Category Archives: Health

Fasting & Juicing

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Fasting Buddha

The Buddha emaciated after undergoing severe ascetic practises.

Fasting is an advanced spiritual discipline that purifies the physical body, and creates increased awareness of the subtle spiritual force. This spiritual force is always present in varying degrees. Through the process of fasting, we re focus the cellular consciousness of the body, and increase the life-force streaming within us. This increased light-flow brings a feeling of great bliss, lightness, and connection to sacred source. When done in the context of living the enlightened life, fasting speeds spiritual evolution, and ultimately shows us the truth of immortal life.

The fasts described below are for healthy people who are seeking to live the enlightened life, and who have sufficient self-discipline and self-responsibility to undertake fasting in a mature, self-aware manner without professional supervision. If you have health concerns, or do not have good insight into your mental and emotional nature, you should not attempt the fasts given here, but you should consider undertaking a fast in a professionally supervised environment. Check your local resources for retreat centres offering supervised juice fasts, and residential programs offering living food programs. Also see the many resources listed in Living Food.

Every day, and especially during a fast, it is very important to drink lots of fresh living water (i.e., spring water – not distilled, tap, or other “dead” waters). In addition to the foods and juices in the following fasts, consume at least 2 litres (or more) of water daily. During the first 24 to 72 hours of a fast you may experience symptoms of detoxification. These may include headaches, fatigue, nausea, and aching muscles and joints. It is important to rest and take it easy during this time. These symptoms are normal and will subside in a few days. The first days of fasting should be devoted to extra meditation, naps, and reading spiritually inspiring material. It is highly recommended that you drink a cup of herbal laxative tea on the second or third day to help the detoxification process. Toxins being broken up through the fasting process are dumped out rapidly into the colon where they can be re absorbed. Consuming herbal laxatives greatly aids the process, and reduces detoxification symptoms. You may also feel cold during a fast, so be sure to wear warm clothing and socks if needed.

By the third or fourth day you will be amazed as how healthy and clear you will begin to feel. At this point, you may begin to do yoga and exercise, which should continue for the rest of the fast – and the rest of your life! Be sure to follow the recommendations for breaking each fast, and returning to an enlightened diet.

A word about juicing: not all juicers are alike. For the greatest concentration of enzymes and life-force energy, you really need a triturating juicer. This type of juicer does not create excessive heat, and therefore preserves all of the live enzymes, fiber, minerals, and vitamins, which are the vital essence of the plant. No juice compares to the richness and intensity of juice from a triturating machine. A masticating juicer is also useful, but it does create heat and some enzymes are destroyed. Centrifugal juicers should be completely avoided as they destroy nearly all the enzymes with excessive heat, and waste a large amount of the produce in the process. You can see some U.S. juicers at BestJuicers.com. In Australia, check out JuicersAustralia.com. For Europe and other locations, try AllOrganic.net. Enlightened Life Sanctuary is located in New Zealand, and we use and recommend the fabulous OscarJuicer.co.nz. Now you are ready to begin to build the enlightened body!

Fasts should be done in the following sequence:
Phase One Fast

Over the course of one to two weeks, gradually reduce the amount of cooked food you eat each day. You may begin by eating only a large raw salad at midday or evening. Next, replace your morning meal with all fruit, followed by the addition of raw vegetables for the remaining meal. You may also drink fresh organic juices. When you have eaten raw food solely for three days, substitute a glass of freshly juiced organic vegetable juice for the midday salad. The next day, have fruit juice in the morning, drink vegetable juice at midday, and have the raw salad at night. You can also eat a little raw fruit or vegetables between meal times if you feel you need it. Finally, replace the evening salad with another glass of freshly juiced vegetable juice. At this point, you can take three to five glasses of juice daily. It is recommended that the majority of juice be vegetable, with smaller amounts of fruit juice being taken in the morning. Don’t forget to continue drinking pure living water too! You may also drink organic herbal teas. Meditate as much as possible – this is important every day, but especially during any type of fasting.

