Chocolate! This is for you!Good question! Actually, I have quite a bit of first hand experience in detoxification and fasting for health and spiritual reasons. We did this in a clinical setting and worked with many hundreds of people. Most people did it for health reasons with superb results. The spiritual aspect would naturally take place after a while! The process itself is quite simple even for people that have never tried it.
To begin, we would have people eat raw fruit in the morning to start cleaning out the gastrointestinal tract. Fresh cut pineapple is an 'aggressive' fruit. Raw apples, bananas and grapes are great. Bananas are VERY filling. People could eat as much as they wanted to satisfy their hunger. It was not necessary to eat it all in one sitting. They could eat fruit all morning.
Lunch would be lightly steamed vegie's. No potatoes. Squash, carrots, zucchini and whatever veggies they liked. A little organic butter, extra virgin olive oil or avocado. No salt or pepper. It would take some people awhile to acclimate to getting used to unseasoned veggies yet most developed a taste for them. Most of their palates had been accustomed to eating highly seasoned cooked foods with MSG yet after a while, depending on the individual, their palates became acclimated to tasting the food itself and they developed a taste for them.
For dinner, a large raw salad along with protein. Some people had been accustomed to eating meat at dinner and for them, we would have them start cutting back on eating it every night. Maybe 3 times a week until they were able to overcome the feeling that they needed it. Steamed fish or shrimp after a would be introduced instead of meat. A couple of hard boiled eggs in the salad in place of meat or fish. The most important part of the evening meal would be the salad. The bigger the better!
If they became hungry before bed - fruit. The last thing we want to do is go to bed with a full stomach! Your body, while sleeping is cleansing and with a full stomach, it cannot do the cleansing because it would be trying to digest and assimilate.
No bread, dairy, pasta, rice or potatoes at any meal. We had a number of unhealthy macrobiotic people come to us. This program took care of most of their issues. We did not get any support from the gurus in the macrobiotic camp for obvious reasons yet they could not discount the results of their followers!
I should also mention that we had many religious denominations come to us. Usually just one would venture in and then we would end up with many more from their community come to us after they saw how their friend[s]had been helped. I received quite a bit of flack from some of the leaders because their diets, depending on the denomination, would have a certain food they used alot of. Dairy, sugar, ALL cooked foods, grains... An over consumption of one food and health problems usually occur.
Remember, this was a transitional period to get their body READY for fasting! We never just fasted someone right away. The amount of garbage that would come out of them would be too much for them. By the time we went through the transitional phase, they were already feeling MUCH better so they were excited to got to the next 'level'! They WANTED to continue!
I am going to post this and then come back and give you some suggestions for the next step. The next step is the fun part! It may be a couple hours yet I will return!
In Joy!
