The Cleansing Diet

A cleansing diet is designed to bring a person into the realm of toxin elimination without requiring the full demands of hard-core fasting. It can be as simple as eating no solids one day per week over a sustained period of time (as long as weight is gradually lost).

Every year, each Spring, I perform a single-event (do it once, not repeatedly) 7-day cleansing diet. This same diet I recommend to people who should perform some serious fasting but are unfamiliar with the experience and require a bit of education and practice, a trial-run, so to speak. The 7-day cleansing diet is the minimum single-event cleansing diet that can possibly be called a “fast,” and that’s stretching it a bit. That is why I often refer to it as a “recreational” fast. Most single-event cleansing fasts are at least 10 days in duration -- as they should be if you wish to achieve a direct and immediate therapeutic effect.

The recreational fast covers all of fasting’s main points. It makes people throw off their immediate food addictions. It forces a person to discover the power of one’s independent body / mind connection as the two and a half day mark looms. It brings people to the point where the fat-burning furnace switches on. And it slowly brings people back to normalcy of diet with both carbohydrate- and fat-burning furnaces firing. But most of all it prepares the chronically ill patient for the experience of a 20 - 40 day juice fast -- a task needing much advance preparation and support.

A good Cleansing Diet can be stretched out indefinitely to convert the diet into a fast of greater duration.

Long duration fasts, until you are experienced with them, may require a bit of monitoring by a natural health practitioner (NHP). This is more for reassurance than anything else as fasting really is a healthful process. But it is always a nice courtesy to let your NHP in on the happy experience, and you will gain a great deal of support, encouragement, and helpful tips.

It is not a good idea, generally, to have a medico doctor monitor your fast. They are completely unfamiliar with the process. If you ask them a question their eyes go wide, the sound of your voice bounces about in their head, and finally it echos back to you reinterpreted into doctor lingo: “You’re going into a state of ketoacidosis and you could die,” or “you’re liver is becoming fatty indicating some serious disease process is taking place, and you could die,” or “you’ve lost more than 10 lbs and now you life is at risk, you could die.” [Notice how everything your doctor tells you ends with, “you could die.” “Better have that chickenpox vaccine as you could catch the disease when you’re older and you could die.” “Consult your doctor before you begin that exercise program, you could die.” My advice is typically the opposite -- the less you see of doctors then the longer you will live.] They are not at all supportive.

Healer J. Mark Taylor, Medical Herbalist

5, 1922 - 9 Avenue SE.

Calgary, Alberta, Canada T2G 0V2