When you have taken only juices for three days, you may return to a combination of juice and raw foods. As you begin to add small amounts of cooked food, keep at least 50% of your diet raw, living food. From this time on, choose one day a week as a juice fast day.
Phase Two Fast

After you have completed Phase One, and have maintained a 50% raw food diet and one day a week juice fast for six months, begin Phase Two by continuing to drink only juices following your weekly juice fast day. Consume 3 to 5 glasses of fresh organic fruit and vegetable juice for five to seven days. Drink lots of water and meditate every day. To end the fast, add raw fruit, followed by raw vegetables. After a few days, slowly add cooked food, again keeping the diet 50% living food, and fasting on juices once a week. Repeat this fast in three to six months, or whenever you desire. Phase Two can be extended for up to 21 days when you feel you are ready to try it. Always listen to your body’s own wisdom.
Phase Three Fast

Begin Phase Three during your third or fourth Phase Two Fast. Fast on juice for two days, on the third day, skip the morning juice. In the next day or two, reduce your intake to one juice a day (plus water – always drink lots of water!). Then eliminate the juice, and drink only water for one to three days. Meditate every day. Break the fast by drinking fresh apple or pear juice, then adding all juices, then raw food, and back to the 50% living food diet. Repeat this fast once a year, or whenever you desire. Phase Three can be expanded to as much as seven to ten days when you are sure you are ready to try it. Again, listen to your body and don’t go beyond your personal limits. Some advanced adepts fast on water for as much as forty days at a time, though this is not recommended until complete enlightenment has been attained!

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Madonna’s B12 shots and Bipolar Disorder

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Madonna & Justin Timbrlake

During her Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction, Justin Timberlake revealed that Madonna told him to drop his drawers so she could administer a B12 shot while they were collaborating.
By Syd Baumel

The following is based on portions of Chapter 6 and 11 of Dealing with Depression Naturally (McGraw-Hill, 2000). For cited references, click here. 

Some of the most florid psychoses in the medical literature – typically involving elderly people gone paranoid, manic, or violent – testify to the perils of unrecognized vitamin B12 deficiency. And that’s only during the early stages. When the cause is the B12 malabsorption disease called pernicious anemia, as the years go by and B12 levels dwindle to nothing, irreversible nerve and brain damage and dementia insidiously ensue. This can also occur in strict vegetarians (vegans) if they fail to obtain B12 from fortified plant foods, like meat and milk substitutes, or supplements.

A less dramatic, but more common symptom of early B12 deficiency is depression, typically of the listless, mentally foggy kind. In the 1950s, one such woman had so convincing a case of endogenous depression that shock therapy was vainly administered. Four years later, her slow-onset B12 deficiency was finally diagnosed. A few days and a few shots of B12 later, “she showed a dramatic clinical improvement and came to life again,” her doctor T. N. Fraser reported. Another couple of months, and “she looked the picture of health.”

Because pernicious anemia is a highly age-related disease, most doctors today are alert for it in elderly patients with neuropsychiatric symptoms. But studies suggest any depressed person has a 10 to 30 percent chance of being B12-shy, usually without pernicious anemia as the cause. That deficiency, according to Cees van Tiggelen et al., “has profound effects on several neurotransmitter systems and results in significantly reduced norepinephrine levels in the brain.” Norepinephrine is one of the brain’s most important good-mood neurotransmitters.

Logically, all depressives with low B12 should be replenished. In practice, many orthomolecular psychiatrists believe any depressive should take extra B12, even to the point of trying B12 shots (injections).

For years, B12 shots have been an unofficial treatment for fatigued, run down, or depressed patients. (Large oral doses are very poorly absorbed, though sublingual and intranasal B12 formulations appear to give injections a run for their money.) The practice has been the butt (pun intended) of many jokes among skeptics. Yet what research there is has supported it.

Columbia University psychiatrist Richard Brown and Baylor University neuropharmacologist Teodoro Bottiglieri recommend that all psychiatric patients take a daily megadose of 1 mg of oral B12.

In 1973, in a double-blind trial by F. R. Ellis and S. Nasser, B12 shots boosted the energy and lifted the moods of chronically fatigued patients significantly more than shots of water. Sixteen years later, in a less formal single-blind study, orthomolecular psychiatrist Herbert Newbold reported that his B12-responsive patients “invariably” were able to tell whether they had received B12 or an injection of water. Newbold also noted that B12 is not a simple stimulant, but a “normalizer” that helps some of his patients sleep better and even made one less manic. (Mania is a symptom of B12 deficiency.)

Newbold’s suggestion that B12 is a mood stabilizer is echoed by recent research in which oral megadoses of methylcobalamin – the most bioactive form of B12 – has shown promise as a regulator of disturbed sleep-wake rhythms. Methylcobalamin has been particularly well-studied in Japan as a treatment for delayed sleep phase syndrome; that is, not being able to fall asleep until very late at night and needing to sleep in every morning. Because sleep-wake disturbances are part and parcel of most mood disorders, B12’s apparent sleep-wake regulatory effect could help account for its mood-stabilizing benefits. In a 1996 study by G. Mayer et al., three grams a day of methylcobalamin, but not cyanocobalamin (the form of B12 in most supplements), managed to decrease sleep time yet improve sleep quality and daytime alertness in a small group of healthy men and women.

