Spain and one 
from India and one from Argentina 
all in the same day. I am sure I 

88