There is an intriguing reason why some people with normal blood levels of B12 may need megadoses of the vitamin. They may have a B12 deficiency that is confined to the brain. 

While most doctors would never consider such a possibility, studies have documented local cerebral deficiencies of B12 (using cerebrospinal fluid levels as a measure) in people with Alzheimer’s disease, postpartum depression, and toxic neuropsychiatric disorders, including toxic depression. Cees van Tiggelen and associates suspect this cryptic condition may also commonly afflict people with histories of nitrous oxide or Agent Orange intoxication, alcoholics (including those with alcohol-related dementia), long-term users of dilantin, and people with brain atrophy.

B12 has its mainstream advocates too. In 1975, psychiatrists K. Geagea and Jambur Ananth, then at McGill University, remarked that “astonishing results can be obtained in some cases with B12 therapy, even if B12 levels are within normal range.” They had just described one such case. Their young patient’s two year depression had landed him in Montreal’s Jewish General Hospital after a suicide attempt. Because the man had had a total gastrectomy nine years earlier – a risk factor for B12 deficiency – and because his treatment-resistant symptoms had become progressively more psychotic and neurologic in quality, Geagea and Ananth took a leap of faith. The man’s B12 levels were normal, but they gave him B12 shots anyway. 

“The response to this therapeutic trial,” they wrote, “was dramatic. The patient was discharged eight days later with complete remission.” He was still well three years later.

In 1999, in their book Stop Depression Now, Columbia University psychiatrist Richard Brown and Baylor University neuropharmacologist Teodoro Bottiglieri (a leader in vitamin/depression research) recommend that all psychiatric patients take a daily megadose of 1 mg of oral B12. In The Way Up From Down, UCLA psychiatrist Priscilla Slagle suggests: “If you are over fifty-five, vegetarian or alcoholic, have extreme fatigue, poor memory, low thyroid or weight loss, I recommend you take 1000 to 2000 mcg of the sublingual form [of B12] every morning.”

Using Vitamin B12
(cobalamin, cyanocobalamin, hydroxocobalamin, methylcobalamin)

Recommended Daily Intake: 6 mcg.

Dosage (therapeutic): By injection: from 1000 mcg every few days up to 10,000 to 25,000 mcg/day. Oral (including sublingual) and nasal gel: probably 500-25,000 mcg/day. Sublingual and (especially) nasal gel products may rival B12 shots in their ability to increase blood levels. Studies like that of Mayer et al. suggest the cyanocobalamin form of B12 typically used in supplements isn’t as clinically effective as methylcobalamin.

Cost: moderate.

Side effects, cautions, contraindications: Evidently none.

Syd Baumel is a writer and Editor of The Aquarian in Winnipeg, Canada. 

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Tolstoy on Doctors

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Leo Tolstoy Doctors

I’m reading War and Peace now and will probably post a review here when I finish. I don’t remember how, but in childhood I managed to only read 1.5 of the novel’s 4 volumes, all of which must have been required at school. If I missed the rest of the book because I was out sick, then this post would be pretty fitting.

Tolstoy didn’t care the least bit about elegant prose or humor, but he wrote about a very interesting, no longer existing group of people (the Russian aristocracy) from an insider’s perspective and he had a lot of wisdom. He applied this wisdom to dozens of very diverse topics in this enormous book. I made this post about Tolstoy’s take on the medical profession because it completely agrees with mine.

In the third volume Natasha Rostova, one of the novel’s major characters, is suffering from teenage heartbreak, but her family mistakenly believes that her condition is more serious than that.

“She could not eat or sleep, grew visibly thinner, coughed, and, as the doctors made them feel, was in danger. They could not think of anything but how to help her. Doctors came to see her singly and in consultation, talked much in French, German, and Latin, blamed one another, and prescribed a great variety of medicines for all the diseases known to them, but the simple idea never occurred to any of them that they could not know the disease Natasha was suffering from, as no disease suffered by a live man can be known, for every living person has his own peculiarities and always has his own peculiar, personal, novel, complicated disease, unknown to medicine–not a disease of the lungs, liver, skin, heart, nerves, and so on mentioned in medical books, but a disease consisting of one of the innumerable combinations of the maladies of those organs. This simple thought could not occur to the doctors (as it cannot occur to a wizard that he is unable to work his charms) because the business of their lives was to cure, and they received money for it and had spent the best years of their lives on that business. But, above all, that thought was kept out of their minds by the fact that they saw they were really useful, as in fact they were to the whole Rostov family. Their usefulness did not depend on making the patient swallow substances for the most part harmful (the harm was scarcely perceptible, as they were given in small doses), but they were useful, necessary, and indispensable because they satisfied a mental need of the invalid and of those who loved her–and that is why there are, and always will be, pseudo-healers, wise women, homeopaths, and allopaths. They satisfied that eternal human need for hope of relief, for sympathy, and that something should be done, which is felt by those who are suffering. They satisfied the need seen in its most elementary form in a child, when it wants to have a place rubbed that has been hurt. A child knocks itself and runs at once to the arms of its mother or nurse to have the aching spot rubbed or kissed, and it feels better when this is done. The child cannot believe that the strongest and wisest of its people have no remedy for its pain, and the hope of relief and the expression of its mother’s sympathy while she rubs the bump comforts it. The doctors were of use to Natasha because they kissed and rubbed her bump, assuring her that it would soon pass if only the coachman went to the chemist’s in the Arbat and got a powder and some pills in a pretty box of a ruble and seventy kopeks, and if she took those powders in boiled water at intervals of precisely two hours, neither more nor less.

What would Sonya and the count and countess have done, how would they have looked, if nothing had been done, if there had not been those pills to give by the clock, the warm drinks, the chicken cutlets, and all the other details of life ordered by the doctors, the carrying out of which supplied an occupation and consolation to the family circle? How would the count have borne his dearly loved daughter’s illness had he not known that it was costing him a thousand rubles, and that he would not grudge thousands more to benefit her, or had he not known that if her illness continued he would not grudge yet other thousands and would take her abroad for consultations there, and had he not been able to explain the details of how Metivier and Feller had not understood the symptoms, but Frise had, and Mudrov had diagnosed them even better? What would the countess have done had she not been able sometimes to scold the invalid for not strictly obeying the doctor’s orders?

“You’ll never get well like that,” she would say, forgetting her grief in her vexation, “if you won’t obey the doctor and take your medicine at the right time! You mustn’t trifle with it, you know, or it may turn to pneumonia,” she would go on, deriving much comfort from the utterance of that foreign word, incomprehensible to others as well as to herself.

What would Sonya have done without the glad consciousness that she had not undressed during the first three nights, in order to be ready to carry out all the doctor’s injunctions with precision, and that she still kept awake at night so as not to miss the proper time when the slightly harmful pills in the little gilt box had to be administered? Even to Natasha herself it was pleasant to see that so many sacrifices were being made for her sake, and to know that she had to take medicine at certain hours, though she declared that no medicine would cure her and that it was all nonsense. And it was even pleasant to be able to show, by disregarding the orders, that she did not believe in medical treatment and did not value her life.

…

The symptoms of Natasha’s illness were that she ate little, slept little, coughed, and was always low-spirited. The doctors said that she could not get on without medical treatment, so they kept her in the stifling atmosphere of the town, and the Rostovs did not move to the country that summer of 1812.

In spite of the many pills she swallowed and the drops and powders out of the little bottles and boxes of which Madame Schoss who was fond of such things made a large collection, and in spite of being deprived of the country life to which she was accustomed, youth prevailed. Natasha’s grief began to be overlaid by the impressions of daily life, it ceased to press so painfully on her heart, it gradually faded into the past, and she began to recover physically.”

The average person reading this now probably thinks that that’s only how medicine was like then, that progress and technology have blah blah blah…

If Tolstoy’s description fit 95% of the medical practice of his day, then it would probably fit 70% of what’s going on in 2010. Medicine is still and probably will always be mostly like that.

From what I’ve read, Tolstoy practiced what he preached, never asking or following doctors’ advice and lived to the age of 82.

Being a glossophiliac, I can’t resist mentioning that the native Russian word for doctor (vrach) is etymologically related to the Russian word for lying (vrat’). Faith healers were habitually called liars by their customers. When Western medicine arrived in Russia, its typical practitioner seemed like just another type of faith healer, so the word vrach was applied to him as well. It is now roughly as popular as “doctor” in Russia, but with overuse has unfortunately lost its sting.

– Glossy

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